When all communication fails, burst into a Bollywood song

Next to my own country, India, there is no place in the world that has been more important to my development as a writer than Egypt. It is now nearly twenty-eight years since I first landed in Cairo on 19 April 1980: I was then twenty-four years old, and I had come to explore what was to me a new—but not entirely unknown—world. The immediate pretext for my journey was research: a short while earlier, I had won a scholarship that took me from Delhi University to Oxford to study social anthropology. My dream was of writing fiction, but like many an aspiring novelist, I felt I lacked the necessary richness of experience. The writers I admired—V.S. Naipaul, James Baldwin and others—had gone out into the world and watched it go by: I wanted no less for myself. The scholarship was a godsend because it allowed me to choose where I wanted to go, and in my case that was Egypt.

Through the good offices of Dr. Aly Issa, an eminent anthropologist from Alexandria, I was soon installed in a small village in the Governorate of Beheira, near the town of Damanhour: in my book In an Antique Land, I give this village the name ‘Lataifa’. My home there consisted of a recently-vacated chicken coop on the roof of a mud hut; at the time there was no electricity in the village, although there was, as I recall, a supply of piped water. Lataifa and I were undeniably a shock to each other. There was the question of language to begin with: I spoke very little Arabic, and what I knew was of a laboriously classical variety. Thus, even simple operations such as asking for water could cause great outbursts of laughter.

In the process, however, my hosts and I discovered one medium of communication where we were on equal terms: this was the language of aflaam al-Hindeyya—that is to say, Hindi film songs. When all other efforts at communication broke down, we would burst into song—this was no small accomplishment on my part as I am a terrible singer. But many of the younger people in the village sang very well and knew innumerable Hindi songs. Indian filmi music thus became a shared language and opened many barriers and earned me many invitations to meals.

The Hindi films that were best known in Lataifa were of the ’50s and ’60s vintage—films that featured such stars as Raj Kapoor, Nargis, Padmini, Manoj Kumar and Babita. The ‘good-hearted vamp’ and ‘cabaret dancer’ Helen was another popular figure. Everyone in the village had a few favourite scenes, and I would often be asked detailed questions about these episodes. This was a great trial to me, as I was by no means an expert on the films of that era. Often children would be called out to perform, which they would do with the greatest gusto.

There were even minor specializations, some boys being regarded as particularly good performers of Raj Kapoor numbers, while others were experts in reciting dialogues and soliloquies. The performances were almost always by boys, as I remember, and it was quite the sight to see young jallabeyya-clad fellaheen attempting to imitate the dance numbers of scantily dressed actresses like Helen. Even more astonishing were the recitations, for it would happen sometimes that children would reel off large chunks of Hindi dialogue without knowing a word of the language. Hindi films also provided me with a certain name recognition, for although the megastar Amitabh Bachchan was not as well-known in the Middle East then as he is now, there were plenty of people who knew of him. It was thus not as difficult as it might have been to introduce myself.

To read more of the excerpt, turn to ‘Confessions of a Xenophile’ from the recently published Wild Fictions: Essays by Amitav Ghosh (HarperCollins)