Cover not available

Article published In: Relationality: Discursive constructions of Asian Pacific American identities
Edited by Adrienne Lo and Angela Reyes
[Pragmatics 14:2/3] 2004
► pp. 317–335

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF

Reel to real

Desi teens’ linguistic engagements with Bollywood

Open Access logo
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) 4.0 license.
Published online: 1 June 2004
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/prag.14.2-3.12sha
Diasporic media, though widely discussed theoretically and occasionally ethnographically, are seldom explored with explicit attention to language. “Bollywood” films - feature-length movies produced and distributed in Bombay (Mumbai), India - are an excellent media source through which to examine linguistic anthropological topics of indexicality, bivalency, and identity in diasporic communities. In this paper, I analyze the circulation and consumption of Bollywood films - created in Hindi and subtitled in English - among South Asian-American (desi) communities in both Silicon Valley, CA and Queens, NY. Bollywood films are watched in family and peer groups, and portions of the films’ songs and dialogue become incorporated into everyday speech practices. I present and analyze instances of Hindi film dialogue interwoven into conversational exchanges between desi teens in ways that impact negotiations of style and identity. For many teens, the films provide narrative frameworks, prescripted dialogue, and socially recognizable registers and varieties of affect through which they enact their own dynamics of humor, flirting, conflict, and other types of talk. Drawing on ethnographic and sociolinguistic data, I contrast how these processes vary between these two diasporic communities.
References (44)
Abu-Lughod, L. (1995) The objects of soap opera: Egyptian television and the cultural politics of modernity. In D. Miller (ed), Worlds apart: Modernity through the prism of the local. London: Routledge, pp. 190-210.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Anderson, B. (1991) Imagined communities. London: Verso.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ang, I. (1996) Living room wars: Rethinking media audiences for a postmodern world. New York: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Appadurai, A. (1996) Modernity at large: Cultural dimensions of globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Auer, J.C.P (1998) Code-Switching in conversation. London: RoutledgeGoogle Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Back, L. (1996) New ethnicities and urban culture. New York: St. Marten’s PressGoogle Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bakhtin, M. (1981) The dialogic imagination: Four essays. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Barthes, R. (1972) Mythologies. New York: Noonday Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Baumann, G. (1996) Contesting culture: Discourses of identity in multi-ethnic London. London: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bauman, R., and C. Briggs (1992) Genre, intertextuality, and social power. Journal of linguistic anthropology 2.2: 131-172.  BoPGoogle Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bourdieu, P. (1991) Language and symbolic power. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.  BoPGoogle Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Coupland, N. (2001) Dialect stylization in radio talk. Language in society 30.3: 345-375.  BoP. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Dornfeld, B. (1998) Producing public television, producing public culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Eckert, P. (1989) Jocks and burnouts: Social categories and identity in high school. New York: Teachers College Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gal, S. (1987) Code-switching and consciousness in the European periphery. American ethnologist 141: 637-53. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ganti, T. (2000) Casting culture: The social life of Hindi film production in contemporary India. Doctoral dissertation. New York University.
. (2002) “And yet my heart is still Indian”: The Bombay film industry and the (H)Indianization of Hollywood. In F. Ginsburg, L. Abu-Lughod and B. Larkin (eds), Media worlds: Anthropology on new terrain. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 281-300.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. (2004) Bollywood: A guidebook to popular Hindi cinema. New York: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gillespie, M. (1995) Television, ethnicity and cultural change. London: RoutledgeGoogle Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ginsburg, F., L. Abu-Lughod, and B. Larkin (eds) (2002) Media worlds: Anthropology on new terrain. Berkeley: University of California Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Heller, M. (1999) Linguistic minorities and modernity: A sociolinguistic ethnography. New York: Addison Wesley Longman Limited.  BoPGoogle Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hill, J. (1995) The voices of Don Gabriel: Responsibility and self in a modern Mexicano narrative. In D. Tedlock and B. Mannheim (eds), Dialogic emergence of culture. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, pp. 97-147.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hill, J., and J.T. Irvine (eds) (1992) Responsibility and evidence in oral discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Joshi, L. (2002) Bollywood: Popular Indian cinema. Delhi: Dakini Books Inc.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Keane, W. (1999) Voice. Journal of linguistic anthropology. 9.1–2: 271-273. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kolar-Panov, D. (1996) Video and the diasporic imagination of selfhood: A case-study of the Croatians in Australia. Cultural Studies 101: 288-314. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Larkin, B. (1997) Indian films, Nigerian lovers: Media and the creation of parallel modernities. Africa 671: 406-440. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Liechty, M. (1995) Media, markets and modernization: Youth identities and the experience of modernity in Katmandu, Nepal. In V. Amit-Talai and H. Wulff (eds), Youth cultures: A cross-cultural perspective. London: Routledge, pp. 166-201.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. (2002) Suitably modern: Making middle-class culture in a new consumer society. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Maira, S. (2002) Desis in the house: Indian American youth culture in New York City. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mendoza-Denton, N. (1996) “Muy macha”: Gender and ideology in gang-girls’ discourse about makeup. Ethnos 611: 47-63. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Milroy, L., and P. Muysken (eds) (1995) One speaker, two languages: Cross-disciplinary perspectives on code-switching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  BoPGoogle Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Naficy, H. (1993) The making of exile cultures: Iranian television in Los Angeles. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Prasad, M.M. (2001) Ideology of the Hindi film: A historical construction. Delhi: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rampton, B. (1995) Crossing: Language and ethnicity among adolescents. New York: Longman.  BoPGoogle Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Ray, M. (2000) Bollywood down under. In S. Cunningham and J. Sinclair (eds), Floating lives: The media and Asian diasporas. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, pp. 136-184.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Romaine, S. (1995) Bilingualism. New York: Blackwell.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Shankar, S. (2003) Windows of opportunity: South Asian American teenagers and the promise of technology in Silicon Valley. Doctoral dissertation. New York University Department of Anthropology.
. (2004) “FOBby or tight?: ‘Multicultural Day’ and other struggles at two Silicon Valley high schools. In M. Checker and M. Fishman (eds), Local actions: Cultural activism, power and public life. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 184-207. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Spitulnik, D. (1996) The social circulation of media discourse and the mediation of communities. Journal of linguistic anthropology 6.2: 161-187. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Srinivas, L. (1998) Active viewing: An ethnography of the Indian film audience. Visual anthropology 11.4: 323-353. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tarone, E., S. Gass, and A. Cohen (eds) (1994) Research methodology in second-language acquisition. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.  BoPGoogle Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Woolard, K. (1999) Simultaneity and bivalency as strategies in bilingualism. Journal of linguistic anthropology 8.1: 3-29. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Zentella, A.C. (1997) Growing up bilingual. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing.  BoPGoogle Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Cited by (26)

Cited by 26 other publications

Kulkarni, Damini
2024. Displacing difference, interrupting Indianness: Song sequences in digitally-released Indian-American films. Journal of Postcolonial Writing 60:2 ► pp. 215 ff. DOI logo
Androutsopoulos, Jannis & Kristin Vold Lexander
2021. Digital polycentricity and diasporic connectivity: A Norwegian‐Senegalese case study. Journal of Sociolinguistics 25:5 ► pp. 720 ff. DOI logo
Sankaran, Lavanya
2021. “Talk in Tamil!” – Does Sri Lankan Tamil onward migration from Europe influence Tamil language maintenance in the UK?. International Journal of the Sociology of Language 2021:269 ► pp. 123 ff. DOI logo
Sankaran, Lavanya
2022. Sri Lankan Tamil experiences of the home-land and host-land: The interaction between language and diasporic identity. Language in Society 51:1 ► pp. 143 ff. DOI logo
Sultana, Shaila
2019. Language crossing of young adults in Bangladesh. Journal of Multicultural Discourses 14:4 ► pp. 352 ff. DOI logo
Mostafanezhad, Mary & Tanya Promburom
2018. ‘Lost in Thailand’: the popular geopolitics of film-induced tourism in northern Thailand. Social & Cultural Geography 19:1 ► pp. 81 ff. DOI logo
Sultana, Shaila & Sender Dovchin
2017. Popular Culture in Transglossic Language Practices of Young Adults. International Multilingual Research Journal 11:2 ► pp. 67 ff. DOI logo
Parshad, Rana D., Suman Bhowmick, Vineeta Chand, Nitu Kumari & Neha Sinha
2016. What is India speaking? Exploring the “Hinglish” invasion. Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications 449 ► pp. 375 ff. DOI logo
Bartlett, Lesley & Monisha Bajaj
2015. Nonformal Bilingual Education. In The Handbook of Bilingual and Multilingual Education, ► pp. 428 ff. DOI logo
Vandevelde, Iris, Philippe Meers, Sofie Van Bauwel & Roel Vande Winkel
2015. Sharing the Silver Screen: The Social Experience of Cinemagoing in the Indian Diaspora. BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies 6:1 ► pp. 88 ff. DOI logo
Androutsopoulos, Jannis
2014. Beyond ‘media influence’. Journal of Sociolinguistics 18:2 ► pp. 242 ff. DOI logo
CHAND, VINEETA
2009. [v]at is going on? Local and global ideologies about Indian English. Language in Society 38:4 ► pp. 393 ff. DOI logo
Leppänen, Sirpa, Anne Pitkänen-Huhta, Arja Piirainen-Marsh, Tarja Nikula & Saija Peuronen
2009. Young People's Translocal New Media Uses: A Multiperspective Analysis Of Language Choice And Heteroglossia. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 14:4 ► pp. 1080 ff. DOI logo
MARSH, ARJA PIIRAINEN & LIISA TAINIO
2009. Other‐Repetition as a Resource for Participation in the Activity of Playing a Video Game. The Modern Language Journal 93:2 ► pp. 153 ff. DOI logo
Shankar, Shalini
2008. Speaking like a Model Minority: “FOB” Styles, Gender, and Racial Meanings among Desi Teens in Silicon Valley. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 18:2 ► pp. 268 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2020. “Brad and Angelina: And Now … Brangelina!”. In Manufacturing Celebrity, ► pp. 218 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2020. Reconsidering News and Gossip in the Trump Era. In Manufacturing Celebrity, ► pp. 243 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2020. Shooteando. In Manufacturing Celebrity, ► pp. 33 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2020. Latinos Selling Celebrity. In Manufacturing Celebrity, ► pp. 76 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2020. To Live and Die in L.A.. In Manufacturing Celebrity, ► pp. 95 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2020. Body Teams, Baby Bumps, Beauty Standards. In Manufacturing Celebrity, ► pp. 181 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2020. Notes. In Manufacturing Celebrity, ► pp. 255 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2020. Where Reporting Happens. In Manufacturing Celebrity, ► pp. 150 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2020. Bibliography. In Manufacturing Celebrity, ► pp. 271 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2020. The Precarious Work of Celebrity Media Production. In Manufacturing Celebrity, ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2020. Red Carpet Rituals. In Manufacturing Celebrity, ► pp. 125 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 29 november 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue