writing – Page 4 – Missionaries, Mercenaries and Misfits

April 19, 2025May 6, 2025

Chapter Two: Of Tea and Opium

Lollywood: stories of Pakistan’s 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 entrepôt to the Jewel in Queen Vic’s 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 India’s 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 Europe’s 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 lands—often, malarial swamps—and 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 Company’s 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 Britain’s 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 Light’s 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. 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. The new trade of journalism was quickly embraced by writers, marking the beginnings of modern India’s 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. After some initial resistance, musicians realised they could reach a much bigger audience by recording their music on phonographs and radio. 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.

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 India’s 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 17^th century, they showed themselves to be expert traders and developed a refined taste for European luxury goods. The East India Company’s trade with China began in the early 18^th century and immediately a number of Indian traders, including two Parsi brothers, Hirji and Mancherji Readymoney, established themselves in Canton. Of all the groups it was the Parsis who were the most successful. By the early 19^th 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. Sensationally, tea became the single biggest import into Britain during the late 17^th 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.

But wool–heavy and hot–did not exactly suit the Chinese climate and was rejected by the Chinese who, upon the Emperor’s orders, demanded silver in exchange for their liquid gold. The Company had no option but to oblige and approached the government for access to the country’s silver stocks. 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 craze—including slapping a 119% tax on tea which only opened the way for smugglers to set up elaborate networks up and down the country’s 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 to offer the Chinese hongs (licensed traders).

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-18^th 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. The company quickly established a monopoly on Indian opium—claiming 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 parties—many of them Parsis—who 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, “the British East India Company was thus able to deny responsibility for importing opium and retain its other trading rights with China.” But still reap incredible profits from the trade. By the early decades of the 1800s, China was home to millions of addicts—some estimate as many as 10-12 million—and 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. While Bombay enjoyed one of the great natural harbours in Asia the political realities of strong regional—mainly Maratha—Mughal successor states in western and central India meant that the EIC was unable to find a political or economic footing. The EIC chiefs in Calcutta and London had grown weary of Bombay’s drain on Company subsidies. As Gov. General Cornwallis’ (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.

“I 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.”

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 18^th 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. 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.

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. 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 traders’ warehouses. 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. The war ended in the defeat of the Chinese three years later. The British received Hong Kong as part of the settlement, 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. 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. 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 India’s 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.

Jamsetjee Bomanjee Wadia (1756-1821) painted by J. Dorman. The Wadias were for many years one of the most influential and powerful Parsi families in Bombay and played a significant role in the development of the South Asian film industry.

April 18, 2025May 6, 2025

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 15^th August 1896, the well heeled citizens of Bombay enjoyed a final evening of the most ‘marvellous’ spectacle the city had ever experienced. For several weeks, first at Watson’s 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 ‘cinematographe’ 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 Paris’ 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 brothers’ version of the movie camera-cum-projector was small and light enough to be carried about outdoors. At first, the inventor brothers didn’t 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 ‘an invention without a future.’ His brother put it even more emphatically: ‘our invention…has no commercial future whatsoever.’

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 technology’s evangelist in the furthest end of the world, Australia. So dubious of their invention’s 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 didn’t 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, ‘The Wonder of the World!’

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 Watson’s hotel to be somewhat unsuitable. The Bombay Gazette’s reporter complained that because of “the 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.”

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 Bombay’s glittering new theatres along Grant Road, the city’s 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 26^th 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 India’s 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 VII’s 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 Bengal’s 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 Calcutta’s 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 Sestier’s 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 ‘Bioscope’ 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 Edison’s agent for the state of Michigan. By 1896, as Sestier was wowing Bombay’s citizens at the Novelty Theatre, Urban was trying to sell Edison’s 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 didn’t ‘flicker’ as each frame passed through the light, Urban was marketing his very own Bioscope, a single wooden box more tall and narrow than Lumiere’s 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 family’s wealth it appears not to have been a big deal for Sen to fork out Rs. 5000 for one of Urban’s 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 public’s 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. “This is a thousand times better than the live circuses performed by real persons. Moreover, it is not very costly … Everybody should view this strange phenomenon,” gushed one local daily.

And it wasn’t just the residents of India’s 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 India’s 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 Asia’s earliest and most important films.

Sen’s success ignited the imaginations of others and movies began their journey from novelty toward industry. Back in Bombay, in 1911, Dhundiraj Govind ‘Dadasaheb’ 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. ‘Why,’ he whispered quietly to his to his sceptical wife as they sat in the dark, ‘couldn’t I tell the story of our Hindu gods and deities on film, as well?’

How his wife answered we don’t 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 who’s 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 Phalke’s 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.

Phalke’s London sojourn was a lightening trip. 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 India’s 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, ‘Dadasaheb’ Tornay, the maker of Shree Pundalik, who deserves the accolade as India’s 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 Phalke’s 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 India’s 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 India’s 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 Gandhi’s 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.

April 18, 2025May 6, 2025

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 city’s sense of community, the disruption of a vibrant economy and a fundamental reassessment of a people’s and city’s very meaning and identity seemed to signal, beyond any shadow of doubt, the end of Lahore’s emerging movie making dream.

Within a month of Roop Kishore’s 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 ‘nominal’ Hindus’ like Shorey, many of the editors and writers of the city’s lively film press, actors, music director, playback singers, directors and countless Sikh and Hindu technicians—cameramen, editors, sound recordists and visual artists—fled. While most probably harboured hopes that ‘when things calm down’ they would return–‘maybe a few weeks, at most a month or two’– 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 we’ll 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 city’s 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. It is said that Mehboob Khan, one of India’s most revered directors, maker of Mother India, made a quick post Partition foray into Lahore to assess whether he should emigrate. “I need electricity to make films,” he is reported to have snorted upon his return to Bombay.

Yes, Noor Jehan, India’s most famous and beloved singing actress, ‘opted’ 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 Lahore’s 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 city’s residents, especially the large number of students who attended Lahore’s 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 city’s 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.

When speaking and singing pictures became possible others jumped into the river. ‘Studios’ and production units popped up all over the place in Muslim Town, on McLeod Road, along Multan Road, and especially Laxmi Chowk. Lahore’s 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 poof—like 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 4^th 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.

April 18, 2025May 6, 2025

Lollywood: stories of Pakistan’s unlikely film industry

Scenes from never-made Pakistani films [Number 1]

Film: Tabahi (Annihilation)

Released: June & July 1947

Starring: al Nasir, Vinod & Roop Kishore Shorey

A man stands by the side of the road staring into the smouldering skeleton of a large double storied building. He covers his nose with a blue silk handkerchief to keep the noxious, semi-sweet smell of burning nitrate at bay. The lenses of his round rimmed glasses reflect the flames that leap from room to room.

The camera pans back for a super wide shot and reveals behind him the apocalypse that everyone had been praying would never come playing out. The citizens of Lahore are moving hurriedly and fearfully towards the railway station. For once no one argues with the tonga walas who are demanding Rs100 to make the short journey. Bloated groups of people–women and children in the middle; wild-eyed men armed with swords, pistols, axes and lathis on the perimeters–move deliberately towards neighbourhoods where their co-religionists might give them safety. Hindus to Nisbet and Chamberlain Roads. Muslims to Mozang and Icchra. Sikhs want to make Amritsar or Delhi.

To the north, old Lahore is an inferno. The once rich markets and havelis of Shahalmi, one of Lahore’s mighty 13 gates is no more. Gangsters and politicians had banded together two days previous to raze the historic mohalla to the ground, killing hundreds of mostly Hindus. War chants echo in waves as lorries race by loaded with enraged men. “Khoon se lenge Pakistan!” “Har Har Mahadev.” For weeks the citizens of Punjab’s greatest city have heard that goondas from Amritsar have snuck into town to mock and shame their Muslim brothers to cleanse the city of all kafir. In response the Sikh leaders have mobilised their small armies of jathas in an all out war of revenge. Everyone knows that even the Lahore Relief Committee set up by some prominent Hindus is just a front for RSS militants more concerned with smuggling weapons to their frightened people than offering relief any sort of relief.

The days are unbearable. The early summer heat has maded the tar on the roads gooey. With the fires and explosions all across the city the temperature has never risen so high. Perhaps when the rains come all this madness with come to an end?

The staring man goes by the name of Roop Kishore Shorey. He turns away and falls into the backseat of an American sedan that has been idling for him. Inside an anxious driver guns the car down the road and yells out “Where to sahib? Lahore is no longer safe.”

Shorey doesn’t answer. Next to him fidgeting anxiously sits his friend, the music director Vinod, who just a few months earlier had completed his first score for the movie Khamosh Nigahein at the now destroyed Shorey Studio. Vinod shouts for the driver to turn the car, which was headed north toward the city and railway station, to the south. ‘Go to Walton Air field.’

At the airport the pair find Al Nasir, the debonair hero and recently licensed pilot, readying his tiny single prop plane for takeoff. “You know, I only have room for one of you,” Al Nasir says merrily, seemingly oblivious to the carnage in the city.

“Take him.” Vinod pushes a nearly catatonic Shorey forward. “I’ve got a family to worry about.”

“Thirty-four and still a bachelor! Who can believe it,” laughs Al Nasir. Sex and women were essential parts of the actor’s life. He’d just divorced the beautiful Meena and was now hot in pursuit of a number of other starlets in Lahore and Bombay.

Shorey embraces Vinod seemingly unwilling to let him go, but the music director untangles himself. “I’ll follow you soon. I’ll find you, don’t worry. My family must think I’m dead, I have to go.”

Vinod runs back to the car which speeds off toward the city.

Al Nasir gets in beside Shorey and notices that the producer’s normally pristine white shirt is grey with dust and ash. Sweat and tears have muddied the lenses of his expensive German spectacles. He smiles grimly at his friend and without waiting for approval from the tower taxis down the runway. Lifting off, the plane circles and climbs steadily through the heavy, smoky air. Shorey stares out of the window. The city of his birth, the city he loved, the city he was so determined would one day be as famous for its movies as Bombay, is now a medieval battleground. Fires, pillars of black smoke and crumbled buildings everywhere. Around the railway station a mini city has grown up. He can hear gun shots, There are army trucks at every chowk.

‘We’ll be back,’ Al Nasir, calls out. He’s still smiling. “Nehru and Jinnah and Gandhi will sort it out. This is Lahore after all. Let them call it Pakistan. It’s still India. In a few weeks everyone will get tired of blood and bombs and the public will want to see our movies and have fun again.”

The plane climbs higher and disappears into a dark grey cloud.

April 15, 2025May 6, 2025

World Muzak [not]

There is an ultra-thin niche in the Ameri-Euro music business that is best described as ‘world fusion’. Colourful, mostly upbeat music, played by globalised musical combos or artists that draw on all manner of culture and creeds for their musical inspiration and membership. Indian wedding bands alongside southern funk outfits. Spanish flamenco coloured by qawwali. Politically-charged West African hard rock. Reggae played by Mexicans. Indian ragas recreated in a bluegrass style.

I actually don’t know, but as a rusted-on fan of this sort of music, I would suspect this sub-sub-no-genre is not huge. Certainly not in Australia and the States, the two Western countries I think I know the best. Even in the home countries of many of the performers of this music, their following is tiny compared to hip-hop, J or K pop or the dozens of local musical styles. It is a hybrid music which can seem to the casual listener to be contrived. Forced rather than natural. A sort of international muzak for weirdos. Exactly the sort of thing missionaries, mercenaries and misfits would love. Among my own circle of friends, few, I reckon, would echo my pro-‘world fusion’ sentiments.

I’ve not spent time reflecting on who the ‘ideal market’ segment for this music might be, but fans seem to be generally well-read musically and well-travelled in life. Immigrants, refugees, aid workers, guestworkers, academics, third culture kids, diplomats and children of missionaries, such as myself. World fusion lovers usually have some significant personal or emotional connection with WF’s endless, restless creativity.

I find this musical omnium gatherum–corny as a lot of it sounds to the vast majority of music listeners–as essential to my comfort zone as shag carpet was to our homes in 1972. I may not listen to it every day but I could never not enjoy listening to it.

I was born and lived most of my pre-University years in India. I’ve had the unbelievable privilege of working as an ‘aid-worker’ in every continent bar Antarctica and South America. Though I didn’t seriously listen to and pay attention to the ‘world music’ that I had been exposed to, be it an all-night Ravi Shankar concert in Delhi or the soukous bubbling out of every taxi in Nairobi until I began blogging in 2010, I have always enjoyed keeping my ears open to the music of wherever I happened to be at any given moment.

I’m not interested in defending or attacking the marketing category known as ‘world music’, one of the more pointless ways to spend time. I’m not in any position to write a ‘history’ of world music if even such a history could be written. What I am interested in exploring is why I so love ‘world fusion’.

World music is arguably the loosest, broadest and most inclusive genre out there. I mean, it’s music. From the world. The usual line in the sand that it must be from non-English speaking countries/artists, has always been misleading. Taj Mahal, to cite just one quick example, is as much a world music artist (starting with his very nom du chanteur) as Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. If you doubt me, check out Mkutano or Music Fuh Ya’ (Musica Para Tu) only two of his several ‘world fusion’ discs.

The much-loved Reddit debates about breaking music into sub and sub-sub categories is the second most pointless debate. Spotify the evident source of all important musical data has come up with a list of over 1300 genres from #1 A Cappella to #1383 Zydeco. It’s hilarious but kind of useful. There are those, like my nephew, who eschew noting any genres in their music collections. I empathise with that policy but find some sort of labelling is essential for me to keep track of a sprawling digital music hoard. I generally cram everything into one of two dozen genres and forget about it. But I’m wandering here.

On Spotify’s master genre list, just barely holding on by its fingernails at #1370, is a genre they call ‘world fusion’. And that’s what I’m on about here.

I have no idea how ‘world fusion’ is actually defined by the Scandihooligans as I don’t have a sub to Spotify, but I would guess it would include everything from spa music to Buddha Bar and not much else.

Here’s my definition.

World fusion music is a style, performed primarily by groups rather than individuals, that consciously mixes musical traditions, instruments, languages, singing styles from one or more cultural/musical traditions. The purpose is exploratory, adventure-seeking and overlaid with what these days would count as a ‘woke’ ethos; i.e. there is often a deliberate message of the unity of all humans and equal value to all of our cultures; a conviction that playing music with our politically identified enemies is actually a really good way to create some safe spaces in this world. And as such, WF is a threat to the ever more popular “my country is the best” version of nationalism that is spreading across our weary planet. And to that extent, please call me ‘woke’.

Corny? Self deluded? Perhaps, but it’s the music I’m interested in not the political commentary.

In this category are bands like The Kronos Quartet, Tabla Beat Science, Hindugrass, Abrasaz, Bansal Trio, Ifriqiyya Électrique, Bustan Abraham and hundreds more. Bands that freely experiment with blending bluegrass with ragas, rock ‘n’ roll with North African gnawa, Western classical with jazzy Hindustani violin, oud and sitar, jazz and Carnatic horn blowing.

I love this music. It not only reminds me of places, experiences and people I’ve met, worked and lived with over the past 35 years but it keeps me connected to the world. In diminished circumstances, it allows me to travel the world. It is hopeful music in that if global cooperation, respect and decency are not politically palatable at least WF musicians are keeping these things alive notionally. Which is critical in our destructive times. World fusion simultaneously connects my personal story with a once and future state of mind. It is an almost invisible way to Resist.

On a more mundane plain ‘WF’ inspires me to dig into a particular instrument (kamancheh; duduk) which often leads to learning about musical movements in which some of the artists or bands participated. It helps me appreciate what a particular music scene was like in a particular country at a particular moment (pre-Revolutionary Iran; 1980s Somalia). All of which feeds back into my understanding and appreciation of the many places I’ve lived and visited. The music adds tonal depth, colour and additional realities to places like Angola and Afghanistan which during my sojourns there were understood almost entirely in political or humanitarian terms.

While some of the musical blends WF comes up with (bluegrass with Hindustani classical?) can seem contrived or dead-upon arrival, many times it works far better than you can imagine. As I listen more and more to this music I marvel at how natural and organic it sounds. It turns out the tabla is one of the most versatile and expressive drums ever invented; it sounds good almost anywhere. The oud of Araby has a strong resemblance to the lute of Europe and both pair well with sitar. The Afghan rubab is fucking exhilarating when used as a lead guitar. Bansuri, the Indian bamboo flute, is another instrument that seems universally suited to almost any other strain of music.

World fusion can slip into dinner background music. It’s generally very melodic and interesting rhythmically. Maybe too much like smooth jazz for some ears. I for one don’t mind pleasant music playing in the background when I’m cooking or paying the bills or chatting over chocolate pudding. Much as I love soft rock, chill-out, lo-fi or Top 40. In the right context anything can do the trick.

But when I pay attention, the better bands or groups amaze me with their inventiveness. Such as the group Abrasaz, a Germany-based collective with members from Austria, Turkey, Singapore and Japan. A true ‘world fusion’ outfit who came together to release a single album, Biraminket, in 2008.

There is a strong South Asian atmosphere here with Ravi Srinivasan’s tabla featuring prominently throughout, especially on the opening track in which a racing pattern of drums and steady, plucked bass line (Akira Ando) set the stage for an intense musical hymn to Maya Wati, the mother of illusion and magic. Paul Schwingenschlögl’s trumpet/flügelhorn keeps the feel edgy and like Srinivasan’s drumming is the other magical part of this record.

On Samraat, Srinivasan, in addition to keeping the beat going, joins Mustafa el Dino in vocalising lines of one of South Asia’s great qawwalis, Shams-ud-duhaa Badr-ud-dujaa Teri Bari Tauqir Hai, which switches over to jazz scatting while Schwingenschlögl solos on flügelhorn.

Lhasa opens with a lovely piano alaap played by Schwingenschlögl which then he turns into an equally beautiful semi-ballad. Pentagram introduces the Kashmiri dulcimer (santoor) played by Srinivasan, whose slivery-steely tones immediately move us to a dream-like plain. The flügelhorn alternates between drone and improv.

Though Indian/Pakistani themes and titles abound, none of the performers is actually from those countries. Yet they have been able to build on that platform to explore the limits of their instruments and voices in interesting directions. Purists of all types would find much to be offended here and sometimes it does seem that things are being thrown against the wall to see if the spaghetti sticks. For me that is what makes this album so endlessly entertaining. Because they owe no professional loyalty to qawwali or khayal they are able to approach each as a discrete musical element that can be tested to see if it fits. Thus, scatting against the Indian musical scale or picking out a line or two of a traditional much more famous piece, means they can connect to both European and Indian ears. The sound is familiar enough to both but neither pure jazz nor Indian. Or anything else. Oiwake, based on a much-loved Japanese folk song, allows Ando to foreground his bass before singing inspired by khayal soars above the driving rhythm, ultimately creating a twirling dervish chant. The transition is as seamless and satisfying as George Harrison’s ‘hallelujah’ to ‘Hare Krisna’ chorus on My Sweet Lord.

If there is one thing that I wish I could change it would be highlighting more of the saz, the only stringed instrument featured here. The saz, like its cousin the bouzouki, is suited to both rhythm and solo and always adds excitement to the proceedings. Unfortunately, it is heard far too little here but has a nice turn on Kalbimiz Bir and Abraxis II.

An album that will be your friend forever.

March 5, 2025May 6, 2025

My Missionary Family Pt 3 : Ocean Liners and St. Thomas

My folks and two older brothers landed in Bombay on 2 February 1952. A second application for a visa had been successful and 28 days after leaving New York they squinted at the skyline of India’s largest city ‘with its many high-rises [that] looked pale yellow in the hazy afternoon sun, more modern looking that we had expected.

The country where they would live and work for nearly 40 years was still young then. Four and half years earlier the British had left in a rush leaving behind two new countries. Pakistan and India, to sort out the affairs of state amidst deep political divisions over the Partition of the subcontinent, heightened communal identify and sensitivity, a bankrupt treasury and a level of poverty that had been severely exacerbated by several massive famines in Bengal, Punjab and Sindh.

Politically, Pakistan was in turmoil. Their first Prime Minister, Liaqat Ali Khan had been assassinated in October 1951, which saw the first direct intervention of the military in the country’s governance, a legacy the people of Pakistan continue to fight against. The UN had declared a ceasefire in January 1951 and sent peacekeepers to Kashmir to manage the fallout of the first of four wars fought over that territory.

India had the good fortune of being led by a charismatic visionary Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, who enjoyed stature across the globe. When the SS Stratheden, a British ocean liner that carried troops (during the war) and mail (after) between the UK and Australia, and which George Orwell had sailed to Morocco on in 1938, dropped anchor at Ballard Pier in Bombay, India’s first parliamentary elections since gaining independence were almost complete. Nehru’s Congress party would win easily and remain in power for the next 25 years.

In Madras, the original Indian colonial city, 1300 kms southeast of Bombay, a cricket match between England and India got underway on the 6^th of February. King George VI died that same day, placing young Elizabeth on the throne where she would remain for many years after mom and dad both passed away. India went on to gain its first Cricket Test victory in that match which marks the rise of the mighty Indian team of our times.

Our family, and few missionaries that we knew,¹ cared little for cricket. It was a quaint British game played over 5 (!) days by princes and engineers. Like polo, it was an elite sport. Nothing like the massively wealthy and dominant public phenomenon it is today. Field hockey was the more popular and accomplished sport¹ in those years.

We weren’t Brits so the change of monarchs in the UK would have been little more than headline news. There was, however, one anniversary or milestone that Dad would have liked (and probably knew). That his own missionary career was beginning exactly 1900 years after one of Christ’s own apostles had first arrived in India. The tradition (which is generally accepted) tells of St. Thomas, one of the original Twelve, landing along the south east coast of India in the vicinity of the modern city of Chennai (Madras)in 52 CE. He preached to the locals and had some success but other locals, usually identified as stuffy Brahmins, murdered him around 72 CE. But he left behind India’s first indigenous Christian community and church, the Mar Thoma, which can, with strong historical evidence, claim to be one of the oldest, if not the oldest Christian community outside of Palestine.

If I’m to understand my parents’ life as missionaries in India I have to spend some time exploring a much broader history, that of Christian India, which pre-dates any formal European missionary by nearly 2 millennia. In the next few instalments, I’m going to highlight some of the highpoints in that fascinating but underreported history.

India holds the record for most consecutive Olympic Golds (6) and most total Olympic Golds (8) in the sport. ↩︎

March 4, 2025May 6, 2025

My Missionary Family Pt. 2

By mid-1951 Dad and Mom’s preparations to leave for India were in high gear. The few worldly possessions they had accumulated were packed away, ready to be shipped to their new home, or stored in the garages and basements of relatives in Minneapolis. They had been recruited by a mission board known as the Oriental Missionary Society (OMS), a minnow in a lake dominated by the mainline Methodist and Presbyterian churches.

They were excited but anxious, not knowing what to expect or how to prepare for what was going to be their first 5yr tour of duty. They received two bits of advice from senior missionaries. Dad writes about the first one:

Orville French (an OMS missionary in India) accompanied us for a walk. He encouraged us to keep focused on India–’a desperately dark and needy land’, he said. Later while studying in Houghton [College, New York] we corresponded with the Frenches who had arrived in Gadag by then. In one of his letters Orville asked us about our conjugal relationship. Hmm. He said that couples planning to serve in India, especially, needed to be sure that they were well adjusted sexually, and ‘at peace’ with their sex lives. For India, he warned, was a place where sex was overtly ‘worshipped’ (Shiva phallus symbol, erotic temple carvings etc.) and this might prove to be troublesome! His concern was doubtless given in the context of what happened to two missionary families who were forced to return home because of the husbands’ improprieties. Orville’s questions we found a bit intriguing, and actually the ‘only word of counsel’ we had from OMS on how to get ready for India.

Now. If there ever was a paragraph that deserved unpacking, this is it. But Dad’s final statement is not entirely accurate. Mom wrote of another piece of advice they received, this time from Orville’s wife, Aileen.

Aileen, in response to my queries as to what to bring with us, replied that India (and Gadag in particular) was rather drab and dreary, so ‘Bring whatever you can to make your home cheery and cozy.’ One surprising suggestion was to bring toilet paper—India’s being hard to obtain and or poor quality, if and when available. We packed a [55 gallon] drum full of it when we sailed for our first term.

Thus alerted to the pitfalls they could expect to find, they were ready to set sail from New York in September, 1951. With tickets booked and much of their luggage enroute to New York, they were informed that their visa had been refused by the Indian government. This was, in Dad’s words, ‘a slap in the face’ and suddenly it looked as if the erotic temples, jewel encrusted turbans and lost souls would remain figments of their imaginations forever.

The Indian government’s hardening stance against new missionaries was a theme of many family conversations throughout my childhood. Though individuals who could be classified as Christian missionaries had been in India since the early years after the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth and though southern India was home to one of the oldest orthodox churches in the world, predating any European missionary presence by centuries, the ‘modern’ missionary movement in India really began in the early 18^th century.

It is a story filled with ups and downs and long periods of marginalization followed by shorter bouts by lionization before an inevitable return to ostracism. I’ll write more about that at some other point, but for now, the refusal of a visa for Mom and Dad, though disappointing for them, was not surprising given the political context of a newly independent country.

Indian elites had waged an ever more acrimonious and violent war of resistance against Imperial Britian, aka The Raj, for decades. Indeed, you could make the case that the ‘natives had been restless’ for more than a century and that the first mass armed uprising against the British had taken place in 1857, when a loose coalition of soldiers, disempowered regional rulers and peasants, nearly succeeded in wiping all Europeans off the north Indian map.

The country’s new rulers, though committed to building a non-sectarian, secular state, viewed missionaries as a subversive, antiquated, anachronistic and altogether unwanted cohort of foreigners living in their midst. Missionary evangelizing, as unsuccessful as it was in convincing more than a handful of Indians to renounce the faith of their birth, was especially hated.

Prominent leaders including the Governor General Mr. Rajagopalachari and Prime Minister Nehru expressed their views that missionaries were cultural aggressors and foreign fifth columnists. An official investigation in the early 50s by the government of Madhya Pradesh concluded:

Evangelisation in India appears to be part of a uniform world policy to revive Christendom, to re-establish Western supremacy and is not prompted by spiritual motives. The objective is to disrupt the solidarity of the non-Christian societies, with danger to the security of the State. Enormous sums of foreign money flow into the country, and it is out of such funds that the Lutherans and other proselytising agencies were able to secure nearly four thousand converts. Missions are in some places used to serve extra-religious ends. As conversion muddles the convert’s sense of solidarity with his society there is a danger of his loyalty to his country being undermined.

A vile propaganda against the religion of the majority is being systematically and deliberately carried out so as to create an apprehension of breach of public peace. There has been an appreciable increase in the American personnel of missionary organisations in India.

Which must be halted immediately, the report declared.

Things didn’t look good for wannabe missionaries like Rudy and Eleanore Rabe and their two young sons Michael (4) and Gregg (2).

March 3, 2025May 6, 2025

My Missionary Family: Part 1

There is no generic missionary. There is no single description that all missionaries would agree on. Missionaries were/are as diverse as any other group of humans. They had a variety of motivations for being in India, vastly differing theologies and lifestyles. Many didn’t like each other, even when they worked for the same ‘mission board’. Some were world class historians and biologists and linguists. Some developed new nutritious products for the emerging middle class. Some led the world in the treatment of blindness and leprosy. Some ‘went native’. Others went mad and had to be shipped back to Ohio. Some believed every word of the Bible was historically accurate and spiritually true. Others could not find their way to 2 Chronicles. One even became a leading White Supremacist.

What follows is what my missionary world looked like.

My parents came to India in 1952. Dad was 27. Mom 30. Dad had been appointed by ‘the Mission’ to teach in a small Bible college in a not-very-significant district town in what was then Bombay Province but which, in 1956, was included within the freshly minted Mysore State that was renamed again in 1973 as Karnataka State.

Home for both Mom and Dad was the upper Midwest: Minnesota and the Dakotas. Both families were of German extract and both were equally poor. And both families belonged to the ultra-small, ultra-conservative Holiness Methodist denomination.

Mom was older than Dad by three years. She had grown up a farmer’s daughter and harbored the suspicion that she was an ‘afterthought’. She always claimed to have enjoyed a loving childhood but one that was lonely and isolated. Her siblings were 10-15 years older and the farms she grew up on, first outside the northern Minnesota town of Detroit Lakes and later near Paynesville, in Stearns Country–heavy German immigrant territory– were several miles from civilisation. She loved (and dreamed of) sharp clothes, baking and reading.

Going on to High School was a major aspiration for most of her social network. Though her father lost his farm in Detroit Lakes during the early days of the Depression, forcing him to become a sharecropping dirt farmer, mom did graduate high school and went on to Business College in Minneapolis just as WWII began. She admitted to having a few boys from the community make eyes at her, even a few handsome lads, but she never made eyes back. Mainly because it was clear to her that they had no desire to go to High School. Or they smoked. Had no real prospects. One boy, however, did stand out–Melvin Finger. She liked the look of him and noted with approval that he was ‘serious-minded and read TIME magazine’.

She grew up loved, she said. She also said, she felt as if her mother, a devout and extremely soft-spoken woman, had hoped she would be a boy because she confessed to hoping that her final child would be a ‘preacher or missionary’. To mom, these were clear signals that she had disappointed her mother by being a woman. I think she carried that feeling of being ‘second best’ with her throughout life.

Her dad, a tall and toothless man with a hearty laugh and a 19^th century outlook, was not particularly religious. He’d go to church occasionally but did nothing to encourage Christian faith in his children. That was their mother’s role. He was too busy scraping enough sustenance together from the tiny Minnesota plots he farmed.

Her upbringing was stifling. Though she accepted the conservative Christian values and faith of her family and neighbors she knew early on that she needed to escape rural Minnesota. In later years she would cackle over the thought of her being a Minnesota farmer’s wife, something that bemused and terrified her. When a recruiter from Minneapolis Business College laid out brochures of a nine-month secretarial course in the Big Smoke, she didn’t hesitate. Minneapolis was a ‘magical city’ for her. Shops full of wonderful dresses and shoes and a place where she could be surrounded by people but still keep to herself.

In their memoir Mom wrote:

Though I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do or be, I was SURE I did not want to spend my life on a farm! Dad and mom had worked their fingers to the bone for years, and what did they have to show for it? I wanted to have a nice home and some stylish clothes—admittedly I was ‘materially’ minded. Attending business college offered me a way out of Paynesville and an escape from the farm. What could be better? I was excited!

Dad’s family were more recent German immigrants. Grandpa had arrived with his mother and siblings from what is now western Poland in 1903. They settled in Guelph, North Dakota, a speck on the prairie not too far from the South Dakota border. The Great Northern Railway that linked St. Paul with Seattle in far west Washington State ran through Guelph and provided jobs for grandpa and his brother Julius. But the hard physical labor didn’t do it for Grandpa, Rudolph Senior, who was still a couple years shy of fifteen. Around that time he was dragged to a ‘revival meeting’, had a spiritual conversion and dedicated himself to ‘full time Christian ministry’. He committed himself to a Holiness theology, serving as a preacher (who often had to move from parish to parish filling in for small rural communities) and eventually General Secretary of the denomination. Here’s how Dad summed him up in the memoir he wrote with Mom in 2011.

The Holiness Methodists were a small, struggling denomination with never more than 30-35 churches and preaching points. But they established a small Bible school (Holiness Methodist School of Theology) in Minneapolis. A year or so after his conversion. Rudolph felt God was calling him to the ministry, so went to Minneapolis and enrolled at HMST. After just a year’s study, the church assigned him as a pioneering evangelist to a remote area way out in northern Montana.

For a year and a half—April 1915 to October 1916—he lived in a small mountain cabin in close proximity to the Pinkham Creek and Fortine lumber camps located a few miles from the town of Eureka. Life in those Rocky Mountain woods was primitive, ultra simple, far from being as romantic as one might think.

He married a feisty woman named Leona and together produced a large family of 9 children of which Dad was number four. Grandpa struggled with depression throughout his life (Dad brushed it aside as nothing more than ‘the winter blues’) which is probably one of the reasons he returned to Minneapolis and HMST. The family could barely put food on the table, especially as Rudolph Senior’s body began to break down with the stress of scraping a living together in the Depression.

Dad spent most of his youth moving between small towns in South Dakota and Minnesota before completing his high school in Duluth. Like his soon-to-be girlfriend, Eleanore Naugle, that older, lonesome, beautiful farm girl he met at the annual Watson Camp Meeting, Dad knew from a young age that he had to escape this small, loving but culturally isolated world of poor Midwestern farmers and laborers for something more hopeful and spacious.

Both Mom and Dad spoke fondly of the annual Holiness camp meetings they attended in the tiny Christian enclave of Watson (pop. 290) in south central Chippewa County. A regular feature of rural American Christianity, the camp meeting tradition had its roots in the so-called Second Great Awakening of the late 18^th century. The meetings were ten days of hallelujahs, hymns, fire and brimstone preaching and sanctification under a tent in the woods. They were an opportunity for socially isolated people to meet their co-religionists and for preachers and hucksters to reach tens of thousands of people in one place. And as ever, camp meetings were places for young people to meet up, fall in love and probably do all sorts of unsanctified and sinful things like smooching.

[Listen to Brother Claude Ely singing at a camp meeting ca. late 1940s]

Dad’s favorite part of the meetings were the sermons of visiting missionaries who told stories of the exotic, colorful and spiritually benighted Hindoos and Mohammadans of India.

In 1946, now married to Mom, they once more attended the Watson camp meetings.

There, the camp’s missionary speaker was…China missionary Roland [Rollie] Rice…. I had been thinking quite a bit about India during our last months in Fort Robinson, remarking more than once that I had wished the army had sent me there instead of one of my Camp Dodge buddies. This friend, Carl, and I corresponded during our Fort time. In one letter he was complaining about some of India’s negatives and wrote ‘You’d be crazy Rabe, to ever want to come to this place!’

My interest in India had been kindled years earlier and only kept growing. The stories of India that Rev. F.B. Whistler told [in previous years at Watson camp] had ignited that early-on ‘India interest’. That interest was reinforced (admittedly in a fanciful way) through reading about the country—particularly in the adventure books of Richard Halliburton who wrote about snake charmers, tiger hunting, maharajas with jewel encrusted turbans and other exotic minutia. In one of those ‘I plan to be’ talks in a Denfield high school class, I informed my classmates I planned to join the US Foreign Service. Around that time I also made up a fictitious address in Bombay, gave it to my mother saying, ‘Some day you will be writing to me in Bombay where I’ll be serving as US Ambassador or as some officer for the US Government.’ She smiled and said, ‘Yes, Rudy, I think I’ll be writing to you in India one day, but you’ll be there as an Ambassador for Jesus Christ, not the US government.’ I always thought it interesting that 10 years later when we got to India, our first mailing address included the name Bombay: Gadag, Dharwar District, Bombay Presidency.

And so it became family history. Dad was the one who had been inspired to be a missionary as a young boy. Eleanore fell in love with him and ‘accepted as part of the deal’ that her commitment to him meant a life far from her family in what must have seemed to her a hostile and harsh environment on the other side of the world.

But re-reading their joint memoir, I have a much stronger sense of Mom’s agency in this. She knew exactly who she was marrying. Rudy had many of the qualities she admitted to liking in men. He was a Christian. He was good looking. He didn’t smoke or drink. He was ‘serious minded and read TIME magazine’ like one of her early crushes Melvin Finger did. And like him she shared a desire to get away from the stifling atmosphere of rural Minnesota and have a bit of adventure. And similar to Dad, her mother had already committed her last child to God to be one of His missionaries.

On the last night of 1946 camp, Dad and Mom both publicly declared their desire to move to India to ‘serve the Lord’.

The reality, in fact, seems to be, contrary to family oral history, that a career in India was something they both consciously chose. Maybe Dad’s interest in the country was deeper and more longstanding than Mom’s, who probably had zero curiosity about the place, but both of them were excited about the prospect of leaving America in search of adventure and souls to save.

Years later after attending her high school class’s 50^th reunion she commented with obvious, if well-controlled glee: “Although I had been such a shy and unassuming little girl, I probably traveled farther and had a more exciting life than most anyone else. It’s safe to say that Rudy, the man I married, was the secret of my out-of-the-ordinary’ life.”

March 1, 2025March 1, 2025

Exit and Entry

33 years 2 months and 2 days ago Mikhail Gorbachev announced his resignation as leader of the Soviet Union. The next day, 26 January 1991, the world learned that the Soviet Union itself, had ceased to exist as a political entity.

I watched Gorbachev on American TV. The enormity of his resignation and the dissolution of USSR silenced the room. The consequences of it were unclear but generally I think everyone felt lighter; things were bound to get better.

Today, I watched President Trump and VP Vance go on TV and announce their desire to join a new USSR, led by their buddy Vlad Putin. The enormity of this decision was lost in a squabble of hectoring and scolding more akin to a WWE extravangza than a diplomatic photo opp.

Just as Gorbachev’s announcement stunned the world, so too the Dynamic Duo’s performance on live TV today, has left the world immobile with shock. Only instead of hope we watch in horror, knowing for sure that only worse lies ahead.

A few months earlier I had watched Boris Yeltsin jump onto a tank in the middle of Moscow and rally his fellow Russians to resist the coup that had been launched by hardline Communists against Gorbachev’s glasnost and perestroika. I remember thinking, ‘Wow, that’s ballsy!’ And the people rallied, the coup was put down and Big Boris led them into a new era.

I don’t watch TV or read much news anymore. But I find it interesting that Yeltsin’s demonstration of leadership and purpose is apparently so uninspiring to the politicians of the Greatest Country in the History of Humanity. Our leaders, our so-called Yeltsins’, our hardcore anti-Putin hawks, now flap their wings and coo quietly in harmony with the two assholes at the top.

DJT is leading us into a new era too.

February 28, 2025May 6, 2025