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Abstract
Research on Bollywood cinema's increasingly global presence identifies the genre as a significant cultural domain for the articulation of diasporic Indian identity and its constitution. Focusing on the appropriation of Bollywood cinema and its filmi song and dance, regarded as a multi-sensual media, the article investigates Bollywood's popularity among Bene Israel immigrants in Israel and explores the aesthetics of diaspora, understood as a politics of consumption, embodied performance of identity and claims to ownership of tradition shaped by commercialized popular culture imported into Israeli society. I suggest that a sentient anthropology may provide insights into cultural identity as emerging out of material, social and aesthetic practices. The participatory culture and multi-sensual milieus inspired by Bollywood's sensorium are constitutive, the paper argues, of diasporic identity and community through their potential to evoke shared emotions and a sense of place and subjectivity, mediated by the qualities of objects, performance styles and etiquette.
Acknowledgements
A draft of this paper was presented at the ASA08: Ownership and Appropriation Conference, held at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, in December 2008. I would like to thank all participants of the panel on aesthetics of diaspora for their insightful comments and, in particular, Pnina Werbner who read and commented on an earlier draft of my paper. I also thank the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful and inspiring comments on an earlier draft of my paper. Finally, this paper would not have been written without the generous support of my Bene Israel interlocutors in Israel who invited me to their community events as well as their private homes. I am grateful to Yossi Aptekar for giving his permission for the reproduction of some of the images he has taken during the hoduyada in Eilat.
Notes
The annual gathering of Indian Jews is sometimes also referred to as hodiyada (Indian festival).
Some of these festivals, such as the Kurdish saharane, the Iranian ruze-baque or the Moroccan mimouna, are a continuation of ethnic holidays in the diaspora. In Israel, they have undergone far-reaching changes in their meaning, their functions and atmosphere. Others, such as the Yemenite teimaniyada or the Indian hoduyada, are not associated with a traditional ethnic festival in the diaspora and hence are newly invented traditions. Significantly, in the diaspora, celebrations like the Moroccan mimouna, the Iranian ruze-baque and the Kurdish saharanei were family- and community-centred events, while in Israel they have developed into large ethnic–political festivals which are regularly attended by Israeli politicians, in particular, during election times (Shokeid Citation1984:262–3). Indeed, the Moroccan mimouna, the Kurdish saharanei and the Ethiopian sigd festivals have become national festivals in Israel.
It has become increasingly difficult to define what postzionism refers to since the term is used in various discourses, both academic and public. It is commonly used to refer to the structural changes triggered off by the advent of economic and cultural globalization into Israel as well as a critical counter-hegemonic discourse that emerged in Israeli academia in the 1990s. More generally, postzionism can be seen as the Israeli variant of a postmodern counter-discourse.
There are three established Indian Jewish communities, the Marathi-speaking Bene Israel, the Malayalam-speaking Jews from Kerala and the Arabic- and Persian-speaking Baghdadi Jews (see, for example, Katz Citation2000). Further groups are the Bnei Menashe from northeast India, who claim to be descendants of the tribe of Menashe and the Bene Ephraim of Andhra Pradesh, South India. Other Jewish communities who resided in India include German, Russian and Yiddish-speaking European Jews who came to India fleeing Nazi persecution.
See also a letter by US-based Bene Israel Rabbi Romiel Daniel. Description of Bene Israel in a Cookbook. Indian Jewish Congregation of USA, Newsletter, (4) 2, September 2010, pp. 3–4. http://www.jewsofindia.org/PDFs/newsletters/Indian%20Jewish%20Congregation%20) Newsletter%20Sep-2010.pdf (accessed 15 October 2010).
For a review of Bene Israel theories of origin in the light of historical and biblical history, see, in particular, Isenberg (Citation1988). For an account of the formation of a Bene Israel ethnic Jewish identity, see, in particular, Roland (Citation1989).
There are other Indian Jews who contributed to the Hindi Film industry. See, for example, Jews of India Forum. Indian Jewish Bollywood Stars. http://jewsofindia.org/forum/index.php?topic=4.0 (accessed 10 October 2010).
The Central Bureau of Statistics does not yield any numerical data on the size of individual immigrant groups and it is, therefore, not possible to give accurate statistical data on the size of the community. The number of Jews of Indian origin is also difficult to estimate by synagogue membership, since not all families are registered. Also a significant number of the Israeli born generation has intermarried with non-Indian Israeli Jews, but there are no numerical data available on the identities they chose to embrace. Since the mid-1990s, the size of the community has been estimated anywhere between 40,000 and 70,000, with researchers, journalists and the Indian embassy in Israel referring to these figures. It seems, however, unclear who originally came up with these now widely circulated figures.
http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/10/israeli-arms-dealer-tries-bollywood-pitch/ (accessed 20 May 2009). For StratPost interview with Assy Josephy, Director for Exhibitions at Rafael, see http://www.flightglobal.com/blogs/the-dewline/2009/03/israels-rafael-goes-bollywood.html (accessed 1 June 2009).
Aniruddha Bahal. Hindi Films in Iraq and Palestine, posted 22 October 2004. http://www.chowk.com/articles/8236 (accessed 19 October 2010). Sholay (1975), an action–adventure film produced by G.P. Sippy and directed by Ramesh Sippy, is considered to be among the greatest films of Indian cinema.
Since the 1970s, there has been no significant commercial distribution of Hindi films in Israel. Israeli film distributors who attempted to bring Hindi films to commercial theatres in the 1990s faced major financial losses. Their hope that the thousands of Israeli backpackers who travel to India each year would flock into the movie theatres to watch Hindi films upon their return to Israel did not materialize (Parciack Citation2008:229–30).
Ha'ir, Tel Aviv, 16 April 1998.
Various journalists and scholars have commented on the centrality of Indian popular cinema to the life of Indian immigrants in various diasporic settings (Punathambekar Citation2005:152). Hindi films have been, for example, one of the major sources of the cultural renewal for Indo-Guyanese (Narain Citation2008:164). Kaur, on the other hand, cautions that it is too cursory to say that Bollywood enables a religious-like nostalgia for people of the Indian diaspora and that film provides an emotional link that needs to be reaffirmed. Instead, she observes that among the relatively more assured and confident South Asian diaspora in Britain, as opposed to Germany, for instance, there is a playful and parodic relationship amongst the spectators of Indian cinema (2005:314).