Lahore+Film+Industry

//From: Ishtiaq Ahmed // //To: Ishtiaq Ahmed  Bcc: srhodewalt@wilmingtonfriends.org// //Date: 03/17/2012 07:20 PM// //Subject: The Lahore film industry's cultural roots//

//Dear All,// //Sorry for this repeat. The first email failed and so I am trying again. I will write on the Lollywood-Bollywood connection in a series of articles - interspersed with current affairs issues and other interesting topics. Comments are welcome//

//{The writer has a PhD from Stockholm University. He is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Stockholm University. He is also Honorary Senior Fellow of the Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore. His latest publication is: The Punjab Bloodied, Partitioned and Cleansed: Unravelling the 1947 Tragedy through Secret British Reports and First-Person Accounts (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2012; New Delhi: Rupa Books, 2011). He can be reached at billumian@gmail.com}//

Daily Times, Sunday, March 18, 2012 http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2012\03\18\story_18-3-2012_pg3_3 VIEW: **The Lahore film industry’s cultural roots —Ishtiaq Ahmed**

As the capital of Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s kingdom, Lahore continued to be a city known for its large numbers of courtesans and musicians, and there was much conviviality and entertainment prevalent at his court

Recently, a long article, “The Lahore Film Industry” was published in a major scholarly undertaking edited by Professor Anjali Gera Roy and Chua Beng Huat, Travels of Bollywood Cinema: From Bombay to LA (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012). The book is a mine of information on the ubiquitous Bombay cinema’s connections in all directions in the Indian subcontinent and now to all the nooks and corners of the world.

The pristine Lahore film industry was a major victim of the 1947 partition riots. I tell the story of all those who left Lahore and those who came from Bombay to Lahore — because they had a name that made them a target for religious fanatics. I launch with this article a series of articles on this theme, interspersed with current affairs and related topics.

My magnum opus, The Punjab Bloodied, Partitioned and Cleansed: Unravelling the 1947 Tragedy through Secret British Reports and First-Person Accounts (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2012), published only last week, contains some interviews with stars Sunil Dutt and Raj Babbar; filmmakers and directors B. R. Chopra and Ramanand Sagar; song and script writers Naqsh Lyallpuri, Prem Dhawan and Hamid Akhtar, and television story and script writers A. Hameed, Bhisham Sahni and Mustansar Hussain Tarar. So the two research undertakings are interlinked.

It is important to note that historical Punjab had a very rich and varied cultural heritage in which the performing arts were very much a part of life. That heritage paved the way for the evolution of the Lahore film industry. Much before the British conquered Punjab, a vibrant tradition of story-telling and melodic rendering of heroic and romantic epics was prevalent in Punjab. Epics such as Heer Ranjha, Sohni Mahiwal, Sassi Punnu, Puran Bhagat and other such tales were recited in the baithaks [private sittings] in towns and cities, and in the village square under a tall and big tree. Story-tellers would wander around narrating tales from the Mahabharata, the Ramayan, Guru ki Baani, the Tragedy of Karbala as well as the Dastan-e-Amir Hamza and many other such stories. On the occasion of Ram Lila and the annual gatherings at sufi shrines, wandering actors would perform to eager audiences. The mirasi or bard was an essential component of the social order. In that traditional hierarchical order, he alone could take liberties with the landowning castes and biradaris (kinship lineages).

Lahore, the traditional capital of Punjab, always had a large number of non-conformists. Shah Hussain, a rebel sufi, drank wine and danced ecstatically in the streets of Lahore. His idiosyncratic behaviour and defiant lifestyle earned him the ire of the conservative sections of society, who approached Emperor Akbar to chastise him. Akbar was in Lahore at that time. He ignored their protests. Shah Hussain’s close friendship with Madho, a beautiful Brahmin boy from Shahdara on the other side of the Ravi, raised many eyebrows. Both are buried in the same tomb and an annual festival attracts a large number of people to their tomb. Later, Bulleh Shah, another rebel sufi and poet par excellence, migrated from nearby Kasur and lived in Lahore for a long time. His guide and master, Shah Inayat Qadri, initiated him into the unorthodox Shattari branch of the Qadri Sufi Order that sought a synthesis between Hindu and Islamic mysticism. Bulleh Shah, in his own right, gathered a large following of non-conformists. As the capital of Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s kingdom, Lahore continued to be a city known for its large numbers of courtesans and musicians, and there was much conviviality and entertainment prevalent at his court.

There can be no denying that the Punjab in general and Lahore in particular benefited the most from colonial modernisation and development policies. The British decided to recruit a major portion of its army from Punjab and Urdu was promoted as the medium of instruction in schools. The Urdu Board was not established in Delhi or Lucknow, the centres of the Urdu-speaking heartland in northern India, but in Lahore. As a result educated Punjabi Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs were literate in Urdu. This was to prove a great asset when Punjabis went to the Bombay film industry in search of work.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, Lahore had turned into the cultural and educational capital of north-western India, Kolkata being the centre at the other end, in the north-east, whereas Delhi was reduced in 1911 to the administrative capital of British India. Although the majority of the Lahore population was Muslim, 40 per cent were Hindus and Sikhs. There were Europeans and Anglo-Indians, indigenous Punjabi Christians, Parsees and many other smaller groups including Buddhists, Jews and Armenians as well. A colony of Bengali educationists was also settled in Lahore.

A friend of mine, Waleed Meer, told me that the famous Swiss chateau-type building on Montgomery Road was built by an Armenian. Another friend, Advocate Liaqat Ali, told me that before cinema theatres were built, two Lahori Muslims had roaming theatre companies: a Syed company and an Arain company (both castes). Iqbal specialist Professor Riffat Hassan told me that her maternal grandfather, a Pathan, also owned a theatre company in Lahore. Lahore Hindus and Sikhs were also deeply involved in cultural activism; not to forget that Lahore Christians were also a prominent element in the theatre and entertainment business. I grew up in Mozang in post-partition Lahore. I remember Sain Khutais could mesmerise audiences by rendering Heer Waris Shah in the most haunting voice. My father and his friends would attend qawwaali sessions in the evenings. Muppet shows and street theatres and magicians were still around.

Then there was Ustad Bhawaan, a chat vendor, who had gone into a trance ever since he saw the film Baiju Bawra (1952). He started believing that one could melt stones by singing the appropriate raga. People would buck him up to sing, and once he started a semi-classic melody, his aloo-chholae (potatoes and chickpeas) chaat was pilfered by the rascals around. However, as a true artiste he would not interrupt his singing, which the crowd exploited with a wicked sense of humour. It was a Lahore that was just recovering from the looting, burning and killing that had taken place a few years earlier. The innocence of ordinary folks in 1947 had received severe jolts, but it still pervaded their lives.

//Date: 03/24/2012 07:02 PM// //Subject: The establishment of the Lahore film industry//

//Dear All,// //The next article in the history of the Lahore film industry is presented to you: a Lahore which was more relaxed with cosmopolitanism in the 1930s than it is now. Comments are welcome.// //Warm regards,// Ishtiaq //The writer has a PhD from Stockholm University. He is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Stockholm University. He is also Honorary Senior Fellow of the Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore.His latest publication is: The Punjab Bloodied, Partitioned and Cleansed: Unravelling the 1947 Tragedy through Secret British Reports and First-Person Accounts (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2012; New Delhi: Rupa Books, 2011). He can be reached at billumian@gmail.com//

Daily Times, Sunday, March 25, 2012 http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2012\03\25\story_25-3-2012_pg3_3 VIEW: **The establishment of the Lahore film industry —Ishtiaq Ahmed** An American actress, Iris Crawford, also acted in the film. It is indicative of cosmopolitanism being an attractive feature of the Lahore that developed into a beautiful city under enlightened British administrators

When was the first film theatre built in Lahore? A reliable answer eludes us, but we can say with certainty that by the early 1920s there were nine cinemas in Lahore. It was the era of silent films. Films made in Hollywood, London, Bombay and Calcutta attracted eager crowds as Punjabis have proverbially been among the first to respond when it comes to entertainment. A very interesting feature of the silent films era was live background music accompanying the film. A group of musicians was in the cinema hall who played the piano, tabla and other instruments to provide dramatic effects to the story being told. So, it was a semi-live performance to which the audiences related in a more animated manner than when the talkies arrived and no intermediary between the film being shown on the screen and the people watching it existed.

The first silent film made in Lahore was The Daughters of Today, released in 1924. A former officer of the North-Western Railway, G. K. Mehta, produced it. He had imported a camera from London. The future legendary Bombay filmmaker, Mian Abdur Rashid Kardar, famously known as A R Kardar, worked with Mehta as assistant director and also as the lead actor. According to veteran writer A Hameed, The Daughters of Today was produced largely in the open air as there was no studio in Lahore at that time. Kardar and his fellow artist and calligraphist, M Ismail, later a noted character actor in post-partition Pakistani films, sold their properties and in 1928 established a studio on Ravi Road, near Bhaati Gate where they lived. The lighting facilities in the studios were not very good and shooting was possible only in the daylight. The choice of Ravi Road was partly dictated by the fact that at that time thick forest existed along the banks of the River Ravi while the mausoleums of Mughal Emperor Jahangir and his wife Nur Jahan were just across the bridge. These provided excellent locations for shooting action packed melodramas.

The first film produced at the Ravi Road Studios was Husn ka Daku or Mysterious Eagle. This time, Kardar was the director himself as well as the leading male actor oppositie Gulzar Begum. Ismail played a supporting role. An American actress, Iris Crawford, also acted in the film. It is indicative of cosmopolitanism being an attractive feature of the Lahore that developed into a beautiful city under enlightened British administrators. The film did quite well, but Kardar decided to not act in films and instead concentrate on direction. Kardar also produced Sarfarosh or Braveheart with Gul Hameed playing the lead role. Hameed was reportedly one of the handsomest men to grace the silver screen. Sarfarosh was noticed by the film pundits in Bombay and Calcutta and Lahore’s reputation as an up and coming film-making centre began to receive greater attention.

In 1932, Kardar produced the first talkie from Lahore, Heer Ranjha. That must have been quite an achievement because the first Bombay talkie, Alam Ara, was released only a year earlier. Punjab’s contribution to romance — the passion it arouses and the pain it causes — has a very long pedigree. In that pedigree, the legend of Heer in particular has always been the most fascinating. It is the Punjabi variant of Romeo and Juliet.

Down the ages, Damodar Das Arora, Mukbaz and Ahmed Gujjar have told the story but the most famous rendition is by the sufi-scholar Waris Shah (1722-1798). Ranjha romances with Heer initially in the typical Krishna model: A god playing the flute, herding cattle and attracting young girls. Later, Ranjha joins the Order of Gorakhnathi yogis to express his protest and rejection of an unkind world as Heer is married off to Saida Khera.

No wonder the legend of Heer continues to fascinate Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs alike as it is a blend of several layers of the subcontinent’s religious mythology and folklore. It continues to be told on the silver screen over and over again in Bombay, though in Lahore the last attempt in 1970 became a great musical of Khawaja Khurshid Anwar. In any event, by launching Heer Ranjha as the first talking movie from Lahore in 1932, Kardar made a landmark contribution to the history of the Lahore film industry. I hope film historians will take note of it.

Now, the intriguing point to consider is that Waris Shah called his epic only Heer. According to my very learned senior friend Mr Bhisham Kumar Bakshi, there was a feminist rationale behind it. Waris Shah wanted to expose male chauvinism that characterised the powerful Jatt caste of Jhang in western Punjab to which Heer belonged. Ownership of women was and still is a very strong indicator of the hegemony of male chauvinism, and in the agricultural order such possession and control of females is an integral part of the possession of land and other factors. That we are still stuck in it or rather have sunk deeper into it through honour killings and acid throwing is something to consider. Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy has used cinematography to highlight that and has won a most coveted Oscar in 2012. But, of that later.

Two other individuals played a pioneering role in the development of the nascent film industry in Lahore. Roop Lal Shori, a resident of Brandreth Road, Lahore, produced several films that found eager audiences outside Punjab. In particular, Qismat ke Her Pher, aka Life After Death, firmly established the new industry’s reputation as being in line with other film industries of the time. Later, a Gujrati, DM Pancholi, set up a studio in Lahore and with it the Lahore industry had firmly established its credentials.

In the beginning, films produced in Lahore were mainly in the Punjabi language, which till 1947 were shown in the whole of undivided Punjab as well as in Delhi, Calcutta, Bombay and Kanpur where Punjabis had been settling in significant numbers since the early 20th century.

After the partition of Punjab in 1947, no comparable Punjabi-language film industry came up in the Indian Punjab. Some Punjabi films continued to be made in Bombay, but as a whole the partition of Punjab was a major blow to regional-language cinema in India.

{The writer has a PhD from Stockholm University. He is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Stockholm University. He is also Honorary Senior Fellow of the Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore. His latest publication is: The Punjab Bloodied, Partitioned and Cleansed: Unravelling the 1947 Tragedy through Secret British Reports and First-Person Accounts (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2012; New Delhi: Rupa Books, 2011). He can be reached at billumian@gmail.com}