Two years ago, an Indian traveller to Egypt struggling with a fund transfer received help from an unlikely source —a fan of Shah Rukh Khan in the country of the pyramids. Ashwini Deshpande, a teacher at the Ashoka University in Sonepat, Haryana, was making travel arrangements for her family’s visit to Egypt when she encountered a snag in the wire transfer. Deshpande was relieved when the travel agent in Cairo told her she could pay him later. Because she was from the country of Shah Rukh Khan.
The testy encounter and its happy ending, as well as Shah Rukh Khan’s warm response on the then Twitter, resembled the plot of a Bollywood blockbuster. It also revealed a traditional affinity with Hindi cinema for film loving Egyptians. The African continent’s earliest film producing country, Egypt harbours a decades-long addiction for movies centered on drama and song and dance made in Mumbai. Bollywood superstars like Shah Rukh Khan, Amitabh Bachchan, Salman Khan, Aamir Khan, Kajol, Kareena Kapoor and Katrina Kaif are household names in a country that doesn’t even share the same language. When the Shah Rukh Khan-starrer Pathaan was released theatrically in Egypt last year, it broke the box office record for a Hindi film in the North African nation.
Focus on family
“Pathaan earned 1.5 million Egyptian pounds (approximately `40 lakh), which was a record for an Indian film in Egypt,” says Mohammad Hussain, head of content at the Arab Cinema Centre, an Egypt-based initiative to promote Arab cinema around the world. “In the ’70s and ’80s, Indian movies were No. 1 at box office, ahead of Hollywood films,” adds Hussain. “When I am watching an Indian film, I need a moment to realise it is not an Egyptian film. The subjects in movies of both Egypt and India focus on family. Even with contemporary cinema it is the same in drama and action movies,” he says.
The box office success of Pathaan last year was followed by the success of Hindi films like Gandhi Godse: Ek Yudh by Rajkumar Santoshi, Tiger 3 starring Salman Khan and Katrina Kaif and Shah Rukh Khan’s own Jawan and Dunki. “In the early ’90s when Amitabh Bachchan came to the Cairo International Film Festival, people were lining up at the venue to get a glimpse of the Indian superstar,” says Alaa Amin of MAD Solutions, a major distributor of Arab films in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. “The Indian hero can do anything—he can act, dance and fight. He is my hero too, it is simple,” adds Amin, who became a Shah Rukh Khan fan after watching My Name is Khan. “My mother doesn’t get up from her seat for three hours if she is watching a Bollywood film on television,” he says. El Sayed Baelawy, a hotel management graduate from Luxor, a favourite destination for foreign tourists in Egypt, echoes the sentiment of Amin: “I watched movies of Amitabh Bachchan as a child with my parents. Cinemas in Luxor, Cairo, Aswan and Alexandria screened many Indian films then.”
Egypt, which hosts the MENA region’s oldest film industry, first came across Hindi cinema in the ’40s when Hindi movies were travelling to far corners of the world, especially in Asia and Africa. Incidentally, the ancient Egyptian port city of Alexandria was the first stop after Mumbai when the first motion pictures by Lumiere brothers were on a global tour in 1896. In the ’70s and ’80s, Hindi films were regularly beamed into Egyptian homes from state-run television networks, a period still remembered by ordinary people who grew up watching movies starring Amitabh Bachchan, the Indian equivalent of Omar Sharif, the best-known Egyptian actor. Sharif’s early Egyptian films were strikingly similar to the rich girl-poor boy dramas of the neorealism era in Hindi cinema. Faten Hamama, another Egyptian acting legend, was often compared to Nargis, and the handsome hero Hussein Fahmy to Rajesh Khanna. The Egypt-India screen romance ended in the ’90s when import of Indian films was restricted by the Egyptian government to protect the domestic film industry. The restrictions were lifted in 2013, and Egyptians welcomed Bollywood back with SRK’s Chennai Express.
Return of Bollywood
“There are a lot of similarities between Indian and Egyptian cultures. You feel you are much closer than the distance because of the affinity to each other’s culture,” says Delhi-based Shaji Mathew, the producer of such award-winning Malayalam films as S Durga and Nani. “The Egyptian people are not ready to move to conversation with the next person when they hear you are from India,” adds Mathew, a guest at the recently-concluded El Gouna Film Festival in Egypt where Whispers of Fire & Water, a feature film produced by him was part of the official selection in the international competition category.
“Egyptians used to watch Bollywood films regularly in the ’70s and ’80s. Some people would even sing Hindi songs. Both Egyptian and Indian films in those decades talked about lower classes and their suffering that appealed to the masses,” says Cairo-based Egyptian film critic Hani Mustafa. “Most people watch Bollywood cinema today on television,” adds Mustafa. “For Egyptian film lovers, Indian superstars were bigger than Hollywood superstars. They favoured Indian films over Hollywood films,” says Arab Cinema Centre’s Hussain. “In 2023, Bollywood movies are returning to their previous levels of box office success,” he adds.
Faizal Khan is a freelancer