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By Root 680 0

nor is the spread of Indian movies. Too often writers bewail the octopus spread of Hollywood and American TV soaps. It is true that for some years the American soap Baywatch was the most watched series in the world, but the spread of Hindi movies in all the Indian Ocean and beyond is equally important. These movies are certainly formulaic, but the formula is different from Hollywood. 'Marsala' films are influenced by Indian classical literature, especially the great epics of the Ramayana and Mahabharata. Every film, regardless of subject matter, has dance and music in conjunction with romance, adventure, violence and morality. What is important is that this recipe appeals not only to the Indian diaspora, but to many others in Africa, the Middle East and southeast Asia. This is understandable in arguably Indianised areas like Burma and Indonesia, but they also find a huge market in Kenya, Tanzania, Sri Lanka, Singapore, the Gulf states, Thailand and Indonesia.87 Changes in Indian television have also provided a new market for Bollywood, and all the other areas of India which make movies. Up to the early 1990s the government-controlled Doordarshan mostly, as a matter of policy, promoted the Hindi language. Now that private players have been allowed in, there is much more content in other Indian languages, and also more foreign content. More channels need more product from the local film industry. Here also however westernisation has not been totally triumphant. Rupert Murdoch found that he had to indigenise his offerings via satellite in India much more than he had expected to.88

So far we can write about the distribution of these movies, or for that matter of Islam or Christianity, but we know little about something even more important, that is their consumption. Certainly Hindi and other Indian movies mean different things to different audiences, in other words are consumed in different ways by different receptors, but this difficult matter has been little studied so far.

In some aspects globalisation has acted to increase worldwide communications at the expense of more local circuits. As examples, it is now quicker to get to Paris from Mayotte than it is to get to Zanzibar, despite age-old connections between these two East African islands. Similarly, it is quicker to get goods from a French mail order firm than it is to get something from Mombasa, again undermining very ancient local connections. International connections via satellite, for those who can afford them, are often quicker and more reliable than internal telephone connections in many littoral countries around the Indian Ocean.89

A further aspect of history in the Indian Ocean is to look at strategic matters, and the place of the ocean during the Cold War and later. We need also to consider the local reaction to this, which is halting moves towards greater integration within the region, that is then an attempt to respond by a focus of or within the ocean.

The context is the end of the British lake period. British naval dominance was plain to see after 1815, and indeed could be dated from the end of the Seven Years War in 1763. This lake took very little effort to remain exclusive, as no other power challenged British dominance, except for a land-based threat from Russia. Britain concentrated her navy in the Atlantic and the Pacific, not the Indian Ocean, and within the ocean spent most money on the Indian Army. The Royal Navy's job was to combat piracy, as defined by the British, and to suppress the slave trade. It was only in the 1920s that British naval dominance worldwide began to be eroded.

As independence got closer the influential author and diplomat K.M. Panikkar wrote a short book about India and the Indian Ocean. He complained bitterly that his fellow countrymen were landlubbers, yet 'In fact it may truly be said that India never lost her independence till she lost the command of the sea in the first decade of the sixteenth century.' From this time 'the future of India has been determined not on the land frontiers, but on the oceanic expanse