ABSTRACT
Considered an appropriate form of entertainment for South Asian indentured workers during the colonial era, Indian popular cinema, now known as Bollywood, has been travelling to British colonies with South Asian diasporic populations since the silent era. Indian films were regularly screened in tent cinemas from the 1930s in the British Malaya, one of the earliest sites of Sikh military and kangani Tamil migration, and both Hindi and Tamil films began to be exhibited in theatres with the advent of theatrical exhibition of films. 1 As opposed to in the sending areas, ‘going to the movies’ in the South Asian diasporas has always been associated with forms of pleasure that are not just visual but also auditory, kinetic, olfactory and even tactile.
