Abstract
Iftikhar Dadi, Lahore Cinema: Between Realism and Romance, 2022, 264 pp., $35.00, University of Washington Press. ISBN: 9780295750811 (Paperback).
Iftikhar Dadi’s Lahore Cinema: Between Realism and Romance is a richly argued and long-overdue study that repositions Pakistani cinema within a broader South Asian aesthetic and cultural history. Dadi, an art historian and scholar of South Asian visual culture, brings to the field an analytic sensibility that is largely new to the study of Pakistani film, which has until now been dominated by sociological and anthropological approaches concerned primarily with film production, audiences, censorship, Islamisation, technology and informal economies. In contrast, Dadi’s analytical approach is clearly grounded in art history and focused on filmmakers’ aesthetic choices, thus locating Pakistani cinema in a broader landscape of twentieth-century global cinema. The result is a book that will be of significant value to scholars of South Asian cinema, Pakistani cultural history and film studies broadly.
One of the book’s most important contributions is its relocation of Pakistani cinema within a transnational South Asian field. Drawing on Ashish Rajadhyaksha’s concept of the ‘Lahore effect’, Dadi demonstrates that Bombay cinema itself is partly diasporic and substantially indebted to Lahore, a claim that destabilises the received framework of national cinema as a coherent, bounded object of study. Rather than treating Pakistani and Indian cinema as parallel but separate national traditions, Dadi traces shared personnel flows, overlapping genre conventions, common musical traditions and entangled aesthetic vocabularies that cut across the Partition divide. In so doing, he reframes what might superficially appear as mere imitation or derivative borrowing (sometimes called charba) as the outcome of a deeper and more generative cultural circulation within a shared cinematic machine. This is an important corrective both to nationalist film historiography and to the at times casual dismissiveness with which Lahore cinema (along with many other so-called ‘regional’ cinemas) has been treated in relation to its Mumbai counterpart.
The book’s chronological scope is another of its virtues. Dadi undertakes what might be called a longue durée of Pakistani cinema, tracking aesthetic tendencies from the late colonial and early postcolonial periods through the politically turbulent 1960s and into the contemporary moment, represented by Zinda Bhaag (2013). This long view allows him to demonstrate how pre-Partition continuities persist formally, for instance in structures of doubling, melodramatic recursion and lyrical repetition, across the major political ruptures of Pakistani history, including the 1971 breakup of the country and the Islamisation of the Zia ul-Haq era. Particularly illuminating is his identification of the ‘long sixties’ (roughly 1956–1969) as a coherent aesthetic and political formation, one shaped by leftist literary culture, socialist humanism and the contradictions of Ayub Khan’s authoritarian modernisation project. Dadi’s treatment of state censorship under Ayub is admirably nuanced: rather than defaulting to a simplistic dictatorship-as-repression narrative, he foregrounds selective censorship, institutional ambivalence and the paradoxes of a bourgeois liberal modernisation that simultaneously constrained and enabled politically engaged filmmaking.
The four case studies at the heart of the book demonstrate the range and sophistication of Dadi’s analysis. His chapter on Jago Hua Savera (1959), directed by A. J. Kardar and adapted by Faiz Ahmed Faiz from Manik Bandopadhyay’s 1936 novel Padma Nadir Majhi, situates the film carefully within the tradition of global neorealism, a transnational formation indebted to Italian neorealism and Indian parallel cinema alike. This framing is refreshing for a cinema routinely characterised as regional, or even parochial, rather than connected with global aesthetic movements. His reading of the film’s formal fractures is especially astute: The coexistence of black-and-white cinematography with a colour song sequence inserted for commercial reasons, the tension between neorealist restraint and the theatrical heightening of dialogue, the oscillation between humanist timelessness and progressive social critique. These are not dismissed as incoherences or compromises but read as the constitutive tensions of a cinema negotiating artistic idealism, political commitment and commercial viability in a context where no settled audience for alternative film yet existed. The chapter on Khurshid Anwar extends this attention to formal complexity into the domain of music, tracing how Anwar’s melodramas transform lyrical ambiguity and emotional interiority into a sustained meditation on Partition loss and the possibility of aesthetic transcendence. Dadi’s insistence on treating film music as analytically co-equal with visual and narrative form, rather than as accompaniment, invitation to escapism or emotional filler, represents one of the book’s most significant methodological commitments. Equally innovative is his sustained attention to Khurshid Anwar as a composer and intellectual in his own right, a move that productively displaces the director-centred frameworks that have long dominated film historiography and allows for a more genuinely holistic account of cinematic production.
Equally valuable is Dadi’s attention to the methodological problem of the archive itself. This represents a perennial challenge to scholars of Pakistani cinema as Pakistan lacks institutional film archives, and a significant portion of its cinematic history survives only in degraded, informal and fragmentary forms. Dadi’s handling of this condition is quietly devastating; rather than simply noting it as a practical obstacle, he develops it into a theoretically productive insight, treating cinema itself as an archive, a site where cultural memory is stored and transmitted in the absence of more formal preservational institutions. This move has broader implications for how we think about film historiography in postcolonial contexts or where official infrastructures of preservation have been similarly weak, absent or ambivalent to popular cultural forms.
One question the book productively raises, even if it does not fully pursue it, concerns the relationship between Dadi’s theoretical defence of popular form and the specific films his analysis centres on. His arguments for melodrama, the song sequence and charba as legitimate aesthetic and cultural modes are among the most theoretically generative in the book, and they sit in interesting tension with a case selection that skews, understandably given the project’s archival and historical focus, towards films that are formally ambitious, politically legible and affiliated with elite literary modernism or leftist humanism. The popular Punjabi and Pashto cinema that packed cinema halls across Pakistan until the early 2000s – precisely the cinema that has been most aggressively dismissed or marginalised by aesthetic gatekeepers lamenting the zawaal (‘downfall’) of Pakistani cinema – is largely missing here too. Dadi’s framework, with its capacious understanding of aesthetic circulation and its refusal to pathologise popular excess, seems unusually well suited to that terrain, and one hopes future work (by Dadi or by scholars building on his work) will take up the invitation his arguments implicitly extend. This small reservation notwithstanding, Lahore Cinema is a major contribution to South Asian cinema studies, Pakistani cultural history and the global history of film. It brings disciplinary rigour, aesthetic seriousness and historical nuance to a body of work that has been badly underserved. Scholars interested in South Asian film history, the cultural history of Partition, the global spread of neorealism or the relationship between film music and melodrama will find this an indispensable study. It is, moreover, a model of how art history and film studies can be productively brought to bear on cinemas that have too often been treated as peripheral or derivative, and in that sense, it is itself an act of critical recuperation of the kind it so powerfully advocates.