Rivers, Spies and a Treasure Trove of Stories (Pt.2)
Lollywood: stories of Pakistanโs unlikely film industry
Mughal Stories
From day to day, experts present books to the emperor who hears every book from beginning to end. Every day he marks the spot where they have reached with his pearl-strewing pen. He does not tire of hearing a book again and again, but listens with great interest. The Akhlaq-i-Nasiri by Tusi, the Kimiya-yi-saโadat by Ghazzali, the Gulistan by Saโdi, the Masnavi-i-maโnavi by Rumi, the Shahnama by Firdausi, the khamsa of Shaikh Nizami, the kulliyats of Amir Khusrau and Maula Jami, the divans of Khaqani, Anvari and other history books are read out to him. He rewards the readers with gold and silver according to the number of pages read.
It was between the 9th and 19th centuries when north India was ruled by a series of Muslim sultans that Lahore reached its cultural apogee. And especially under the Mughals who built India into the medieval worldโs grandest empire. Akbar, the greatest of all the Mughal emperors of India loved books and stories. The snippet above, from his biographer Abul Fazl, is a fascinating glimpse into the cultured atmosphere that permeated the courts of the ruling elite of northern India. The royal library, Abul Fazl proudly noted, included books written in Hindavi (early Hindustani), Greek, Persian, Arabic and Kashmiri. Akbarโs sons and grandsons and many of his senior nobles continued to add to the library, composing their own works but also drawing to the great darbar (court) of Lahore the greatest talents from all across India, Afghanistan, Central Asia, and even as far away as Iraq.
The Mughals looked to Persia for their notions of culture and gave pride of place not just to the Persian language but to the great poets and thinkers of Iran. And it was from Persia that many of the grand stories they loved so much and which they adopted and were absorbed into Indian culture first came. The elites of northern Indian during this period adopted a number of Persian poetic and literary forms in which they preserved their histories, but also stories, poems and philosophies.
Several of these forms, especially the qasida, which was a poem in praise of the monarch, remained a novelty of the darbar and did not influence broader society, but several others did. Chief among these was the qissa, an extended poem that combined elements of moral and linguistic instruction as well as entertainment. The subject matter were stories of military valour, spiritual attainment, love and romance. The Mughals, especially Akbar and his son Jahangir enjoyed the qissa Dastan-i-Amir Hamza which relates at great length and with vivid imagination the fantastic adventures of the Prophet Mohammadโs uncle Hamza. So much did Akbar appreciate this work that he commissioned a massive project to illustrate the entire epic. Completed over a period of 14 years (1562-77) the final product included 1400 full page miniature paintings and was housed in 14 volumes.
Qissas were not just stories but in the control of a good narrator, complete one-man performances/ shows. Some of the royal qissa-khawans (story tellers) are recorded as demonstrating all manner of expressions, body movements and vocal tones in their telling, sometimes even transforming themselves, in the words of one critic of Lucknow, into tasvirs (pictures). Thus, introducing for the first time into Lahore the concept of moving pictures! Akbar so loved the story that several times he is described as telling and acting out the qissa himself in front of courtiers and guests. When Delhi was sacked by the Afghan Nadir Shah in 1739 the reigning emperor Muhammad Shah pleaded that after the peacock throne what he most desired to be returned to him was Akbarโs Hamzanama which had illustrations โbeyond imaginationโ.
The critics of the day stressed both telling and listening to stories were beneficial to the soul with some claiming that in the cosmic order of beings, poets and storytellers were ranked second, right behind Prophets and before Emperors! Though this is undoubtedly a minority view, the best qissa-khawans were indeed highly esteemed.
In 1617, Emperor Jahangir, son of Akbar the Great, recorded the following event:
Mulla Asad the storyteller, one of the servants of Mirza Ghazi, came in those same days from Thatta and waited on me. Since he was skilled in transmitted accounts and sweet tales, and was good in his expression, I was struck with his company, and made him happy with the title of Mahzuz Khan. I gave him 1000 rupees, a robe of honor, a horse, an elephant in chains, and a palanquin. After a few days I gave the order for him to be weighed against rupees, and his weight came up to 4,400 rupees. He was honored with a mansab of 200 persons, and 20 horse. I ordered that he should always be present at the gatherings for a chat [gap].
It was under the reign, and patronage of Jahangir that Lahore became the favoured city of the Mughals. The emperor is remembered for ruling over a stable and prosperous Empire and for patronizing painting, poetry and architecture. A man of artistic inclinations it was during this time that story forms like masnavi which told of current events and wonderful victories and ghazal a short romantic-mystical form of poetry superseded other forms of literature. The ghazal in particular was championed by Jahangir and his son and successor, Shahjahan.
The ghazal both facilitated a large appreciation of poetry outside the circles of the aristocracy, among people of all walks of life, and began to be composed and recited in all sorts of settings including by women, in private homes, in public houses and in competitions. The masnavi quickly declined because compared to the ghazal it was a bit lengthy and rather tedious. The ghazal on the other hand, was snappy, called for clever word play and rarely ran more than a few verses. Mushaira, poetry recitations that centred around the ghazal, became one of the most popular forms of entertainment in Lahore during this period.
Many tales are told of courtly mushaira presided over by the Emperor who believed that when expertly delivered, a ghazal was full of magical power.
One night a singer by the name of Sayyid Shah was performing for the Emperor and impersonated an ecstatic state (sama). Jahangir questioned the meaning of one line from the ghazal
Every community has its right way, creed and prayer
I turn to pray towards him with his cap awry
From the audience the royal seal engraver, one Mulla Ali gave an explanation of the line which was written by Amir Khusrau and which his father had taught him. As soon as he finished telling the story, Mulla Ali collapsed and despite the best efforts of the royal physicians to revive him, passed away.
Of course, this literary world of elaborate illustrated tomes, royal qisse and the like was not uniquely Punjabi. Rather it was the literary province of the elite and as such, familiar to most urban literate North Indians. But the mass of people was not literate and had no access to the libraries, the texts, treatises and poets of the nobility. And yet beyond the forts and palaces and even beyond the urban areas of Mughal India there pulsated a great tradition of storytelling that influenced the emergence of films in the early 20th century.
To name all of the genres of Punjabi storytelling would be nearly impossible. In addition to qissa and ghazal there were afsane (stories), dastan (heroic tales), latifa (jokes), katha (Puranic stories), naat (poetry in praise of the Prophet), kafi (sufi poems), boliyan (musical couplets sung by women), dhadhi, kirtan, bhajan, swang, sangit, nautanki , marsiya, moโjizat kahanis (miracle stories of Shiโa Muslims), mahavara (proverbs) and so on.
These forms of storytelling were a part of everyday life for the people of Lahore and the Punjab. Though they may never have seen the beautiful courtly books produced by the Emperors, the characters, plotlines and themes were deeply embedded in the consciousness and culture of common folk.
One story in particular, Heer Ranjha, based on the Arabic classic Laila Majnun, was especially beloved by Punjabis. Compiled originally in the time of Akbar by a storyteller named Damodar Gulati, Heer Ranjha tells the story of a beautiful girl, Heer, who is wooed by a flute-playing handsome young man Ranjha. Rejected by Heerโs family because he belongs to a rival Punjabi clan, Ranjha turns toward a spiritual path. He spends time in Tilla Jogian, the premier centre of Hindu ascetism in the medieval period, and becomes a powerful kanpatha (pierced ear) jogi. His identity is uncovered by Heerโs friends who convince her to run away with him which ends badly with the death of both lovers.
The tale is the greatest of the many similar legends known as tragic love stories, the speciality of Punjab. Sohni Mahiwal, Sassi Pannu and Dhola Bhatti are taken from the same tradition and have been told, acted and sung to rapt audiences for centuries. Stories such as these and others, like Anarkali, whether recorded in royal tomes or told under a tree by a wondering minstrel formed the foundational inspiration for Lahoreโs movie makers. By 1932, just four years after the Lahore produced its first film, Heer Ranjha had already been made into a movie four times!
Performing Arts
Though the earliest Punjabi stories were written down during the Indus Valley civilization, once Harappa and the other cities were abandoned, India would not use writing again until the rule of the emperor Asoka, more than 1500 years later.
The Vedas were memorised and passed on word for word from generation to generation through a caste of priests, the Brahmins. And though many of the later Buddhist tales and eventually, even the Mahabharata and Ramayana were put into written form, writing, reading and access to these skills were confined to the very thinnest layer of elite society. The stories of Punjab survived because they were remembered, retold, performed on stages, recited in poems, acted out in the streets and reimagined with each generation. This oral and physical transmission, this retelling and telling again, kept the stories fresh and alive, changing, not only depending on who was doing the dancing or singing but whether the context was spiritual, secular, public or private.
As with its oral and written literature, Punjab is likewise blessed with a huge variety of musical styles and musician groups. Broadly referred to by the public as mirasi, the society of hereditary Punjabi musicians is complex, and highly differentiated. Though musicians, singers and dancers were uniformly relegated to the outer limits of the caste and class system they played an important, even essential role in Punjabi society. They were the repositories of significant parts of family, folk, clan culture and history. When the movies arrived, the mirasi provided many of the musicians, dancers, singers and composers of what more than any other single trait exemplifies Pakistani/Indian popular movies, the song.
Certain groups of singers have had a direct and enduring connection with the film industry. The dhadhis, wandering minstrels and balladeers who trace their lineage back to the times of Akbar the Great, were particularly active in Punjab. Accompanying themselves on an hourglass-shaped hand drum (dhadh) and a variety of bowed instruments, dhadis specialised in singing heroic tales (var) of local chieftains, especially Sikh rajas ,as well as the tragic love tales such as Heer Ranjha and Sohni Mahiwal. Qawwals, who are sometimes considered part of the dhadhi tradition, were associated with the Sufi shrines and sing an intense trance (sama) inducing music that is so identified with South Asian Islamic practice. Qawwali was a form that was quickly picked up by film makers who inserted it into scenes as light relief or as a sonic representation of an Islamic character or theme.
Also associated with spiritual singing were a class of Muslim singers known as rubabis (after the Afghan stringed lute, rubab). The Sikh gurus employed rubabis to sing kirtans and shabad, essentially the sayings of the various Sikh gurus sung in their temples (gurdwara) as part of Sikh worship. These musicians had respected musical pedigrees and were expert on the rubab, harmonium, drums and other instruments. Being largely a Muslim group, most moved to Pakistan after 1947 and several played critical, pioneering roles as musical directors in the film world that grew up in Lahore.
The brass wedding bands that became an urban phenomenon in north India in the 19th century drew their members from yet another group of hereditary musicians known variously as Mazhabi (if they were Sikh), Musalli (if they were Muslim) and Valmiki (if they were Hindu). These musicians provided services including acting as town criers and news readers. They would make community announcements while beating their drums and playing their horns and clarinets. During festivals and celebrations they entertained people from their vast repertoire of religious and secular songs. As the forms of entertainment changed in the 20th century and especially when sound and music were incorporated into movies in the 1930s, these skilled players formed the backbone of the studio orchestras that produced the amazing soundtracks of the films.
In addition to singers and musicians a universe of street performers, actors and magicians made up part of the Punjabi landscape as well. There were bazigaars (acrobats and contortionists who also sang and acted), bhands (comics) who interrupted weddings and other events to make fun of prominent members of the family and their guests with quick jokes and bawdy repartee for small sums, madaars (jugglers and magicians) who with their magical powders and wands would make birds, eggs and even people disappear and reappear at will.
These groups performed publicly on the streets, in city squares or open fields and bazaars. At any fair (mela) or โursโ (sufi celebration at a shrine) all of these and more would be part of the entertainment. Indian diplomat, Pran Neville, writes in his memoir of Lahore, ๏ปฟโwe had but to walk into the streets to be entertained by one or the other professional jugglers, madaris (magicians), baazigars (acrobats), bhands (jesters), animal and bird tamers, snake charmers, singers, not to mention the Chinese performers of gymnastic feats who would be out on their daily rounds.โ[1] Like the mirasi, many of these castes of public entertainers found that the new film studios popping up in Lahore could be an unexpected source of livelihood.
If Parsi Theatre inspired the early film makers of Bombay, in Punjab other forms of theatre were just as important: swang, naqqali and nautanki. Each of these theatrical codes were common across the Punjabi countryside where performing troupes travelled and performed a rich variety of dramas.
The most important of the traditional theatres in Punjab was a form of nautanki known locally as swang. In essence swang which takes its name from the Sanskrit word for music (sangit) is informal folk opera. The production incorporates liberal portions of singing and dance and often all the parts are sung rather than spoken.
A performance would generally take place in an open part of a village where a local dignitary had invited the troupe to play. After a day of preparation during which the excitement built as stages were erected and children ran amok amidst the activity. The performers prepared by singing for hours with the heads facing downwards into the villageโs wells, a practice that allowed them to improve their range and enhance their projection. The actual performance would finally begin late in the evening and continue till the early hours of the morning. If the plot was a long one this would continue over a number of evenings.
Audience participation–hissing, shouting, calling out requests for songs or jokes to be repeated–was expected and happily accommodated. The performers were masterful singers who had to project their voices over the audience noise and often compete against a rival troupe performing in another part of the village. It was said that some of the best singers could be heard more than a mile away. One only needs to listen to the resounding voice of Noor Jehan, Pakistanโs Queen of Melody, and one of the greatest film singers of the subcontinent, to get a sense of the amazing power of these traditional singers.
Long before Nargis played Radha in Mother India (1957) or Prithviraj Kapoor played Akbar in Mughal-e-Azam (1960) these open-air travelling opera companies were laying the essential template of and sketching out the iconic roles for South Asian popular cinema.
The City as a Story
Lahore, the cultural capital of the greater Punjab region was itself was a city of a million tales. In many ways Lahore, a city so fabled for so long, was the most famous of Punjabโs myriad stories.
The origins of Lahore stretch back to one of the two foundational epics of Hinduism, the Ramayana. In a storyline familiar to all movie lovers in South Asia, we are told that Sita, Ramaโs wife and a goddess in her own right, becomes pregnant making her jealous husband, Rama, question her fidelity. Falsely accusing her of adultery, Rama turns Sita out of the house. Deep in a forest Sita gives birth to twin boys, Lav and Kush, whom she raises with great love and devotion. In a dramatic twist of Fate, years later, the boys are reunited with their father whom they have never met. They take him into the forest to meet their mother. Ram is stunned and realises his mistake but despite Ramaโs protestations and desperate apologies, Sita is swallowed up by the earth and returned to the Heavens. Rama goes on to rule his kingdom with his two sons by his side in a Golden Era of peace and stability. When the time comes, he sets Lav and Kush up in the far West of his country where they establish themselves in two cities. Kush in Kasur, 52 km southeast of Lahore on the Indian border, and Lav in Lavapuri, modern Lahore, where even today, inside the fort of Lahore, there is still a small temple dedicated to this son of Lord Rama.
Despite its hoary Hindu roots, and being described as early as 300 BCE by the Greek historian Megasthenes as a place โof great culture and charmโ, Lahoreโs greatest glory was experienced when it was the capital of various Muslim sultanates and states. Throughout the medieval period when northern India was ruled by a succession of ethnic Turkish rulers who promoted a heavily Persianised culture, Lahore was a city of prime strategic, commercial and cultural significance. And despite its oppressive summer heat a reputation of luxury, elegance and sophistication attached to the city. Its guilds and craftsmen were heralded throughout the region and beyond; its poets, some of the most beloved, even in Persia. Like a handful of other cities around the worldโmodern Paris and New York for exampleโLahore has developed a special atmosphere which has caused both natives and visitors to fall in love with it. Way back in the 12th century, Masud ibn Said al Salman one of the cityโs most popular poets found himself imprisoned far from his home city for pissing off one of the cityโs rulers. Pining away in his cell he wrote a lamentation.
Lahore my loveโฆ How are you?
Without your radiant sun, oh How are you?
Your darling child was torn away from you
With sighs, laments and cries, woe! How are you?
Each of the four great Mughals (Akbar, Jahangir, Shahjahan and Aurangzeb) did their bit to build, extend and refurbish the city. Along with Agra and Delhi and for a while Fatehpur Sikri, Lahore served for years at a time as the Imperial capital and was heavily fortified as a military hub. As it enjoyed the presence of the Emperor himself, artists, administrators, philosophers and emissaries hailing from all across the world came to Lahore to live, seek patronage and practice their speciality.
Poets such as โUrfiโ of Iran made Lahore their home finding the relatively tolerant and inclusive atmosphere a delicious change from the claustrophobic Shiโa Islam of his home country. He and other poets employed by the durbar [court] produced sublime poems which were sometimes reproduced on paper reputed to be as delicate and as thin as butterfly wings. Artisans brought their skills and looms to the royal city which by the 16th century had an international reputation for producing exquisite silken carpets which, in the words of one historian, made โthe carpets made at Kirman in the manufactory of the kings of Iran, look like coarseโ rugs.
The painters who made Lahore their homeโboth immigrants from Iran and the hills of Punjab and Kashmir, as well as nativesโbrought glory and awe to the city and its rulers. Ibrahim Lahori and Kalu Lahori, two painters in the court of Akbar illustrated a book called Darabnama (The Story of Darab) which set out the exploits of the young Akbar, sometimes in fantastic detail, just after he had decided to leave his new purpose-built capital, Fatehpur Sikri, to take up residence in Lahore. Their miniatures brought to life the Persian text which told wild tales of dragons swallowing both horses and their riders in one awesome gulp, as well as radical illustrations of naked humans which according to art historians were never before so accurately depicted by Indian artists. The Darabnama which is recorded as being one of the emperorโs favourite story books also depicts scenes from courtly life such as Akbar being praised and honoured by rulers from other parts of the world and India. Ibrahim Lahori along with miniaturists like Madhu Khurd are credited with bringing a fresh and naturalistic realism to portraiture. It was in Lahore-produced books like the Darabnama that for the first time individuals with all their physical quirksโbulging pot bellies, monobrows, turban stylesโcould be identified as real historical individuals.
The cityโs countless mosques and Sufi dargah (tombs) honouring Lahoreโs many saints and pirs are not just revered places of devotion but subjects of and characters in stories filled with miracles and magic that are still told today. The cityโs storied inner walled city dominated by the domes of the Jamโa masjid but filled with hundreds of other havelis (mansions), shrines, tombs, pleasure palaces and gardens are themselves characters in the various storylines. How many poems, songs, operas and movies, including made in Hollywood, include the name Shalimarโthose famous Mughal-era gardens of Lahore?
Probably the most famous of Lahoreโs many stories and one that has been retold in film in both Pakistan and India many times, is that of Anarkali. Like all tales that have been passed down through generations this one has several different tellings but the most famous and popular one is the tragic one.
One day a Persian trader came to Lahore for business and brought with him members of his family. In his caravan was his beautiful pink complexioned daughter Nadira also known as Sharf un-Nissa. Her beauty stunned the bazaars of Lahore and word quickly reached the Emperor himself that there was a woman as splendidly gorgeous as a pomegranate seed in his city. He summoned the merchant to his court and upon seeing the young woman fell immediately in love with her graceful charm. The young womanโs father was only too pleased to accede to the great Mughalโs request for Nadira to be allowed to join the royal harem.
Much to the chagrin of his wives and other concubines Akbar seemed completely fixated upon the beautiful Iranian girl who was rechristened Anarkali (pomegranate seed) by the King himself. The only time she was not by his side was when he was away from Lahore, conquering yet more lands and expanding the glory of his family and empire. And so it happened when Akbar was leading his armies in a campaign in central India, Anarkali and the crown prince, Salim, later to rule as Jahangir, developed an intimate relationship. The gossip hit the bazaars and everyone spoke of how much the two loved each other. Salim it was said was ready even to renounce his right to the throne of India for a life with Anarkali.
When Akbar returned to Lahore he called for Anarkali but immediately sensed something different in the way she approached him. โWhat is the matter,โ he cooed but she resisted his embrace and made an excuse to retire to her chambers as swiftly as possible. Akbar was upset and soon livid when his spies and courtiers informed him of the fool Anarkali had made of him during his absence. โThe bazaar is echoing with jokes that say Your Highness is too old to water such a lovely tree as Anakaliโ.
The next day Anarkali was summoned to the Emperorโs chambers. โIs what I am told true? That you love Salim more than me?โ
Anarkali tried to demur but the wizened old ruler knew a lie when it was uttered no matter how lovely the lips that spoke it.
He sent his favourite concubine back to the harem and then called his chief wazir and instructed him to arrest Anarkali before the night was through. โYou should bury the witch alive and leave no marking of her cursed tombโ.
In the years that followed Lahore was abuzz with rumours and theories of what happened to Anarkali. Salim was depressed as she was nowhere to be seen. Had she been banished back to Iran?
Eventually the old Mughal died and Salim ascended the jewel encrusted throne of Lahore. One of his first acts was to build a simple tomb on the spot where Anarkali had been so heartlessly murdered. Inscribed upon the tomb is a couplet from the love-lorn Jahangir himself, If I could behold my beloved only once, I would remain thankful to Allah till doomsday
[1] Pran Neville. Lahore: A Sentimental Journey. (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 1997), 60.
Rivers, Spies and a Treasure Trove of Stories (Pt. 1)
Lollywood: stories of Pakistanโs unlikely filmย industry
Rivers and Stories
His eyes might there command whatever stood
City of old or modern fame, the seat
Of mightiest empire, from the destined walls
Of Cambalu, seat of Cathian Can,
And Samarcand by Oxus, Temirโs throne,
To Paquin of Sinaen Kings, and thence
To Agra and Lahore of Great Mogulโฆ.
(Paradise Lost XI 385-91. John Milton)
Fourteen hundred kilometres due north of Bombay and seventeen hundred kilometres to the northwest of Calcutta, sprawled across the flat northwest plains, lay the fabled city of Lahore. ย The city, erstwhile capital of not just the Mughals but numerous Afghan, Arab, Turk and Hindu kingdoms, had a reputation that extended across oceans, continents and time itself. Lahore was mentioned in Egyptian texts and visited by travellers and adventurers from China and Arabia in the early centuries of the current era, all of whom valorised the river city as a place of incredible wealth, luxury and refined taste.ย Elizabethan poets and dramatists including Milton and Dryden, fascinated by the contemporary accounts of adventurers from France and Italy imagined Lahore to be one of the grandest cities ever constructed by humans. ย ย Even in the late 19th century, the Orientalist opera Le Roi de Lahore (The King of Lahore) by French composer Jules Massanet, ran to full houses and ecstatic reviews all across Europe and North America.ย Itโs bungled-up quasi-historical plot, set in the 11th century, had Lahore ruled by a โHindooโ raja named Alim (a Muslim name!) who tries to rally his people to stop the Muslim invaders.ย Almost forgotten today, Le Roi de Lahore was able to succeed simply by playing on the cityโs name, which more than any other conjured up the mysterious exotic Orient in the minds of 19th century Europeans.
Compared to Bombay or Calcutta, Lahore was a seeming backwater. It possessed none of the attributes of the sparkling imperial cities.ย ย Where Bombay was new and young, Lahore was ancient.ย Where Calcutta was the modern power centre of India, Lahore was the sometime capital of the recently vanquished House of Babur. ย ย The new colonial metropolises looked outward, beyond India, to the future. Lahore and its walled โinner cityโ seemed to be the perfect symbol of an insular and irrelevant past.
Far from the coasts, a distant outpost of Empire, there was nothing about Lahore that would suggest that movies, this most modern and technologically complex of entertainments, would take root here.ย In the early days (1900-1935) films were produced in all sorts of townย across the subcontinent. Hyderabad, Kholapur, Coimbatore, Salem and even Gaya, reputedly the site of where Siddhartha Gautama meditated under a bodhi tree on his way to becoming, the Buddha. All had film production units, though almost all fell by the wayside after one or two outings.ย
Movie making was a cottage industry of sorts and anyone with a story and some basic equipment could shoot a short film. But as the audience for movies grew and with it a demand for meaningful and quality content (there were only so many wrestling matches and train arrivals you could stomach), production became concentrated in Bombay, Calcutta and Madras.ย With the possible exception of the Prabhat Film Company, initially based in Kholapur but by 1933 centred in Poona (Pune), and which over a short life of less than 30 years produced only 45 films, Lahore was the only non-colonial city in South Asia to produce films of high quality, significant volume, in multiple languages over an extended period. ย And which continues to do so.
Why Lahore?
While Bombay, Madras and Calcutta had the location and access to new forms of capital and technology, the one thing they didnโt have much of prior to the arrival of the British was stories, the most ancient and beloved form of human entertainment. At heart, movies are nothing more than the most dramatic way of telling stories humans have yet invented. And prior to the arrival of Europeans, the three Imperial cities of India had little history.ย It was the British who conceived and built the cities; in essence their histories are inseparable from the history of the British Raj. This is not to suggest that the countryside around what became the three great Presidency cities was some terra nullius, devoid of human settlement and imagination.ย The islands of Bombay had been part of various kingdoms stretching back to prehistory and even under the Mauryas a regional centre of learning and religion.ย Various Hindu and Muslim dynasts had controlled the islands and, the settlements along the coast had well established links with far away Egypt. But by the time the English took possession of the islands they had lost any significant political or economic consequence.ย Prior to the East India Company there no Bombay.
So too with Calcutta and Madras. Though they were located in regions which had been part of ancient civilisations, both were mere villages that the English built into complex urban metropolises.ย Any stories that were told in these new cities had been brought in from outside. Bombay, Madras and Calcutta were blank canvases upon which was written a modern tale of interaction between Europeans and Indians. History was being created here. The past with its legends, myths and tales belonged to the countryside, the far away โinteriorโ from whence the cities residents had come to seek their fortunes.
Lahore, though, was different. It was not just ancient, it was still a vital, thriving city with a huge catalogue of stories stretching back to the very beginning of the Indian imagination.ย Like the other cities, Lahore attracted to it people from other parts of India but the stories they brought with them were absorbed into an already deep and luxurious sediment of fables, sagas and epics that remained every bit alive when the British arrived as they were when they were first told.
The Pakistani film industry, that which today some call Lollywood, is built more than anything upon this uniquely rich Punjabi culture. At the heart of which lies the immemorial city of Lahore. Itโs worth taking a quick tour of this landscape to help us understand why the emergence of a movie industry here was not so much unlikely, as almost inevitable.
Treasure trove of tales
Punjab is the cradle of Indian civilisation.ย It was here in the land of five rivers (panj/5; ab/water) beyond which, in the words of Babur, Mughal Indiaโs founding monarch, โeverything is in the Hindustan wayโ, that the very story of India began.
Greater Punjab which includes all of the present day Province and State of Punjab in Pakistan and India, as well as parts of Khyber Pakhtunkwa, Rajasthan, Sindh, Haryana and Delhi, is home to one of the worldโs richest, most variegated and dynamic of South Asia’s innumerable cultures. Peoples, and with them their stories, poems, music, gods, heroes, languages and ideas, have been flowing into the subcontinent via the Punjab since the earliest days of human settlement on the subcontinent. It is not in the least surprising that when the right historic moment arrived a lively and resilient cinema would be crafted from this treasure trove of material.
And to truly appreciate the deep roots of Pakistani films it is essential to have an understanding of the shared culture of language, song, theatre, poetry, storytelling and visual art that has distinguished this part of South Asia for millennia. It is from this profound tradition that ย Pakistani films initially took inspiration and upon which they continue to draw. And why, despite the many attempts to legislate against the industry, or even blow cinema halls up, Pakistanis keep making and watching movies.
Spies, scholars and antiquities
The good old man unfolds full many a tale,
That chills and turns his youthful audience pale,
Or full of glorious marvels, topics rich,
Exalts their fancies to intensest pitch.
Charles Masson
In 1832, while carrying out his undercover duties as a โnews writerโ (spy) in the employ of the British East India Company, a certain Karamat Ali was taken by the recent arrival of a strange European in the bazaars of Kabul.ย Following from a distance he made mental notes of the character which he included in his next report to his control Mr. Claude Wade, British Political Agent in Ludhiana.
โI would like to bring to your kind attentionโ writes Karamat Ali in an undiscovered report, โthe presence of an Englishman in the city.ย He keeps his hair (which is the colour of some of my countrymen who stain their beards with henna) cut close to his head. His eyes I have noted are the colour of a cat, by which I mean, grey and transparent. His beard is red as well. He appears to be a strong man as he has no horse or mule with him. His clothes are dusty from walking across the countryside and on top of his head he wears a cap made of green cloth. You may find it difficult to believe but he wears neither stockings nor shoes on his feet. I have learnt he carries with him some strange books, a compass and a device by which he reads the stars and thus makes his way from one place to the next. He answers to the name of Masson and speaks excellent Persian. I trust you will find this information helpful in your duties as Political Agent.ย ย Post Script. He could be mistaken for a faqir.โ
Mr. Wade was well pleased with this information which he tucked away in the back of his mind. Over the next several years this mysterious Mr Masson continued to enter and exit official British communications like a phantom. Some reports had him pegged as an American physician from the backwoods of Kentucky. Others spoke of his brilliant command of Italian and that he was in fact a Frenchman. He popped up in Persia then Baluchistan; some reports detailed his convincing tales of journeys across Russia and the Caucasus.
But Afghanistan was where this strange morphing wanderer seemed most at home. He was reported to be interested in the history of some old earthen mounds outside of Kabul and had enlisted a number of the natives to assist him in his digging. ย ย Political Agent Wade kept tabs on Masson until finally three years after Karamat Aliโs report he wrote a letter to the wanderer with some shocking news. Over the years Wade had pieced together the mystery manโs history and in his letter he took great pleasure in letting Masson know about it.
โI know who you are, Masson. And not just me. Calcutta is perfectly informed of your antecedents. The jig is up, old boy. You are not Charles Masson at all, sir. You are an Englishman and a traitor. Your true name is James Lewis born in London the son of a common brewer. You arrived in this ghastly country some dozen years ago as a private soldier in the Bengal European Artillery 1st Brigade, 3rd Troop.โ
The letter which clearly made Masson panic went on to detail his history as a deserter from the Company ranks at Agra and the precarious position vis-a-vis his former employer he now occupied: he was due to be shot if apprehended. But Wade being a practical sort of man and a patriot had already received permission from his superiors to throw Masson a lifeline.
โWeโve noted your excellent knowledge of several languages including Persian, French and Hindoostani. You also appear to be blessed with a natural ease in your interactions with the natives of the regions you have traversed. Your mind clearly, though not pointed in the proper direction, is sharp. In light of this and by way of making amends for your dereliction of duty and in recognition of the reality that the Tsar is intent on extending Russiaโs influence into our Asiatic possessions, I offer you the following modest proposal.โ
Wade informed Masson that if he would like to escape the firing-squad he would be wise to accept the Companyโs offer to return to Kabul as its spy and to use his sharp mind, ears and eyes to keep Wade abreast of events in โlower Afghanistan and Kabul with special attention on the comings and goings of the tribesmen in support of Dost Mohammad but even more so the Russians.โ
Mr Charles Masson of course agreed to Wadeโs proposition and did (unhappily) return to Afghanistan as the Companyโs ‘news writer.’ย For several years, leading up to the invasion of the country by his compatriots in 1839, Masson filed detailed and insightful reports many of which cautioned against a British invasion.ย At the same time, he continued his archaeological digs on the outskirts of Kabul and beyond, wrote ponderous historical poems and engraved a couplet that included his name onto the majestic 55 metre high Buddhas of Bamiyan where it remained until the icons were blown up by the Taliban in 2001.ย
By the time he left the Companyโs employ in 1838, Masson had ensured his place in history. Not so much as a spy or soldier but as a scholar. His archaeological digs around Kabul are now acknowledged as advancing the worldโs understanding of ancient Afghanistan as well as its archaeological history. His work is still hailed as absolutely fundamental, especially his identification of Bagram as the ancient city of Alexandria Caucasum. Alexandria in the Caucasus while geographically inaccurate was indeed a city established by the Macedonian conqueror, Alexander, but one that history seemed to have assigned to legend. No one knew where exactly it was located which perhaps accounts for the faulty identification of the mountains where it was thought to have been located. Did it even exist?ย
By digging up tens of thousands of coins many with Greek script on one side and the Kharosthi script on the other, around the town of Bagram, north of Kabul, famous in more recent times as the site of the US Air Forceโs major military post in Afghanistan, Masson identified the city as not only as one of the many ancient Alexandrias but shed new light on the Greco-Buddhist culture that dominated the area until the arrival of Islam. ย Indeed, Masson was instrumental in uncovering evidence of the spread of Buddhism into Central Asia from its Indian birthplace, as well as unearthing the names of several hitherto unknown monarchs of the region.
Masson returned to England in 1842 where he faded away, the only trace being the thousands of artefacts he dug from the Afghan dirt and transported back home and which are now on display in collections across the country.ย And though he is regarded as a pioneer of Afghan archaeology this rough and tumble shape shifting scholar-spy-poet is also credited with another landmark historical discovery.
Reflecting in 1842 on his initial desertion from the Company’s army in Agra and escape through the Punjab plains sixteen years earlier, Masson wrote,
A long march preceded our arrival at Hairpah (Harappa) through jangal of the closest descriptionโฆBehind us was a large circular mound or eminence, and to the west was an irregular rocky height, crowned with remains of buildings, in fragments of walls, with niches, after the eastern mannerโฆI examined the remains on the height, and found two circular perforated stones, affirmed to have been used as bangles, or arm rings, by a faqir of renown. He has also credit for having subsisted on earth and other unusual substancesโฆThe walls and towers of the castle are remarkably high, though, from having been deserted, they exhibit in some parts the ravages of time and decay.โ (Narrative of Various Journeys in Balochistan, Afghanistan, and the Punjab 1842, pg 452-54)
Thus, within a few lines from an adventurerโs memoir the Western world hears the name Harappa for the first time. Harappa, of course, is the small town just 24 km west of the modern Pakistani city of Sahiwal where 95 years after Massonโs overnight camp, excavations lead to the uncovering of a large buried city, and ultimately one of the worldโs oldest, most sophisticated and enigmatic urban societies.
Thirty years after Massonโs visit, British engineers engaged in building the rail line between Multan and Lahore discovered a trove of wonderfully hard but thin kiln-fired bricks lying just beneath the surface of the earth. The bricks, much to the engineersโ delight made the perfect beds upon which to lay the rails and tens of thousands of them were used and in fact remain in place even today.ย The bricks formed the โcastleโ Masson described in his book.ย Scattered in and amongst the bricks, railway workers discovered a number of small soapstone seals, no larger than a large modern postage stamp, but exquisitely crafted. They were quaint, mysterious objects whose beauty and workmanship were beyond question but whose history and significance baffled the archaeologists. A few made their way into the British Museum where bearded antiquarians speculated they dated to a Buddhist past around the turn of the millennium. In 1921, a young Punjabi archaeologist and Sanskrit whiz, Daya Ram Sahni, did some initial excavating at Harappa for the Archaeological Survey of India. His report piqued the interest of the ASI’s Director, John Marshall, who authorised Sahni to undertake more systematic excavations.
To their amazement Sahniโs men uncovered an entire city laid out with gridded streets and communal buildings. Delicate, finely worked beads and bracelets emerged out of the Punjabi mud as well as further south in Mohenjo Daro in the Sindh region. ย Many of the artefacts, especially the seals, were marked what appears to be a script–lines, single or in close formation–squiggles and geometric designs. Despite the efforts of Sahni and others to decode the language, the lines remain one of antiquityโs great mysteries. But the archaeologists noted that the most extensive use of the language was visible on the seals and amulets which also featured a menagerie of beasts.ย
These seals depicted bulls with massive humps, rhinos, elephants, tigers and deer, sometimes with humans bowing before them, sometimes with the poor sods being attacked. Here was Indiaโs first story. But what exactly is the plotline? What is the point of these images? Are they telling us about the spirit world or the world of markets and trade? Who are the heroes? Which ones are the demons and villains? If only we could make out that writing.
What seems clear is that the people of Harappa and other Indus Valley cities were not particular inclined to warfare and violence. Archaeologists have not found anything that suggests the people were massacred or that their cities were burned or destroyed in combat.ย Rather, the similar layout and construction of the houses, the lack of particularly large private dwellings together with those seals, which scholarly consensus suggests, were “probably used to close documents and mark packages of goods“, (theyโve been found as far away as Iraq) suggests early Punjabi life was relatively cooperative, civil, peaceful, prosperous and not very religious. There is little of the elaborate hierarchy of later Hindu India and relatively little evidence of great economic inequality.
Such readings of the Indus Valley story are speculative but not so far-fetched.ย However, the relatively tolerant, accepting, less heirarchical social structure that some scholars attribute to the people of the Indus Valley does echo, if ever so faintly, the Punjab which until the mid-19th century was renowned for its syncretic, less orthodoxย and unitary culture.
One thing that can be said without any doubt about the people of the Indus Valley is that these earliest of Punjabis had vivid imaginations. Of all the animals depicted on the seals the most common is what appears to be a unicorn, a cow like quadruped with a long pointy horn protruding out of its forehead.
This unique beast which we now associate with rainbows and 8 year old girls, was born in the Indus Valley but doesnโt seem to have survived in the post Harappan culture. Further west though, the unicorn went on to enjoy a glorious career as a symbol of chastity, the Incarnation of Christ, strength and true love. ย The one horned Punjabi horse/cow was and is so revered it graces the coats of arms of noble houses from the Czech Republic to England and is the subject of some of the most sublime works of European art and storytelling.
The cities, script, society and unicorns of the Indus Valley vanished from the Punjabi story about 1900 BC and would all but be forgotten for thousands of years.ย But an even richer series of chapters began to unfold around the same time.ย Nomads from the steppes of Central Asia came across the mountains with horses, powerful hallucinogens and a love of gambling.ย Over several centuries they herded their cattle and horses across the plains and between the Punjabโs many rivers. These nomads who called themselves Arya began to recite an elaborate series of poems that told tales of mighty gods and wily demons who provided instructions on how to sacrifice animals and conduct animal sacrifices. ย Like the American blues would millennia in the future, the Aryan poets bemoaned the addictions of gambling and intoxication.
Unlike the Harappans, the Vedic Punjabis left no cities or monuments. The only way we know them is through their storiesโthe Vedasโespecially the Rg Veda, a song cycle of 1028 verses that was and continues to be passed down by people who took it upon themselves to memorize its every syllable, tone, character and subplot.ย Suddenly, around 4000 years ago, the Punjabi/Aryan/Vedic/Indian imagination erupts with the intensity, colour and wild swirlings of an acid trip.ย ย
The rivers of this land, the Rg Veda tell us, are not five but seven and the land is called Sapta Sindhu (seven rivers). Each one of them is identified by name and is in some way a geographic representation of a character in the grand Vedic story. ย Vyasa (Beas) is the great sage who divides the Vedas into parts and Askini (Chenab) is married to Daksha who is instructed by Brahma to create all living beings.ย One of the great Vedic sages Kashyap has a daughter Iravati (Ravi) and one day he asks the goddess Parvati to come to Kashmir to clean up its valleys which she does by becoming the river Vitasta (Jhelum). Saraswati, the goddess of arts and learning herself is a river that flows through the desert but eventually dries up leaving one of her tributaries, Sutdiri (Sutlej), to carry on and join with the others in the rushing Sindhu (Indus).
In these early Punjabi poems and narratives itโs easy to find the deepest roots of many of the outlines of what would one day depicted in the films made in Bombay and Lahore. Take for example the story of the lout who takes a swig of soma (a sort of pre-historic Vat 69) and with his mates tosses the dice onto the gambling mat. He laughs and carouses as his dutiful and kind wife watches silently.ย Eventually, but too late, the gambler realises his mistake. โIโve driven my blameless wife away from me. My mother-in-law hates me and all my friends have deserted me. They have as much use for me as a decrepit old horse.โ
His mother cries and tries to make him stop but he pushes her away.ย As the sun goes down, he starts his lament confessing that as soon as he thinks of the tumbling dice, he is off to the gambling dens with his male buddies. Like the drunken Talish in the 1957 film Saat Lakh, who sings the apologia, Yaaron mujhe muaff rakho, mein nashe main hun, [Friends, forgive me, Iโm completely pissed] the Vedic gambler sings, โI canโt stop and all my friends desert me.โย As the story comes to an end he collapses and dies. (Rg Veda 10:34). Very Lollywood!
The Aryans slowly moved eastward, leaving their beloved Sapta Sindhu behind to push into the northern plains watered by the Ganga and Yamuna rivers.ย Eventually Vedic religion as outlined in the Rg Veda was transformed into what we recognize as Hinduism and the central importance of Punjab to the Hindu story diminished somewhat. Which is not to say it was completely forgotten, as later epics such as the Ramayana and Mahabharata are filled with references to the places and people of Punjab.ย
This northwest corner of the subcontinent which was the reputed land of legendary wealth was coveted by other non-Indian empires. Persians, Greeks, Chinese, Mongols, Turks and Arabs and numerous waves of Afghan raiders came crashing through the Punjab on their way to the fabled riches of India. With each of these incursions came not just soldiers but new traditions, new ideas, new heroes and new villains.ย ย ย
During the period 500 BC-300 CE small fiefdoms and city states vied for control of the Punjab and more layers were added to the already rich three-millennia old culture.ย Taxila, 375 kms northwest of Lahore, became the most significant political and cultural centre of the region. It was here, the story goes, that the sage Vaishampayana (pupil of Vyasa) gave the original recital of the Mahabharata to king Janamejaya.ย The worldโs longest narrative poem (100,000+ verses) the Mahabharata tells with fantastic imagination and a cast of thousands, the battle of various Punjabi tribes for supremacy.
Darius I of Persia, drawn to India for its supply of elephants, camels, gold and silk conquered Taxila in the mid 5th century BCE.ย By the 4th century Buddhist jataka tales (fables of the Buddhaโs early incarnations) were speaking of Taxila as a mighty kingdom and centre of great learning. Indeed, it was around Taxila that Greeks who had ventured to the edge of India as part of Alexanderโs victorious army, intermarried with local women and developed the unique and elegant Greek-Buddhist Gandhara, culture that added a distinctly European flavour to Indian culture and which Charles Masson did so much to illuminate.
Tales and narratives travelled in both directions, influencing the stories of Punjab but also taking Indian stories to the far corners of the world. The fable of Alexander and the Poisoned Maiden is one such Punjabi story that grew out of this mingling of Greeks and Indians. Though it is long forgotten in India the story was picked up and recorded by the Persians from whom it was passed to Arabs, Jews, and eventually Europeans who recorded it in Latin.
The astrologers of an Indian king warn him that a man named Alexander will one day try to conquer his kingdom and before he does, he will demand tribute of four gifts: a beautiful girl; a wise man able to reveal all of natureโs mysteries; a top notch physician and; a bottomless cup in which water is never heated when placed on fire.
When Alexander arrives in the kingdom, the king obliges in hopes of saving his kingdom. He selects a beautiful maiden whom all of Alexanderโs emissaries agree is the most beautiful woman they have ever laid eyes on. Little did they know however, that the woman had been raised as a child by a snake and has been fed poison all her life, instead of milk. Alexander immediately falls in love and that night sleeps with her. However, the top notch physician is aware of the womanโs true nature and quickly slips Alexander a special herb that protects him from the girlโs poison. A grateful Alexander is able to enjoy sex with the woman but not die and he goes on to conquer the Indian kingโs country.
Though his story does not exist in any Indian text its central character–a dangerous woman who in fact is a snake (nagina)–is a famous and recurring subject of many a horror film in both Pakistan and India.
Such fantastic stories pop up throughout the history of the region and are buried deep in the DNA of Punjab. We have stories of Buddha as a college boy at Taxila University as well as stories from Zoroastrian Iran. There is even a story told of how St. Thomas was sold into slavery to the king of Taxila by none other than Jesus himself but who manages to secure his freedom by raising the Punjabi kingโs brother from the dead! A thousand years later the film makers of Lahore would tell a similar story in the cult horror classic Zinda Laash (Living Corpse).
Note: the letters from Karamat Ali to Charles Wade and related conversations are made up. However, the basics of the narrative are historically accurate.
Deep Dive: The Wadia Brothers and the Masked Woman
Lollywood: stories of Pakistanโs unlikely film industry
Of the many Parsi clans who leveraged their interaction with the British in Bombay to establish themselves as economic powerhouses, even to this day, the shipbuilding Wadia family is worth a closer look.
Even before the community fled Persia to seek refuge along Indiaโs western coast, the Zoroastrians were renowned ship builders and sailors. During the reign of King Darius (522-486 BCE) the Persians had learned well from the Phoenicians (1200-800 BCE) and become the acknowledged shipbuilding and maritime empire of the epoch. Though their numbers were tiny in their new home in India, (never more than 100,000) the community kept these ancient skills alive.
Settled and working out of Surat, the Wadia (Gujarati for โship builderโ) clan, interacted with the various European trading nationsโPortugal, Netherlands, Franceโthat sought trade with the Mughal empire and its wealthy business communities of Gujarat. When the rather slow-starting English received the islands of Bombay from the Portuguese, Parsis began to migrate from the hinterland south. One of Suratโs most prominent shipbuilders, a Parsi named Lovji Nusserwanji Wadia who had built ships for a number of European trading firms in Surat, was invited by the English to establish a branch of the family business in Bombay. And so, beginning in 1736, Lovji along with his brother Sorabji set to work building Asiaโs first dry docking facility where EIC ships could be drawn entirely out of the water to be repaired and refurbished. This single bit of infrastructure increased the economic and strategic value of Bombay immensely. It brought to the foreground Bombayโs exceptional qualities as one of the best deep water harbours (the city’s name derives from the Portuguese words Bom (good) and Bahia (harbour)) from which the British, with their new infrastructure and world-class Parsi shipbuilders, were able to not only vanquish the Portuguese, Dutch and regional Indian naval powers but also clear the Arabian Sea of pirates which led to a steady increase in traffic and trade. By the mid-19th century Bombay had become a major international commercial and naval port and the most important city in British India.
By 1759 the dry dock was operational. At the same time the brothers Wadia were providing many of the ships that carried cotton and spices and eventually that fateful black gold, opium, from India to China and other Asian ports. Given the EICโs monopoly on the Indian trade and the massive growth in the economy opium facilitated, particularly in the first part of the 19th century, the Wadiaโs became immensely wealthy. Theirs was a full-service enterprise, building single-sailed sloops, water boats that managed trade up and down the west coast, beautifully sleek, fast-moving clippers, well armed frigates and man-o-wars for the military as well as cutters, schooners, and eventually steamships for the Asian/Chinese trade. Using teak, rather than English oak for the hulls, the Wadiaโs ships were lighter and more resilient than ships made in Britain. Over the years, the family built over 400 ships for the EICโs Maritime Service and others including their fellow Parsi sethias.
Lovjiโs grandson, Nusserwanji Maneckji continued the family business and in addition to servicing the British became a much sought after local agent for early American traders building up the trade between India and New England. Maneckji Wadia was so well regarded by the Americans that he and his relatives enjoyed a virtual monopoly on the Yankee business with many American traders exchanging effusive letters with him in which his โimpeccable characterโ is praised and his family compared to โsatrapsโ. Both sides profited handsomely. In the words of one Yankee businessman, they profited โmonstrouslyโ, recovering up to 300% on the Indian textiles and other goods sourced by the Wadias.
One of Nusserwanjiโs sons, Jamshetji Bombanji, was appointed Bombayโs Master Builder[1], a role usually held by an Englishman, but which the Wadia family was to hold for 150 years running. Several of Bomanjiโs ships found their way into the larger events of the time, including the first man-o-war built in Indiaโa huge warship with three masts and loaded with 74 large cannonsโthe HMS Minden. When it set sail in 1810 a Bombay newspaper, the Chronicle, praised โthe skill of its architectsโ and went on to note that with โthe superiority of its timber, and for the excellence of its docks, Bombay may now claim a distinguished place among naval arsenalsโ. Several years later, on the night of 13 September 1814, the HMS Minden was tied to a British ship in Chesapeake Bay, along the east coast of the United States, after a local lawyer, Francis Scott Key, had helped to secure the release of an American prisoner-of-war held by the British. Fighting between the Americans and British was intense with the night sky flashing red and yellow. The frightening spectacle inspired Key to write a poem, The Star Spangled Banner, which was eventually adopted as Americaโs national anthem.
Steel eventually replaced teak in the building of ships and steam took over from wind. The Wadias, like many Parsis diversified initially into textile production where steam-derived technologies helped to propel the Wadiaโs Bombay Dyeing mill into one of the most successful and iconic of Indiaโs modern businesses. And when the movies came to India, two great-great grandsons of Lovji Nusserwanji took the daring decision to turn their back on textiles and ships altogether and embrace the world of moving pictures.
Jamshed Boman Homi Wadia, known as JBH, was only 12 when Dadasaheb Phalke exhibited Raja Harishchandra, but spent his youth captivated by the Hollywood films that were becoming an increasingly common form of entertainment in Bombay. Though well-educated as a lawyer JBH horrified his family with his announcement that he intended to make films for a living. He quickly found work with the then prominent Kohinoor Studios producing a dozen films for the studio, some of which saw moderate success. But being an entrepreneur JBH didnโt want to work for anyone else, so, joined by his younger brother Homi, launched his own studio, Wadia Movietone in 1933, retaining the family’s shipbuilding past as part of the studio’s logo.
The brothers became icons of the early Indian film history and throughout the 30s and 40s Wadia Movietone was the most profitable of all Indian filmmaking enterprises.
Wadia Movietone studios was financially backed by several other Bombay Parsi families-including the famous Tatas-and grew into one of the most successful and consistently profitable studios of the 1930s. The brothers were basically in love with stunts and action. They especially adored derring-do characters like Zorro and Robin Hood played by Douglas Fairbanks Jr, and blatantly copied many of Fairbanksโ movies for Wadia Movietone. When Fairbanks visited Bombay, JBH made sure the actor visited his own studio; so impressed was his American idol that Fairbanks agreed to sell the Indian rights of his mega hit Mark of Zorro to Wadia Movietone.
The brothers proudly low-brow fare of fistfights, speeding trains and masked heroines dominated Indiaโs box offices throughout the 30s and became the most popular genre in India at the time. Sadly, as film historian Rosie Thomas states, Indian โfilm history was rewrittenโ, by starchy Hindu nationalists who objected that stunt films did not inspire sufficient pride in Indiaโs Hindu classical past. The whole stunt movie genre was effectively eliminated from most histories of Indian film giving virtually all attention on the more staid and far less fun, middle-class targeted โsocialโ melodramas focusing on family and relationships.
At their height, however, the Wadia brothersโ studio was the rage of the box office. Their greatest success was without a doubt a series of action films which in todayโs parlance might be called a franchise, starring a stunning white woman they billed as Fearless Nadia.
Mary Evans, a West Australian girl of Scottish-Greek extraction, moved in 1911, at the age of three, to India where her father served with the British army. Settled and schooled for several of her early years in Bombay, Evans father was killed in 1915 while fighting in France and eventually moved to Peshawar to live with an โuncleโ who in fact was a friend of her deceased father. It was the wilds of the NW frontier of India that stimulated Maryโs tomboy personality to blossom. She discovered a love for the outdoors, sports and horse riding and with a mother who had once been a belly dancer, found herself singing (often bawdy songs) and dancing on stages across the NW and Punjab. Between 1927 and 1934, Mary performed as a dancer and singer in various troupes and circuses as well as a solo performer, travelling across the Indian subcontinent performing for wealthy maharajas as well as illiterate labourers. It was a risky job for a slightly big boned, well-built blonde-haired woman, travelling (often) alone across India, speaking only English and Greek, working at night in (often) seedy venues but it was one that seemed to suit her. When an Armenian fortune teller predicted a bright career for Mary, they used tarot cards to select a stage name, eventually settling on Nadia.
Sometime in the early 1930s, a Mr. Langa, the owner of Lahoreโs Regent Cinema, saw one of Maryโs stage shows. Given that cinemas in those days regularly booked dance troupes to complement the movie, it is possible Langa hosted Mary at the Regent itself. Whatever the circumstances, Langa was taken by her presence and striking looks. He offered to introduce Evans to a friend of his, someone named JBH Wadia, who ran a movie studio in Bombay. Was she interested? With sparkling blue eyes and blonde hair, Nadia hardly fit the bill as the ideal Indian woman but she was not alone. Throughout the silent era and even into the age of Talkies, many of Indiaโs initial generation of female starlets were in fact Anglo-Indian (mixed European and Indian heritage), European and Jewish women. At a time when acting was considered a dishonourable career by most Indians, non-Indian women felt less inhibited socially to take to the stage. Most adopted Indian stage names and worked hard to improve their unmistakably foreign accents. Still, the basic assumption was that actress was a synonym for prostitute. German film historian, Dorothee Wenner, whose biography of Evans, Fearless Nadia, sums up the situation as follows:
The connections between theatre, dance, music and prostitution remained so closely entwined well into the twentieth century that any official attempt to limit prostitution simultaneously represented a threat to the dramatic arts. The consequences for cinema were first felt by the father of Indian cinema, D.G. Phalke. He knew that filming made different demands on the realism of scenes than the stage did and therefore he wanted a woman to play the female lead in his first film Raja Harischandra. It was 1912 when he went looking around the red-light district of Bombay for a suitable performer. Although the impoverished director offered the few interested parties more money than they would normally earn, all the prostitutes turned the film work downโฆit was below their dignity!โ[2]
When they met, Wadia immediately understood Evansโ appeal and potential. He suggested that the Australian change her name to Nanda Devi and wear a plaited dark wig. But Mary refused. โLook here Mr Wadia,โ she said, undeterred of her future employerโs power or status, โIโm a white woman and Iโll look foolish with long black hair.โ As for the name change, she scoffed. โThatโs not in my contract and Iโm no Devi! (goddess)โ She pointed out that her chosen stage name, Nadia, resonated with both Indian and European audiences, and also just happened to rhyme with his own name, Wadia. JBH, not used to be spoken to so boldly by an employee, let alone a woman, figured she just might have what it takes to make it in the movies. He hired her on the spot.
An agreement was reached and in 1935 the brothers tested her in a couple of small roles in two films. Her charisma, not to mention her stunning and exotic looks, were obvious. She stood out like a ghost at midnight. Immediately, she was offered the lead in a Zorro-like picture called Hunterwali (Lady Hunter) which became a smash hit and is now considered one of the most significant milestones in South Asian film. The Wadia brothers had been unable to find a distributor for their extravagant production. Most considered it too radical and unsuitable for local tastes. A white masked woman, cracking a whip, smashing up villainous men, riding a horse and sporting hot pants that revealed her very white fleshy thighs? Absolutely not!
Unbowed, the brothers pooled their resources and sponsored the filmโs premier at the Super Cinema on Grant Road, on a wet June evening in 1935. This was make or break. The Wadias believed in Nadia even though everyone else did not. Not without a little trepidation rippling through the cinema the lights dimmed and the show began. Fifteen minutes in, as Nadia pronounced that โFrom now on, I will be known as Hunterwali!โ, the working class male audience stood up, cheered and clapped and in their own way pronounced the coronation of the Queen of the Box Office, a title she would hold for more than a decade.
The Wadiaโs, as indeed most of their countrymen and women, were politically active (supporting Independence from Britain) and socially progressive. They championed womenโs rights, Hindu-Muslim solidarity and anti-casteism. Though official censorship prohibited open discussion of these themes the Wadias made sure their superstar made casual references to them. As Nadia herself said, โIn all the pictures there was a propaganda message, something to fight for.โ[3]
The girl from Perth via Peshawar and Lahore, was now a superstar of action and stunt film with millions of fans. Known and billed as Fearless Nadia she insisted on doing all her own stunts be it fistfights on the top of a fast-moving train, throwing men from roofs or being cuddled by lions. She starred in nearly 40 pictures most made by the Wadia brothers (she married Homi in 1961) with such fantastical titles as Lady Robinhood, Miss Punjab Mail, Tigress, Jungle Princess and Stunt Queen.
In 1988 a version of Hunterwali, perhaps the most famous of all of Nadiaโs films was released in Pakistan, starring Punjabi movie icons, Sultan Rahi and Anjuman.
[1] A highly critical and strategic role that oversaw ship design and construction but innovation, compliance with international shipping regulations and development of the shipbuilding industry.
[2] Wenner, Dorothee. 2005. Fearless Nadia: The True Story of Bollywoodโs Original Stunt Queen. Penguin. Pg. 79.
[3] Thomas, Rosie, โNot Quite (Pearl) White: Fearless Nadia, Queen of the Stuntsโ, in Bollyword: Popular Indian Cinema through a Transnational Lens, ed. Raminder Kaur & Ajay J Sinha (New Delhi: Sage Publications India Pvt Ltd, 2005) 35-69.
Punch Houses to Parsi Theatre
Lollywood: stories of the Pakistani film industry
From Punch houses to Parsi Theatre
Though the early years of the East India Company are remembered in history as a time when hundreds of British men came to India and rapidly became very wealthy, life in a small up-country district was tough. Though the British public, to the extent they had time to care, resented the new โnabobsโ who returned home to England full of ill-gotten wealth and social swagger, relatively few servants of the company actually made fortunes. Many stayed on in India after their tours setting themselves up as indigo planters or scrounging for work in the big cities. For those not part of the elite โCovenanted Officerโ class which included most non-Indians, the Englishmanโs daily round involved three essential things: work, avoiding illness and drink, with the last usually combined with the first two. Alcohol consumption was both a way to stay aliveโespecially since local water supplies were contaminatedโand a way to pass the time. The highest rungs of British society had access to a variety of European wines, porters and spirits. The sailors, soldiers and planters, on the other hand, could mostly only afford locally brewed (and occasionally, deadly) concoctions that mixed ingredients like coconut spirits, chillis and opium.
Though the origin of its name is contended (does it refer to the 500 litre wooden barrel that held it, known as a โpuncheonโ or to the Hindustani word, panch, for the number 5, the number of ingredients) punch was an alcoholic innovation invented in India by early European residents who wanted a lighter, sweeter drink than the local spirits or fiery rum. ย Experimentation found that by mixing rum or arrack,ย sugar,ย lemon/citrus juice, rosewater andย spices in water a very tasty and potent beverage emerged. As early as the 1630s, Englishmen were writing home about this new drink they called โpunchโ. ย When the Companyโs ships returned from India loaded with exotic luxuries, the shipsโ crew and locals enjoyed evenings together drinking Punch on the docks. Though the many of the individual ingredients (lemons, nutmeg) were expensive in Britain, punch became โthe tipple of choice for English aristocratsโ for the next hundred years and since then has become a regular offering at parties, weddings and even church potlucks across the English-speaking world.
In India, however, the grimy taverns where such alcoholic drinks were sold became known as punch houses. Not dissimilar to the famous jook joints in the southern United States, famous for their cheap booze and violence, punch houses were perfect venues for drinking binges, rowdy roughhousing, fisticuffs and whoring by bored sailors, down on their luck Europeans and soldiers. Indeed, one Englishman summarised the entertainment available for the British lower classes in India as amounting to โdrinking hells, gambling hells or other hells.โ For the upper-class elite, punch houses were a definite โno goโ.
By the early decades of the 19th century this public drunkenness and violence was so pervasive in the three colonial cities as well as smaller outposts across the country that the authorities grew increasingly alarmed at the damage such behaviour was doing to the image of European and Christian superiority. Serial campaigns were launched. Multiple strategies tested. Workhouses were built, as were insane asylums. Forced religious conversion was tried out, so too was jail time. None was very successful and the problem of European drunkenness remained forever an embarrassing black spot on the rulers publicly promoted sense of moral superiority.
Though alcohol abuse remained a problem among the British, over time the raw violence of the punch house gave way to other forms of entertainment. Musical evenings, card games and regularly scheduled visits to other European homes were popular among the โbetterโ classes. The rowdier types (i.e. drunken sailors high on Punch) were drawn to disrupting dramas and causing havoc at dramatic performance at a number of theatres that began to pop up across Bombay.
Bombayโs first theatre opened in 1776, situated on a space known as โThe Greenโ surrounded by other official buildings. The Bombay Theatre, as it was christened, catered to officials and their families and staged performances by amateur drama enthusiasts from among the European community. It experienced a difficult life through the early years of its existence and ultimately stood shuttered and unused for many. It was eventually bought by the cityโs post prominent businessman, Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy, a Parsi opium and shipping magnate, who never bothered to reopen it.
By the mid 1840s, the city was wealthy and large enough (thanks in large part to the illegal trade of opium smuggling) to demand better entertainment. Wealthy Indians, again mostly Parsis, championed theatre building as an important part of their civic duty which grew to include funding public charities, colleges and museums. The Grant Road Theatre opened on the northern edge of the city in 1846, at the time, quite a distance from the Fort area inhabited by the elites of the Company. Though opened with an eye on that market few English found the prospect of travelling into underdeveloped outer suburbs, where hygiene and other surprises lay in wait, attractive. Very quickly the financiers opened the halls to local artists who staged plays in Bombayโs most widely spoken languages, Gujarati, Urdu and Hindi.
Somnath Gupt, who wrote a history of Parsi theatre summed up the transition this way. โAs long as it was patronized by the governor and high-level officials, the theatre was frequented by people of good family. Because of the location on Grant Road, however, their attendance decreased. Some Christian preachers also opposed the theatre as depraved and immoral. The Oriental Christian Spectator was chief among those newspapers that wrote in opposition to Hindu drama. In consequence, the theatre was attended by sailors from trading ships, soldiers and traders. A low class public came and made the theatre foul-smelling with their smoking. The performances began to start late, and etiquette deteriorated. Drunken sailors and soldiers behaved rudely with the women. It began to be necessary to bring in the police to keep order. This audience wasโฆinherited by the Parsi theatre.โ[1]
The Grant Road Theatre hosted international troupes enroute to and from Australia when they showed up but the 1850s saw Parsi-owned theatrical troupes mushroom to fill the supply of plays, actors and audiences. Based on the European proscenium-style theatre that featured a huge arch over the stage as a frame for the action, the Parsis saw the theatre as a way to both entertain and educate Bombayโs growing middle class.
What quickly became known as Parsi theatre was an instant hit. The plays set the imagination of Bombay-ites on fire. Many of the plays were wildly popular, running to packed houses night after night for years on end. A whole new class of Parsi actors, playwrights, directors, composers and producers grew up, many of whom moved seamlessly into the film world in the early 20th century. Many companies toured the countryside, not just around Bombay but to far flung parts of the interior and even to places as far away as Sumatra, Malaya, Burma and Ceylon. Drawing on local talent and tales from Hindu, Islamic and Persian epics, Parsi theatre became a uniquely Indian and lively form of entertainment many aspects of whichโsong, dance, bawdy humor, melodramaโwere directly absorbed by the subcontinentโs early film makers.
Along with the companies and cohort of professional players, more theatres were built with names like the Elphinstone, Gaiety, Novelty and Tivoli. The staging of dramas was by the 1870s and 80s a huge part of Bombayโs entertainment scene. Jamshedji Framji Madan โ๏ปฟthe Parsi actor-turned-wine merchant-turned owner of the largest chain of theatres and cinemas in India in the first three decades of the 20th centuryโ[2] exemplifies the central role the Parsi community played not just in whetting the Indian appetite for staged comedic and dramatic entertainment in purpose built buildings, but of leading the transition from Parsi Theatre to what would become one of the most consequential film industries the world has ever seen.
Madan started his career in the theatre first as an actor but he made a considerable fortune in y securing large contracts to provision British troops with the wine that the governing classes so condemned for corrupting Her Majestyโs troops. Sensing greater opportunities in the capital of British India, Calcutta, and loaded with money from his wine-provisioning business, Madan in 1902 set up a diversified business group, J.F Madan & Co., with interests in everything from insurance to film equipment and real estate. He also began buying up Calcutta theatres (the Alfred and the Corinthian) where playwrights including Agha Hashr Kashmiri, aka Indiaโs Shakespeare, plied their trade. Kashmiri, though from Banaras, moved to Lahore in his later years where he also wrote for films, an early example of the cross fertilisation of cinematic talent between India and what would soon become Pakistan.
Immediately after arriving in Calcutta, he set up the โ๏ปฟElphinstone Bioscope Company and began showing films in tents on the Maidan before opening the first dedicated movie house in Calcutta, the Elphinstone Picture Palace.โ[3] The venue not only was Calcuttaโs and Indiaโs first dedicated movie hall but marked the beginning of Indiaโs first cinema hall chain. In 1917 his company, Far Eastern Films, partnered with Maurice Bandman, an American entertainment magnate based in Calcutta to distribute foreign films in India. ๏ปฟ ๏ปฟโIn 1917 his company Madanโs Far Eastern Films joined forces with Bandmann to form the Excelsior Cinematograph Syndicate dedicated to distributing films as well as owning and managing a chain of cinemas. In 1919 Madan, like Bandmann, floated a public company, Madan Theatres Ltd, which incorporated the other companies. It was this company that formed the basis of the remarkable growth of the Madan empire.โ Madanโs multiple interests in theatre and commerce led him to producing his own films, including the first commercial length feature in Bengali, Bilwamangal (1918).
Madanโs strong commercial eye recognized that the medium would need its own venues and screening halls, rather than relying on established theatres. By 1919 the Madan Theatres Limited was in business and set to become India’s largest integrated film production-distribution-exhibition company with assets located not just across India but in Ceylon and Burma as well. Madan issued shares that generated Rs. 10 million and through effective management practices was able to procure a huge number of theatres across South and SE Asia. Though film making was picking up steam in India, the vast majority of films shown were foreign. In 1926 only 15% of films were Indian. 85% were foreign, mostly American, movies. By partnering with the French company ๏ปฟPathรฉ Madanโs theatres were to a significant degree responsible for creating an audience for American and European films in India by importing and screening Hollywood films, such as the Perils of Pauline, The Mark of Zorro and Quo Vadis.
By the mid-1920s Madan controlled half of all revenues from the Indian box office and owned 127 movie houses. His hiring of foreign directors such as the Italian, Eugenio De Liguoro who directed 6 films for Madan Theatres, gave many of his films a sheen of expertise and craft that was not yet visible within local ranks. In essence, Madan had monopolised Indiaโs nascent film industry.
**
The Lumiere brothers may not have understood the commercial viability of their inventions but it seemed that many Indians did. The great colonial cities of Bombay and Calcutta both quadrupled in size between 1850 and 1900 to be home for nearly 1 million people. Bombay and Calcutta were now world cities. It was not surprising that this most modern and hypnotic of new technologies would catch on in places like this. But Bombay, Calcutta and Madras were not alone. Far to the West, on the far frontier of British India another city was starting to make waves in the movie world too.
[1] Hansen, Kathryn. (Translator) 2001, โThe Parsi Theatre: Its Origins and Development (Pt 2).Pdf.โ
[2] Balme, Christopher. 2015. โManaging Theatre and Cinema in Colonial India: Maurice E. Bandmann, J.F. Madan and the War Filmsโ Controversy.โ Popular Entertainment Studies 6: 6โ21.
[3] Ibid.
Chapter Two: Of Tea and Opium
Lollywood: stories of Pakistanโs unlikely film industry
Of Tea and Opium
That movies were instantaneously embraced in the new, purpose-built metropolises of British India is no surprise. Bombay, Calcutta and Madras were the throbbing hubs of an expansive world power at the peak of its self-belief. These great new empire cities were magnets for people of all persuasions, creeds, backgrounds and regions. The only requirement to be a success in this brave new world was to be open to new ideas. And quick on your feet. Being coastal cities, the three great colonial cities served as entrepรดt to the Jewel in Queen Vicโs crown, guarding and servicing the shipping lanes which were the new global trade routes that connected an expanding Europe with the wealth of Africa and Asia.
And not just Indians, but people from all over the world sought their chances in Indiaโs boom and bust emerging economy. Armenian merchants, American missionaries, German scholars as well as businessmen, administrators and artists of all types and nations including some of America and Europeโs finest jazz men and women, all sensed that Bombay and Calcutta were the place to make their names and fortunes. The cities were linked not only to Paris, London and New York but other colonial metropolises like Shanghai, Johannesburg and Singapore. The cities were part of a new international order tied together by a globalizing modern culture in which film was the shiniest element.
Built on marginal landsโoften, malarial swampsโand leased by the British East India Company from local rulers, Madras, Calcutta and Bombay were in conception and culture European cities. They just happened to be located in Asia. Their European quarters and administrative districts were laid out like European cities and they looked outward, to the future for inspiration. What happened in the mofussil (interior, countryside) across the vast plains of India was of interest only to administrators and scholars. In 1857, after a brutally fought war launched from within the East India Companyโs own Indian troops, the British crown took direct control of India from the East India Company and ushered in a century of high imperialist rule. To the British administrators in Calcutta and London 1857 marked the end of Indian history. Henceforth, under their enlightened stewardship, India would exemplify the very best of Britainโs civilizing Will. The great Indian past would now be an object of wonder best gawked at in museums. And the great cities of Bombay, Madras and Calcutta were the ultimate symbols of Lightโs victory over Darkness.
Though the absolute number of Europeans and non-Indians living in India was was its peak in 1911, it never exceeded between 150,000-200,000 depending on how you identified the various groups. The population of India in 1911 was about 300 million souls. Even though Europeans counted for less than 1% of the population their presence had a massive impact on the culture of the cities. Christian missionaries influenced the way Hindus and Muslims understood and organised themselves.ย Religious groups like the Arya Samaj and Brahmo Samaj, adopted reformist, educational and progressive social agendas that were in form if not doctrine heavily influenced by similar movements in Europe and North America.
Educational systems and curricula that emphasised Western sciences and philosophy and cultural institutions that pumped new, so called modern ideas and technologies into the daily lives of Indians sprang up.ย The new trade of journalism was quickly embraced by writers, marking the beginnings of modern Indiaโs lively, vibrant press. The publication of the Urdu novel Umrao Jan Ada in 1899 was the first in what would be a glorious and still current run of South Asian prose writing.ย After some initial resistance, musicians realised they could reach a much bigger audience by recording their music on phonographs and radio.ย In a relatively short space of time economically empowered Indians in the major coastal cities became both the consumers of new technologies and creative adapters of tradition.ย
**
The Parsis, Zoroastrian refugees from Persia, had been settled in Gujarat for centuries by the time the British took possession of a swampy, malarial set of islands from their imperial rivals, the Portuguese. The seven islands were known collectively as Bombay and with the establishment of a British fort, the settlement began to draw migrants from the hinterland. Dorabji Nanabhoy, the first Parsi to make Bombay his home arrived in 1640 but he was joined by a steady stream of thousands of others, mainly weavers and artisans from upcountry Gujarat, who began transforming themselves into one of Indiaโs elite and most influential business groups.
An entrepreneurial community with a sense of adventure, the Parsis had been engaged with Europeans before the British became the dominant Western power in India. Joining Dutch and Portuguese traders operating out of Gujarati ports like Surat and Khambay in the 17th century, they showed themselves to be expert traders and developed a refined taste for European luxury goods.ย The East India Companyโs trade with China began in the early 18th century and immediately a number of Indian traders, including two Parsi brothers, Hirji and Mancherji Readymoney, established themselves in Canton.ย Of all the groups it was the Parsis who were the most successful. By the early 19th century they dominated the China trade; nearly half of all the Indian trading companies in China were Parsi owned.
The only product that really mattered in the China trade was tea. Initially the British offered English wool and Indian cotton for the little black leaves which had taken Blighty completely by storm from the day it was first introduced in the late 1650s–just about the same time the East India Company was setting itself up in Bombay.ย Sensationally, tea became the single biggest import into Britain during the late 17th century. Though at first it was the exclusive drink of the aristocracy and royal family by the mid-1700s it was the undisputed national drink, displacing the traditional gin and beer whose declining sales alarmed the King who personally and financially depended on the taxes from these drinks. More than 2000 tea shops sprang up in London alone.ย
But wool–heavy and hot–did not exactly suit the Chinese climate and was rejected by the Chinese who, upon the Emperorโs orders, demanded silver in exchange for their liquid gold.ย The Company had no option but to oblige and approached the government for access to the countryโs silver stocks.ย So insatiable were the appetites of both English tea drinkers and the Chinese merchants, that the tea trade came dangerously close to draining the English treasury of its bullion reserves and seriously jeopardising the English economy. Despite the best efforts of Parliament to legislate away the negative impacts of the tea crazeโincluding slapping a 119% tax on tea which only opened the way for smugglers to set up elaborate networks up and down the countryโs bounteous coastline– by the early 1700s it was obvious that the East India Company would need to find something far more sexy and attractive than tweed and wool toย offer the Chinese hongs (licensed traders).ย ย
The Dutch had been peddling Indian opium across SE Asia and China where it had been valued as both a medicine and recreational narcotic since the mid 1600s. The Dutch had invented the long opium pipe which made the smoking experience far more potent and addictive than eating opium which was how Indians preferred to consume the drug. It was the long pipe that proved so deadly to the Chinese population and that caused so much havoc over the next centuries.
By the mid-18th century with the opium fields of Bihar and Bengal firmly within their control, the East India Company (EIC) took its first steps into the opium trade and was rewarded with instant success.ย The company quickly established a monopoly on Indian opiumโclaiming a right that the Mughal Emperor Akbar had initially established–and watched their main city Calcutta and British power surge beyond imagination as the product was introduced as a new currency in the tea trade.
The importation of opium had been banned by the Chinese Emperor for a hundred years by the time the British entered the racket. And as the EIC had multiple interests in China it arranged for the opium to be sold to licensed third partiesโmany of them Parsisโwho stored the narcotic in British-controlled warehouses along the SE coast near modern Guangzhou. Corrupt hongs completed the transaction by smuggling the narcotic into the countryside beyond the British zone. As one writer summed up the neat arrangement, โthe British East India Company was thus able to deny responsibility for importing opium and retain its other trading rights with China.โย But still reap incredible profits from the trade.ย By the early decades of the 1800s, China was home to millions of addictsโsome estimate as many as 10-12 millionโand the once shaky, threadbare English Exchequer was bursting with opium derived revenue. Ten percent of all British tax revenue came from the trade and as for the EIC, with 16% of its entire revenue coming from this single source, the further conquest and development of the Raj in India was secured.
But on the western coast of the subcontinent, Bombay, a lonely, underdeveloped and rather neglected British settlement struggled to justify its existence.ย While Bombay enjoyed one of the great natural harbours in Asia the political realities of strong regionalโmainly MarathaโMughal successor states in western and central India meant that the EIC was unable to find a political or economic footing.ย The EIC chiefs in Calcutta and London had grown weary of Bombayโs drain on Company subsidies. As Gov. General Cornwallisโ (the very same who had surrendered to George Washington a few years prior) complaint to Prime Minister William Pitt shows, were the Company was even ready to abandon Bombay as a city.
โI have reflected most seriously and have conversed with the most sensible men in this country, on the utility of the civil establishment at Bombay and I am perfectly convinced that the Company derive no benefit from it.โ
Something had to be done. If Bombay was to survive, a source of revenue had to be secured. And quick. At last, in the late 18th century, Dame Fortune smiled and caused the political winds to blow in such a way that the Company was able to exercise indirect control of large parts of the hinterlands to the north of Bombay, including the central Indian opium producing area of Malwa.ย Though the Company still held a monopoly on the cultivation and production of opium in the east region of India, in Bombay, unlike in Calcutta, the Company made the decision to not take a direct role in the actual transport and sale of opium to China. This it left to local enterpreneurs, among which a number of Parsis immediately came to prominence, including the first Indian to be knighted, Sir Jamsetji Jejeebhoy.ย
The Chinese Emperor, alarmed at the havoc opium continued to wreak upon his people, despite repeated bans on its import, began in the 1830s to make moves to crack down on the trade. Traders were forbidden from repatriating their profits to India.ย Tensions were rising between the Emperor and western nations, that now included American trader/smugglers (including the forebears of a certain Franklin Roosevelt).
In March 1839, the governor of Canton forcibly confiscated and destroyed 1.2 million kgs of Indian opium held in the tradersโ warehouses.ย ย Jejeebhoy, Readymoney and the other Parsi and Indian traders could do nothing as they watched 500 Chinese laborers work for 23 days straight mixing their precious opium with lime and salt and tossing it into the sea. In all, not one rupee of compensation was paid. Incensed that an Asian despot would dare threaten their smuggling operation so dramatically the British navy immediately launched an attack in what has become known as the First Opium war.ย The war ended in the defeat of the Chinese three years later. The British received Hong Kong as part of the settlement,ย from where the smuggling operations continued for years to come.
The disruptions of the Opium Wars caused many Parsi families to diversify their interests. Given their background as producers of fine textiles many Parsi opium lords switched to cotton production thereby establishing the mills of Bombay as major world players.ย In the 1860s, when Civil War in the United States temporarily interrupted the global supply of cotton, the Parsi Sethias happily filled the gap and reaped yet another windfall.ย By this time the Parsis were the wealthiest and most influential group in Bombay. They used their fortunes made in China and cotton to go into banking and insurance and played a critical role in establishing Bombay as Indiaโs financial capital. The Sethias (a professional name often used for powerful businessmen) in fact, laid many other foundations of modern Bombay: its culture of philanthropy, its museums, educational and social institutions, its wealth and its world of entertainment.
Lollywood: stories of Pakistan’s unlikely film industry
Chapter One: An Invention With No Future
Fifty one years to the day before India won its Independence, on 15th August 1896, the well heeled citizens of Bombay enjoyed a final evening of the most โmarvellousโ spectacle the city had ever experienced. For several weeks, first at Watsonโs Hotel in Kalaghoda and then at the Novelty Theatre on Grant Road, a Frenchman en route to Australia, had been delighting audiences with the latest hi-tech entertainment. Called the โcinematographeโ his contraption, which looked like an ordinary wooden box with a hand crank on one side and a small brass-encased lens on the other, was the closest thing to magic audiences could imagine. As the Frenchman rotated the crank a spool of thin grey film through which light flowed from a second box attached to the top, the most unbelievable photographic images danced against a white screen. In the darkened hall the rapt viewers wondered if they had not been transported to a new dimension.
The projection of moving pictures was the most exciting development yet in the short life of the revolutionary new science of photography. Two French brothers Auguste and Louis Lumiere had been experimenting with colour photography for a number of years and as a sort of intellectual side-project had attacked the problem of combining animation with projection of light. Just nine months earlier, in December 1895, at Parisโ Grand Cafe, the brothers had stunned audiences with the first commercial showing of a film, which over a span of 49 seconds, depicted a train pulling into a station and passengers jumping on and off.
The Lumiere brothersโ version of the movie camera-cum-projector was small and light enough to be carried about outdoors. At first, the inventor brothers didnโt know what to make of their apparatus. In fact, they saw it not so much as an idea whose time had come but, as Louis Lumiere said, as โan invention without a future.โ His brother put it even more emphatically: โour inventionโฆhas no commercial future whatsoever.โ
But in direct contradiction of their conviction, the siblings launched a campaign to take the Cinematographe experience to audiences around the world. To assist them they contracted a fellow Frenchman, a pharmacist by trade, named Marius Sestier to be this new technologyโs evangelist in the furthest end of the world, Australia. So dubious of their inventionโs prospects were the brothers that a year or two later they put together a travelling road show complete with 40 magicians to tour Asia, the Far East and the Fiji Islands. If the moving pictures didnโt draw the crowds perhaps the wonder workers would be a profitable Plan B.
Sestier, who sported a trim beard and moustache with ends that curled confidently upwards in the style of an upperclass gentleman, set sail, with this wife, from Marseilles on 11 June 1896 with a passage to India. They docked in Bombay nineteen days later and though it seems Sestier knew little English, he immediately set out making arrangements for the showing of several films. Over a period of four nights people crammed into a small room in Watsons Hotel to watch six short films[1], including the much bally-hooed Arrival of a Train, all produced by the Lumiere brothers. The local papers proclaimed this new thing, โThe Wonder of the World!โ
The impact was tremendous and immediate. More showings were added (though one was cancelled due to an early case of load shedding) and additional, larger venues were secured. The local press gushed enthusiastically about this amazing Marvel of the Century but found Mr Watsonโs hotel to be somewhat unsuitable. The Bombay Gazetteโs reporter complained that because of โthe smallness of the room, the operator is unable to have the instrument sufficiently removed from the canvas to make the figures life-size, and this has the further disadvantage that it makes the actors in each of the scenes move about rather too quickly.โ
Sestier responded to the criticism by securing the premises of the Novelty Theatre as a corrective measure. Built in 1878, the Novelty was one of Bombayโs glittering new theatres along Grant Road, the cityโs answer to Broadway. It boasted a large 90 x 65 ft. stage and accommodated 1400 people. The Lumieres were in business! At Rs. 1 a seat, Sestier grossed close to Rs. 100,000 (close to one million in contemporary terms) over more than 60 sold-out shows, which proved beyond any argument, that inventors should not be relied upon for their business acumen.
By the time Sestier boarded the French steamship Caledonien for Colombo and Sydney on 26th August, he had changed India forever. The movie bug had found a new host. Many Indians had attended the shows at the Novelty Theatre and one in particular, a photographer, Harishchandra Sakharam Bhatwadekar (aka ‘Save Dada’) was so enraptured he immediately placed an order for a Lumiere Cinematographe with the London firm Riley Brothers. The investment set him back a pretty penny but within three years Bhatwadekar had made and shown Indiaโs first documentary film, The Wrestlers, which depicted a match at Bombay’s Hanging Gardens between a couple of popular local wrestlers, Pundalik Dada and Krishna Navi. Over the next several years Save Dada made a number of other films, all of mundane everyday subjects and reached his cinematic zenith by documenting the grand Delhi Durbar, a celebration of King Edward VIIโs accession to the Imperial throne in 1903.
Save Dada was not alone. In Calcutta and Madras, other men (yes, they were all men) were just as excited about this stunning new invention. With a buzz that can only compare to the one we experienced when we received our first email or spent our first hours surfing the web, dreamers and entrepreneurs in every corner of British India sensed the magic of films and moved quickly to grab hold of it.
In Bengal, a rakishly thin lawyer, Hiralal Sen, scion of one of Bengalโs prominent Bhadralok families moved to Calcutta from Dhaka in 1887 to indulge his fascination with photography and cameras. Some years after his arrival in Calcutta, the legendary studio of Bourne and Shepherd sponsored a photographic competition which Sen, eager, like all budding photographers for some recognition, entered. When he won a prize, the young lawyer was so encouraged he abandoned the Bar and rather rashly established his own photo business.
Though photography had been around for nearly half a century by this time, it was still so new. Its possibilities intrigued practitioners who experimented with all manner of materials and processes. Everything had to be tested and tried. In between taking portraits of Calcuttaโs citizenry Sen began experimenting with light by projecting shadowy images against the wall using a lantern and black cloth. But as far as we know, by 1896 Sen had not yet seen a motion picture.
This happy event happened in 1898, two years after Sestierโs shows on the other side of the country. A certain Mr Stevenson, one of those minor characters that wanders across the stage of history but about whom next to nothing is known, hired a swank venue on Beadon Street, the Star Theatre, where he exhibited a โBioscopeโ film that ran on the same bill as a popular stage play, The Flower of Persia.
Charles Urban, an American book and office supplies salesman with a fetish for silk hats, fell in love with movies from the first moment he put his eye to the peephole of a Kinetoscope, the early American film projector invented by Thomas Edison. Ever the salesman, Urban immediately cottoned to the commercial potential of moving pictures (even if Edison, like the Lumieres, did not) and arranged to be Edisonโs agent for the state of Michigan. By 1896, as Sestier was wowing Bombayโs citizens at the Novelty Theatre, Urban was trying to sell Edisonโs updated projector, the Vitascope from his shop in Detroit. A year later, after asking an engineer friend to come up with a better projector that didnโt โflickerโ as each frame passed through the light, Urban was marketing his very own Bioscope, a single wooden box more tall and narrow than Lumiereโs but like theirs with a hand crank. His projector had the added advantage of not requiring electricity to operate. The Bioscope was so successful that an English firm, Warwick Trading Company, invited Urban to move to London and head up the company with his Bioscope as its flagship product.
Given his familyโs wealth it appears not to have been a big deal for Sen to fork out Rs. 5000 for one of Urbanโs spiffy new inventions. Upon its arrival in India though the equipment was slightly damaged. And to complicate matters it came with no instruction manual. But Sen was not easily deterred. He sought out a European friend, a Jesuit priest named Father Lafouis, who assisted Sen in repairing the Bioscope as well as figuring out how the contraption functioned. Within a short time Sen had so mastered the Bioscope that with the financial help of his brother Motilal and two other investors, he established the Royal Bioscope Company in 1899. Sen quickly became an importer of European films and within a year had shot his own footage. Taking a cue from the mysterious Mr Stevenson, who appears to have moved on to greener pastures, Sen cut a deal with the Classic Theatre, to exhibit his films between acts of a stage play, as a sort of bonus entertainment. The first Sen film to gather notices was Dancing Scenes from the Flower of Persia, which was a popular stage production at the time. Encouraged by the publicโs response Sen filmed scenes from other stage productions including Ali Baba, Sitaram and Life of Buddha which were then shown at other city theatres including the Star and Minerva. As in Bombay, the shows stunned the local press. โThis is a thousand times better than the live circuses performed by real persons. Moreover, it is not very costly โฆ Everybody should view this strange phenomenon,โ gushed one local daily.
And it wasnโt just the residents of Indiaโs most populous city that got to partake of this strange phenomenon. Royal Bioscope took their films to the countryside, setting up impromptu open-air cinemas in small towns across Bengal and Orissa, starting a practice of travelling movies that continues up to the present. Hiralal turned out to be an artiste of amazing inquisitiveness and is credited with making Indiaโs first political film (fiery nationalist speeches denouncing the British Raj by Surendranath Bannerjee, a founder of the Indian National Congress) as well the first commercials for a certain Edwards Tonic and Jabaskum Hair Oil. He continued to film stage shows as well as produce short films of everyday life for a decade and a half but sadly his entire ouvre went up in smoke. Literally. In 1917 the Royal Bioscope Company warehouse caught fire and destroyed all his work and some of South Asiaโs earliest and most important films.
Senโs success ignited the imaginations of others and movies began their journey from novelty toward industry. Back in Bombay, in 1911, Dhundiraj Govind โDadasahebโ Phalke, another photographer cum magician cum printmaker was completely smitten after catching a film called Amazing Animals, a sort of early David Attenborough nature film, at the America India Picture Palace. He returned for more, this time buying a ticket to an Easter time showing of a French film called The Life of Jesus. โWhy,โ he whispered quietly to his to his sceptical wife as they sat in the dark, โcouldnโt I tell the story of our Hindu gods and deities on film, as well?โ
How his wife answered we donโt know. But Phalke who had struggled up this point to find anything that could capture his interest for more than a few years at a time, and whoโs several business partnerships had ended acrimoniously, spent the better part of a year buying up equipment and learning as much as he could about film making before travelling to England in February 1912 to meet with moviemakers and technicians. During this time one of Phalkeโs correspondents was an American magician named Carl Hertz. Hertz had spent time in India tracking down fakirs who could reveal to him the secret of the Indian Rope Trick and meeting with the painter Raja Ravi Varma. Given subsequent events, in which he tours the South Pacific as part of the Lumiere brothers troupe of 40 magicians/ projectionists it seems likely that he may have met Sestier himself at one his Bombay movie exhibitions.
In any case, both men, Phalke and Hertz, were in Bombay around the same time and shared a passion for moving pictures and magic. In the years proceeding his cinematic career, Phalke for a time had billed himself as a magic man named Professor Kelpha, an anagram of his family name. In another intriguing twist Phalke had done business with Raja Ravi Varma through one of his other commercial ventures the Phalke Engraving and Printing Works. So it is possible that Hertz had met Phalke as well. After leaving India, Hertz integrated moving images into his magic show as a regular feature and went on to achieve a minor notoriety as the first man to show a film on a ship and in South Africa.
Phalkeโs London sojourn was a lightening trip.ย He was back on Indian soil three months later, and on 1 April 1912, the very day he landed in Bombay, he registered the Phalke Films Company, and began putting together this first film, Raja Harischandra, based upon a legendary ruler of ancient India described in the epic Mahabharata and other literary works.
Released in 1913, Raja Harishchandra holds the official title as Indiaโs first feature film. But in fact, a year earlier, in 1912, another enterprising Maharashtrian exhibited a movie titled, Shree Pundalik, at the Coronation Cinematograph at Girgaum. Most film historians reject the idea that it was in fact, โDadasahebโ Tornay, the maker of Shree Pundalik, who deserves the accolade as Indiaโs earliest feature film maker, on the rather lame grounds that the camera was operated by a European named Johnson. And that the film was sent to London for processing. Had these criteria been sufficient to disqualify a film from being judged Indian, many films including some of the most loved such as the classic Pakeezah (1972) which was shot by German Josef Wirsching would also need to be removed from the canon.
But whereas Tornay failed–Shree Pundalik was a commercial flop–Phalke went on to make more than a hundred silent films many of which included his wizardry with special effects like the Hindu god Hanuman flying through the sky. After a falling out with his business partners Phalke, who rightly, is credited as the father of Indo-Pakistani cinema, retired to the banks of the Ganges in Varanasi, a somewhat disillusioned and lonely man. For years he resisted making more films but eventually agreed to accept an offer from the maharaja of Kholapur to produce one final film, a talkie called Gangavatran. Like many others Phalke struggled to cope with the transition from silent to sound films and was unable to repeat his early silent film success. He passed away in 1944 a forlorn and rather forgotten figure.
In the southern city of Madras, a dealer of imported American cars, Nataraja Mudaliar, was a fan of Phalkeโs films, and like Sen, Bhatwadekar and Phalke just had to try his hand at the new craze. Mudaliar requested an Englishman by the name of Stewart Smith who was in town filming a documentary on Lord Curzon ( Viceroy of India from 1899 to 1905), to give him several lessons on the finer points of using a camera. With a confidence that only the amateur can muster, Mudaliar, established Indiaโs first film studio, the India Film Company in Puruswalkam. The year was 1917. Within a year, he had produced a series a well-received historical pictures including South Indiaโs first feature film Keechaka Vatham, an episode from the Mahabharata, exhibited at the Elphinstone Theatre. The film was a smash hit by any standards thrilling audiences and netting Mudaliar Rs. 50,000. Excited by the money making potential of his film, Mudaliar arranged for it to be shown in cities outside of India with large Tamil populations including Rangoon, Singapore and Colombo. These venues further netted him a handsome Rs. 15,000. So infectious was this new art form that even the Father of Independent India, Mahatma Gandhiโs family was caught up. His son Devdas Gandhi, then a journalist, was hired by Mudaliar to write the script cards for Keechaka Vatham in Hindi, in order that the film could be shown in the north.
[1] During his stay in Bombay, Sestier screened between 35-40 films, all presumably shot by his sibling sponsors in France. They included such delights as Rejoicing in the Marketplace, Foggy Day in London and Babies Quarrels.
Lollywood: stories of Pakistan’s unlikely film industry
Introduction
The bloody cataclysm of 1947 which resulted in the death and displacement of multiple millions of people, the destruction of an ancient cityโs sense of community, the disruption of a vibrant economy and a fundamental reassessment of a peopleโs and cityโs very meaning and identity seemed to signal, beyond any shadow of doubt, the end of Lahoreโs emerging movie making dream.
Within a month of Roop Kishoreโs escape and the razing of his sparkling new studio the guts were ripped out of the entire industry. The financers and producers, most of whom were at least โnominalโ Hindusโ like Shorey, many of the editors and writers of the cityโs lively film press, actors, music director, playback singers, directors and countless Sikh and Hindu techniciansโcameramen, editors, sound recordists and visual artistsโfled. While most probably harboured hopes that โwhen things calm downโ they would return–โmaybe a few weeks, at most a month or twoโ– and pick up finishing the picture they were working on, all except a small handful never set foot in Lahore again. As it happened, Roop Kishore Shorey was one of the few who did. But weโll get to that a bit later.
By the end of 1947 the writing was on the wall. The exciting glory days of making films in Lahore was over. The cityโs movie refugees reconciled themselves to re-establishing themselves in Bombay, which except for the biggest names and most established stars turned out to be a struggle. Eventually some made it and went on to become rich. Even giants. Most found work, maybe even had a hit or three, but within a decade, they quietly faded away like the pages of the film magazines that once published their pictures.
Back in Lahore the remnant of the industry had other priorities: rebuilding their city, burying their dead, feeding and schooling their children. Making films seemed frivolous under the circumstances. And already questions were being raised by the mullahs, those who had championed the very idea of Pakistan as a thing, about whether there was a place for such a ridiculous, scandalous and even anti-Islamic thing as movies in the new country.
A number of Muslim actors, directors, producers singers and writers did leave Bombay and Calcutta and move to Lahore. But their number was small, especially in the early days.ย It is said that Mehboob Khan, one of Indiaโs most revered directors, maker of Mother India, made a quick post Partition foray into Lahore to assess whether he should emigrate. โI need electricity to make films,โ he is reported to have snorted upon his return to Bombay.
Yes, Noor Jehan, Indiaโs most famous and beloved singing actress, โoptedโ for Pakistan as did Manto, the incendiary writer, and a few other biggish names but obstacles and hurdles were so many that the idea of putting Lahore back on the film making map seemed the stuff of madmen. Manto drank himself to death, after spending most of his time in court fighting for artistic freedom.
One can empathise with their gloom. The dream had ended not only so abruptly, but too soon.
Films had been a part of Lahoreโs life since at least the 1920s though one source claims that the Aziz Theatre in Shahi Mohalla was converted to a cinema in 1908. The cityโs residents, especially the large number of students who attended Lahoreโs many premier universities and colleges, were instant fans and supporters of the medium. Hollywood movies starring Mary Pickford, Hedy Lamar, Charlie Chaplain, Douglas Fairbanks and especially Rudolph Valentino were hugely popular. Rowdy Punjabi audiences were recognised (and most of the time appreciated) for their unabashed preference for action and romance pictures; by the late 1920s and early 30s the Northwest region of India was the number 1 film market outside of Bombay. The big production centers of Calcutta and Bombay made pictures that would appeal to the Punjabi and Muslim audience churning out Mughal era historicals and recreations of Arabic and Persian folk stories.
In the late 1920s a Bhatti Gate resident, Abdul Rashid Kardar, turned to making his own films. Filmed in open air along the banks of the Ravi river or amidst the cityโs many medieval ruins, the films were well received even if by a tiny local audience. Wealthy businessmen and civic leaders started investing in the new technology. A high court judge invested Rs45,000 in a German Indian co-production called Prem Sanyas (The Light of Asia), a story of the Buddha, that has gone on to be claimed as a classic of world cinema.ย
When speaking and singing pictures became possible others jumped into the river. โStudiosโ and production units popped up all over the place in Muslim Town, on McLeod Road, along Multan Road, and especially Laxmi Chowk. Lahoreโs publishing industry sprang into action and began pumping out film magazines in English and Urdu from as early as the 1920s and 30s. Roop Kishore Shorey started making rip offs of American and Bombay action films some of which got fair notices. After a downturn in the mid-1930s by the early 1940s Lahore was fast developing into the B-movie capital of India. A source of talent and story lines (the number of Lahore or Punjab born and or educated actors, directors, producers, singers and writers who made and whose children and grandchildren continue to make Bombay the world leading industry it is, is too numerous to count) Lahore was what the Americans call a farm club. A place where talent was procured tested and then sent up to the big leagues in Calcutta and Bombay.
While the smart movies were made in Calcutta and the big productions came out of Bombay the filmmakers of Lahore in no way suffered from an inferiority complex. They prioritised quantity, action and speed. They prioritised fun. They made money, they drank, they swapped wives, they got divorced, they gambled and raced the horses. They travelled the world looking for money and even produced films for international markets.
But then the dark clouds of politics rolled in and poofโlike the bomb in one of their action movies–the game was up.
Yet, it was in the bloody rubble of Lahore that the seeds of a new industry were born. Not just a minor player, but within a few decades, a booming national film industry. By 1970 Pakistan was the largest film producer in the Islamic world and the 4th largest (by volume) in the world. Without its old stars it produced several generations of superstars, actors, starlets, writers and singers, oh the singers. Not just Noor Jehan, but Mehnaz, Irene, Nahid and the Bengali bomb, Runa Laila. A lot of them went on to sing for Bollywood and still do (Atif, Adnan Sami, Ali Zafar, Rahat).
That Lahore would be a major world film centre is on the face of it improbable. It was far removed for the colonial power centers and indeed, is the only major south Asian movie city not based in a colonial city, that has survived and thrived. How weird is that? Especially, in such a hostile environment. In a land where official, political and religious biases have constantly been more of a threat than the erstwhile films of India which are forever being outlawed.
To understand this amazing, improbable story we have to start not with Roop Kishore Shorey staring into the ashes of his modern studio but go back in time to the very beginning.
Missionaries, Mercenaries and Misfits 