Imagining women and diaspora in the 1990s Bollywood film: A ‘close-up’ look at the visual politics in Pardes

This article highlights the manner in which Bollywood cinema functions as an effective visual public space for disseminating hegemonic forms of gendered nationalism in the troubled times of neo-liberalization and increased migration to the West in the 1990s. The visual strategies employed in the Bollywood blockbuster Pardes/Overseas (Ghai 1997) reveal such problematic intersections of the discourses of nation, culture and gender. Moreover, the iconic construction of the Hindu woman as nation in the film is also underpinned by the anxiety of patriarchal transformations resulting from the multiple economic and cultural shifts that characterized this Indian diaspora at the time.