Abstract
This chapter presents a counterintuitive analysis of Himalaya Singh (2005), a film by Hong Kong director Wai Ka-Fai that is built upon the Orientalist stereotypes of India and is criticised by Indian scholars as humiliating and distasteful. By highlighting inter-Asian solidarities, Srinivas shows that the fusion of Hong Kong martial arts with Bollywood music and dance unites the twin paragons of global cinema and permits a new reading of the films as a performative critique of the Orientalising gaze.
I am grateful to Kyouko Nobi for her works on Indian cinema. My research in Tokyo in 2010 was supported by the Slavic Research Centre of Hokkaido University in Sapporo. This chapter draws on arguments that I presented in a lecture at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan, on October 27, 2010. An earlier version of this was presented at the international conference on “India, Russia, China: Comparative Aspects of Religion and Culture,” organised by the Slavic Research Centre of Hokkaido University and the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society in Bangalore in September 2011.
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Srinivas, S.V. (2016). Chinaman, Not Hindustani: Stereotypes and Solidarity in a Hong Kong Film on India. In: Lee, JH., Kolluri, S. (eds) Hong Kong and Bollywood. Global Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-94932-8_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-94932-8_5
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