Cairo : Bollywood movies and Indian television drama have recently become a daily dear guest for Egyptian audiences, who find great similarities between both the cultures.
Pulling the rug out from under the Turkish drama, which stayed for the past years on the top of the audiences preferences, Indian series have succeeded in attracting Egyptians with interesting topics, rich production and good acting performances.
This encouraged many Egyptian satellite channels to bring different Indian series to replace the Turkish drama, which many people abandoned for different reasons, including political ones. The Egyptian-Turkish bilateral relations have soured dramatically after the ouster of Islamist ex-president Mohamed Morsi in 2013 by the army following massive protests against his rule.
Since then, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who was one of the allies of Morsi’s Brotherhood group, has made many remarks that criticise the country and its current regime. His remarks were condemned by Egypt on many occasions.
As a response for this, many satellite channels – that used to air Turkish series – decided to reduce the number of those shows and resorted to the Indian drama. The step was risky at first, because there already was a great turnout on Turkish series, while the Indian ones were still new for people, critics said.
However, these channels and some activists launched campaigns calling people to boycott the Turkish drama to show their objection against the hostile situation of the Turkish president Erdogan towards Egypt’s internal policies.
Immediately, Bollywood and Indian TV drama succeeded in attracting the Egyptian audience, not only because of the political situation but also because of their stories that suit the Egyptian society’s measures, according to critics.
Among these successful TV series that were admired by audiences are the historical-drama “Jodhaa Akbar”, “Geet – Hui Sabse Parayi”, the romantic-drama “Punar Vivah” besides a few comedy shows, which have all been dubbed in Arabic.
“Indian drama appeals to Egyptian audiences as it presents all kinds of arts like dancing, singing, comedy and others. And also because the Indian actors are popular in Egypt and Arab countries,” critic Khaireya el-Beshlawy said.
“I think people like the Indian series because their culture is close to the Egyptian culture,” she opined. Critic Magda Moris said the Indian drama came lately to Egypt, but the Egyptian audiences are already familiar to Indian culture as Indian movies have witnessed a great turnout during the 1980s and during the end of the last century.
