Faculty Brown Bag Lecture with Prof. Ashvin Kini: “Who Am I To You?”: Mourning, Memory and the Bollywood Family Drama, 3/20 @ 1pm

Our next faculty Brown Bag talk will feature Dr. Ashvin Kini on Tuesday, March 21 at 1pm (on Zoom). Prof. Kini's talk is titled "'Who Am I To You?': Mourning, Memory and the Bollywood Family Drama."

Abstract: Not long before my father passed away in 2021, estranged from his children, my mother confided in me that he had begun binge-watching the 1970s television series The Waltons. Depicting the wholesome lives of a rural white Virginian family during the Great Depression, The Waltons seemed an odd and frustrating choice for my mom. “I just don’t understand,” she said, “how he can watch this show about a family that is so happy and close and together while his own is separated.” If The Waltons was my dad’s televisual family drama of choice, my own viewing practice had reverted back to the iconic Bollywood family melodramas that circulated widely in the South Asian diaspora in the 1990s and early 2000s—films like Sooraj Barjatya’s Hum Aapke Hain Koun, Karan Johar’s Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham, and Aditya Chopra’s Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge. Queer and feminist critics in South Asian diaspora studies and Asian American studies have analyzed these films for both 1) their alignment with the transnational rise of Hindu nationalist heteropatriarchies at the turn of the 21st century and 2) the moments of rupture and disidentificatory pleasure engendered by queer diasporic reading and performance practices. Both extending and departing from this important scholarship to combine close reading, analysis of cinematic and televisual production and circulation as well as personal narrative, this paper considers the unsettling of the “family drama” in the context of queer diasporic loss and grief.

image from IMDB for film, Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham

image credit: brown paper bag by clikr, licensed under CC0 / public domain declaration