Appadurai argues that the new cosmopolitanism brought about by movements of people and capital in the contemporary era has created a deterritorialised world that has new significance for the understanding of media and of imagination (1990, 1991). Media figure prominently in creating interconnections between different peoples who can now consider alternative lives based not on experiences in their own locality but on a range of experiences brought to them through international mass media. As more people throughout the world see their reality 'through the prisms of possible lives offered by the mass media', Appadurai argues that contemporary ethnography must now expand to find ways of understanding the social reality of imagination: 'fantasy is now a social practice; it enters, in a host of ways, into the fabrication of social lives' (Appadurai, 1991: 198).
The concept of imagination as outlined by Appadurai is helpful in gaining insight into the pleasures that Indian films offer Hausa viewers. (I shall discuss this further below.) It also provides a theoretical way to understand the complicated identifications of audiences and cultural forms that cross expected racial, cultural and national lines. For Hausa viewers, Indian films offer images of a parallel modernity to the West, one intimately concerned with the changing basis of social life, but rooted in conservative cultural values. Characters in Indian films struggle over whether they should speak Hindi or borrow from English, whether they should marry the person they love or wed the person their parents choose. In these and many other decisions like them the narrative tensions of Indian films raise, consider and resolve minor and major anxieties within contemporary Indian society, anxieties that are relevant to Hausa viewers. Moreover, when Hausa youth rework Indian films within their own culture by adopting Indian fashions (such as the headscarves or jewellery of Indian actresses), by copying the music styles for religious purposes, or by using the filmic world of Indian sexual relations to probe the limitations within their own cultural world they can do so without engaging with the heavy ideological load of 'becoming Western'. The popularity of Indian films rests on this delicate balance of being situated between Nigerian 'tradition' and Western 'modernity', offering a mediating space for postcolonial Hausa viewers from which they may reflect on and consider the nature of contemporary social change.
INDIAN FILMS AND HAUSA VIEWERS
One result of the myopia regarding the presence of Indian films in West Africa is that hard data regarding their distribution and exhibition are extremely difficult to come by. Ekwuazi, for instance, borrows from UN statistics to write that in 1978-79 86 per cent of all films imported into Nigeria were of American origin (1987: 121). Yet earlier in the same book he acknowledges that many films come in through a grey market that escapes official notice, and unofficially 'the all-time favourite is the Indian, not the American film' (1987: 44).(7) Whereas all American films were imported through the American Motion Picture Exporters and Cinema Association (AMPECA), later the Nigerian Film Distribution Company (NFDC), Indian films were imported by a host of entrepreneurs in different countries, including the Middle East, England and India. British censorship records reveal that Indian films were first introduced by Lebanese exhibitors in the 1950s who were eager to see whether the diet of American and English films could be supplemented by the odd Arab or Indian one.s These exhibitors speculated that Arabic films would be popular in the north because of the many religious links between northern Nigeria and the Islamic world. As the language of religious practice and debate Arabic carried immense authority, but despite these links the films never became popular on northern Nigerian screens while Indian films came to dominate them.(9)
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