Cinema-Going in the South Asian Diaspora: Indian Films, Entrepreneurs and Audiences in Trinidad and Durban, South Africa

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.