KEYNOTE ADDRESS: AUSTRALIA-INDIA LEADERSHIP DIALOGUE

This address was delivered by Pallavi Sharda at the Australia–India Leadership Dialogue — a high-level forum comprising thought leaders and key stakeholders in the bilateral relationship. She was invited to speak on the convergence of arts, technology and culture in the soft power corridor between the two countries. We are publishing it here because it is, in part, the founding argument for why Bodhini Studios exists.

I can't not approach this topic from a deeply personal standpoint.

I stand before you today as an Australian woman - born in Perth on Noongar land and brought up here in Melbourne on the lands of the Wurundjeri people. An Indian woman - the child of two academics who grew up in Delhi but chose Australia as their home in the mid 1980s.

I learnt Hindi by watching bootleg Bollywood movies hired from a corner Indian shop called Masala Queen - a place where I became smitten by Hindi cinema. I learnt the tropes of my Australianness, amongst other things, from the tele and by cheering on my older brother as he ran between the wickets for our local club cricket team every Saturday morning.

I stand before you today also as an artist. While I may be known as a film actress, I trained foremost as a Bharatha Natyam classical dancer here in Melbourne - under the tutelage of Dr Chandrabhanu, a man of mixed Malay-Indian heritage who brought the Kalakshetra style of dance to Australia in the 1970s, and under Srimati Renuka Arumughasamy who arrived in Australia from Sri Lanka in the 1980s and taught the fundamentals of this art form from the garage of her modest home. So smitten was I by this ancient art form that aged nine, in what was perhaps the first child-led solo cultural exchange program between India and Australia, I moved to Chennai for a semester to learn dance there.

It was in my late teens that, while completing my higher education in law and journalism and studying drama, I shifted from Melbourne to Mumbai - because in Australia, as a professional arts practitioner of Indian heritage, there simply was no space to perform.

Stripped of my Australianness - my most cherished privilege - I was completely alone in India. I was now distinctly other. There was no pathway, no institutional support. It was statistically impossible and, dare I say, had never been done before.

I don't use myself as a case study lightly. But I can't help feeling like an anthropological study in what it takes to contribute to a cultural corridor between these two great countries without any framework, paradigm or dialogue to support it. Without anyone, at any institutional level, saying: we see what you're doing, and it matters.

As time passed, I carved a diverse global film career - one which has always had an eye on breathing life into the reality of an Indian-Australian identity. Cricket and Bollywood - the vegemite on toast of our cultural relationship - were central themes. I waved my hands alongside Shane Warne as Melbourne's Moomba Queen. I curated and performed at White Night, bringing Bollywood, Kathak and Bharatha Natyam to a floating stage on the Yarra. In India, I hosted the IPL for Sony ESPN, using live television broadcast to a country of a billion as the forum where I finally ‘came out as Australian’, letting my hidden Aussie twang loose on Indian screens for the first time since arriving in India.

And then I came back.

The language of diversity erupted in the global screen framework – it seemed for once possible that people of colour might finally be allowed in. Cross back over the Indian Ocean and onto Australian screens - building the the other side of that bridge - was my inevitable next step.  

What I did not expect upon my return was having to forge a career from scratch - all over again - because the world that had inducted me into the screen arts was considered mythic, exotic, irrelevant when it came to the nuts and bolts of being a working actress in Australia. I was other and foreign once again. Not Indian enough for one room. Not Australian enough for the other.

Until not that long ago, there was a stark lack of understanding - on both sides - of what it means to live fluidly between two places. To shape-shift between parts of yourself not as performance but as survival. The existing frameworks didn't account for the adaptability that comes naturally to those of us who work, live and have our hearts in both places.

At every step, I sought institutional help. I tried to create artist residencies. To prove the worth of the experiment in cultural bridge-building. Each time, my successes were celebrated - by community, sometimes diplomatically - but the sweat and toil of the grassroots work remained invisible.

This is not unique to me. People-to-people links in the arts have largely been an individualised endeavour. Workers - and that's what we are, workers - in culture industries are often self-starters. Underfunded. Devoid of institutional backing. Expected to be the icing on the cake in our cross-cultural story while quietly being the ingredient that makes it rise.

I want to say that plainly to this room, because this is the room that makes decisions about what gets resourced and what gets left to individuals to carry alone.

Culture is not the soft option in the bilateral relationship. It is not decoration. It is not the thing you fund after the trade agreements are signed. It is the connective tissue that makes everything else legible - that turns a strategic partnership into something people actually feel. 

In 2022, Netflix USA released three Indian-American pieces of content in one week — one of which was Wedding Season, a rom-com I was fortunate to star in. The American example shows that cross-pollination of our stories, whether for the screen or through sport, has global rewards — it can create valuable IP and build cultural output that transcends physical boundaries. The benefits aren't limited to the aspirations of practitioners. They extend to industry development and the realisation of community-building goals.

With the internet and technology, the possibilities are infinite. The Sitar player in Dandenong and the weaver in Banaras and the indie game developer in Hyderabad have the capacity to converge, create and build new narratives together. But that requires sustained investment. Real pathways. Not celebration without infrastructure.

Like India, Australia is not a monolith. It is not just a filming location or a tax incentive or a golden beach (though the beaches are pretty great). It is a layered community with a rich Indigenous history, filled with mythology and art, contemporary research and innovation, and now the stories of a million-strong Indian diaspora who are making something genuinely new here.

Those stories deserve a room of their own.

The convergence of India and Australia - through arts, sport and technology - is already underway. It is happening in garages and studios and community halls, carried by individuals who built the corridor themselves because no one built it for them.

The question for this room is not whether that convergence is real. It is whether you are willing to invest in it as though it is.