Cinema as Contraband: The Transregional Corridor from Bombay to Dubai (1977-1993)

Silpa Mukherjee
Literature
UC San Diego

Cinema as Contraband: The Transregional Corridor from Bombay to Dubai (1977-1993) centers a contraband corridor connecting Bombay and Dubai in the 1980s to underscore how state involvement in the cross-border shadow economy was concealed by the hypervisibility of cinema, which drew attention to its own excesses. It confronts the regulation of cinema in crisis-driven media ecologies of the Global South, where the ostensible “uselessness” of entertainment plays into the state’s discursive logic made visible through its strategic permissiveness of crime. Challenging the epistemological boundaries of what counts as evidence, it foregrounds that which is often shunned as marginalia and inadvertencies in bureaucratic documents as central to assembling the invisible memos of the state’s dubious deals. It offers a new mode of interpreting media cultures as illicit, subterranean, and deliberately undeveloped. Tracing Bombay cinema’s links with the Middle East—a shadow globalization forged through border breakings—Cinema as Contraband foregrounds South-South networks based on quasi-legitimate activities that challenge, exceed, and traverse the unfettered flow of elite global capital. It provides an open-ended inquiry that travels between a difficult present and an unfinished past, approaching relays of illicit desires and movement between South Asia and the Middle East aslant and materially.