Past Meets Present: Monsoon Wedding Redux

Abstract

Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding provokes questions on the limits and boundaries of hospitality and acceptance. Can the camaraderie in Monsoon Wedding transcend economic class and social markers to promise an optimistic dance that thinks of equality with a difference? In interrogating and exploring such a possibility, I deploy cosmopolitanism as a critical conceptual tool. To my mind, interrogating and applying the concepts of cosmopolitanism can categorically help understand and develop the terrains of an ethical and empathetic community building across class, caste, and other socio-cultural and geographic matrices. Within the realities of a growing global sphere, this kind of an interrogation can help support a global civic culture while laying the foundations of a cosmopolitan democracy. I take Monsoon Wedding as a premise marking tensions within group and individual interactions while exploring this potential of community building.