Movie bonds stronger than cricket ties

In reaction to the IPL’s rejection of Pakistani players, the PML(N) has called for an immediate ban on the screening of Indian films in Pakistan. While the idea is a counter-offensive, it equally affects the thousands of Pakistani fans who thrive on Hindi films. Recently, when Indian films came back to theatres after a long period of exclusion, the response was overwhelming.
While Pakistan has had its own top league of cricketers, lack of development of Pakistan’s film industry made Indian cinema ‘Pakistani’ as well. Having a common cultural denominator, Hindi films have been an important part of Pakistan’s popular culture even in moments of political uncertainty.
Hindi cinema was popular in the subcontinent even when there was no India-Pakistan divide. As early as the 1920s Lahore was an important market for Bombay’s silent films. With the talkies in the early ’30s, Panjab with Lahore as epicentre became all the more vibrant. Films made by top studios in Bombay and Calcutta used an Urdu-ized Hindi, and cinema became a domain of fusion between two cultural traditions — the Hindi-Hindu and the Islamicate.
A group of immensely talented singers and actors from what is now Pakistan moved to Bombay and Calcutta between 1930s and 1940s. Among them was Bombay’s singing star Noorjehan, who along with her sisters Eidan and Haidar Bandi had arrived in Calcutta from Lahore in 1933. These performers and similar others were instrumental in forging a culture, which even later resisted being coded as exclusively Indian or Pakistani.
After 1947, top artistes like Noorjehan went to Pakistan, but continued to have a devoted audience in India. Between 1948 and 1954, there appeared in Lahore’s Urdu daily Afaq an immensely popular series of ‘sketches’ of Bombay film personalities like Ashok Kumar and Nargis. The writer was none other than Sadat Hasan Manto, who had been a scriptwriter in Bombay, and had closely known some of the top actors and actresses of the day. Manto had moved to Pakistan but stood testimony to the cultural intercourse that existed across borders. Dilip Kumar had a Pakistani fan base, and is among the few equally respected in both countries.
Hindi cinema has remained an arena of cultural proximity between India and Pakistan and is most powerfully evinced in the diaspora today, where Bollywood is a common cultural banner for Indians and Pakistanis. In almost all South Asian diasporas across the world a major Bollywood release is occasion for celebration. When Lage Raho Munnabhai came to the theatres, many in the South Asian diaspora Down Under suggested that generals across the Wagah border should greet each other with flowers in an attempt at dousing tension. When Abhishek Bachchan and Aishwarya Rai were married, Pakistani ladies on Devon Street in Chicago were all attention. Abhishek’s sherwani and Aishwarya’s get-up were the day’s talk. Many Pakistani students braced the cold Toronto winter to catch a glimpse of Akshay Kumar running with the Olympic flame in the run up to the Vancouver Olympics.
Films have seen little of the rivalry and competition that has marked Indo-Pak cricket. With films, there is a rare scope for closeness and exchange, and the spontaneity of response will possibly stand the test of its detractors.
QnA: Cosidering the strained relations, will Pakistan now shun Bollywood?