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South Asian Digital Diasporas

Remixing Diasporic Youth Cultures

Radhika Gajjala and Yeon Ju Oh

Introduction

Since the early 1990s, a time that coincides with global access to the Internet in the form of the World Wide Web, certain categories of South Asian diaspora have been rearticulated through techno-mediation. Such rearticulations are based in naming of diasporas through the politics of nation-state, while others are based in naming of diasporas through transnational linkages along with the struggle for an autonomous nation-state (as in the case of Tamil Eelam diasporas). Still others are rearticulations along transnational links based in fandom, popular culture, and music online. Digitally produced and circulated media play a significant role in such South Asian diasporas. In the case of the Indian nation-state, “New Bollywood” is significant as both a site where new digital technologies become widely available (Booth, 2008) and a space that invokes nostalgia for an imagined homeland for the non-resident Indian (NRI) population. At the same time, a particular section of the NRI population is being encouraged to “return home” to establish transnational industry and business in India. In turn, the Indian government and industry have mobilized the term “diaspora” to build transnational connections. In this context, the notion of “digital diaspora” has become a way to envision and build networks of transnational capital and labor.

This chapter works from this background and explores how Indian-identified artifacts, practices, soundbytes, and images travel through digital worlds in the form of machinima.¹ We argue that social formations in these virtual spaces reproduce notions of “Indian” through online diasporic networks. These social formations are routed through renewed identifications and re-memberings, as they actively, even intentionally, contribute to processes of transnationalization of labor and business through recoded online and offline subjectivities. These byte-sized representations of Indianness travel and flow through digital circuits, circulating and remixing into formations that rearticulate global identities.

In this chapter we specifically focus on three examples of South Asian digital diasporic productions: (1) the work of Indusgeeks.com; (2) machinima produced by “desi” players of a computer game, World of Warcraft (WoW); and (3) the traveling meme of Daler Mehndi's “Tunak Tunak Tun” on YouTube. Indusgeeks is an organization formed through the entrepreneurial drive of its Indian founders. The group began as a productive engagement with play and work in the online world of Second Life and is now a full-fledged business, offering “metamersive” services.² Most of the geeks who are operating the website are Indian-identified and located in the United States. In contrast, Daler Mehndi is an India-born bhangra/pop singer (the “King of Pop” according to the promotional website http://www.dalermehndi.com/), who was trained in traditional Punjabi music but who rose to become a transnational popular music icon outside of Bollywood (although eventually doing work for Bollywood as well).

The first part of this chapter lays out the theoretical background, focusing on studies that examine the interplay of nostalgia and national politics, as well as how members of South Asian diasporas work and play within a global economy. While members of such diasporas are granted citizenship and a sense of belongingness by the Indian nation-state, they are mobilized to perform transnational forms of cultural labor in return. Research on the era of “Bollywoodization” or “New Bollywood” helps us look at the dialectic relationship between diasporas and their associated nation-states. In the second part of the chapter, we discuss examples from popular culture and digital worlds to show how South Asian diasporas are manifested both as Indian and transnational diasporas simultaneously.

Part I: Theorizing South Asian Diaspora

Writings about postcolonial diasporas and imagined communities are filled with discussions of nostalgic connections to the homeland. Of course, postcolonial, feminist, and other critical theories of diasporas and transnational travel have challenged the logic that locates diasporic emotional yearnings in a simple nostalgia for a past homeland. For instance, Jigna Desai (2003) has pointed out that formulations that see nostalgia as the defining diasporic emotion – a yearning for a past manifested as a “homeland” – ignore the economic and political power relations and implications of diasporas (p. 1). Further, it is clear from past work on South Asian diasporic identities that the politics of transnational mobility in any moment in history requires members of the diaspora to rearticulate their identities in relation to the contemporary political moment in racial politics. This process of diasporic identity formation manifests, fundamentally, in continuous negotiations over one's sense of place and belonging.

Avtar Brah's (1996) writing on the meaning of “home” demonstrates this complex process of negotiation. She identifies two different meanings of the referent “home” in questions posed to her during an interview for an admission to a US institution of higher education by an all-male panel of interviewers. In one of the questions asked of her, she writes, “home” implied

In a separate question, Brah explains, home referred to “an invocation of narratives of the nation” in which one's identity is rooted (p. 3). For Brah, who is a Ugandan of Indian descent, home is plural rather than singular – simultaneously interwoven as both India and Uganda. However, in racialized or nationalist discourses one's home is confined within a place where races and ethnicities can be traced back by others. Members of South Asian diasporas across the globe are not necessarily members “of” a certain nation-state, although they live “in” those places and identify partly as belonging to those nations. Their looks and accents become signifiers that determine their identities in racially and ethnically stratified societies.

In recent decades there has been a shift in how transnational business and media networks take shape and operate, which highlights the fact that diasporas are not (and have never been) pulled together merely by a nostalgic association with one single “homeland.” The articulations of nostalgia for such a “return” to a homeland miss the productive and re-membering nature of how nostalgia and the politics of affect play into emerging futures of diasporas. Here we purposely spell it as “re-membering” in order to highlight both the psychic acts of remembrance through individual and group memory and the social relations produced through the assertion of commonality so as to increase the membership of such groups. This implies, then, that the re-membering of such diasporic communities happens through choice, selection, and recruitment, signaling active inclusions and exclusions in social relations, based on the politics of what counts as correct emotion and nostalgia. Particularly, we focus on the emerging futures of diasporas that travel transnationally, carrying packaged and byte-sized “homes” along with them, as members rearticulate their sense of self by placing themselves, and in turn being placed, as South Asians or Indians in diaspora. Avtar Brah asks, “what is the relationship between affect, psychic modalities, social relations, and politics?” (1996, p. 5). In this chapter we examine such relationships in Indian digital diasporas.

In an interrogation of English-language Indian films of the 1990s, such as Hyderabad Blues (Kukunoor, 1998) and Bombay Boys (Gustad, 1998), Jigna Desai challenged, as too limiting, the idea that “diasporas are ‘hailed by’ the narratives of the homeland nation-state that activate sentiments of nostalgia and belonging” (2003, p. 45). Pointing to the strong impact that South Asian diasporic populations have had on South Asian nation-states, she writes that “focusing only on the homeland nation as origin of culture, tradition, and values and the state as authority and granter of citizenship can overshadow an examination of the economic and political power in relations between diasporic communities and nation-states” (p. 45).

In her unpacking of how diaspora and the nation-state function dialectically to produce a transnational South Asian politics, Desai does not discount the use and function of emotion and affect in diasporic yearnings for return. But she adds an important dimension to this theorization of diaspora – namely, that the relationship between diasporic populations and the nation-state, and the articulation of nostalgia for a homeland, are shaped through the economics and politics of transnational capital and labor flows. She explains “that while diasporas hail the homeland through nostalgia and return, they do so when convenient. The homeland nation's heralding of diaspora has little to do with the everyday lives and interests of the non-elite classes who are clearly critical of and ambivalent in regard to diaspora” (p. 55).

While we cannot totally discount the role that nostalgia plays in how the home-nation can mobilize, shape, and invoke the involvement of those in diaspora, we need to observe how diasporic desire for home functions for those who identify as members of diasporas, and for national and transnational politics. These forces sometimes mutually reinforce each other and are sometimes at odds with each other, in the production and reproduction of tradition and culture in various contexts. It is critical to understand how mediated nostalgic storytelling comes into play in these reproductions. As previous literature on online South Asian diasporas shows, the “hailing” based in caste-based and religion-based forms of nostalgia in fact has produced certain kinds of community that have exerted some political influence in the “homeland” (Bahri, 2001; Rai, 1995).

Today, Indian-identified offline bodies are building socially networked Indian diasporas online through a similar placement of affect and cultural labor. Technologically mediated diasporas take shape at online–offline intersections. Community formations that emerge through wired and networked portable digital devices help counter the sense of isolation and alienation faced by today's youth as they continually uproot and re-place locations in their mobile work and play lifestyles. In such mobile portable communities, affective links, sometimes manifested as “nostalgia,” are produced through re-membered pasts that are rearticulated through such groups forming and living partly online, in virtual communities.

Divya Tolia-Kelly (2004) writes about “locating processes of identity” through an examination of how everyday artifacts and

Such signification of enfranchisement with landscapes of belonging is produced through a process of reconfiguring memory and affective engagements. Transnational environments that are made accessible by online media and mobile technology create media landscapes where scattered fragments of nostalgic memory and affect are produced and distributed. Meanwhile, diasporic individuals who form groups and communities of mediated exchange and sharing, and who live in these environments, shape the globalized world. In other words, ethnoscapes are formed when people move across national boundaries not only in physical ways, but also in more virtual or mediated ways, as occurs in call centers or virtual communities. Despite the existence of material beings dispersed over the world, they are geographically, socially, and culturally located in their “home” through specific practices of memory and affect that serve as forms of racial and ethnic authentication.

Particular South Asian cultural commonalities have also emerged through mass media and communication technologies since the early 1960s, creating new communicative spaces of diaspora. The recognition of these culturally representative images, texts, and sounds serves as a “remediation” of an imagined community. Rituals of authentication emerge through expectations of recognition of these commonalities present in reproduced and remixed digitally mediated images, texts, and sounds. Reproduction and remixing occur through a post-1990s “Bollywoodization” of South Asian-centric digital environments (Rajadhyaksha, 2002). These cultural formations are increasingly “Indianized” in a continuing synergy with satellite TV (the South Asian package) (Punathambekar, 2005). Here, themes such as “Yeh Mera India” (this is my India) are reiterated through a continuum of commercialization, Bollywood films, music, TV serials, global TV format-based productions such as Indian Idol, as well as advertisements for New York Life Insurance. Communities of online and offline bodies form around digitally mediated communicative practices, often centered around the sharing of Bollywoodized media. These communities build pockets and enclaves of networked affect. The emergence of seemingly disconnected yet representative cultural symbols in these spaces functions to rearticulate emotional histories through re-placement of affect in transitional place. These online networks transform from contact zones where people from diverse backgrounds encounter one another. These virtual spaces become transitional zones, where people build virtual commonalities and practices, as they place themselves and enhance their skills in global work and play environments.

Our observations are based on years of ethnography in online worlds and social networks, as well as on more than a decade's worth of ethnographies offline of teens in the United States and in India, playing computer games and using digital technologies. Many of the texts we examine are from the virtual world called Second Life, which first became publicly available in 2003 (see http://www.secondlife.com). Simultaneously, and a few years prior to encountering Second Life, one of us was using text-based MOOs³ in pedagogic settings and also doing ethnography in the online network known as Livejournal. In retrospect, it seems that Livejournal was a precursor to social networking sites that emerged in 2004.

In the recent past, transnational traveling and diasporic South Asians have placed and transmitted affect both audiovisually and sensually through radio, cinema, television, cassettes, video, and letters (and continue to do so). These traveling signifiers combine with physical objects, such as artifacts for living rooms, spices for “authentic” home food, fabric and incense, carried along in suitcases and scattered memories to allow the South Asian diasporic to feel “at home” in various nooks and crannies of the globe. In the age of social media, this packaging has come online in the form of hybrid “desi” popular cultures that leave behind spatio-temporally layered stains and traces of material artifacts in digital space. These are virtual objects that have been placed there by South Asians and those linked to South Asian culture and experience. Such artifacts acquire multiple meanings through symbols and associations as they journey through various networks. The use of remixed Bollywood tunes and ethnic avatars marks South Asian digital diasporic place in virtual worlds such as Second Life and Sims 2. Facebook and iPhone apps also code nostalgia and affect through circulating image and sound. Zynga, the makers of Farmville, reputedly the most widely played Facebook game online in 2009, was compelled by Facebook-based activism (the campaigning of Indian-identified Farmville players through a Facebook group, for instance) to include the Indian flag as one of the artifacts/objects to use in building personal profiles. It also recently launched visual artifacts such as auto-rickshaws, monkeys, and elephants to signal the opening of a branch of its company in India.

South Asian identities are now produced in part within sociocultural digital places constructed by computer software and hardware. Sociocultural and technically produced time-space compression enables members of Indian diasporas to be globally networked and to co-produce their identities. The sociocultural literacies of these inhabitants determine the kinds of free labor (Terranova, 2000) they contribute toward the building of these spaces. The continued inhabiting of these spaces leads to a reorganization of social space and everyday practice, similar to that experience by call center workers from India who are tuned in to time zones and cultural practices in the Western world (Mitra, 2008). They experience a social, affective transformation that orients them toward life in global multicultural communities similar to those encountered in diaspora.

South Asian Digital Diasporas

In this chapter, we extend existing work that examines how technologically mediated diasporas occur at online–offline intersections specifically in relation to the “South Asian,” “digital,” and “diasporic.” Past research on South Asian presence in online spaces has made observations based on studies of online bulletin boards (Rai, 1995), email lists (Bahri, 2001), and websites (Chopra 2006; Mallapragada, 2006). In order to better understand the interplay of globalization and technology, we propose examining how sociocultural formations of youth cultures form online through work and play activities.

There are very specific circumstances that allow us to think in terms of “digital diasporas” – namely, globalized markets as well as the interactive nature of online technologies. At the same time, it is also important to take into account the layered and nuanced ways in which such diasporic subjectivities are produced, if we are to understand how the global/local continuum plays out in specific situations in present cultures and economies. What is unique about the digital time-space continuum is its tendency to record practices and leave behind histories and actual archives, providing valuable data with which to study the use of digital technologies. Significantly, the various texts or representations that are produced in these contexts can be viewed as diasporic in and of themselves. In the formation of these online representations (whether they be written texts, moving images, static images, or three-dimensional representations), there is a certain situatedness, a sense of “landing” somewhere. At the same time, there is an affective reproduction of travel, as well as a sense of disorientation through encounters with other cultures that simulates a form of culture shock. The unique qualities of these digital contexts and experiences necessitate the use of phrases like “digital diaspora” and “virtual community.”

We use the term “digital diaspora” to talk about how diasporic populations the world over use the Internet to connect to one another. Digital media used for digital diasporic formations are networked and interactive, potentially allowing people from different parts of the world to feel located in one “place.” They provide sites where people with similar interests and similar missions can gather in a common space. Online networks formed through digitally mediated communicative media – whether accessed via desk-top computers, Xboxes, or iPhones – permit the local to exist within the global and vice versa.

The transition from print media to mass media allowed the imagining of common places, or what Anderson (1983) referred to as the convergence of capitalism and print technology. The fatal diversity of human language created the possibility of a new form of imagined community, which in its basic morphology set the stage for the modern nation. As print media were made accessible – actually or potentially – to “the masses,” the world experienced the growth of modern capitalism, as well as the emergence of modern nations and internationalism.

Interactive online technologies help reproduce and enhance transnationalism based on global flows of capital and labor. The interactivity of online technologies in their current forms is a logical extension for global financial networks in particular. The architects of digital capitalism have pursued one major objective: to develop an economy-wide network that can support an ever-growing range of intra-corporate and inter-corporate business processes (Schiller, 2000). At the same time, the combined logic of digital transnationalism with globalized markets and interactive online technologies allows the emergence of digital diasporas.

Bollywoodization of South Asian Digital Diasporas

In mapping affective South Asian/Indian social networks online, we suggest that memory, nostalgia, and affect simultaneously work to place and locate South Asian/Indian identifiers in digital space. In doing so we focus on the circulation and proliferation of “Bollywood” media (whether as clips of music, video, image icons, or Second Life and Sims avatars), as well as on specific symbols and artifacts that register as “Indian.” Many of these signifiers work in sync with a post-1990s opening of the Indian markets to transnational labor and trade, as they reconfigure and “remix” older images and sounds for the techno-mediated “desi” global workforces. These workers increasingly live in digital diasporic spaces and global–local offline hubs, such as dance clubs and coffeehouses, as well as in multinational corporate environments where they work and play. These groups of young men and women live in remixed and cross-routed communicative spaces of diaspora, carrying partial nostalgic attachments from previous generations as they employ a medley of soundbytes, icons, and visual loops to produce meaning and community identifications in nodal points. The role of Bollywood-based music is especially important in these online and offline settings, as it provides a link through the scattered visual signifiers. Bodies and avatars sway in motion to sound clips coded digitally through online portals, offline loudspeakers, or iPods and smartphones.

This remixing of South Asian/Indian media artifacts was made possible by structural changes in the Indian film industry. Nilanjana Bhattacharjya (2009) notes the shift in how Bollywood films are now funded since the economic liberalization of the Indian economy in the 1990s. She describes how the Indian government's encouragement of privatization and international investment led to the Indian film industry being increasingly funded through contributions by non-resident Indian investors. This in turn led to a shift in the orientation of the films produced. More and more films were produced for South Asian diasporic audiences. Ashish Rajadhyaksha (2002) refers to this process as the “Bollywoodization” of Indian cinema. Gregory Booth (2008) refers to this period as “New Bollywood,” noting the shift in the production technologies and processes for film and music in the Indian media industry to privilege digital formats. “When younger, more technically sophisticated filmmakers and technicians finally introduced digital sound and filmmaking techniques and computers became widely available, a new era began that I call ‘New Bollywood’” (Booth, 2008, p. 85). It is this transition in Indian film – whether we call it a “Bollywoodization” or a transition to the “New Bollywood” – that allows the byte-sized packaging of images and sounds from the Indian film industry into South Asian digital diasporic spaces.

Part II: Desi Youth Hanging Out in Digital Diaspora

In the remainder of this chapter, we examine three examples of digital environments built around nostalgic notions of an imagined homeland on the part of people who labor in these environments. These examples show how the practices of identification and engagement within South Asian digital diasporas feed into building a brand of “Indianness” (Bolin & Ståhlberg, 2010) that is inextricably tied to the “Bollywoodization” of Indian and South Asian culture and identity. Many of the transnational venues in these digital diasporas are inhabited by technologically savvy young men and women, with their casual dress codes and urban sensibilities. Some of these spaces are less US-centric than the previous Internet-based South Asian generations. These social network systems and blogs, masked in semi-anonymity, often interrupt offline social conventions. They complicate notions of transnational identity and sexuality, as digital diasporas hide behind Bollywood, manga, and other pop icons and game-based avatars. There is a continuous play on identity and gender, as the Bollywood icons produced in these communities blur the boundary between queer pleasure and the idolization of heteronormative Bollywood themes and stars. Meanwhile, such communities produce uncertainty about geographic location, as members of these digital diasporas appear to multitask between work, leisure, and offline/online formations of friends.

For this generation, being online is no more unusual than being on the phone as they incessantly text-message, tweet, and “FB” at every mundane moment and download and exchange ring tones, pix, and flix. This group of young South Asians living in digital diasporas is multiply literate and socioculturally flexible and mobile, “hanging out” in online communities of open source developers and various kinds of fan groups. The young people participating in the Indian digital diaspora are producing new layerings of hierarchies and skills. Even as most seem to be just “hanging out” online, many of these young people are reskilling themselves quite desperately in an attempt to outsmart the job market. Of course, there are other participants from more materially privileged backgrounds who are indeed “hanging out” for leisure. Despite this internal hierarchy, the everyday practices of mobile generations in digital diasporas involve and invoke new and different kinds of problem-solving spaces from those inhabited by the materially underprivileged of the world.

Sunaina Maira (2000) has traced the origins of diasporic youth subcultures in locations offline. In her article on “Henna and Hip Hop,” she writes

For Indian diasporic youth, as Maira describes, their collective memories of the homeland in which they have never lived are re-membered through Bollywoodized cultural forms such as music and dance. Social spaces like the youth clubs function to produce “the ideologies of ethnicity, pan-ethnicity, and nationalism,” as diasporic youth practice cultural rituals they believe to be “authentic,” thereby placing themselves within the imagined Indian community (p. 334). The emergence of computer-mediated social networks has brought a spatial shift from metropolitan-centered to online spaces for diasporic youth culture.

In the virtual world of Second Life, several such dance clubs exist where young men and women of South Asian descent and their non-South Asian friends “hang out.” At least that is how it appears to the Second Life players who visit these clubs. Here we base our observations on our experience visiting these clubs mostly in 2007, 2008, and 2009. Our understanding comes from a form of participant observation, or “deep hanging out,” in various dance clubs on Second Life, in order to understand some sociotechnically scripted codes for behavior in such environments. We visited dance clubs that self-describe as Hispanic clubs, Middle Eastern, Reggae, Jazz, “desi,” and Bollywood-focused. In Second Life, no “place” stays static for long. Groups and individuals are continually rebuilding and relocating; therefore, observations of these dance clubs can only be located in specific affective experiences and memories of the events, and on snapshots and various YouTube videos taken by Second Life residents as they visit these clubs.⁴ Of course, merely viewing the videos or images does not provide a sense of how it actually feels when immersed in the environment. Thus as researchers we rely on our own readings of performative cues to describe and examine these activities.

All these virtual dance clubs have basic scripted objects – a dancing ball, or a floor with dance script – to animate the avatars.⁵ They also use streaming media, where the songs are streamed from a server (such as Shoutcast or Icecast) onto the Second Life location. Most of them have tip balls or some form of money-collecting scripted objects, and some also have exploding objects that are scripted to allow visitors to enter into a competition for a cash prize. Some clubs have themed dances and competitions for dancers (this is also done through scripted objects), where fellow dancers get to vote for the “best dressed female in pink” or other themes decided by the club owners.

In dance clubs focused on Indian themes, there is often a stock set of Bollywood remix music (and sometimes even video) streaming in. The Second Life avatars in these clubs are dressed in a variety of clothes, but more and more of them (since 2007) are dressing in ethnic-seeming garb, mostly modeled after Bollywood characters' dresses.

As far as the dance clubs with Bollywood music are concerned, Indianness is established mainly through familiarity with the music being played and a basic minimum knowledge of Hindi, which is demonstrated in conversation amongst avatars in the club as they dance on. “Where are you from?” seems to be a question often asked of newcomers in an attempt to connect to South Asian origin stories. Bollywood is invoked as representative of India in such mediated environments but also serves as an apolitical and safe common language.

A narrow interpretation of these social spaces as produced through a purely nostalgic longing for an imagined homeland leaves the national politics of the Indian government and the implications of transnationalization unexamined. The interplay of technologies and cultural artifacts connects Indian diasporas over the world, in particular those who have economic power, and attracts them to invest in the homeland. In this sense, Bollywood not only serves up nostalgic pleasure, it also incorporates specific and selective ideologies and resonances from Indian diasporic communities into the building of a “Global India.” Those who produce Indian cultural artifacts online perform important cultural labor to produce the nation's brand in the global marketplace. This is well demonstrated in a machinima produced by Indusgeeks.

In 2007, Indusgeeks produced a machinima called “India in Second Life – shot on a location on Bollywood Island.”⁶ “A new world beckons” is the first line that appears on the screen, while young men and women from all vocations are shown rising up in a trance and running toward what turns out to be “Bollywood Island” in Second Life. The avatars, mostly wearing Bollywood-style Indian dresses, gather hand in hand to salute the Indian flag, as the video concludes with an invitation to viewers to “Join us . . . in Second Life.”

The notion of a new world, and the seemingly open, inclusive invitation to participate in that world, resonates with the discourse of “Bollystan,” or “India's diasporic diplomacy” (Khanna, 2005). Parag Khanna (2005) describes Bollystan as “a diasporic salad bowl of ethno-commerce and a new model of geographically transcendent sovereignty” (p. 17). Bollywood stars like Aishwarya Rai and Sharukh Khan have been proclaimed Indian ambassadors. In this mediated environment, Bollywood increasingly becomes representative of “India” for much of the second and later generations of diasporic Indians. As Ashis Nandy (1998) has pointed out, Bollywood provides categories of meaning making for a large population of Indians the world over. That is, Bollywood provides common language for diasporic Indians across generations whatever their actual geographic locations are.

The characterization of a Bollywoodized, 3D “new world,” evident in the Indusgeeks machinima described above, serves to reinstate existing offline hierarchies and binaries. It does this while also reproducing a very specific, euphoric vision of the future that brings together India's vision for development through the IT sector with its entertainment industry's call to specific groups of NRIs to return as investors.

Two-dimensional web space does not always offer the flexibility or excitement of three-dimensional platforms like Second Life in helping diasporic youth perform their cultural and national identities. Within such three-dimensional environments, youth seek venues where their cultural identities can be articulated in digital cultural artifacts. In addition to machinima produced from Second Life gameplay, another site of South Asian digital diasporic engagement is in remixed videos and machinima found on YouTube made through the platform of the computer game known as World of Warcraft (WoW).

These videos and machinima not only illustrate how South Asians code affect within computer game worlds as they play through the use of Bollywood music, they also show glimpses of the struggle over racial identity within a non-customizable online world like WoW. Here the categories and game routines are coded so that players do not have much flexibility regarding the appearance or clothing of the avatar. This is unlike malleable games such as Sims 2, where users can, within limits, produce custom meshes for avatar appearance and clothing. One video demonstrating such limitations was posted to YouTube in November 2006.⁷ The video uses figures from the visually dwarf-like “Mage” race from WoW to depict a Bollywood aesthetic in machinima form.⁸ In the comments section on YouTube, some viewers critiqued the producer of the machinima for using a figure that does not fit Bollywood appearances. One user stated, “Very good but the gnomes are not so good for this song.”⁹ Another wrote, “Good vid, but it'd be better if you used Dranei models instead. They are THE Bollywood race imo.:).” The machinima creator noted, in response, that “This vid was made before addon, so only_ oldschool models.” And indeed in a later video uploaded by another user in June 2007, a Dranei female avatar is used as a central character. The machinima, named “wow dranei dance,”¹⁰ depicts a very sexualized rendering of a Dranei female avatar dancing to the tune of Asha Bhonsle and Kronos Quartet performing “Koi Aaya Aane Bhi De.”

The remixing of a Hindi song within WoW's environment demonstrates Indian diasporic youth's struggles to inscribe their identities through cultural artifacts online. In this example, cultural identities are imagined and re-membered by Bollywood's representation of Indianness, thereby assuring the role of Bollywood in constructing the image/brand of “Global India.” In performing such a branding role, Bollywood mobilizes transnational labor, in particular those who play with cultural artifacts and digital technologies that serve to form a networked, imagined Indian community across the globe.

In June 2007, another YouTube user posted a WoW machinima video that also used an avatar from the Dranei race and featured a hooded male character dancing to the Hindi popular song “Tunak Tunak Tun” by the widely known Punjabi popular music singer and performer, Daler Mehndi.¹¹ The background song to this video was first performed by Mehndi in 1998.¹² The song became an Internet meme because of its random silliness, as the Wikipedia entry about the song notes (Tunak Tunak Tun, n.d.). Judging by the many videos produced transnationally that referenced the Daler Mehndi song, this meme caught on across contexts and traveled through digital networks.¹³ Significantly, Daler was neither a Bollywood singing star (even though he did a few songs for Hindi films) nor an NRI at the time this Internet meme originated.¹⁴ Nevertheless, he was criticized by some in the Bollywood industry, who suggested his popularity was due more to the young girls dancing on stage with him than to his own talent and music.¹⁵ Subsequently, however, he has worked with Hindi Films, such as in Rang de Basanti released 2006, for which he sang the title song under the musical direction of A. R. Rehman. Thus Daler's affective labor, constantly referenced in online social spaces, has become a part of the Bollywood industry's attempt to evoke a sense of community in digital diasporas.

Diasporic Youth Culture as Transnational Conjuncture

Each of the examples of South Asian digital diasporic engagement discussed in this chapter follows different trajectories of labor, online cultures, and global circulation. For the moment at least, each one has become transnationalized by routing through Indian-based locations of origin and circulation (one from “Virtual India” in Second Life, the second from the computer game World of Warcraft, and the third from offline Punjab). They now inhabit global spaces of transnational capital. The machinima by Indusgeeks produces an idealized vision of India in sync with the utopian discourse around the notion of a “second life,” performing the dual function of selling both Second Life and a particular vision of India and its future. The Indusgeeks Second Life video is clearly connecting to a nation-state and a particular vision of development for the nation-state. The examples from the machinima produced using WoW demonstrate racial identifications of a Bollywoodized form of Indian identity, as well as the affective pull that Bollywood music has for producers and viewers. These machinima locate a diasporic place at the intersection of the fantasy world of WoW and the fantasy world of Bollywood – in this case there is likewise an affective pull, layered and remixed. Finally, in the Internet meme around Daler Mehndi's song, we see that the identifications travel through transnational contexts with people from a variety of backgrounds (including youth from US college classrooms as well as fans of Anime and Manga worldwide¹⁶). While Daler Mehndi was not closely associated with Bollywood at the time he produced the “Tunak Tunak Tun” video, it is significant that in later years he worked for major Bollywood hits such as Rang de Basanti, thereby serving in his own way as an ambassador of Bollystan – the “new model of geographically transcendent sovereignty” for India.

What sorts of convergences, conjunctures, and connections emerge in relation to globalization and migrant populations the world over along with the emergence of new forms of digital networked media? How are transnational diasporas manifested in relation to new technologies and to evolving forms of economic and cultural globalization? These are questions that have underpinned this chapter, which has mapped a particular route through digital space to explore how new conjunctures and convergences are produced in Indian digital diasporas.

NOTES

1 Machinima is the use of real-time 3D computer graphics rendering engines to create a cinematic production. Most often, videogames are used to generate the computer animation. Machinima-based artists, sometimes called machinimists or machinimators, are often fan laborers by virtue of their reuse of copyrighted materials. The practice of using graphics engines from videogames arose from the animated software introductions of the 1980s demoscene, Disney Interactive Studios' 1992 videogame Stunt Island, and 1990s recordings of gameplay in first-person shooter (FPS) videogames, such as id Software's Doom and Quake. Originally, these recordings documented speedruns – attempts to complete a level as quickly as possible – and multi-player matches. The addition of storylines to these films created “Quake movies.” The more general term machinima, a misspelled portmanteau of machine cinema, arose when the concept spread beyond the Quake series to other games and software. After this generalization, machinima appeared in mainstream media, including television series and advertisements (Machinima, n.d.).

2 See “Our Story: Indusgeeks” at http://www.indusgeeks.com/OurStory.html

3 MUDs Object-Oriented.

4 For a quick idea of how this scene looks, see the video “Bollywood in Second Life,” posted on YouTube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2w2p3v7WSE&feature=related

5 Kelly's world blog (http://www.kgadams.net/2006/06/11/my-second-life-deflowering) describes scripted objects as follows: “Objects a user creates can have scripted behaviors – a table could have a fold out extension, or those ears I mentioned could wiggle. Even more intriguing, an object's behavior could be based on something outside the game: virtual weather in an area could be based on real-world weather reports, for example, or a soccer ball could move based on telemetry from a real-world soccer ball.”

6 See Mira Migel (Director). “India in Second Life.” Retrieved July 18, 2011, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIg4XMhh14Y&feature=related

7 See “Bollywood Goes World of Warcraft.” Retrieved July 18, 2011, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbL3ZtBDRak

8 For a description of the Mage race, see http://wow.stratics.com/content/features/guides/mage/

9 See user comments at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbL3ZtBDRak

10 See “wow dranei dance,” retrieved July 18, 2011, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GWJhtBENUk

11 See “Exotic Draenei Indian dance,” retrieved July 18, 2011, from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyCPPSB7b5E

12 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=066_q4DIeqk

13 See “Tunak Tunak Tun” video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bAN7Ts0xBo&feature=related

14 See “Daler Mehndi” entry at Answers.com. Retrieved July 18, 2011, from http://www.answers.com/topic/daler-mehndi

15 See the “Tunak Tunak Tun Dance” entry at Knowyourmeme.com. Retrieved July 18, 2011, from http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/tunak-tunak-tun-dance

16 See the following examples posted on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MRf2DiQh2mY&feature=related; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7KSITrAcus&feature=related

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