A ‘New India’ for the Arab World

Abstract

This article investigates the formations of ‘Brand Modi’ and ‘Brand Bollywood’ and their strategic and overlapping foray into the United Arab Emirates, considering it a pivotal moment in contemporary transregional media production. Two branding campaigns form the basis of my analysis: Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s highly mediatized 2015–2018 U.A.E. visits and Shah Rukh Khan’s 2016–2019 ‘#BeMyGuest’ campaign for Visit Dubai (the Emirate’s official tourism brand). Attending to questions of branding techniques, diasporic identity and historical imagination, I examine how these campaigns play on notions of the common man or aam aadmi and the upwardly-mobile and cosmopolitan ‘New Indian’ through the celebrity personas of Modi and Khan. I argue that this creation of a ‘New India’ for the Arab world seeks to efface down class connotations of India and Indians in Arab imaginaries by re-framing India as a key diplomatic and cultural-infrastructural partner of the Emirates.