From Bandar to Bollywood: Jamal Kudu, Virality and Rediscovery of Erased Past

Directed by Sandeep Reddy Vanga, the film Animal (2023) became one of the most controversial films of Bollywood in 2023 and 2024 for its unapologetic portrayal of toxic masculinity and conversations that followed it (Bhardwaj, 2023; Roy, 2023; Samantha, 2024). However, it also became famous following the virality of one of the songs in the film called Jamal Kudu in the South Asian social media. The song was used during a wedding scene, and it was later presented as a folk love song from Iran. However, titled siah-e zangi (the Zanzibar black), the song was written in the 1970’s by a musician from the Hormozgan province called Ebrahim Shahdousti, and it is about an enslaved person (Shahdousti’s friend) who ran away from the family who he lived with because they treated him poorly (Shahdousti, 2024). This paper explores how a song about the history of slavery in Iran ends up becoming a viral phenomenon in India in 2023/2024 and what the implications of this virality is. The paper positions itself in “digital leisure studies” (Schultz & McKeown, 2018) and considers Jamal Kudu’s virality as a practice of digital leisure. It asks the following question: how did the online virality of Jamal Kudu recontextualized, decontextualized, and rediscovered the erased past of the song and the history of slavery in Iran? Following the works of Tony D. Sampson (2012) on mimetics and virality and Beeta Baghoolizadeh (2024) on enslavement and erasure in Iran, the paper analyzes how virality can not only continually change the meaning of a media content, but also rediscover its erased past, ie. the cultural skeletons in the closet of a society.