Némésis Srour, Bollywood Film Traffic: A History of Hindi Films’ Circulation in Beirut, Cairo, and Dubai (1954–2014) (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Némésis Srour (NS): Paris is known for the richness of its cinema landscape: it has, by some counts, the most cinemas and cinema screens of any city in the world. After moving here some years ago, I gradually became conscious of a distinct lack of Indian films being screened, especially given the significant presence of world cinema. Why were there so few Indian films in French cinemas? This in turn led to a larger question, namely why and how do Indian films circulate more or less easily in various countries?
While I was reflecting on this question and how it would shape the direction of my doctoral research, I happened to have a striking conversation with my grandmother about Bollywood. In the 1980s, during the Civil War in Lebanon, she would rent many movies on VHS and watch them time and again. I wondered how these Bollywood films had arrived in the Bekaa Valley, during such a turbulent period. Who were the people behind this distribution network, and how and why had they set their eyes on this market?
My initial line of inquiry was the circulation of films, both ways, between the Indian and the Arab world; their shared cinematic culture was an argument that would often come up when I started my research. But as I dived into the network’s logic, I started to question the given of this shared culture, and my field research in Mumbai, Cairo, Beirut and Dubai confirmed an alternative paradigm and dismantled a kind of Orientalist trope.
The book offers a global history, spotlighting South-South cultural dynamics through the prism of hidden Bollywood networks in the Arab world.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
NS: Bollywood Film Traffic addresses topics at the crossroads of several fields of research. The book offers a global history, spotlighting South-South cultural dynamics through the prism of hidden Bollywood networks in the Arab world. Not only does this allow us to reshape narratives about the industry, through firsthand insights, but it also offers a transnational ethnographic journey, unveiling the Middle East through the distinctive lens of the Bombay film industry.
The book seeks to address major gaps about Bollywood film circulation and how the film industries in India and the Middle East are connected. My research, by establishing the history of circulations, also makes sense of incomplete data on the history of the film industries (cinemas, exhibitors, distribution, and distributors). My book offers a first step in documenting the circulation of Hindi films in the Middle East and offers an alternate vision of “the Arab space” (Franck Mermier) from the Bombay film industry perspective.
The issue of the invisible dimension of these circulations is key, given the sporadic nature of the sources and the conservation of archives in each of the countries discussed. The book highlights the challenge of providing a history of the films that were screened publicly, given that the history of the movie theaters and their owners is less easy to locate than the production of the films. In addition to this challenge, I discuss the difficulty of tracing the history of a popular cinema, generally despised by the elites of Arab countries, who prefer American or European cinema, and the necessity to consider oral testimonies as vital forms of historical documentation.
From the perspective of transnational studies, I offer an account of how the Bombay industry accommodated the specific issues of various local film industries. My research on the transnational ethnography of Hindi film circulation networks in Beirut, Cairo, and Dubai reveals different types of networks and their transformation over time and various regions. The plasticity at work in the formation of the networks highlights a shifting geography of cinema in the region, participating in the demystification of a homogeneous Arab world that has been saturated by Indian films.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
NS: The book builds on parts of my master's thesis, which provided an anthropological history of body language in Bollywood movies. The eleventh chapter of the book, “1985, Amitabh Bachchan’s Mard in Cairo: Embodying a Transnational Masculinity,” draws on this approach, shedding light on the convergence of Indian and Egyptian audiences and the embodiment of transnational masculinity in Bollywood cinema.
Beginning my doctoral research, initially my ambition was to establish a cinematographic or filmic body language common to Bollywood and Egyptian cinema (and Arab cinema more broadly) that would explain the extent of the film circulation between these two regions. However, I soon realized that in order to do this, it was crucial to identify the corpus of films that were most widely circulated. My focus of my book thus evolved, from its initial focus as anthropological study of corporeal representation in films, to being an ethnography of the networks behind the scenes. For future research dealing in filmic representations and cultural exchanges between India and the Arab world, my book provides the necessary groundwork.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
NS: I hope my book will be valuable to scholars in globalization studies and in Middle Eastern and South Asian studies, and equally to those in film studies and cinema history. The term Bollywood tends to restrict our understanding of the phenomenon of the circulation of Indian films, associating it with a cultural commodity destined for the diaspora and contemporary globalization, whereas the notion of “Hindi film” allows me to decompartmentalize these semantic power relations while highlighting the plurality of the modes of distribution of Indian films.
By deviating from the diasporic focus as an apparatus for understanding the dissemination of Indian films abroad, I hope that my book will render visible the manifold links that unite India with other regions of the world. By looking away from the West, the pivotal role of Hindi cinema within a globalized South emerges and the dissemination of Hindi films in the Middle East highlights a history of South-South cinema circuits, at the same time charting a new path through globalization studies.
The impact of the book will be, I hope, to provide a refreshing outlook on the Arab world, by bringing to light the rich subject of film history and circulation from the perspective of the Bombay cinema industry. Through the media lens, the Middle East is often associated with war, violence, and social issues, and scholarship within film studies largely focuses on the same topics, extending them to topics such as exile and war trauma. Given the situation in the region today, it seems particularly crucial that scholarly research presents the Middle East through alternative prisms, as a culturally dynamic region interconnected with many parts of the world, playing a pivotal role in film dissemination and other forms of cultural exchange.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
NS: My new project continues to address the circulation of Bollywood films through the lens of an Algerian distribution company specializing in Bollywood and Arab cinema. Originally based in Algiers, this company distributed Indian films across North Africa before relocating to Paris, where it shifted its focus to the European market. The study traces the history of Bollywood and Arab film circulation, beginning in North Africa, examining its connections—or lack thereof—with Middle Eastern networks, and culminating in an analysis of Paris's cinema landscape that specialized in Bollywood and Arab movies.
By connecting the history of immigration with the history of Parisian cinemas and the broader French film industry, this project aims to shed light on the cultural, social, and economic dynamics underlying the distribution and reception of Bollywood and Arab films in North Africa and France.
J: What was your methodology, and how was it innovative in the field? What made your methodology particularly effective?
NS: If one relies solely on written sources, the presence of Indian films becomes nearly invisible. General newspapers such as L'Orient-le-Jour, An-Nahar, and Al-Ahram primarily list Indian films in weekly programming, while offering in-depth articles and reviews for more prestigious cinematographies. This highlights the importance of moving beyond written sources to incorporate oral testimonies as vital historical documentation.
To analyze the commercial dimensions of film circulation, I focused on the stories and portraits of the men who forged the routes that brought Hindi cinema to the Arab world. Taking an anthropological approach, I placed these life stories at the center of my methodology to reconstruct history from the perspective of the actors directly involved. This approach not only sheds light on an under-documented history but also challenges traditional epistemological tools, highlighting the processes through which certain historical phenomena are erased.
Excerpt from the book (from the Introduction)
Among the global audiences for Bollywood cinema, the Arab world is among the most prominent, and the least understood. “Why the Arab World is Infatuated With Bollywood,” GQ magazine online promised to explain, “Forget Hollywood, Egyptians are in love with Bollywood,” was the headline of The World an American radio website on May 17, 2015. These contemporary news stories reflect the Arab world’s long-held love for Hindi films, as historian B. D. Garga testifies:
“Well over a decade after its release in India, the Cinémathèque Algérienne was showing Mother India to a packed house. As I watched the film, I was surprised to discover the spell a rural Indian family had cast on a wholly Arab audience”
The success of Indian films in Southern locales underscores the resonance that Indian cinema has had in “societies in transition” where “modernity competes with tradition, where urban and rural commingle in uneasy proximity, where underdevelopment meets development…” and the creation of “parallel modernities”. The ethnographic documenting of cultural global flows of Indian film in the Arab world, shifting the focus away from the screen and towards the film industry backstage, allows to recenter the gaze from the position of postcolonial societies, in order to look beyond the “centrality of the West”. Yet, the Arab world’s relationship with Hindi films is more ambiguous than it seems, if only we look away from the screen.
In 1965, at a Conference on Arab Cinemas and Cultures, held under the aegis of the UNESCO, the presence of Indian films in the Arab region sparked debate. While some Arab attendees perceived the popularity of Indian films as an “invasion”, the reasons for this success were formulated in essentialist terms by the film historian Georges Sadoul, “As far as the importance that Arab countries attach to Indian cinema is concerned, this is a kind of innate spontaneity that I cannot explain”.
The popularity of Indian films in Arab countries is often seen as an enigma, compared to the barriers they face in Western countries; at times, critics have accredited its popularity to shared values around the notion of family, modesty, and shared sentimentality. The circulation of Indian films within the Arab world, and the Arab public's love of these flamboyant musical melodramas, are determined and explained in essentialist terms, both by agents from the Western world, and by local consumers themselves. The aim of this book could have been to find explanations for this “innate spontaneity”, to support the idea of “innate” cultural affinities between India and Arab countries, and to offer a posthumous response to Georges Sadoul by analyzing the film as text. Rather than start from such essentialist cultural explanations, or give arguments within the framework of this system, I will begin by going back to the geographical and historical places where Indian films were distributed. My first step was to look off screen and go beyond film analysis, be it cultural and/or aesthetic, to make use “of other methodologies and other sources than those typically central to film studies”, that of “archives, trade magazines, newspapers and oral histories”.
In search of these “nomadic” Indian images, to use Hans Belting's concept, which have traveled from Bombay to Beirut, Cairo and Dubai, my research has itself taken an itinerant form to infiltrate these circulations. It followed a nomadic path that had to accommodate the opening and closing of territories, playing with borders and their redefinitions in view of foreign films. In the course of these migrations, images and their status are transformed as they arrive in other spaces. If an Indian film left Bombay as one of the biggest commercial successes of its time, with a star-studded cast of actors and a renowned director, by the time it arrived in Egypt or Lebanon, it was sometimes part of the stream of B-movies confined to second-class cinemas and their popular audiences. Circulation transforms the very value of the film, as well as the modalities of its movement through time. Paradoxically, while contemporary globalization advocates an openness and permeability of borders, my nomadic images come up against barriers that run counter to this supposed fluidity. From these obstacles, Indian films find other circuits and other ways of distribution. The cultural reasons for Hindi films’ success in the Arab world has never been truly evaluated, measured, or questioned. The first thing I wanted to do was to clear the ground for the circulation of these nomadic films, to question the process. How do Bollywood films circulate, through which networks, and who are the agents of this diffusion? Where are the locations of circulation, and what do these locations tell us about the place of this object in the public space?
By examining the processes of circulation of Indian films in the Middle East over a long period of time, from the 1950s to the contemporary era, this work crosses a multitude of histories: that of inventions and technology, a national political history, but also the economic history of the world of film merchants and distribution, as well as the history of migration and the history of piracy.
[…]
Will studying the modalities of these cinematographic circulations allow us to leave behind an essentialist vision of cultural affinities between countries of the South? Will it help us to decompartmentalize the category of the “South” in order to restore all its depth, ambiguity and plural heterogeneity? To render all these questions in their historical dimension, the book is organized in chronological sections, with focuses on specific years, to capture circulations in the form of a "close-up" on their highlight moments.
Part I opens in the 1950s, and grounds the debate on the presence of Hindi films in the Middle East in general. Part II is a focus on the year 1954, that marks the advent of the first Hindi film diffusion in Egypt. Part III focuses on merchant’s trade routes in the 1960s and 1970s, with Tehran as starting point in 1964 and the distribution of Sangam (Raj Kapoor, 1964), and closing in Beirut in 1977, a couple years after the Civil War started. Part IV examines a central period from the 1970s to the contemporary period, marked by multiple transformations: change of audiences, change of circulations modalities, change of cinematic geographies. They concentrate around key dates: 1973 law on Indian films import in Egypt, 1985 Golden Age of Hindi films in Cairo, and 2007, the launch of cable channel Zee Aflam, dedicated to Bollywood movies. And, finally, Part V offers a dive into the recent reconfigurations of Hindi film distribution around Dubai, and the barriers of circulation outside the Emirates, made particularly visible with the distribution of Dhoom 3 in 2013. The chronological milestone in contemporary times stops in 2014, the year of my last fieldwork in the Middle East. The book chapters are intertwined with interstitial elements, working as a punctuation on the general partition of the text. These interstitial elements are there to give flesh to the unsung agents of the film industry, to save from oblivion, as much as possible, the persons who paved the way for Indian films in the Middle East, as the purpose of this book is not to offer the arguments of a cultural connivance between Indian films and Arab countries, but to document the circulation of films, contributing to a global history of South-South cinematographic circuits.
