Traveling Together and Journeying Apart, Revisiting Highway

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Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size AcknowledgementsA special thank you to friend, colleague and sociologist Sriti Ganguly, and my partner, Sid, with whom I am lucky to share a love of Bollywood cinema. Gratitude to Rachel Cantave and Zaheer Abbas for helping find a copy of the film and offering feedback—it truly takes a village.Notes1 Ali, Imtiaz, Highway is a Hindi-language Bollywood film directed by Imtiaz Ali and produced by Sajid Nadiawala. It had a theatrical release in 2014 and stars Alia Bhatt and Randeep Hooda. For more information, see https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2980794/. (UTV Motion Pictures, 2014). The film is available for purchase in the United States in DVD format on Amazon and can be streamed in India on the OTT platform Hotstar.2 Most other and recent coming-of-age stories are centered around the growing up of male protagonists. For example, Mukherji, Ayan, Wake Up Sid (Dharma Productions, 2009) https://www.netflix.com/title/70123119, Ali, Imtiaz, director. Love Aaj Kal, (Eros International, 2009) https://www.primevideo.com/dp/amzn1.dv.gti.6aba5a5d-3e27-0474-1ca3-2072d14054f6?autoplay=0&ref_=atv_cf_strg_wb, and Rockstar (Eros International, 2011) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3y6xksjre4. Road movies, rare in Bollywood, have focused on male friends who travel together and rediscover themselves and their friendships. Two prominent ones are Akhtar, Farhan, Dil Chahta Hai (Yash Raj Films, 2001) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTAWi0El5E0, Akhtar, Zoya, Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara (Eros International, 2011) https://www.netflix.com/title/70202336, and even Akhtar, Zoya, Dil Dhadakne Do (Eros International, 2015) https://www.netflix.com/title/80057585, a film about a family and their friends on a cruise with the son’s growth arc as the focus.3 Kathinka Frøystad, “Anonymous Encounters: Class Categorisation and Social Distancing in Public Places,” in The Meaning of the Local: Politics of Place in Urban India, ed. Henrike Donner and Geert De Neve (London: Routledge, 2011), 159–181; Surinder Jodhka, Caste in Contemporary India (New Delhi: Routledge, 2015); M. N. Srinivas, “Caste in Modern India,” The Journal of Asian Studies 16, no. 4 (1957): 529–548.4 Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. John Richardson (New York: Greenwood, 1986), 241–258; Frøystad, “Anonymous Encounters,” 2011.5 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 2002); Louis Dumont, “Homo Hierarchicus,” Social Science Information, 8, no. 2 (1969): 69–87.6 Gopal Guru, editor, Humiliation: Claims and Contexts (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009); Anand Teltumbde, The Persistence of Caste: The Khairlanji Murders and India’s Hidden Apartheid (London: Zed Books, 2010).Additional informationNotes on contributorsRiddhi BhandariRiddhi Bhandari is an anthropologist with research interests in everyday economic practices, aspirations and enterprise culture in contemporary India. Currently, she is working on two research projects: tourism entrepreneurship and digital self-help gurus. She is assistant professor at O.P. Jindal Global University’s School of Liberal Arts and Humanities and a Junior Fellow at Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, where she is working on her book manuscript on tourism entrepreneurship in post-liberalization India.