Paper short abstract:

Social scientists have recently replaced "Diaspora" by "cosmopolitanism", which came to fill the historical and sociological gaps between the postcolonial paradigm and the contemporary new conditions of political and cultural citizenship.

Paper long abstract:

In the case of the Indian diaspora, Bollywood cinema has contributed noticeably to these new conditions. It has gained currency over the past years within the global arena as never before and it has become a term with which Indian popular culture is identified all over the world as it heralds a new era for Hindi cinema that connect India and the diaspora in a loop that, in the whole, and along with IT and outsource, are emblematic of trademark India.

My paper aims at showing how Bollywood and more broadly the consumption of Indian culture is shedding a new light into the increasing Indian influence in the mainstream European culture, threatening the perceived pre-eminence of Western popular culture, and showing the complex dialectic of transnational emotions trough which the Indian Diaspora evolves and relates to the Indian homeland. Therefore creating a cosmopolitan web linking India and the world, through a common aesthetic and semiological language, a web that reformulates the notion of citizenship and national belonging.