Abstract
This chapter aims to document and trace the transnational journeys of Sooni Taraporevala’s screenwriting and filmmaking. As a skilled photographer for many years, followed by screenwriting for Mira Nair’s films, her screenwriting constructs the exilic worlds of her characters through an almost cinema vérité approach. I argue that universalism frames the hybridized and multicultural identities of the South Asian diaspora in her work. The terrain of the home is explored through imaginative utopian constructs that mediate the problems of an immigrant out in the world. Self-discovery narratives then become the node by which her characters emerge to fight the gritty realities of life. On the one hand, the transnational lens lends the Indian identity a global perspective in Taraporevala’s work, and on the other hand, her position as the immigrant film professional dependent on the Hollywood systems of funding reinforces the questions around the representation of Indian identity. Thus, this chapter places her work in a multicultural framing and layers it with the critiques and questions around representation.
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Rastogi, A. (2023). Roots and Routes: Home and the World in Sooni Taraporevala’s Transnational Storytelling. In: Iqbal Viswamohan, A. (eds) Women Filmmakers in Contemporary Hindi Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-10232-5_9
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