The Politics of Staging Emotions in Contemporary Bollywood Films: Aditya Chopra’s Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995) and Karan Johar’s My Name is Khan (2010)

Abstract

The article examines how the staging of emotions in two recent Bollywood films affects socio-political configurations and modes of collective identification. Stressing the politics and sociality of emotions (cf. Ahmed 2004: 9), it is argued that representations of affect and emotion in Aditya Chopra’s Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995) and Karan Johar’s My Name is Khan (2010) are central to engaging with the complexities of transcultural modernity. To the extent that circulating images address deterritorialised Indian audiences, they produce diasporic communities beyond traditional national and regional realms. The films’ ostentatious celebration of the morality of a fictional universe, which is both transculturally organised and steeped in traditional Indian values, addresses the cultural fragmentations and temporal discontinuities inevitably produced by globalisation. By means of their affective structure these Bollywood melodramas cater to the diasporic desire for belonging and construct a globalised version of Indian culture that embraces the transformative “dynamics of local agency” (Ashcroft 2012: 16).