A Gujarati grandmother in Nairobi and a Sikh trucker’s kid in Southall share little in common.
Moreover, a second-gen software engineer in Toronto adds another difference in passports and mother tongues.
Additionally, put on a Shah Rukh Khan film from any decade, and Bollywood fans will recognise the same beats.
Thus, the airport reunion and the arranged-marriage standoff appear in every case.
Similarly, the NRI son who forgets how to touch his parents’ feet appears in the third act.
In contrast, that recognition is the whole point, according to a growing body of media-anthropology research.
It is heavier than the word ‘nostalgia’ makes it sound.
The term researchers keep reaching for is “imagined community,” borrowed from Benedict Anderson’s nationalism writing. It is repurposed for a population that shares no territory at all. Sociology.Institute’s 2026 survey of the field puts it plainly. However, bollywood cinema acts as a cultural mediator, its narratives negotiating Indian diasporic identity through watching together. You don’t need to live in the same city to be part of the audience. A film is imagining a community into existence. You just need to recognise the grammar.
That grammar didn’t emerge by accident. Amandeep Takhar, Pauline Maclaran, and Lorna Stevens’s 2012 study of British Sikh viewers, published in the Journal of Macromarketing, found the films doing three specific jobs at once: reaffirming pride in Indian heritage, supplying a socially sanctioned outlet for romance and longing, and reinforcing family and kinship structures that felt precarious under UK assimilation pressure. None of that is incidental filler between musical numbers — it’s the mechanism by which a diaspora that might otherwise fragment along class, region, and generation lines gets handed a shared script to perform belonging with.
The research also draws a hard line between two very different diasporas watching the same screen. There is the old diaspora — descendants of 19th- and 20th-century indentured labourers scattered across the Caribbean, East Africa, and Southeast Asia, whose relationship to India is generations removed and largely inherited. There is the new diaspora of post-1960s professional migrants to the US, UK, and Australia, whose ties to home are often a single generation old and considerably more direct. Bollywood does not serve these two audiences identically, but post-1990s films found a workaround: the ideal NRI archetype, materially Western but culturally untouched, who lets both groups project their own version of successful diasporic life onto one figure. Scholars have also flagged the cost of that figure — it tends to code cultural purity as feminine, casting women characters as custodians of tradition while men get to modernise freely.
Where it gets more interesting is the generational split within a single household. Sociology.Institute’s analysis notes that first-generation viewers are largely watching for nostalgia — a direct emotional line back to a specific place and time they remember. Second-generation viewers are after something else entirely: modern representations of an India they never lived in, evidence that the culture their parents left is still alive and evolving rather than frozen in a memory. That’s not a minor distinction. It means the same film is doing completely different psychological work depending on who’s on the couch, which is exactly why “nostalgia” undersells what’s happening — nostalgia can’t be the mechanism for someone with nothing to be nostalgic for.
Bollywood content saw a reported 42% jump in North American streaming hours between 2022 and 2025.
Moreover, there was a 75% jump in Africa over the same span.
Growth is no longer coming only from South Asian audiences, with gains in Latin America and Eastern Europe too.
Platforms have noticed, bundling and marketing specifically to the “South Asian diaspora” as a definable, monetizable audience segment, even though the scholarship is clear that category papers over real fractures: the industry’s default lens still runs upper-middle-class, Hindu, and Hindi-first, leaving out the diaspora’s rural, minority, and non-Hindi-speaking members almost entirely.
None of which changes why the airport-reunion scene still works on three generations at once, in three different countries, for three different reasons. That’s not habit. That’s a community deciding, one shared viewing at a time, what it still wants to recognise as itself.
Sources
- How Bollywood Shapes Diasporic Identities: Consumption and Representations — Sociology.Institute, 2026
- Bollywood Cinema’s Global Reach: Consuming the “Diasporic Consciousness” — Takhar, Maclaran & Stevens, Journal of Macromarketing, 2012
- (Dis)locating South Asia: Diasporic markets in the global streaming landscape — Baishya & Mini, 2026
- Nostalgia, nation and Bollywood: second-generation Indian-Americans and the consumption of movies — South Asian Diaspora, 2021
SEO
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