Abstract

This article explores the circulation and reception of Indian media (including films and more recently television series) in the majority Muslim city of Tamale, Northern Ghana. This includes the arrival of Hindi films during the late 1950s, the subsequent (short-lived) circulation of Bollywood films in the early 1990s, and the more recent arrival of contemporary Indian television serials in the 2010s. In charting histories of these three regionally linked transnational media flows, this article complicates ‘linear’ experiences of Indian media in Northern Ghana. Though Tamale’s Dagbamba viewers understand these three media flows as regionally linked, they are sensitive to changes in format, narrative, plot, and style taking place in Indian film and television over time. For over sixty years, Indian media flows have gained traction, broken down, restarted, and flowed in ‘feedback loops’, dependent on the ways in which Indian media reflect, align with, and at times depart from Dagbamba conservative cultural and religious values.