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The muse's journey: transcultural translators and the domestication of Hindi music in Hausa popular culture

The diffusion of entertainment forms made available through small media technologies has created transnational pathways for the adoption, appropriation, adaptation and domestication of entertainment forms in African mediascapes. In Muslim northern Nigeria, the most common transnational entertainment template is Hindi film and music from the Indian Bollywood film industry. The popularity of Hindi films has stimulated an appropriation strategy that relies on onomatopoeic translation of lyrics from popular Hindi film soundtracks, which are reworked so that they become part of the Muslim Hausa entertainment space. This article traces the antecedent Muslim Hausa onomatopoeic tradition rooted in Hausa shamanism, tsibbu, which reworks selected verses from the Qur'an as vocal amulets to ‘cure’ various ailments. The cure relies on the vocal harmony between the Qur'anic verses and appropriate Hausa equivalents. This practice eventually found its way into popular culture mediated by the massive popularity of Hindi films, which saw local Hausa musicians using vocal harmonies from Hindi film lyrics and reworking them into Hausa versions. This process was strongly entrenched in the performances of the Ushaq'u Indiya (Society for the Lovers of India), a Sufi bandiri (frame drum) group in the heart of the city of Kano, northern Nigeria. The Ushaq'u Indiya's performance repertoire consisted of reworking the vocal harmonies of Hindi film lyrics into Hausa versions in which the Hausa lyrics sing the praises of the Prophet Muhammad. This onomatopoeic translation strategy thus domesticated Hindi film soundtracks and lyrics.