Dwelling-in-motion: Indian Bollywood tourists and their hosts in the Swiss Alps

ABSTRACT

Until recently, tourist routes typically led from ‘the West’ to the so-called ‘rest’ of the world, and travel guides and travel novels were the essential media for planning a journey. In recent years, however, the intensified circulation of place images through global communication media has connected more and more places with more and more imaginations, while the price reductions in and the expansion of travel offers as well as the economic upswing in parts of the global ‘East’, ‘Middle East’, and ‘South’ have set a rising number of these places within potential reach for ever more people. This paper investigates the places and performances of Indian Bollywood tourists and their hosts in and beyond a small town hotel in the Swiss mountains. The Swiss Alps are quite a ‘traditional’ destination of Indian tourism, as they were discovered by the Indian Bollywood film industry as a filming set as early as in the 1980s. Today, many Swiss towns display a comprehensive tourist infrastructure that specifically cares for the services needs of Indian tourists. Building on ethnographic field research and based on recent tourism mobilities studies, this paper explores the practices of Indian tourists in a transitory mode of dwelling and in a place familiar to them through the images produced by the film industry. Moreover, it retraces the way in which the Indian tourists’ practices of dwelling-in-motion have been co-produced and received by service and sales personnel as well as the local population, and how rather immobile imaginations rooted in colonial times structure both the discourses and interactions in the local tourist space.

KEYWORDS:

• Tourism
• India
• Switzerland
• Bollywood
• imaginations
• hotel

Notes on the contributor

Sybille Frank, Prof. Dr phil., is Junior Professor for Urban and Regional Sociology at the Department of Sociology, Technische Universität Berlin. She held positions as researcher at the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB) and the Technical University Darmstadt. In 2011, Frank was awarded a guest professorship for Sociology of Space at the Goethe University Frankfurt; in 2014 she was a visiting researcher in the Priority Research Area Critical Heritage Studies at the University of Gothenburg. Her work focuses on urban studies, tourism and heritage studies, comparative city research, and on the sociology of space and place. Recent publications include: Stadium Worlds: Football, Space and the Built Environment (ed., with Silke Steets, Routledge 2010); Städte unterscheiden lernen. Zur Analyse interurbaner Kontraste. Birmingham, Dortmund, Frankfurt, Glasgow (in German, ed., with Petra Gehring, Julika Griem and Michael Haus, Campus 2014); Wall Memorials and Heritage: The Heritage Industry of Berlin's Checkpoint Charlie (Routledge 2016, forthcoming).

Notes

1. http://www.superbrandsindia.com/images/brand_pdf/consumer_3rd_edition/SOTC.pdf, accessed 2 November 2014.

2. http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/records-1/largest-annual-film-output/, accessed 4 November 2014.

3. German original: ‘Was heißt nun Bauen? Das althochdeutsche Wort für bauen, ,buan’, bedeutet Wohnen. Dies besagt: bleiben, sich aufhalten. […] Die Art, wie du bist und ich bin, die Weise, nach der wir Menschen auf der Erde sind, ist […] das Wohnen. Mensch sein heißt: als Sterblicher auf der Erde sein, heißt: wohnen’.

4. Unfortunately, informal conversations with tourists from India proved to be outspokenly difficult, as many of the Indian guests – in particular women and children – were not ready to talk to me. Occasionally, when being on the car up to the peak of Mt. Titlis, I could take the opportunity of having a longer conversation.

5. For this article data that has been published in parts in two German journals (Frank 2012a, Frank 2012b) is employed to develop a new paper.

6. http://www.gde-engelberg.ch/dl.php/de/0civ5-xmpdcc/bevlkerungsstatistik_2012_gesamt.pdf, accessed 2 November 2014.

7. http://www.gde-engelberg.ch/de/portrait/gemeindeinzahlen, accessed 2 November 2014.

8. http://www.twai-canada.com/site/sotc.html, accessed 2 August 2012.

9. http://www.migrosmagazin.ch/leben/reisen/artikel/k%C3%A4ptn-iglu-und-die-inder, accessed 2 August 2012.