Editorial

This issue of Bioscope explores the relationship among categories of language, community, and nation in 1940s Bombay/Lahore cinema. The 1940s was referred to as seed-time for Indian and Pakistani film traditions. In his influential Pakistani Cinema 1947–1997 (1998), Mushtaq Gazdar made a bid to trump national, religious, and ethnic particularity by claiming a broader linguistic genealogy for Pakistani cinema in the Hindi–Urdu cinema of Bombay and Lahore. In the BioScope special issue on Pakistani cinema, Ali Ahmed Nobil sought to complicate this claim, noting that an overinvestment in the cultural value of the Urdu social film had suborned a slate of regional productions, for example, Punjabi and Sindhi cinema, as unbefitting a sophisticated, middle-class-led Pakistani nation (Nobil, 2014). While such hierarchies need unsettling, we also need to extend our viewpoint beyond the subcontinent and canvas a broader swathe of legendary romance, as in the Laila Majnu, Shirin Farhad traditions, as well as Arabian Nights and dastaan storytelling. Language use in the period needs to be explored in official policies and areas such as, state broadcasting, and in the variety of practices discernible in the cinema’s visual, aural, and textual registers. Collective and individual biography also provide rich testimony on how transition and painful rupture were navigated, leaving in its wake a host of contrary identity practices. All of this lies in clear counterpoint to the claims ideologues would make, and continue to make, about identities grounded in clear affiliation to language, Hindi versus Urdu, religious and ethnic identity, Hindu versus Muslim, and in the choices made about which nation one should belong to.

These research concerns are addressed in this issue by articles on language, genre, and star biography. David Lunn’s work on Hindustani explores both film-based articulations of linguistic complexity, and a rich seam of print material in songbooks and popular periodical literature. Arguing for the validity of Hindustani as a more accurate rendering of the language used in the Bombay cinema than Hindi or Urdu, Lunn provides sensitive excavation of the copresence and mixing of linguistic idioms and tropes, and extends analysis from the aural to the textual. Here he looks at the importance of film credits, often using multiple languages, and also the way such textuality moves into the register of print material. This is an instance of “words in motion pictures,” the research template Ravikant has been evolving to explore the movement of language across media registers, from print journalism and songbooks to radio, gramophone records, cassettes, and cinema (Ravikant, 2011). There are a series of suggestive intersections here, from the movement of words as text across a variety of surfaces, to their particular articulation with the materiality of media forms—alphabets, oral utterances, paper, celluloid—and the auditory, visual, and information environments of these forms.

The messy world of popular film genres and the logic of their (non-)transformation is the object of Ravi S. Vasudevan’s article, with a particular focus on the emergence of the category of the Muslim social film. Vasudevan draws attention to the way the film trade evaluated how specific genres might attract or repel particular audiences, a speculative register that should not be taken literally. He counterpoints trade formulations to the research on genres and audiences in the scholarly work on “Islamicate,” “oriental,” “Arabian nights,” and a wider field of fantasy film. While it appears these cultural forms and fictional universes appealed to audiences across ethnic and religious distinctions, a notable shift in discourse about genre and genre appeal emerged around 1940, when the Muslim League declared its Pakistan agenda. Vasudevan suggests that a secular nationalism, represented by figures such as K.A. Abbas, intervened in the fuzzier, cross-community habitations of cultural knowledge. Despite contrary evidence, secularists and Hindu majoritarian ideologues asserted that Indian communities were divided in their linguistic and narrative cultures, that cinema facilitated a field of intercultural communication, and that the modernizing impulses of realism available in the social genre were critical to advancing mutual understanding and collective interests. Vasudevan traces the emergence of the Muslim social genre against this background, as an intervention by Muslim filmmakers, but also important figures, such as, Dalsukh Pancholi and actors, such as, Ashok Kumar and Surendra. While the genre needs fuller description and cataloguing, its key agenda was to present Muslim communities and households participating in everyday life and national modernity, even as the genre often fashioned attractions in the cultural idioms and graces of an upper-class Muslim world.

The full complexity of what happened to the film industry, films, and film professionals during the Partition process is yet to be adequately documented. The cinema provided possibilities for reinvention, self-fictionalization, and religious and ethnic boundary crossing, as Salma Siddique demonstrates in her work on the actress Meena Shorey, formerly Khurshid Jahan. Siddique places Meena’s career in relation to two filmmaking cities, Bombay and Lahore, and how film industrial change after the Partition affected film professionals. She also situates Meena’s life in relation to the countervailing claims, obligations, and affections of family and of her Hindu business partner and husband, Roop Shorey. The account provides us with a vivid sense of a life motivated by escape (from an oppressive family), career possibility, rational calculation, and, most arrestingly, of romance and play. Siddique highlights Meena’s initiative in restarting Shorey’s career after his Lahore business capsized with Partition. She shows that this involved the setting up of Shorey’s Bombay concern, inhabiting a variety of identity practices with cosmopolitan ease, and introducing a new genre modeled on the Hollywood screwball. Siddique reads key films of this oeuvre, such as, Ek Thi Ladki (1949), to suggest how the off-screen dynamics in the Meena–Roop relationship infuse on-screen gender dynamics, with Meena’s unfashionably large, raucous, and ungainly heroine providing the motor of the story, of madcap chases and romantic partnership. Siddique argues that this comedy of gender equality and the ungainly body provides a new type of personality made intelligible through the Punjabiyat of characters; and that the Queen of Droll, as journalists dubbed her, navigated scenes suggestive of Partition displacement but conveyed in the idioms of comedy. Siddique draws on accounts from Indian and Pakistani sources, and from Meena’s own reflections retailed many years later, in the orthodox Pakistan of Zia-ul-Haq, to map a compelling life story. There is a sense of pathos but also of rational calculation when the experimental qualities of this life come to a close. With the hardening of national and industrial barriers, there were constraints on easy movement between countries and remittance of earnings to Meena’s Pakistan-located family, compelling Meena to align herself to Pakistan, family, and her Muslim identity.

We conclude the main article section of this issue by shifting focus from the 1940s to the contemporary, carrying themes of Muslim subalternity and marginality into a quite novel, if once again transitional, setting. If 1930s and 1940s trade discourses referred to oriental fantasy and action films as a key vector for Muslim audiences, it did so without reckoning on how such movies could engage a wide variety of audiences. However, formulations have been commonplace that action and special effects films attract proletarian audiences, in India and elsewhere, and indeed that dubbed Hollywood films have, in general, only achieved success in these genres. Ishita Tiwary’s article considers the well-known case of the spoof/mimic cinema of Malegaon, the Maharashtrian power loom town otherwise known for a strong incidence of Hindu–Muslim violence. This is an action and special effects cinema based on the activity and reception of a mainly Muslim working-class community and audience, a mimic cinema based on low technology and make-do special effects, including bullock cart crane shots, dolly shots on bicycles, and toy miniatures for helicopters. Tiwary tracks the way local cinephilia based on video viewing mutated into a video film cottage industry, one that demonstrates the pleasures of redoing big cinema as performed by familiars from the locality. This pleasure of seeing oneself and those one knows on-screen derives from a longer history of what the cinema offered from the days when itinerant Lumiere Brothers cameramen peddled the new technology in different parts of the world.

The film experience rendered by Tiwary straddles a series of transitions. Thus, the locality becomes the object of an urbane documentary discourse, and it is abstracted to generate narrative for national television. And there is also a delayed technological transition, in the continued recourse of local filmmakers to analog video when digital practices were widely available. This suggests the time-warp effect of low income, low-tech practices, the “obviation of obsolescence” Sudhir Mahadevan has referred to as being common to South Asian media histories (Mahadevan, 2010). However, once the transition to the digital takes place, it does so rapidly, after the arrival of documentary interest in this low-tech form and life situation. The transition is one that shifts away from the big picture of mainstream forms into a host of local video practices accelerated by the emergence of digital technology. For our purposes, the technological also facilitates a transition in the relation of community and the cinematic imagination. When the communities were simply viewers, Tiwary notes that the menu on offer was quite international, even if of the B movie sort; and Sheikh Nasir, Maleagaon’s Phalke, said he learnt how to make cinema by viewing it, especially Hollywood cinema, which he considered superior to Bombay film. It is this wider repertoire of cinephilia that we need to attend to. This was not governed by the logics of identity and its reproduction, but, as Tiwary, drawing on Jacques Ranciere’s Nights of Labour (1989) suggests, by the desire to be other than what one is ordained to be in the world. This uncoupling of subjects and objects in the contemporary may give us pause for thought as we look back at the longer history of film audiences and audience dispositions in the field of film fantasy.

In our fieldwork section, we feature interview and survey methods conducted by Iris Vandevelde, Philippe Meers, Sofie Van Bauwel, and Roel Vande Winkel, a research team exploring film culture amongst an Indian diaspora in Antwerp, Belgium. Looking at a diaspora community primarily made up of information technology professionals and those in Antwerp’s diamond trade, the research uses interviews and survey of cinema attendance to explore community formation at the cinema, with a particular focus on audience discourses that precede and follow the actual cinema-going act.