Shaming the Indian Diaspora, Asking for “Returns”: Swades

This essay examines how the Bollywood film Swades (Gowariker 2004) mobilizes a discourse of shame to reorient Indian diasporic communities toward the homeland and, in the process, urges them to invest affectively and financially—or, better yet, to return physically to India. By revealing possibilities for non-resident Indians to inaugurate new relations with the world left behind, Swades prods Indian diasporic viewers to rethink their relations to the homeland. The construction of shame within Swades is part of a complex address to those diasporic communities who consume Bollywood products through an affect of nostalgia and whose economic investment proves necessary to the continuation of Bollywood’s free enterprise and to India’s economic development.