Beyond the border

A collection of essays on cinema in Pakistan includes pieces on its troubled history, its iconic movie theatres, and the impact of the blockbuster Maula Jatt

One of my most memorable cinematic experiences came about when, as a seven year old, I first visited a drive-in cinema in Karachi. My cousins there hired cars and took us. The magic of a giant screen in the open air, of families sitting in cars enjoying a picnic while watching a film, alongside its beaches and joyrides at Clifton, made Karachi a particularly unforgettable experience.

My other memory of Pakistani cinema is from an afternoon at Oxford 25 years ago. A group of us Indians and Pakistanis watched Sholay and Maula Jatt back to back, and had many laughs together. The success of last year’s remake, The Legend of Maula Jatt, starring Fawad Khan, seems like Sultan Rahi’s (he was the star of the original film, made in 1979) revenge against us for laughing at him that afternoon.

The recent revival of the Pakistani film industry, as well as its changing fortunes through the decades, is the subject of this marvellous collection of essays, which emerged out of two film festivals at the Universities of Harvard and Brown in the US.

Yes, there was once a thriving culture of making and watching films in Pakistan. At its height in the 1960s and ’70s, there were more than 1,000 cinema halls in Pakistan, and hundreds of films were produced every year, most in Urdu.

Indeed, until 1947, Lahore was a hub of film production in India and Manto, who forms the subject of an incisive essay by niece Ayesha Jalal in this collection, has written about his struggles there after he migrated to Pakistan. Indian films found a steady release in Pakistan until the 1965 war. The ban imposed thereafter further propelled the Pakistani film industry.

This highly readable collection comprises many different kinds of essays. One of the editors, Vazira Zamindar, took the lead in organising the festivals that produced this book. She contributes two wonderful essays, including one on the incredible one-man film archive run by Guddu Khan in his sparse two rooms in Karachi.

Iftikhar Dadi, one of the founders of Karachi pop and a highly distinguished artist and art historian, writes about the aesthetics of Pakistani cinema and its interactions with art, and the cinematic limitations of its TV industry, despite its progressivism.

The journalist Fahad Naveed puts together a poignant photo essay on cinema halls. There is a delightful photo essay by Bani Abidi, one of the pioneers of video art in Pakistan, on the burnt reels of Nishat Cinema after it was attacked by a mob. In a brilliant essay on death, hauntings and rebirths, Meenu Gaur and Asad Ali write about the contradictions surrounding Maula Jatt, which ran for 216 weeks until martial-law authorities took it down.

In their introduction, the editors spell out the conventional periodisation of Pakistani cinema as follows: “one can speak of (a) Karachi and the Urdu Social until the mid-1970s, (b) the emergence of Lollywood from roughly the mid-1970s to the late 1990s, and (c) a new constellation once again centred on Karachi, from roughly 2013 onwards.”

It turns out that the cult status of Maula Jatt marks a cleavage between two Karachi-dominated epochs. The original Maula Jatt was released in 1979 and the story of its success and how its producer fought the censors is the centrepiece of this history. Sultan Rahi, its protagonist, became a one-man industry and spawned two decades of violence and revenge-based films that were too risqué for the middle classes, who abandoned the cinema. The rise of the Punjabi film industry and Lahore’s dominance coincided with these years and with the years of Pakistani President Muhammad Zia-ulHaq. It was a time of intense censorship, when cinema became an object of condemnation.

A year after we watched Maula Jatt at Oxford, Sultan Rahi was assassinated; the exact motive remains unclear. Official reports said it was a robbery. Many believe he was killed by religious bigots because he planned to reconvert to the religion of his birth, Christianity. “This sudden death also more or less coincided with another untimely death, that of the Pakistani film industry itself. While several factors were responsible for the decline of the industry... Sultan Rahi’s passing most definitely heralded the end of an era, after which Lollywood more or less struggled with its own extinction.”

Pakistani cinema is still fighting an ideological battle for legitimacy. In 2012, a series of attacks by rioters resulted in six cinemas being burnt in Karachi and Peshawar. Ali Nobil Ahmad, one of its foremost scholars of cinema, has called Pakistan “one of most cine-phobic nations on earth.”

As a theatre owner states, in the book, “People ask us why our industry is not prospering, and I always tell them that this industry cannot prosper until film and filmmakers are given their due respect. A nation that addresses its musicians as marasi, film personnel as kanjar, and film heroines as gashti (ie prostitute) — how can the industry of that country prosper?”

From 1989 onwards there was a steady decline in the number of films produced annually. This became especially acute after 2003. The slump continued until it reached a low of 23 films in 2012. The following year marked a revival in the number of productions (37) and in box-office collections.

What is notable, since 2015, is the increasing dominance of Urdu. Karachi has once again emerged as the capital of the Pakistani film industry. This revival is linked to an earlier decision by former President Pervez Musharraf to re-allow the screening of Indian films and his liberalisation of the TV industry. One of the early outcomes of this was Khuda Kay Liye (2007), a film which enjoyed great success upon its theatrical release in India. Now, The Legend of Maula Jatt starring Fawad Khan has once again become the great hit of Pakistani cinema.

While cinema remains popular, it is no longer the mass phenomenon that it once was in South Asia. Still, the revival of the Pakistani film industry, and conversations around it, alert us not just to the commonalities we share but also to the fact that our post-colonial trajectories, despite our different political experiences, may not be so dissimilar after all. One must remember that the entitled bourgeoisie in all of South Asia consider themselves to be organically linked to the universal Enlightenment values of Europe, and, in fact, it is Maula Jatt who challenges this hegemony.

Love, War and Other Longings: Essays on Cinema in Pakistan Ed. by Vazira Zamindar and Asad Ali; 274pp, Rs2068; OUP, Pakistan

Mahmood Farooqui is best known for reviving Dastangoi, the lost art of Urdu storytelling

CORBIS VIA GETTY IMAGES Essayist, novelist, and opposer of imperialism, fascism and totalitarianism in all its forms, George Orwell (June 25, 1903 – January 21, 1950), born Eric Arthur Blair, was a lifelong truth-speaker who had the strength of character to call out Stalinism when many other Left-wing intellectuals chose to ignore the purges in the USSR. Prominent publishers were initially wary of his best-known work, for its perceived criticism of communism. Which isn’t to say he was a raving capitalist. which looks at working-class poverty in the north of England, proves otherwise. Beginning his working career as an unlikely policeman in Burma, the man from Motihari (he was born in Bihar) was a lifelong socialist who produced a vast body of journalistic work, including an unpublished, still-excellent essay in defence of British cookery, and an early memoir, His work, especially the very prescient continues to serve as a warning of the dangers of authoritarianism. Terms he coined, such as “doublethink” and “Big Brother”, are popular as descriptions of patterns in contemporary surveillance societies. This photograph was taken in 1945, when he was with the BBC’s Eastern Service, for which he supervised cultural broadcasts to India.