dossier
1 Ali Nobil Ahmad ‘Fascism and real
estate: an inquiry into the strange
death of traditional cinema halls in
Pakistan’, in Ali Khan and Ali Nobil
Ahmad (eds), Cinema and Society:
Film and Social Change in Pakistan
(Karachi: Oxford University Press,
2016).
2 Ehsan ul Haque, Furrukh Khan, Ali
Qazilbash and Farrah Arif, Current
Impediments and Prospects of the
Film Industry Revival in Pakistan
(Unpublished Report for USAID,
2013), pp. v–vi.
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Explorations into Pakistani cinema:
introduction
ALI NOBIL AHMAD
Friday 21 September 2012 in Pakistan was officially designated ‘Youm-e
Ishq-e Rasool’, a national ‘Day of Love for the Prophet’, marking the
country’s formal participation in a wave of angry protests that swept the
Muslim world in response to the uploading of an ‘anti-Islamic’ film clip
on YouTube. Amidst the globally televised demonstrations that ensued,
nine of Karachi and Peshawar’s most cherished cinema halls were
vandalized by rioters. Despite the dramatic spectacle of these attacks,
which drew global attention to the apparently abysmal plight of cinema
in Pakistan, their impact was minor in comparison with an older and
deeper structural assault on traditional film-viewing venues. These have
virtually disappeared since the 1990s, largely due to their conversion into
shopping malls on prime sites of urban real estate.1 Dwindling supply
and demand for locally made films has reinforced this downward spiral,
with production plummeting from well over a hundred films per year
between the 1960s and 1980s to less than twenty at recent points in the
new millennium.2
A year after the events of ‘Youm-e Ishq-e Rasool’, the release of a
tranche of new digital films in 2013 prompted a radical shift in media
discourse concerning the fortunes of the Pakistani film industry. In
particular, Zinda Bhaag/Run For Your Life (Meenu Gaur/Farjad Nabi),
the first Pakistani film longlisted for an Academy Award in over fifty
years, and Waar/War (Bilal Lashari), the highest-grossing Pakistani
release in history, received considerable international attention. As both
these films and others, such as the political thriller Chambaili/Jasmine
468
Screen 57:4 Winter 2016
© The Author 2016. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved
doi:10.1093/screen/hjw053
3 Shayan Shakeel, ‘Back from the
dead?’, Dawn, 18 August 2013,
1036664/back-from-the-dead>
accessed 19 September 2016.
4 Sher Ali Khan, ‘A Pakistani New
Wave’, Thelka.com, vol.10, no. 21,
25 May 2013, <http://www.
tehelka.com/a-pakistaninew-wave/> accessed 19
September 2016.
5 Chaired by Professor Rachel Dwyer
of SOAS, a panel discussion
featuring Zinda Bhaag director
Meeenu Gaur explored the validity
of referring to a ‘Pakistani New
Wave’ as part of a special day of
talks at London’s Southbank
Centre, ‘Pakistan: satire, film and
cricket’, 25 May 2014, <http://
www.southbankcentre.co.uk/
whatson/pakistan-82468>
accessed 19 September 2016.
6 Haque et al., Current Impediments,
pp xi, 8.
7 These include Gwendolyn Kirk’s
ethnography of Punjabi cinema,
Farida Batool’s important study of
new media and Zebunnisa Hamid’s
research into distribution and
exhibition.
8 Iftikhar Dadi, ‘Roundtable on
Bioscope and screen studies in
Pakistan and of contemporary art’,
Bioscope, vol. 1, no.1 (2010),
pp. 11–15, and Ali Nobil Ahmad,
‘Film and cinephilia in Pakistan:
beyond life and death’, Bioscope,
vol. 5 no. 2 (2014), pp. 81–98.
9 Lotte Hoek, Cut Pieces: Celluloid
Obscenity and Popular Cinema in
Bangladesh (New York, NY:
Columbia University Press, 2014),
p. 9.
(Ismail Jilani), were exhibited in and beyond Pakistan, a wave of
optimism about the supposedly brightening prospects of Pakistani
cinema swept the same newspapers that just months previously had been
driven to despair. Entertainment journalists reveled in the prospect of a
digital turn, hailing a new age of cinematic ‘rebirth’.3 Indian publications
referred to a ‘Pakistani New Wave’;4 a special event was organized at
London’s BFI Southbank in May 2014 to explore the validity of this last
term.5
The current moment, then, is one at which a good deal of expectancy
surrounds the fortunes of Pakistani cinema. Pronounced ‘dead’ and
‘reborn’ within a single calendar year, it seems safe to say a period of
flux is underway, owing to its belated transition from celluloid. This last
technological shift is being greeted with much excitement from those
eager for it to continue at a faster pace. A report published by academics
at the Business School of the Lahore University of Management
Sciences, for instance, claims that despite languishing on its deathbed,
the Pakistani film industry appears to be on the ‘threshold of major
changes’. Current Impediments and Prospects of the Film Industry
Revival in Pakistan urges the government to seize the opportunity to
‘revive’ it to its ‘glory days’ by investing in multiplexes and digital
technology.6 With dozens of digital films released between 2013 and
2015 and many more in production, their excitement would seem to be
justified. In its own way, academic research is also responding: at least
three PhDs on Pakistani cinema have recently been undertaken or
completed at leading Euro-American universities.7
Against the backdrop of this departing bandwagon it is tempting to call
for an expansion of scholarly research into the past and present of
Pakistani cinema, a field many have argued is hopelessly underdeveloped
in comparison with Indian film studies.8 And yet, as Lotte Hoek has
recently pointed out in the context of emergent research on India’s
regional cinemas, there is something amiss about attempts to dislodge the
hegemony of Hindi cinema within film studies through mere horizontal
expansion of study into increasingly nuanced consideration of different
languages, regions and states.9 From disputed territories to cricket and
nuclear weapons, Pakistanis like to think we can match Indian strength
and have a tendency to complain about conspiracy when success proves
illusory. For numerous reasons, a more humble and, frankly, more
thoughtful approach is necessary for the development of knowledge
about screen cultures in Pakistan, beginning with an understanding that,
as Iftikhar Dadi argues in the following pages, India’s academic
hegemony is a product of decades of indigenous scholarship about an
industry of global scale and sophistication. Comparison with our own
thus has an apples-and-oranges quality, while any attempt to proceed
without reference to the insights of this massive body of work threatens,
at best, to reinvent the wheel.
The objective of this dossier is not to stake out the parameters of
‘Pakistani cinema’ as an independent, specialized field of scholarly
469
Screen 57:4 Winter 2016 Ali Nobil Ahmad Explorations into Pakistani cinema
dossier
<http://www.dawn.com/news/
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dossier
10 Ahmad, ‘Film and cinephilia in
Pakistan’.
11 Paul Willemen, ‘The national
revisited’, in Valentina Vitali and
Paul Willemen (eds), Theorizing
National Cinema (London: BFI
Publishing, 2006), pp. 44–60.
12 Mitsuhiro Yoshimoto, ‘National/
international/transnational: the
concept of trans-Asian cinema
and the cultural politics of film
criticism’, in Vitali and Willemen
(eds), Theorizing National
Cinema, pp. 254–61.
13 Ravi S. Vasudevan, ‘Geographies
of the cinematic public: notes on
the regional, national and global
histories of Indian cinema’,
Journal of the Moving Image
(2010), pp. 94–117, <http://
jmionline.org/articles/2010/
geographies_of_the_cinematic_
public_notes_on_regional_
national_and_global.pdf>
accessed 16 September 2016.
14 Ibid., pp. 94–95.
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research, but rather to integrate Pakistan into existing frameworks of
cinema studies in such a way that we deepen our collective insights about
international film and media at large. Aside from the obvious political
merits of an approach that takes issue with the postulates of theoretical
nationalism, this also makes better analytical sense. Pakistani cinema
bears important specificities, but these must be teased out from wider
cultural formations and, as such, are barely grounds for some of the more
bombastic notions of past and future cinematic greatness that underpin
recent talk of a ‘New Wave’.
A host of problematic aggregations and pernicious erasures are
embedded in the very terms of reference deployed by those longing for a
‘revival’ of ‘Pakistani cinema’.10 The term ‘national cinemas’ can be
broadly criticized in two ways: first, through an objection to the
ideological role of nationalism in justifying and perpetuating
ethnocentrism, chauvinistic patriotism, capitalist patriarchy and other
forms of domination;11 second, the term is inaccurate and arguably
irrelevant in view of the increasingly transnational realities of production
and consumption in the current age of globalization.12 Accordingly, there
is a reluctance to use the term ‘Pakistani cinema’ (or indeed ‘Indian’ or
‘Bangladeshi cinema’) in this dossier. Each essay makes it a central task
to probe and interrogate the taken-for-granted relationships between
films, industries and languages that accompany the national-state
frameworks dominating mainstreams across South Asia. Taking up Ravi
Vasudevan’s invitation to explore a range of alternative geographies that
envelop all the subcontinent’s territories and well beyond,13 discussions
are conceptualized through diverse units of analysis: the global (relating
to neoliberal cinemas); the regional and transnational (relating to
processes and connections across and within South Asia); linguistic and
vernacular factors (relating to film languages, above all Urdu and Hindi,
but also – within Pakistan – Punjabi, Pashto and so on); and, finally, citybased classifications relating to sites of production such as Bombay,
Lahore and Dhaka.
As will be seen, stretching the cinematic object of study sideways and
vertically in these ways allows for exploration of melodrama, modernism
and action in the Pakistani context through comparison and intersection
with close and distant relatives. None of this renders the nation irrelevant.
Far from diluting its ‘Pakistaniness’, consideration of Urdu and Punjabi
cinema’s mimetic, parasitic and syncretic dynamics provides a fuller
portrait of national specificities. These remain significant given that the
nation state continues to define many of the most important parameters of
cinematic possibility through policies, markets and infrastructures, not to
mention social contexts. Whatever revulsion scholars might feel towards
the absolutist claims, origin myths and exclusionary historiographies
implicit in discourses of cinema framed by nationalism, the undeniable
reality of national specificities remains an observable fact.14
The methodological approaches employed in this dossier range from
oral history interviews with practitioners (Lotte Hoek) to ethnographies
470
Screen 57:4 Winter 2016 Ali Nobil Ahmad Explorations into Pakistani cinema
Cinema 1947–97 (Karachi: Oxford
University Press, 1997).
16 Aijaz Ahmad, ‘In the mirror of
Urdu’, Lineages of the Present
(London: Verso, 2002),
pp. 103–25.
of contemporary media practice (Gwendolyn Kirk) and textual criticism
(Iftikhar Dadi). Themes and issues include genre, cinematic form and
adaptation (Dadi), language and the politics of memory (Hoek), and the
question of changing technologies (Kirk). My own introductory remarks
contextualize these various contents chronologically around two loosely
ordered discussions about the past and present of Pakistani cinema. Both
sections begin with probing dominant narratives as a pathway to the
critique of extant assumptions; both gesture towards fresh perspectives. I
conclude by noting several other possible avenues that might be fruitfully
explored in future research.
Histories of the film industry in Pakistan tend to follow a rubric laid out
by the late documentarian and author Mushtaq Gazdar, whose descriptive
account of the emergence of Urdu film production centres in Lahore,
Karachi and Dhaka during the 1960s has become a sort of master
narrative of cinematic events at the national level.15 Although not
nationalist in simple terms, Gazdar’s chronicle does not engage critically
with the key problematic any serious scholarly analysis must surely
begin with: what is Pakistani cinema? Predicated on the questionable
assumption that national cinema is an exclusive product of industrial and
creative processes that germinate within the territorial boundaries of the
nation-state, its logic is straightforward: the ‘Pakistani film industry’
produces ‘Pakistani cinema’. In South Asia’s multilinguistic polities,
where it is highly problematic to speak of language and nationality as
interchangeable, such commonsense conflations of Urdu cinema with
Pakistan and, by implication, Hindi film with India are quite unsound.
The proportion of Pakistanis who thought of themselves as
Urdu-speakers in 1951, four years after Partition, was a minuscule 7.2 per
cent. Up until at least the 1965 war, the bulk of Urdu writers constituted a
single intellectual community, regardless of religion or region.16 Their
division into separate nation-states, one of which was virtually overnight
designated ‘Islamic’ and therefore Urdu-speaking, the other deemed
Hindu and therefore Hindi-speaking, involved the systematic reification
of largely artificial distinctions. It took many years to solidify these as
legal and political realities, and despite the best efforts of each country’s
media and educational systems, the nationalist project of engineering
culturally distinct populations remains (mercifully) incomplete; many
Pakistanis still prefer to watch ‘Indian’ films over those supposedly in
their own national language. They might refer to them as foreign, but
Hindi screen dialogue and song is more familiar to ordinary citizens than
the increasingly Islamicized official idiom of news bulletins, replete with
Farsi and Arabic words rarely used in everyday life. This proximity to
everyday language is all the more significant when one considers that for
millions in Southern India, the cultural imprint of Urdu-Hindi is limited.
Similar arguments have been be made about Hindi cinema, a
designation increasingly avoided by Indian film scholars because of its
471
Screen 57:4 Winter 2016 Ali Nobil Ahmad Explorations into Pakistani cinema
dossier
15 Mushtaq Gazdar, Pakistani
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17 Tariq Rahman, From Hindi to
dossier
Urdu: A Social and Political
History (Karachi: Oxford
University Press, 2011),
pp. 366–88.
18 Ira Bhaskar and Richard Allen,
Islamicate Cultures of Bombay
Cinema (New Delhi: Tulika, 2009).
19 Vasudevan, ‘Geographies of the
cinematic public’, p. 107.
20 A long poem composed in
rhyming couplets, the masnavi is
common to Urdu, Farsi, Turkish,
Arabic and other languages. Epic
in scope, masnavi tend to deal
with romantic, ethical and
spiritual themes.
21 Ravi Vasudevan, ‘Shifting codes,
dissolving identities: the Hindi
social film of the 1950s as
popular culture’, Third Text,
vol.10, no. 34 (1996), pp. 59–77.
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exaggeration of the difference between Indian and Pakistani linguistic
systems, as Dadi notes. Some have argued that the language of Indian
cinema is in fact Urdu, pointing out that leading stars of the ‘Hindi’ film
industry are coached in classical Urdu diction.17 Whatever the truth of
this last claim, the Muslim ethos of Bombay cinema and deep
entwinement with Urdu literary culture has been extensively researched
in recent years.18 Any serious attempt to define Pakistani cinema or even
sketch the outlines of its history, it follows, cannot treat Urdu film as a
self-contained ‘Pakistani’ cinematic universe.
Although Gazdar locates Pakistan’s cinematic cultural heritage in the
subcontinent’s shared prehistory of Indo-Muslim cultural synthesis,19 he
writes as if Bombay and Lahore simply went their separate ways after
Independence, thus occluding the Urdu-Hindi sphere of art, visual media
and North Indian literary culture that continued to exert considerable
influence upon its contents and formal conventions during the
postcolonial period. As Dadi observes, the particularity of Lahore’s and
Karachi’s Urdu popular cinema of this period emerges not as some
mystical essence of national uniqueness, but rather as a local variant of
broader, regional configurations.
In what sense, then, is it Pakistani? Dadi’s analysis of Masood
Pervez’s cinematic rendering of Mirza Shauq’s nineteenth-century
masnavi,20 Zehr-e Ishq/Poison of Love (1958), holds important clues.
Careful to ground his treatment of form in temporal logic, Dadi points
out that Zehr-e-Ishq represents an early, hybridized instance of the
dominant social film. As in India, cinemas of spectacle continued to exist
alongside and within its framework of concern for the inner
psychological turmoil of characters, pointing to the staggered and uneven
transfer of precinematic literary forms to the screen. If this much aligns
with Asia’s wider experience of modernity as a continual, crisis-ridden
process of incorporating and redefining tradition rather than triumphant
transition, analysis of the film’s imagery and narrative reveal a
particularly troubled take on myths of ‘progress’ and ‘civilization’.
Ending with the suicide of its wild and destructive female protagonist
Sanwali, the daughter of a tribal chief, Zehr-e Ishq can be seen an
allegory for the psychic costs of a nationalism impelled to continually
exorcize the Indic ghosts of its primitivist past.
For a genre whose ideal form reflects and reinforces the values of
South Asia’s middle class through cathartic reassurance, Pakistan’s
equivalent of the social film – in this case at least – represents a curious
subversion of its substantive elements, despite apparent obedience to the
forms delineated in Vasudevan’s analysis of the social film’s Bombay
incarnation.21 Its specificity lies in a surprisingly dark, brooding sense of
loss and desolation at socially conservative outcomes in the narrative.
What could it signify, this refusal to play affective ball, despite ostensibly
accepting the rules of a game that were fairly well established?
In the absence of a wider sample, it would probably be unwise to
extrapolate much further. Tentative speculation, however, is hard to resist
472
Screen 57:4 Winter 2016 Ali Nobil Ahmad Explorations into Pakistani cinema
Art of Muslim South Asia (Chapel
Hill, NC: University of North
Carolina Press, 2010), pp. 29–31.
23 Sumita S. Chakravarty, National
Identity in Indian Popular Cinema:
1947–87 (New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1998),
pp. 21–435.
24 Anirudh Deshpande, ‘Indian
cinema and the bourgeois nation
state’, Economic and Political
Weekly, 15 December 2007,
pp. 95–103.
given the comparable sobriety of the endings of several other widely
viewed social films during the era of Urdu dominance. Eik Gunnah Aur
Sahi/One More Sin (Hassan Tariq, 1975), for instance, concerns a
Christian woman who runs a brothel in an urban setting during the period
of postwar modernization. Based loosely on Sadat Hasan Manto’s short
story, Mummy, the film lays bare the hypocrisy of bourgeois patriarchy,
its bitterly tragic ending leaving the viewer with a similar sense of
emptiness to Zehr-e Ishq. This apparently tormented tendency in the
national bourgeoisie’s cinematic imagination has a broader context that
Dadi has outlined in his pioneering study of modernism and the art of
Muslim South Asia, which points out that Pakistani visual art is marked
by a qualitative difference to that of its neighbour to the East.22 Unlike
the Indian nation-state, which claims deep continuities with an ancient
heritage, culture and civilization that have informed modernist concerns
about tradition, the limited presence of nationalism as a framework or
point of reference in Pakistani modernism is striking. Extending this
insight to the realm of cinema, it is noticeable that filmmakers from D. G.
Phalke to Satyajit Ray in India have confidently addressed themselves to
the nation and its mythology in ways that suggest a conscious concern
with mobilizing the cinematic apparatus as a vehicle for cultural
nationalism.23 Moreover, for most of its postcolonial history, Indian
popular cinema has been regarded as a key ideological plank in the
edifice of bourgeois nation-building.24 In Pakistan, contrastingly, the
embrace of cinema by officialdom and the middle classes has been
uneven and, at times, altogether absent.
Perhaps, then, middle- and upper-class identity in Pakistan has been
more haunted by its inadequacies and lack of legitimacy than it has in
India? Despite the structural commonalities shared by India and Pakistan,
rightly stressed by comparative scholarship across the disciplines,
objective reasons for Pakistan’s elites to feel particularly insecure have
hardly been in short supply. Founded on the flimsy basis of political
expediency and the Muslim League’s original sin of collaborating with
the British for the right to speak on behalf of an Indian Muslim
population that gave it less than eight per cent of the vote in 1937, the
country’s inauspicious origins were predictably translated into a less than
dazzling record of nation-building, culminating in the secession of
Pakistan’s Eastern Wing amidst genocide in 1971.
Which brings us to another elision in commonsense understandings of
Pakistani cinema invoked by Gazdar and the many journalistic accounts
he has inspired: their amnesia concerning the contribution of Dhaka in
the period between Partition and the establishment of Bangladesh. If
1947 to 1971 was the formative period of Urdu cinema, it was also one in
which East Pakistani technicians, writers, cameramen and actors moved
relatively freely between Pakistan’s three principal sites of production,
with profound implications for cinema in both wings. Here, Gazdar
seems even less willing to acknowledge the diversity within Pakistani
cinema, for the most part ignoring the East Pakistani experience, except
473
Screen 57:4 Winter 2016 Ali Nobil Ahmad Explorations into Pakistani cinema
dossier
22 Iftikhar Dadi, Modernism and the
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25 Vasudevan, ‘Geographies of the
dossier
cinematic public’, p. 107.
26 Lotte Hoek, ‘Cross-wing
filmmaking: East Pakistani Urdu
films and their traces in the
Bangladeshi Film Archive’,
Bioscope, vol. 5, no. 2 (2014),
pp. 99–118.
27 Hoek, Cut Pieces, p. 11.
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where it buttresses his narrative of an Urdu golden age. Vasudevan notes
the contrast of this oversight with Gazdar’s relatively generous
acknowledgment of North West Indian Hindu and Buddhist cultural
heritage in his prehistorical sketch of the film industry’s past – that is,
before Pakistan existed.25 Viewed against the political context of the
infamous One Unit scheme, whereby West Pakistan was ruled as a
political and legal entity distinct from the East Wing as a means of
justifying the former’s neocolonial dictatorship over the latter, Dhaka’s
exclusion from narratives of cinematic authenticity is no innocent
mistake. At best insensitive, it smacks of the well-documented bias of
West Wing elites too hung up on their own ‘Indo-Aryan’ origins to
appreciate that many of Pakistan’s richest cultural and intellectual
resources lay to the East. Turning their backs on this inheritance – even
as they plundered Bengal for jute and foreign exchange – severely
compromised the fate of Urdu film production, which had drawn heavily
on Dhaka for talent, expertise and markets in the 1960s, a fact only rarely
acknowledged in contemporary laments about the industry’s decline.
Just how constitutive a role the East Wing played in the making of
Pakistani cinema is a question that can only be addressed through further
research in Pakistan and Bangladesh covering the period from Partition
up to the war of 1971. Elsewhere, Hoek has laid important
methodological foundations for such endeavours.26 Building on these in
this dossier, she considers the extent to which artists, technicians and
actors coming from or working in East Pakistan continued to influence
and indeed define Urdu cinema even after East Pakistan no longer
existed. Following films and careers – ‘things’ rather than conventionally
assumed nationalist starting-points – Hoek identifies the hitherto
unacknowledged labour of East Bengali individuals whose little-known
devotion to the screen in Pakistan has fallen through the cracks of
national and nationalist historiography. As a case study, the life of
cameraman Afzal Chowdhury compels us to rethink ‘Pakistani’ (and
‘Bangladeshi’) cinema in terms not just of Dhaka as a marginal location
but of how we view the very composition of the Urdu filmic canon itself.
For if Karachi’s and Lahore’s respective outputs continued to bear the
imprint of Bengal even after its secession, it follows that the internal
complexity of their technical, artistic and intellectual lineages over the
longue durée are obscured by the idea of a ‘Pakistani cinema’ distinct
from that of Bangladesh.
Spellbound by big-budget spectacle and blinded by leftwing
ideological snobbery respectively, film journalism and scholarly research
on South Asian cinema tend to privilege ‘ideal’ forms and high
production values.27 Within the media and the middle-class drawing
room this sense of hierarchy is even more acute, with the result that
particular notions of value and taste parade as universal and self-evident
truths with consequences that are exclusionary and distortive. Pakistan’s
Gibbonian narrative of Urdu (read middle-class) cinema’s decline and
fall from a golden era has equivalents in India, where Assam hosted a
474
Screen 57:4 Winter 2016 Ali Nobil Ahmad Explorations into Pakistani cinema
28 Ibid., p. 14.
Bollywood (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2012).
30 Haque et al., Current
Impediments, p. vi.
31 Ibid., p. ix.
32 Ibid., p. 11.
33 Ibid., pp. 14–15.
‘Forum for Promoting Better Cinema’ as early as 1982, and Bangladesh,
where parallel versions of the same story lament the eclipse of bourgeois
celluloid’s ‘glory days’ by degenerated forms of commercial and sexual
vulgarity during the 1980s.28
By the same token, recent excitement over the restoration of
middle-class leadership via cinematic modernization is a logical corollary
of the downfall narrative. In the Indian situation, digital Bollywood’s
‘gentrification’29 and new accompanying forms of socio-spatial
segregation associated with multiplex exhibition are part of a neoliberal
transformation in media and urban planning. In Pakistan this
tendency – though frustrated by the relative absence of filmmaking that
could be either described and packaged as ‘big-budget’ or as ‘art cinema’
– is quite clearly evident in the disproportionate level of attention
received by Shoaib Mansoor’s Khuda kay Liye/In God’s Name (2007)
and Bol/Speak (2011) and Bilal Lashari’s Waar/War (2013). Whatever
their debatable quality, it does not take a film critic to spot the complete
lack of formal and thematic unity among these films, or indeed the
difference between them and other more genuinely innovative recent
independent features such as Zinda Bhaag and Omar Khan’s pioneering
comedy-horror, Zibakhana/Hell’s Ground (2007). One could perhaps
claim that the general tenor of realism in all these films is distinct from
the melodramatic action formats of Pashto and Punjabi low-budget
celluloid. But beyond having been made with digital technology and
stereo sound, packaged and marketed through social media and exhibited
in multiplexes, it is hard to identify a single strand of commonality that
could possibly justify serious usage of the term ‘wave’. With all its
implications of shared forms and preoccupations, invocation of this last
term would appear to be a textbook case of media hyperbole.
Indeed, paired with the call for more multiplexes, the celebratory tone
of recent interest in Pakistani cinema can be viewed as an ideological bid
by elites to reclaim and recast cinema as a new media commodity on a
par with computer games and mobile telephony. Its market-driven
foundations are hinted at in the earlier cited USAID report, written by
academics at a prestigious Lahore business school, which calls for
infrastructure to be ‘modernized’, and envisions a scenario in which
‘highly educated young people’ enter the industry so that cinema may
receive a boost from ‘computer animation’ and ‘gaming’.30 Heavily
imbued with the jargon of neoliberal consultancy, the report’s support for
a national film industry is rooted less in any appreciation of the intrinsic
value of art or culture than in a concern to ‘bring in foreign exchange and
improve the brand image of the country’.31 Though a vision of future
progress, it basks in real and imagined glories of Urdu cinema’s past: a
time when ‘Pakistani high society’ was infused with the ‘values, mores
and attitudes of [its] former British masters’; a time before the 1980s,
when ‘going to cinema was a joyful family occasion’.32 At this point,
‘talent from less salubrious backgrounds’ ruined the party. These upstarts
– ‘new, uncouth, gujjar [low caste] financiers’33 – are represented as
475
Screen 57:4 Winter 2016 Ali Nobil Ahmad Explorations into Pakistani cinema
dossier
29 Tejaswini Ganti, Producing
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dossier
34 Ibid., p. vi.
35 Adrian Athique, ‘From cinema hall
to multiplex: a public history’,
South Asian Popular Culture, vol.
9, no. 2 (2011), pp. 147–60.
36 Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of
the Governed (New Delhi:
Permanent Black, 2004).
37 Haque et al., Current
Impediments, pp. vi, ix.
38 Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Indian
Cinema in the Time of Celluloid
(New Delhi: Tulika, 2009).
39 Ahmad, ‘Film and cinephilia in
Pakistan’.
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usurpers by the report’s authors, who describe the last three decades
(when the number of films produced in regional vernaculars, Pushto and
Punjabi, consistently exceeded those produced in Urdu) as a kind of
cinematic dark age. Warming to the prospect of middle-class restoration
in a new era of multiplexes, the authors conclude approvingly that recent
transformations have ‘brought affluent and educated families back to the
cinema. Multiplex theaters provide a very nice ambience.’34
Attempts to order cinemagoing along hierarchical socioeconomic lines
hark back to British anxieties over cinemas as spaces in which crowds
might morph into unruly publics.35 Fears of ‘the crowd’ at traditional film
venues in contemporary India and Pakistan are powerfully reminiscent of
these colonial antecedents, suggesting cinema represents a particular site
of postcolonial South Asia’s wider struggle between ‘civil’ and ‘political
society’.36 By securing cinema’s incorporation within the social and
spatial logic of retail and gated living, the spread of the privatized
multiplex might finally decide the outcome of the now century-old class
struggle over what it means to see a film. Cheered on by economists and
urban planners who have absorbed wholesale the technocratic values of
neoliberal governance, it is little wonder that the new discourse on
Pakistani cinema reads like a World Bank treatise on privatization. Ehsan
ul Haque et al. call explicitly for the strengthening of intellectual property
rights, the enforcement of piracy regulations and the need for ‘Pakistan’s
informal economy to move towards formalisation leading to increased
corporatisation, documentation and professionalism’.37
Like any exercise in neoliberal privatization, the consequences of
digitalization in Pakistan are ambiguous for those with no place in its
preferred frameworks of value. Above all, as Gwendolyn Kirk argues,
Lahore’s long-suffering professional cadre of middle-aged artists,
technicians and artisanal media workers have had their ingenuity at
improvization in the absence of well-resourced infrastructure perversely
held against them by a discourse that bemoans the technical poverty of
domestic productions. For an emergent middle class eager to see Pakistan
emulate the ‘globalised freakshow’38 that is contemporary Bollywood,
this last ‘community of practice’, formed in organic relationship with
film studios like Lahore’s Evernew, has outlived its purpose. Having
worked on the set of what might well be one of Lahore’s very last
celluloid productions, Kirk provides the first detailed ethnography of
filmmaking in Pakistan as a technical and creative process with its own
aesthetic expectations and norms. Far from being static or archaic, she
shows it has evolved in conjunction with a host of financial and
infrastructural limitations that would be unimaginable to a film crew
working under international conditions. Resourceful and dynamic, its
inherent dignity as work stands out in stark contrast to the morbid
language of death with which ‘Lollywood’ is constantly derided in
English-language newspapers.39 Celluloid film as ‘product’ may be in
decline, but the question of who or what is to blame and what ought to be
done to address the state of the film industry as a whole is a complex one.
476
Screen 57:4 Winter 2016 Ali Nobil Ahmad Explorations into Pakistani cinema
41 Laura U. Marks, Enfoldment and
Infinity: An Islamic Genealogy of
New Media Art (Cambridge
MA: MIT Press, 2010).
42 ‘Cinema and Society’ is the title
of a course on Pakistani film I
have taught at universities in
Pakistan and the USA; see also
Khan and Ahmad (eds), Cinema
and Society.
‘Fixing’ it through ‘modernization’ that entails dismissal of an entire
filmmaking community, without regard for individual livelihoods or the
potential contribution of previous generations to the ‘future’, is not only
shortsighted but constitutes a disregard for local knowledge and a waste
of human resources that could result in the permanent loss of Lahore’s
living cinematic heritage.
This introductory essay has sought to explore the past, present and future
complexities of filmmaking in Pakistan with reference to the other
articles in this dossier. Its conceptualization of ‘Pakistani cinema’ has
grappled with the problem of categorizing and studying ‘national’
industries too strictly with the official languages of South Asian
nation-states; in particular, as Hoek points out, commonsense pairings
that tie Indian cinema exclusively to Hindi films, Pakistani to Urdu and
Bangladeshi to Bengali. At the same time, with reference to Dadi’s
intervention, I have tentatively suggested ways to explore national
specificities through regional comparisons of form and content. With
respect to recent excitement within the media about a ‘New Wave’ and
multiplex exhibition, I have identified an elitist South Asian value system
which privileges middle-class cinematic ideals and fetishizes certain
technologies as pathways to ‘progress’ within the media and urban
planning. Kirk’s essay poses a direct challenge to this arrogance,
detailing the creativity in low-tech strategies of production that, far from
being primitive, have continued to adapt in a context of dwindling
production, not unlike those in Bangladesh.40
A number of important questions remain unaddressed in the dossier for
lack of space; several offer potentially fruitful avenues for future research.
The most obvious is the question of Islamic art and its significance as a
category for making sense of modern aesthetic forms. As noted earlier,
Dadi’s work on modernist art in Muslim South Asia is a key reference
point here; so too Laura Marks’s Islamic genealogy of contemporary
media art, whose relevance to cinema might be explored in any number of
ways within and beyond Muslim societies such as Pakistan.41 In addition,
with respect to technology, the changing relationship between film and
television, alongside wider transformations in the Pakistani mediascape to
which it is yoked, remains paramount. Despite the emptiness of terms
such as ‘New Wave’, globalization and satellite television have
undoubtedly altered the overall morphology of film production in ways
that demand urgent scholarly attention. Given the paucity of available data
and the opaque nature of Pakistan’s media economy, qualitative research
on sets and in studios is indispensible, alongside attentiveness to the
textual forms and content of recent films and televisual programming.
Another important area of inquiry concerns the relationship between
cinema and society,42 in particular the history of sexuality in Pakistan (and
other Muslim majority societies), which has gone largely unstudied in
both Pakistan and the western academy for a host of political and
477
Screen 57:4 Winter 2016 Ali Nobil Ahmad Explorations into Pakistani cinema
dossier
40 Hoek Cut Pieces.
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dossier
Fig. 1. Sultan Rahi, Pakistan’s most
famous action hero (in drag), in
Aurat Raj/Women’s Rule
(Rangeela, 1979).
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ideological reasons. Here scholarship must relate the thematic subject
matter of films to social change, attending to the full diversity of cinema
cultures across Pakistan’s various ethno-linguistic regional vernaculars
instead of continually foregrounding Urdu cinema of the 1960s. In
methodological terms this will entail textual interpretation that is informed
by the insights of queer theory but tries to avoid reducing movies to
simple reflections of social processes. To provide one example, Aurat Raj/
Women’s Rule (Rangeela, 1979) – a subversive political satire in which
women seize power through revolutionary violence and radical political
protest – is a film that speaks volumes about the little-known global
dimensions of the sexual revolution, too often thought of as an exclusively
Euro-American phenomenon. Quite apart from its fascination as a
rebellious document of social history, the film’s playful manipulation of
voice, crossdressing and polysexual innuendo make it a masterpiece of
celluloid cabaret (figure 1). Directed by the sexually ambiguous Rangeela,
a sort of modern Charlie Chaplin in the South Asian Bhand (jester)
tradition, Aurat Raj’s incendiary gender politics and outrageously camp
humour should not detract from its seriousness as a work of cinematic art.
The opening scenes include a direct address by the director to the
audience, in which he appears in multiple guises representing various
aspects of the production process. Within the framework of this brief but
vibrant cameo, Rangeela thus establishes himself as chorus, cinephile,
technician, comedian, crossdresser, virtuoso director and trickster.
What is Pakistani cinema? The career of Rangeela is testament to just
how exciting the possibilities of exploring this question might be. The
idiosyncratic individuality of one of Pakistan’s most creative practitioners
of film is even more striking given the absence of a confident, collective
middle-class vision of the nation such as that which exists in India. On the
478
Screen 57:4 Winter 2016 Ali Nobil Ahmad Explorations into Pakistani cinema
cinematic public’, p. 112.
other hand, future scholarship must also be open to exploration of
phenomena and processes rarely thought of as Pakistani. At its outer
limits, Vasudevan has made a case for opening up subcontinental cinema
studies to even broader historical geographies, such as imperial circuits,
diasporas and beyond. Wedding this to an approach that eschews elitism
and technological determinism involves consideration of socially diverse
experiences and human agencies in the spread of filmmaking
technologies. Vasudevan’s idea of the bazaar as a ‘sphere of commodities,
people, labour and cultural forms’, in which ‘petty commodity production,
repair and recycling’ sit in conjunction with the ‘small scale technology of
the workshop’, strikes me as one of the most fertile areas for further
exploration.43 Indeed I would argue – with reference to an interview I
conducted ten years ago with Imran, a British Pakistani restaurateur from
East London – that one of the most politically urgent tasks for scholarship
on South Asian screen cultures is to sketch Pakistan into the history of
global Bollywood. Imran’s grandfather and father had worked in Jewishowned textile factories before entering the catering business in the London
borough of Aldgate. His career took an unexpected turn in the 1980s
when copying and distributing Indian films on VHS became the
household’s primary enterprise. The labour process involved all genders
and generations:
You had to put the reel into the u-matic ... It was quite a skilled job. I
used to go with my father to a place in Epping. A gentleman named
Michael there used to have a big mansion in Epping Forest. The
machinery he had, I’ve seen it with my own eyes ... It was me, my
brother, we had another brother, my cousin, and in one of our
bedrooms in our house, my mum used to put the film into the
pneumatic, and she used to make us all stand near the pause button,
and when she used to say, ‘Go!,’ we used to all let go of the pause
button together, so we could come out with ten, fifteen films at one
time ... Our people were very enterprising.
Imran’s testimony provides a glimpse into the kind of investments in
Indian cinema that routinely feature in ordinary Pakistani life worlds, in
which Bollywood often plays a larger part than ‘their own’ national
cinema. National, linguistic and religious distinctions are often irrelevant
when it comes to reception contexts and networks of circulation;
foregrounding them can obscure actual histories of circulation and
consumption. Pakistani cinephilia might thus hold the key to a more
inclusive global history of Indian film – one in which South Asian labour
diasporas form the material and technological basis of cinematic diffusion
rather than this or that nation-state, ethnic group or religion. Such an
approach might contribute, in its own small way, to problematizing the
narratives of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh maintained by powerful
interests and elites in all three nation-states. All the more reason for
research in years to come to probe, explore and question, rather than take
for granted, the content, forms and borders of ‘Pakistani cinema’.
479
Screen 57:4 Winter 2016 Ali Nobil Ahmad Explorations into Pakistani cinema
dossier
43 Vasudevan, ‘Geographies of the
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