Bollywood's Seeping into Afghanistan

If you look closely at this Bollywood music video, you’ll notice the many scarves worn by the main singer, Salman Khan, and his entourage:

 The video has recently gone viral in Afghanistan, a preview to the movie Ek Tha Tiger. As a result, Khan’s neck scarves have become a prominent fashion accessory throughout the country.

            A Washington Post article stated how this hasn’t been the only globalized trend reaching Afghanistan. Gelled hair and new clothing styles, including women wearing half sleeves on their dresses, have emerged as a result of the Bollywood movies. Businesses are onto the trends as well, instantly importing the actors/actresses’ styles when the movies debut.

            Bollywood movies in this part of the world did not appear by chance. India has been the largest regional donor to Afghanistan’s reconstruction, having spent $1.5 billion over the years and having recently signed a strategic pact to help train Afghan security forces.

            This is a prime example of how technologies and economics are interconnected through globalization. Arjun Appadurai explains this with his idea of “scapes” in Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy. He believes that a “global cultural flow has occurred” in the connections of all aspects of globalized societies – ethnoscapes, technoscapes, financescapes, mediascapes, and ideoscapes. The scarf trend in Afghanistan relates to the connection between economic globalization and the mediascape, defined as the “distribution of electronic capabilities to produce and disseminate information” and the images these capabilities produce. As economic aid from India has increased, so has the popularity of Bollywood films.

            Appadurai then focuses on the audience’s reaction to these new media images. When the audience sees a Bollywood movie, “the lines between realistic and fictional landscapes they see are blurred”, especially if they are far away from “the direct experiences of metropolitan life”. This is playing out in Afghanistan, where some women are wearing dresses with shorter sleeves and men are gelling their hair, mimicking the singers as if they were in the video too. Appadurai further explains cases such as these as “imagined worlds” made up of a mixture of the audiences’ personal values and the perspectives they infer from the media images.

            This mixture of core values and new perspectives affects the community differently. While many are seeing Bollywood as a fashion outlet, others see it as “an erosion of the Islamic ways as people reject traditional dress to keep in step with Bollywood and Hollywood”. The women with the shorter dress sleeves are occasionally criticized. A group of men were pulled aside by the police to have their gelled hair cut off. While many strongly reject globalization, no one can fully escape its effects. The Taxi driver who stated the above quote exemplifies this perfectly: his head was wrapped in one of those trendy scarves while he made his remarks.

            The effects of globalization will continue to show as the “scapes” of different societies become more connected. Individuals will react differently to these changes, as shown with Bollywood’s images populating Afghanistan, but they will eventually have to adapt.