Finding Nostalgia in Diasporic Film

Immigrant nostalgia is a Hydra—a lashing, many-headed thing made of grief.

This is Sepia Tone, a column by Nadya Agrawal on growing up with films from the South Asian diaspora.

My grandparents made a life in America for themselves, their four children, and, through chain immigration, their nieces and nephews. They came with one of the first true waves of South Asian immigrants to Houston, Texas. My grandfather came to study and work in the fast-growing energy sector. And though they dug into their neighborhood—buying a house and opening a business; raising their children, who, in time, raised their own children; spending forty years in the US—they ultimately decided to return to India in the early 2000s.

Immigrant nostalgia is a Hydra—a lashing, many-headed thing made of grief. It is born of self-protection in the face of change, and it is a difficult and often illogical thing, which makes it all the more anguishing. For two years or so my grandparents lived in Hyderabad in India. Then they came back. It wasn’t what they wanted. It didn’t fit right. They were stuck between the Houston they built through hard labor and the India they left behind. The problem was, in the end, that India no longer existed. Time had moved on without them.

When I think about nostalgia, I come back often to the archetypal uncle that haunts so many diaspora films. He shakes his fist at the “bloody English” while he marries a white woman and lives among white people. He drinks himself into a stupor as he reminiscences about beautiful, sun-kissed days in his native Mumbai, or his father’s village, or Chittagong, or Uganda, or a place now lost to time. He claims India or Pakistan or Bangladesh is “number one!” always, never forget. He is played by Om Puri in East Is East or Roshan Seth in Mississippi Masala. He sends all his money to his ailing mother, who still lives in the old country and wishes every day that he could return to being a little boy in her house. He casually rampages over his childrens’ lives with his incompatible desires that they thrive in this new place and that they return home as natives. He takes their assimilation as betrayal. Sometimes it’s a woman, a mother who fears her son is turning into an Englishman and who insists on only speaking Hindi, like Kajol’s Anjali from Kuch Kuch Hota Hai.

The problem was, in the end, that India no longer existed. 

These people are based in reality. They are like my grandparents. Their real-life counterparts love to imagine their homelands as a static thing, untouched by time. But they also know better. Every time they go back with suitcases full of gifts, they can feel their hold on their home country diminishing. New businesses have come up. Families have moved out of the neighborhood. They’ve left the village and moved to the city. The things that only the expats could bring––laptops, phones, flannel pajamas, cake mix, makeup, drug store chocolate––are now plentiful and sold locally. They rub their temples over the changes and put it to the backs of their minds. A new Hydra head emerges.

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Perhaps because of our parents’ nostalgia—or sometimes the glaring, unforgiving lack of it—we, the second and third generations of the diaspora, are often guided by nostalgia.

When my family first started visiting India during the holidays, my mother’s family in New Delhi was sprawling. There were dozens of people to visit. We inhaled dinners, handed over and received a plethora of gifts. The two-week calendar was full. Now, twenty years on, the numbers have halved. So many people have moved to America, to Australia, to other cities where they can work. They have sent their children to every corner of the world. Our visits are shorter and less hurried now. This displacement has made the children of immigrants especially untethered. So we turn to nostalgia, which casts a rosy and undeserved light on things like poverty, colorism, and casteism, to fill in the gaps.

The diaspora film understands immigrant nostalgia. It is populated with both young and old yearners. But just as it is backward looking, it is also future casting. For me, early 2000’s films like Bend It Like Beckham and Where’s the Party Yaar? taught me how to be a brown teenager. They taught me how to hold two contrasting ideas in my hands: wings and roots. They showed me how I could be independent without fully shrugging off the strictures of culture.

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The word nostalgia has a nostalgic history. It is derived from Greek root words but is an invention of the seventeenth century. Combining nóstos, which means “home” or “homecoming,” and álgos, “sorrow,” nostalgia is at its core despairing homesickness. Homesickness itself is a borrowed translation of nostalgia.

Nostalgia is a strange business. Lining the streets of Manhattan are various curio shops selling midcentury antiques, first-edition books, vintage movie posters, stacked towers of Pyrex dishware, Y2K midriff-skimming tops. A few weeks ago, I took two trains and walked twenty-four blocks to buy a mirror from a guy living in a prewar apartment. Together we gushed about the hand-painted red flowers that detailed the top panel. “You just don’t get them like this anymore,” we said to each other over and over. He and I had never lived in a time in which pieces like this were common. We told each other stories about our last great find vintaging upstate. He told me the best times to trawl the Upper East Side streets for trashed treasures. I assured him that we were a strange and rare type of people, but the truth is that in a city of 8.4 million people, none of us are unique. The stores prove that.

Nostalgia reigns in the culture too. Cottagecore reimagines a pastoral past that is finally accessible and harmless, a counter to the tech dystopia we live in. The fashion industry, egged on by the demanding, bottomless hunger of social media, has successfully cannibalized decades of style over the past five years and is now regurgitating turn-of-the-century lowriders and pre-recession gaudiness. Every song on the radio is eerily reminiscent of something from twenty years ago. Nothing is new. But then it never was to begin with.

When the children of the ’90s became old enough to create their own culture via BuzzFeed personality quizzes and viral memes, they expended most of their energy on reminiscing about their childhoods. Spawning a million and one “Only ’90s kids will remember” Facebook groups, listicles, and now TikToks, the archive was being created quickly and efficiently. Gameboys, Tamagotchis, the Golden Age of Disney, water-filled tubes, Beanie Babies, Otter Pops, Arthur on PBS, Skip Ball, and on and on. Nostalgia fixates on the consumables.

In my antique trawling, I always have an eye out for South Asian kitsch. Like the bejeweled blue Odissi dancer statuette standing on the corner of a thrift-store shelf. It has me rapidly messaging with people on Facebook who bought a carved wooden box during their backpacking years and are now downsizing. Ownership feels sometimes like the closest approximation to understanding.

In her book Redefining the Immigrant South: Indian and Pakistani Immigration to Houston during the Cold War, historian Uzma Quraishi explains how the performance and consumption of culture were key ways South Asian immigrants confirmed their and their childrens’ ethnicity. She talks about films from India shown on campus at the University of Houston, which immigrant students and other members of the Houston South Asian diaspora paid one dollar to attend, and the schools of language and classical dance that cropped up in the later part of the century for those immigrants’ children. Culture takes on a transactional quality. It is consumable and portioned out on special days—dance class on the weekends, radio shows in the morning, movie night once a month. Quraishi goes on to say this performance of culture was also a way for South Asians to retain their perpetual foreignness. It kept them insulated from others. Nostalgia is both protection and alienation. The constant challenge to assimilation.

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Assimilation is often a goal of the American culture at large and the individual within it. But it is a careful equation: How much of the original culture can be willingly sacrificed to dominant society, and how much acceptance will be returned in its place?

With South Asian Americans, the ones brought here to be engineers and doctors, like my grandfather, assimilation has a dollar value for those making the jump—it comes with a beautiful McMansion, good schools, suburban bliss. But why are we so able to make this exchange? In her book With All Due Respect, Trump’s former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, who is Indian American, states it smugly: “Mostly we’re just good at being Americans.” But this is, of course, a delusion.

In the Western political imagination, the immigrant is the personification of nostalgia—perpetually pulled back toward their home countries, remarkable in their ability to live here and see their children be successful but always, always the other. If immigrants are embraced by Western society, it is often because we serve a purpose: We hold up the economy, we vote, we make food that people like to eat, our cultures are colorful and to be invited in is a novelty, and on and on.

In a place that is openly hostile to others like us, and where hate crimes seem to always be spiking, teetering on the edge of whatever inflammatory news story makes the covers, the immigrant wants both to settle back into the drugging comfort of homeland nostalgia and to demonstrate that they’ve made a new homeland here. Dangling from the cabbie’s rearview mirror after 9/11 was the Taj Mahal keychain, while American flags streamed from the hood antenna. These are not incompatible desires. But assimilation demands only one answer, not two.

The films of the diaspora are fixated on American middle-class woes and the allure of total and pure assimilation. Kal Penn shrugs off parental expectations to marry a brown girl and become a doctor in The Namesake, Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, and Where’s the Party Yaar? Even abroad, Parminder Nagra’s Jess wants a life beyond her parents’ perpetual disappointments in Bend It Like Beckham. Only the children of immigrants can yearn for this acceptance by their peers and pursue, with total abandon, that elusive concept of happiness. Their parents are caught up in emotional wars they cannot see.

But then the Hydra reemerges, yet another head, devouring the hearts of the children. The pursuit of assimilation isn’t enough. It leaves a hole behind. It is unsatisfying. A tightrope that bucks in the wind. What do you do when there’s nothing to plant your feet on? I, like many second generationers, went through a period of rejecting everything that felt other about me. But even if I shrugged off labels, the people around me were quick to reaffix them. There is little gained in the process. Sometimes the culture you’re born into doesn’t love you back. At times, it seems that when we look back, we see so much more than we do when we look forward.

Nostalgia provides an anchor in time and space when there is nothing. It is easy to be homesick for a place of your own imagining, far easier than it is to be awake to the realities of the place you actually occupy. In this way, the nostalgia of the children is vastly different than that of their parents. Like an echo in a cavern. Insubstantial but haunting.

Nostalgia provides an anchor in time and space when there is nothing.

Much of the modern South Asian American diaspora, from what I can see, is less caught between two countries and more often caught between two senses of time. We, like our parents, hold on to a vision of the Subcontinent where we would be more readily accepted than we are in our home countries in the West. We want to wear the traditional clothes extravagantly, eat and celebrate the food, adorn ourselves, worship together. We want to perform culture as an approximation of living in it full-time. We love to wear our mothers’ wedding jewelry in photos on Instagram. We want to hybridize our experience in new ways. We want to make sense of our displacement through grainy home videos, sepia-toned photographs, and borrowed clothing.

In the end, it’s all just a search for belonging. Origination as a concept is the most grounding one to be found, even if it’s once or twice removed. There is a step beyond nostalgia, and that is creation. Creating culture, not simply reliving it, builds belonging anew. The diaspora is a blurred entity, often cast between poles or places, but it is also a culture in and of itself.

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The diaspora film is the bridge between nostalgia and cultural creation. It can make references to old films, it can play old songs to flesh out a character, it can move back and forward in time to show us why something is the way it is. But as an artifact of modern inspiration, it is also making something new in the present era.

Debuts of diaspora films have always been surprising. We’ve had over thirty years of them, and still they startle. There was a time when these films did not land on Netflix en masse with limited fanfare. We used to have to seek them out or stumble upon them like a twenty-dollar bill on the street. They were as much a manifestation of our will and luck in their watching as they were in their creation.

And now they themselves have become objects of nostalgia. Every year, a thread about Bend It Like Beckham goes viral on Twitter. Fans bemoan the queer film that could have been. They clamber over each other to curse the fact that Parminder Nagra didn’t get the same breakout career trajectory as Keira Knightley. Twenty years on, we can still be angry about what was taken from us. We can still sit down and rewatch the film, reminded that it has been waiting for us on multiple streaming services.

The opening titles come up, and I’m back in that indie theater watching it for the first time. I’m back at the sleepover watching it for the second time. I’m sprawled out on the teddy-bear carpet staring up at the gray-tinged bootleg of American Desi as it plays on the biggest television I’ve ever seen. My mother is standing in the doorway as Denzel flashes his teeth at Sarita in Mississippi Masala. My father is guffawing, slapping his knee through Where’s the Party Yaar? I am so incredibly, heart-wrenchingly nostalgic for all these times. I want to live as a child in my parents’ house again, the dawning realization of what it means to be South Asian American washing me in gold and silver.