Lahore Cinema

A pioneering analysis of exemplary feature films

A pioneering analysis of exemplary feature films

Commercial cinema has been among the most powerful vectors of social and aesthetic modernization in South Asia. So argues Iftikhar Dadi in his provocative examination of cinema produced between 1956 and 1969—the long sixties—in Lahore, Pakistan, following the 1947 Partition of South Asia. These films drew freely from Bengali performance traditions, Hindu mythology, Parsi theater, Sufi conceptions of the self, Urdu lyric poetry, and Hollywood musicals, bringing these traditions into dialogue with melodrama and neorealism. Examining this layered context offers insights into a period of rapid modernization and into cultural affiliation in the South Asian present, when frameworks of multiplicity and plurality are in jeopardy.

Lahore Cinema probes the role of language, rhetoric, lyric, and form in the making of cinematic meaning as well as the relevance of the Urdu cultural universe to midcentury Bombay filmmaking. Challenging the assumption of popular cinema as apolitical, Dadi explores how films allowed their audiences to navigate an accelerating modernity and tense politics by anchoring social change across the terrain of deeper cultural imaginaries. By constituting publics beyond social divides of regional, ethnic, and sectarian affiliations, commercial cinema played an influential progressive role during the mid- and later twentieth century in South Asia.

Lahore Cinema is freely available in an open access edition thanks to TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem) and the generous support of Cornell University.

DOI: 10.6069/9780295750804

Iftikhar Dadi is professor of history of art at Cornell University. He is the author of Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia (University of North Carolina Press, 2010); and coeditor of Lines of Control: Partition as a Productive Space (Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, 2012).Sivaramakrishnan K. :

Kalyanakrishnan "Shivi" Sivaramakrishnan is Dinakar Singh Professor of India and South Asia Studies, professor of anthropology, professor of forestry and environmental studies, and codirector of the Program in Agrarian Studies, Yale University.Yang Anand A. :

Anand A. Yang is professor of international studies and history at the University of Washington. He is coeditor of Interactions: Transregional Perspectives on World History (Hawai'i, 2005), coeditor of Thirteen Months in China: A Subaltern Indian and the Colonial World (Oxford, 2017), and author of Empire of Convicts: Indian Penal Labor in Colonial Southeast Asia (California, 2021).Kaimal Padma :

Padma Kaimal is Batza Professor of Art and Art History at Colgate University. She is the author of Scattered Goddesses: Travels with the Yoginis (Association for Asian Studies, 2013) and Opening Kailasanatha: The Temple in Kanchipuram Revealed in Time and Space (Washington, 2021).

Iftikhar Dadi is John H. Burris Professor in History of Art at Cornell University. He is author of Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia and coeditor of Lines of Control: Partition as a Productive Space.

"Even before Lahore Cinema: Between Realism and Fable, the study of the cinema in Pakistan owed much to the work of Iftikhar Dadi…In many ways, [it] can be read as a companion to Dadi’s 2010 Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia. For the curious reader, these books should be read side-by-side. Together, they help us to better understand and appreciate the distinct contribution of these two seminal work"

"[A] pioneering contribution to the emerging field of cinema studies in Pakistan. Going beyond the spatial borders of nation-states in South Asia and the limitations of decades, Dadi explores the cinematic movement of aesthetic forms and political consciousness. Professor Dadi's work will appeal to a wide readership, including South Asian cinephiles and scholars working on South Asian history and media studies. It serves as a key reference and a classic in the field of South Asian film and media studies."

"At last, a book that utters Lahore and Bombay in the same breath! Dadi tracks the cinematic movement of aesthetic forms and political consciousness beyond the spatial borders of nations and the temporal limits of decades. The result is a deeply pleasurable map of the heady sensuousness of cinema in 1960s Lahore as it permeates both the pasts and futures of cinema in South Asia."—Debashree Mukherjee, author of Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City

"By focusing on films, their themes, the cultural milieu, and the fantasy world of modern desire, the book offers us a history of 1960s Pakistan. Dadi’s analysis of form, technique, and narrative is a pioneering contribution to the nascent field of cinema studies in Pakistan."—Kamran Asdar Ali, author of Communism in Pakistan: Politics and Class Activism 1947-1972

"Imaginative, thoroughly researched, and evocatively written, this book is set to become a key reference and classic in the field of South Asian film and media studies."—Lotte Hoek, author of Cut-Pieces: Celluloid Obscenity and Popular Cinema in Bangladesh