Bollywood's growing popularity overseas, has led South Africa 's national public broadcaster SABC to air, for the first time, a series of Hindi films over a period of 13 weeks.
 

The first among these will be the Sanjay Leela Bhansali opus Devdas, which will be broadcast on 3 April on the corporation's TV3 channel.

"Other movies in the line-up include Company' and Bomba,y and all the movies will have English sub-titles" publicity manager, Michael Van Dyk, said in a statement today.

"We shall test the response depending on the audience, and thereafter decide our approach to Bollywood," he added.

He further said,"A lot of time was spent in choosing the movies. We looked at content, the director and the appeal of the movie to a crossover audience. A deciding factor was also how popular the movie was when it was on circuit."

This move has been welcomed by organisations of Indian origin people as "long overdue".

"Now that the SABC has decided to show Bollywood movies we hope that the SABC would also consider movies in other languages," said president of the Natal Tamil Federation, Bala Naidoo.