Singing Suku, Suku

In the 1950s, the legendary Louis Armstrong the giant of American jazz music performed at the Damascus International Fair. The Damascenes swayed to the unforgettable melody
of his trumpet, welcoming him, then sending him off-stage, with a standing ovation. They liked the America of the 1950s, and nothing mirrored it more brilliantly than Amstrong’s charisma and talent.

Shortly afterwards, the director of the US Information Office in Syria, Harris Peel, came up with a brilliant idea. He decided to send Cinerama, which had never been shown outside the US, to the Damascus Fair, “to show America to the world.” The Cinerama gave a three-panel ultra-wide screen projection of motion pictures, all in panoramic view.
People did not watch it; they experienced it. The Damascenes were always hungry for American films, preferring action-filled Western thrillers of Hollywood to the mushy romantic flicks of French cinema. The Damascus Fair was just opening and slated as the biggest in the Midlde East.
A large outdoor theatre was built at the fairgrounds, and Cinerama opened on September 2, 1954, attended by 1,500 notables from Damascus, including then President of the Republic, Hashem al-Atasi. Those who could not get tickets to the show would climb trees and nearby rooftops to get a glimpse of this amazing American large screen spectacle. Injuries were a nightly event as un-ticketed fans fell from snapped branches to break arms and legs.

The Russians after all had spent $500,000 building the biggest pavilion at the Damascus Fair and the Eisenhower White House wanted to outsmart the Kremlin. The Soviets were pouring men, material, and funds, having hired 1,200 Syrians to build a 40,000 square-meter pavilion, decorated with the Red Star.

The four projectors and 72-speakers for America’s Cinerama were sent to Syria by Warner Bros, and shipped by the US Air Force, along with a 62,000- watt generator, (Cinerama alone could use all of the electricity of Damascus).
The first VIP screening took the Damascenes on a roller coaster, without them leaving their seats, and then had them tour America by airplane, visiting the Grand Canyon and Niagara Falls.
All the while, the sound track was “America: the Beautiful.” A free two-day show ensued, attended by common folk and shepherds who came from faraway districts to see what the Americans had brought to the East. The US Information Office distributed 150,000 tickets
during the show’s month-long run, and informal estimates had a total of nearly a quarter-million people seeing the show. The population of Damascus was 360,000.

American films remained all-time favorites for audiences in Damascus, seconded not by the French, nor by the Russians but by the Indians. Six years after Cinerama made it big in Damascus, Syrian audiences got their first Indian blockbuster, Junglee. It featured the hit song “Suku, Suku,” which became very popular among Syrians. The Indian blockbuster featured film star Shammi Kapoor, one of the youth icons of his era. It was a lighthearted musical, whose soundtrack became a symbol of Shammi’s wild (Junglee) lover-boy image. The song “Suku, Suku” did with Indian films to the Syrian audience what Armstrong’s music and Cinerama did to American culture in Damascus.

Syria’s relations with India, however, certainly date back long before Junglee came to Syrian theaters. As early as 1928, Mahatma Gandhi expressed admiration for Syria when he heard from none other than Jawaharlal Nehru that Damascus Muslims were protesting a French ban on Faris al-Khury a Protestant Christian preventing him from running for parliamentary office.
Gandhi was highly impressed by the coexistence of Syrian society, and Nehru, expressed this during his 1957 and 1960 visits to Damascus, when he paid a courtesy visit to none other than Faris al-Khury, by now an ex-prime minister living in retirement during the years of the United Arab Republic. Nehru wore a red rose on his jacket--a red Damascenerose--which he claimed, made him bright and optimistic.
We are now hearing of a trend to solidify alliances with Russia, China, India, and
Malaysia. China has been a friend of Syria since the days of Chang Kai-shek, lobbying on its behalf with his US allies, as early as 1945. Malaysia has always watched with interest the events in Syria.
Mahathir Mohammad, the legendary prime minister of Malaysia, wrote his PhD dissertation on Syria. He studied the free-market policies of the Syrian economy in the 1950s and how it was able to excel in industry, agriculture, trade, and commerce. He wanted to learn from the “Syrian Model” and take a good look at the wonders he did for the Malaysian economy!

The Soviet relationship with Syria is well known to everybody, and dates back to the mid-1940s, when Comrade Joseph Stalin sent an envoy to Damascus and deliberately bypassed the French Mandate authority in Beirut, refusing to attend the July 14 celebrations in Syria. He also insisted that he meet only Syrian officials, to tell the world that the Kremlin recognized Syrian independence from the French. After the French bombed Damascus in May
1945, the USSR used its right of veto for the first time ever in UN history to drown an American proposal to delay the withdrawal of French troops from Syria.

After 2005, Syrians devised a policy of ‘heading East’ to show the world that they had alies to lean on at the lowestpoint of Syrian-American relations  and that the world was not limited to France, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United States. However, the Syrians did not need to “head East.” They had been a fundamental part of the East since the
days of the Ottoman Empire. We might have snuggled up to the Americans or the French at one point or another, but we never lost our close ties to the East.
We do not really need to “head East;” we are the East.