Indian films and Nigerian lovers: media and the creation of parallel modernities

Abstract

This article discusses the significance of Indian films in revealing a relatively ignored aspect of the transnational flow of culture. The intra-Third World circulation of Indian film offers Hausa viewers a way of imaginatively engaging with forms of tradition different from their own at the same time as conceiving of a modernity that comes without the political and ideological significance of that of the West. After discussing reasons for the popularity of Indian films in a Hausa context, it accounts for this imaginative investment of viewers by looking at narrative as a mode of social enquiry. Hausa youth explore the limits of accepted Hausa attitudes to love and sexuality through the narratives of Indian film and Hausa love stories (soyayya). This exploration has occasioned intense public debate, as soyayya authors are accused of corrupting Hausa youth by borrowing foreign modes of love and sexual relations. The article argues that this controversy indexes wider concerns about the shape and direction of contemporary Nigerian culture. Analysing soyayya books and Indian films gives insight into the local reworking and indigenising of transnational media flows that take place within and between Third World countries, disrupting the dichotomies between West and non-West, coloniser and colonised, modernity and tradition, in order to see how media create parallel modernities. Through spectacle and fantasy, romance and sexuality, Indian films provide arenas for considering what it means to be modern and what may be the place of Hausa society within that modernity. For northern Nigerians, who respond to a number of different centres, whether politically to the Nigerian state, religiously to the Middle East and North Africa, economically to the West, or culturally to the cinematic dominance of India, Indian films are just one part of the heterogeneity of everyday life. They provide a parallel modernity, a way of imaginatively engaging with the changing social basis of contemporary life that is an alternative to the pervasive influence of a secular West.

Popular Culture and Democracy in Some Southern Contexts: An Introduction

“…34 Another globally influential genre within popular culture has been Indian film which, in African societies, has been put to different uses and provided with alternative meanings by different audiences -such as those in Northern Nigeria, for example. 35 And the genre could be as powerful in its absence as in its presence. In Uganda the world of film and cinemas was completely controlled by Indians: their expulsion by Amin in 1971 removed cinemagoing from the list of leisure activities.…”

“Praise the Lord”: Popular cinema and pentecostalite style in Ghana's new public sphere

“…14 Their products have more in common with the soap operas, Indian films (Larkin 1997), and Nigerian video-movies (Haynes 2000) that started to enter the Ghanaian market in the late 1990s than with those expressions of ''African cinema'' that reach Western movie screens; they are certainly not auteur films conveying a distinct director's view but feature everyday life and affirm prevailing moods and structures of feeling. Films have to be easily accessible and consumable, however, without being boring.…”

“…Debates about religion, media, and politics in postcolonial societies have mainly focused on political Islam, especially in the Middle East (cf. Eickelman and Anderson's pathbreaking 1999 volume on new Muslim public spheres and Hirschkind 2001aand Hirschkind , 2001b on Egypt; see also Larkin 1997, and on the rise of Hindu nationalism in India (e.g., Babb and Wadley 1995;Dasgupta 2001;Mankekar 1999;Rajagopal 2001). Considerably less attention has been paid to the public role of Christianity…”

The Karma of Chicken Curry Tibetan Masala Films and Youth Narratives of Exile

“…It is possible, as Rajadhyaksa (2003, 38) has argued, that "the Indian cinema's modes of address have opened up a new category for spectatorial address that appears not to be accounted for by, say, the American cinema". Much like the distinctive reception of Indian cinema by Nigerian spectators (Larkin 1997) or the Fijian Indians' Hindi film productions in Australia (Ray 2000), Rajadhyaksa (2003, 38) points out that possibly "the cinema's addresses are entering complex realms of identification in these places, which would definitely further argument around the nature of the cultural-political mediation that the Indian, or possibly the Hong Kong, cinemas continue to allow". Bollywood, hence, engages Tibetan spectators into such "realms of identification" (Rajad-4 The scholar of International Relations Dibyesh Anand has extensively discussed the construction of 'Tibetanness' among Tibetans exiles in South Asia.…”

“…The film, thus, can be read as an expression of an aesthetics of emotionality that have made of Bollywood films, with their romantic stories and melodramatic style, a suitable formula for conveying the heartfelt need, among young Tibetans, to discuss love and intimacy beyond the boundaries of constraining 'traditions'. Paraphrasing what Brian Larkin (1997) has argued regarding the production of local love story books (soyayya books) and their relationship to Bollywood films' consumption by young Hausa people in Nigeria, we can also say that "the engagement with themes of romantic love [in Tibetan masala films] exemplifies precisely this desire to explore the limits of social norms during a period of rapid change" (415). As much as the "tension between arranged marriages and love marriages is not new to Hausa society, nor is the idea that romantic love may be subversive of the moral order" (415), comparably such topics are common among young Tibetans, who are equally affected by "the speed of contemporary social change that has placed the issues of love, marriage and sexuality squarely at the forefront of social concern" (415).…”