But the New York theatre director makes a surprising revelation that connects Hindi films’ African viewership to South Asian diasporic presence while removing it from the region of official statistics on the export and exhibition of films. Awara, the 1950s angst of unemployed youth in newly independent post-colonial states, connects the Raj Kapoor phenomenon in dissimilar post-colonial locations. This paper draws on these ethnographic studies to locate the global flows of Hindi cinema in these pre-global narratives of mobility to predate the history of globalization in Indian oceanic circulations, colonial migrations and post-colonial exchanges under the rubric of internationalization. Through the evidence provided by these researchers, it appears that African identification with themes, characters and settings portrayed in Hindi films has as much to do with the identity of the post-colonial experience as with the desire for an alternative to western modernity. However, in the absence of research on the history of this cross-fertilization, it is not possible to trace the process through which the idea of India was produced in the African imaginary.
The idea of India that appears to have inspired a variety of activities in Africa ranges from the influence of Indian political movements on African resistance struggles, the conflict between tradition and modernity, and communal value systems. Underlying the incorporation of Indian visual, narrative and performative practices in a wide range of African cultural practices is the idea of India in which India becomes the signifier for a civilizational rhetoric that can be effectively juxtaposed against the west. More recent studies by Haseenah Ebrahim on South Africa confine themselves to Bollywood’s circulation in the new global process However, new findings by Gwenda vander Steene in Senegal decouple Hindi cinema’s pre-global circulation from diasporic settlement by examining cultural practices centred on Hindi cinematic texts in regions without a South Asian diaspora. Pedro Machado in “Threads that Bind†traces the “multiplicity of long-term and complex networks of association across and around the ocean†and maintains that “an inter-relationship exists between cultural practices and material exchangeâ€. Machado’s essay is remarkable in his detailed examination of the expanse of Gujarati vaniya networks in the eighteenth century and the determination of Gujarati textile patterns through the preferences of African consumers.
He shows how the historical spaces of South Asia and East, East Central and Southeast Africa were intimately connected through the cultural logics of cloth consumption and the circulation of networks of South Asian merchants. Bollywood is situated in a transnational network of production, distribution and consumption in the globalized economy in which local cultures, repackaged and redirected in metropolitan hubs, are made available for the consumption of the global consumer. In the same year, Haseenah Ebrahim adds a new dimension to the research on Bollywood audience by tracing the viewership from the ghetto to the mainstream in South Africa. Most of the Indian directors always chooses comedy over other genres since comedy has a mass audience to watch. This narrative of Bollywood’s contemporary global flows to white audience in Europe, North America, Canada and Australia occludes pre-global travels of Hindi popular cinema to the Middle East, Russia, China, Southeast Asia and Africa since the 1950s and those to Indian indentured populations in Fiji, West Indies and Mauritius even earlier.
Whether it is Hindi cinema’s didactic function in Zanzibar or the performance of tradition or sacred in Nigeria, it appears quite clear that Hindi cinema’s global flows even before the era of globalization have constituted a viable alternative to Hollywood. Larkin’s essays that frame the Bollywoodization of Bandiri music or Hausa videos against the discourse of globalization take the 50s flows for granted. THE global flows of Hindi popular cinema, christened Bollywood by the global media, have largely been located within the cultures of circulation that dominate the contemporary global process. Studies by Manas Ray and Vijay Mishra on the popularity of Hindi cinema in Fiji, and by Vijay Devadas in Malaysia, have uncovered an older history of Bollywood’s exhibition in Indian diasporic settlements and the incorporation of Bollywood images into Hindu epic narratives of Mahabharata and Ramayana on which diasporic desire converged in producing nostalgic myths of returns. chale aana cover song of Hindi films in other parts of Africa such as Zanzibar or Senegal pick on Larkin’s notion of parallel modernity to answer the question Larkin asked almost two decades ago: “What then, do African fans get from Indian movies?
This undocumented history of Hindi cinema’s popularity in both Anglophone and Francophone Africa was performed in a party at an autumn school on “Cultural Production and Conflict Mediation†organized by the African Studies Centre at the University of Bayreuth in October 1999 where creative persons from different African regions had congregated. “For over forty years, African audiences have been watching Hindi films†(Npg), Brian Larkin asserts, pointing out that generations of Hausa youth had grown up besotted with Bollywood and traced the influence of Bollywood fashions, music and stories on Nigerian cultural production. †(Npg). African preference for Bollywood melodrama to Hollywood finesse is a form of resistance to the western narratives of modernity. Their familiarity with the Anil Kapoor blockbuster of the late eighties confirms Janaki Nair’s report in 2004 that “the regular matinee show in theatres in Senegal, Gambia, Cameroon and many other parts of Francophone Africa until recently was the Hindi filmâ€, a tradition that “has declined with the gradual disappearance of the old style theatres†(Npg).