ABSTRACT
This chapter explores “Indoprepi” songs in postwar Greek musical production. Indoprepi is a genre comprising diverse forms of adaptation: In particular, tunes and songs from Bollywood films screened in Greek popular cinemas from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s. Through Tim Ingold’s concept of “wayfaring,” the author raises questions concerning the mobilities, disembodied trajectories, transmediality, circulation, appropriation, and popularity of musical objects, including the cartographies of transnational regimes of melodramatic affectivities made in sound/film. As a cosmopolitan and intertextual genre made of “copies” and mobile, intersecting musical fragments—effectively remapping Greek popular song in the Middle East and the global South—Indoprepi is a promising case study for re-thinking the racial question in mainstream epistemologies and sensibilities of Greekness in music as well as its public/national memory. In the light of recent adaptation theories coming from film and literary studies, the author takes Indoprepi as a point of departure for exploring theoretical issues around the ethnomusicological study of adaptation, referentiality, and translatability, including their attendant desires, politics, and pleasures.
