Abstract
This chapter compares cinema-going in Durban South Africa and Port-of-Spain, Trinidad, two cities which became significant consumers of Indian films during the later colonial period. It charts the spread of these films and evaluates their role in creating new cinema markets. Several commonalities make such a comparison worthwhile. Both regions were part of Britain’s empire, and therefore subject to the official and customary censorship policies that London and local authorities sought to impose on all colonial peoples. Each city had large populations that recognised descent from immigrant South Asian laborers. In both regions, members of these communities controlled distribution and exhibition, and formed the majority of the audiences that shaped the cultural and social geography of cinema-going. The robust public cinema culture that emerged in these two cities endured past the 1980s, when movie houses in Britain’s former empire were shuttering at a precipitous rate.
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Notes
- 1.
Post-Apartheid South Africa has hosted many Indian music and cinema awards ceremonies, including the South Africa India Film and Television Awards and the International Indian Film Academy Awards.
- 2.
The South African War of 1899–1902 (also referred to as the ‘Boer War’) resulted after prolonged negotiations in the unification of the Southern African territories of Cape Colony, the Orange Free State, The Transvaal Republic and Natal into the South African Union in 1910.
- 3.
In 1943, there were 90,000 Indians in Durban out of a total population of 240,000 in Durban (Bagwadeen, 1983, p. 170).
- 4.
The South African Indian Commercial Directory (1936–1937) shows ‘Bioscopes: Durban’ as ‘Royal Picture Palace’ (A.C.T) and Victoria Picture Palace (A.C.T. Ltd.).
- 5.
See Jackson (1999, p. 201) who cites ‘Indian Views’, 23 June 1933, p. 11, to support the assertion “Indian talkies had joined imported Indian records as the most significant sources of recreation and Indian cultural renewal”.
- 6.
Cinemas listed in Braby’s Natal Directory, Including Zululand, Griqualand East and Pondoland, 1972 (Durban, A.C. Braby).
- 7.
See Fair, 2018 on popularity of martial arts films in Tanzania.
- 8.
The population of Trinidad descended from enslaved Africans has been referred to as ‘Afro-Trinidadian’ and ‘Creole’.
- 9.
The Colonial Film Exchange tried to block MGM’s entry into the market in court. See Battle for the films in Trinidad (1932, p. 23).
- 10.
Compare this ratio of 81,000 people to nine cinemas in Port of Spain with Durban’s eleven cinemas which catered to the city’s 50,000 white inhabitants in 1938. These ratios are comparable with North American cities such as Toronto, which had one cinema per 5636 (500,000 pop., 112 cinemas) on the eve of the Second World War. See Gutsche (1972, p. 260).
- 11.
See The Memoirs of Bruce Watson, n.d. p. 97, for a description of the popularity of Indian films in Guyana in the late 1930s. https://sites.rootsweb.com/~nyggbs/RogerAustin/TheMemoirsofBruceWatson.pdf
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Burns, J. (2024). Cinema-Going in the South Asian Diaspora: Indian Films, Entrepreneurs and Audiences in Trinidad and Durban, South Africa. In: Treveri Gennari, D., Van de Vijver, L., Ercole, P. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Comparative New Cinema Histories. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38789-0_16
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