Of Echoes and Utterances: A Brief Sketch of Arabic Hauntings in Hindi Cinema and Song

On a Saturday afternoon in January 2017, Shah Rukh Khan—Hindi cinema's reigning star of the last thirty years—arrived at Bollywood Parks Dubai to promote his latest film release, Raees (2017). To the crowd of adoring Arab and South Asian fans and journalists who had flocked to the theme park to catch a glimpse of the “Badshah of Bollywood” and brand ambassador of Dubai, SRK unveiled the much-anticipated Arabic version of “Zaalima” (Cruel One), the film's breakout hit song. Rendered in Darija by Moroccan pop artists Abdelfettah Grini and Jamila El Badaoui, this version of “Zaalima” proved an awkward copy of the original, its unwieldy Arabic lyrics molded to fit as tightly within the blueprint melody as possible. “Dīrī fiya al-thiqa, al-gharām hā howa” (Put your confidence in me, for love is here) did not have quite the same ring or seamlessness as the Hindi-Urdu “Main sau martaba dīwāna hua” (I fell in love a hundred times over), with the Arabic line painstakingly crafted to echo the “hua” ending of the Hindi-Urdu.