Translating Desire from Bombay to Dakar: Cultural Commodities and Transnational Feminism

In 2010, Indian television actor Pallavi Kulkarni visited Dakar, and was greeted by a mob of frenzied fans, and a state reception. The paltry media reportage of this event included a story by Reuters, stating ‘Hindi TV queen touches nerve with African women’. Mansour Sora Wade’s unreleased 2010 documentary, Dakar-Bombay, captures this remarkable ‘media event,’ and the historical production of Indophilia in Senegal through language, sartorial style, music, dance and cinema. This paper examines this media event in the context of the longer flows of cultural commodities between South Asia and Africa. It examines how desire and affect get transferred, from analog to digital contexts, from material to projection, from projection to body, and from the past to the present. In doing so, it engages with the rich body of work that explains the affective force of Indian cinema in transnational contexts, often associated with cinema’s superstars or iconic films like Mother India (Mehboob Khan, 1957) and others. In departing from these older narratives of travelling cinematic affect, the paper examines the peculiar characteristics of transnational fandom, removed from its political edge in South Asia, to reconfigure around questions of gender and transnational feminism, in this particular instance. It explores how film and new media mobilize networks of solidarity, and offers a comment on the productive friction between the commodity form, collective action, and possible futures.