Romanticism and Politics in Mid-Century Lahore Cinema

Mid-century commercial cinema in South Asia has served as among the most powerful vectors of social and aesthetic modernization. By anchoring social change across deeper cultural imaginaries, this cinema has played an influential progressive role by constituting publics beyond existing social divides, forging a shared and expanded experience of modernity that extends beyond regional, ethnic, and sectarian affiliations, and affectively challenging the selective amnesia of nation-state ideologies. In this talk, Iftikhar Dadi focuses on the contributions of Khurshid Anwar (1912-84), who worked in Bombay cinema and later in Lahore cinema. His music, writing, and direction in Lahore ostensibly center on the conflict between the “East” and the “West.” However, Anwar renders this tension distinctive through the role music plays in inviting healing from the unbearable implications of this divide. In a further twist, the “East” here has a prelapsarian evocation that harks back to a conception of South Asia before the Partition in 1947. By closely analyzing Ghoonghat (The Veil, 1962), Dadi argues that Anwar’s youthful political activism inspired by Bhagat Singh (1907-31) is deeply salient to understanding his later melancholic romanticism, and that it nevertheless offers an implied address that is sharply at variance with the claims of post-independence nationalism.