Among global audiences for Bollywood cinema, Némésis Srour notes, the Arab world is “one of the most prominent, and the least understood” (p. 1). Walter Armbrust captured this paradox of visibility without sustained recognition in his description of Indian cinema’s “ubiquitous non-presence” in Egypt in the edited volume Travels of Hindi Song and Dance (2008). In Bollywood Film Traffic, Srour takes this condition in Egypt as a point of departure and extends it to the Middle East as a whole. To challenge essentialist claims about the popularity of Bombay-based Hindi cinema in the Middle East resulting from shared values or cultural affinity, Srour deliberately looks “off screen and beyond film analysis” and shifts our attention toward the film industry backstage and the material conditions of circulation (p. 2). Tracing the distribution of Hindi cinema across Egypt, Lebanon, and the Gulf from the 1950s to the contemporary period, Srour reconstructs the networks, intermediaries, and sites through which Indian films have moved across the Arab world. Like Brian Larkin and other scholars who have analyzed the popularity of Indian cinema in parts of the global South, she moves the gaze from the position of postcolonial contexts and challenges the presumed centrality of the West in film history and criticism.
In Bollywood Film Traffic, Srour pays particular attention to the infrastructures that have facilitated the circulation of Indian cinema in the Middle East. Confronted with what she describes as the “sporadic nature” of available archives and a longstanding disregard for popular Indian cinema among Arab film critics, she draws on alternative sources and methods, including trade magazines, newspapers, participant observation, and oral histories conducted with distributors, merchants, and other intermediaries that she reproduces for the reader in full (p. 10). Through these materials, Srour reconstructs the complex processes through which Hindi films have moved across Egypt, Lebanon, and the Gulf, challenging assumptions about their uniform popularity across the region. In doing so, Srour offers a history in which circulation varies across uneven local conditions, different commercial strategies, and shifting political and technological forces. Rather than relying on essentialist explanation, Srour reorients the study of Hindi cinema in the Middle East toward the material histories and intermediaries that made such traffic possible in the first place.
Srour traces these dynamics across the book’s chapters through a series of case studies from the mid-1950s to the mid-2010s. She begins with the circulation of Hindi films in Egypt in the context of cultural diplomacy under nonalignment before turning to the merchant-family networks that connected Bombay to Tehran, Beirut, and parts of the Gulf in the 1960s and 1970s. In the book’s final sections, she traces the decline in theater exhibition of Indian cinema in Egypt and Lebanon alongside the arrival and dissemination of satellite television and home video, as well as the rise of Dubai as a regional hub. In particular, she considers these developments’ roles in reshaping the routes of Hindi cinema and, as part of these changes, attends to the changing composition of Hindi cinema’s viewing publics in the region, from those composed mainly of the Indian diaspora to others who came into formation during earlier, “heyday” periods of Indian cinema in Egypt and Lebanon. What emerges across these chapters is a history in which a shifting cast of distributors, exhibitors, merchants, and other intermediaries reconfigured and rerouted the audiences and routes of Hindi cinema in response to changing local conditions.
Srour’s focus on the knowledge and creativity employed by distributors as they operated within and across a variety of spaces represents one of the book’s most important contributions. Drawing on oral histories, she explains how the networks within which these actors operated were often ad hoc and relational, structured around family ties and merchant and business connections rather than formal institutional pathways. In elucidating this dynamic she helps us better understand a largely undocumented history of film distribution in both the Middle East and South Asia. In Egypt, for instance, distributors sustained the circulation of Hindi films even amid restrictive state policies by exhibiting films in so-called second-class and third-class theaters and scheduling creative run-lengths in theaters in ways that skirted official restrictions. These strategies depended on these distributors’ intimate knowledge of local exhibition ecologies and regulatory loopholes. As Srour emphasizes in her conclusion, the fundamental characteristic of these circulation networks is their plasticity, or their capacity to adapt to legal, economic, technological, and political constraints while also sustaining the movement of films across the region.
Along with its emphasis on circulation, Bollywood Film Traffic offers insights through textual analysis and questions of representations, including chapters that examine depictions of Egypt in Bombay films and the circulation of star images across the Middle East. In her readings of these films, Srour traces how places, such as Cairo and Beirut, are constructed in Indian films, and how figures like superstar Amitabh Bachchan resonated among viewers within the sociopolitical contexts of the 1970s and 1980s across the Arab world. In these sections, textual analysis helps us understand how the meanings of films shifted as they circulated between various exhibition spaces and audiences. Srour moves fluidly between films as cultural texts and films as circulating commodities, even as her primary focus remains on the infrastructures that enable their movement.
Bollywood Film Traffic occasionally pulls in multiple analytical directions, yet this expansiveness is also the source of its richness. As Srour herself describes, the nature of her research is itinerant and “nomadic,” modes of travel that mirror the movement of films themselves as they crossed shifting borders, entered into different exhibition contexts, and were evaluated according to new regimes of value. It is in this mirroring of method and object that the book’s most compelling contribution is the history it tells of distributors who worked as infrastructural agents that actively shaped and reshaped the maps of Hindi cinema in the Arab world. Although Srour organizes the book around a series of “close-ups” sequenced chronologically, these intermediaries appear and recur across periods and locations in a way that suggests a stronger throughline than that explicitly foregrounded by the book’s structure. As a result, sections of textual analysis can feel somewhat separate from the circulation-centered narrative rather than fully integrated with it. Instead of a shortcoming, I understand this choice as a question of emphasis. The materials themselves point toward a history of circulation in which films are continually transformed as they move, and in which intermediaries—rather than films alone—emerge as the book’s central protagonists.
With the depth and range of the archive it draws upon, Bollywood Film Traffic is an invaluable contribution to the study of film circulation in the Middle East and to South–South film and media histories more broadly. Rather than relegate circulation to background context, Srour foregrounds Hindi cinema’s movements across Egypt, Lebanon, and the Gulf as a historical problem shaped by infrastructure and uneven local conditions. On a personal note, the book has been instrumental to my own scholarship, in particular for the archival materials and circulation histories that Srour brings into view. By taking informal networks and archival absences seriously, Srour challenges hierarchies within both film studies and Middle East media scholarship that have tended to privilege national frameworks and understand influence and exchange along North–South axes rather than through the South–South and postcolonial circuits (many of them informed by older commercial and migratory routes) that structure her study.
