Abstract
Salma Siddique, Evacuee Cinema: Bombay and Lahore in Partition Transit (1940–1960) (Cambridge University Press, 2023), 276 pp. $13.95, ISBN: 978-10-0915-120-7 (Hardback).
Aficionados of old Hindi film songs will undoubtedly be familiar with the ‘evergreen’ song Lara Lappa Lara Lappa Lai Rakh Da from the 1949 black-and-white film Ek Thi Ladki (There Was Once a Girl). What they might not know is that the actress on whom the song is picturised was Meena Shorey, a Muslim woman born Khurshid Jahan near Lahore, who had a successful career there and in Bombay before finally migrating to and becoming a citizen of post-partition Pakistan in 1957. Roop Kishore Shorey, a Hindu filmmaker who was also Meena Shorey’s third husband, headed the refugee team in Bombay that made the film in which the song appears. In Evacuee Cinema: Bombay and Lahore in Partition Transit (1940–1960), these are the sorts of stories that Salma Siddique excavates and presents in a lively fashion. Siddique examines the implications of the forgotten histories of entanglements between Lahore and Bombay film industries during what historians have called the long partition, a drawn-out process that stretches the understanding of partition backwards and forwards beyond 1947. She resurrects these film histories with flair through a creative engagement with a wide range of source materials and archives in English, Hindi and Urdu: films, film reviews, film transcripts, song booklets, film periodicals such as filmindia, memoirs, biographies, newspaper reportage, government records, cartoons, plays and ephemera in the personal collections of cinephiles.
In this 261-page account, Siddique aims to understand the impact of the 1947 partition on the filmmaking project. She does so by focusing on selected film personnel or migrant cultural workers as key figures. This approach draws the readers in as they follow – over the decades and across national borders – the trajectories of individuals whose lives and livelihoods were impacted by the great division and dislocation of partition. Both of the new nation-states used the bureaucratic category of ‘evacuee’ to manage land and property ownership. The book’s evocative title borrows from and extends this category into a conceptual frame to study film personnel, genres and practices. As Siddique explains in her introduction, the term ‘evacuee cinema … as a reflection of exilic cinema is based on the historic specificity of partition involving the two-way migration and impasses of ownership’ (p. 14). Evacuee cinema thus is both a descriptor and a method to think through ‘the evacuation, rehabilitation, and voiding that went into the making of nationally separate cinemas’ of India and Pakistan (p. 14).
The book’s six chapters, along with its introduction and conclusion, maintain a consistent focus on the relationship between Lahore and Bombay. Like the personnel Siddique considers, the chapters move back and forth between these two film-producing cities to emphasise the links between the pre-national film cultures and national cinemas of India and Pakistan. The first chapter, ‘The All-India Ambitions of Lahore’, delves into the all-India film category, which was used during the war years to ‘signal a national taxonomy for films produced in colonial India’ (p. 9). Siddique turns her attention to the significance of a film like Khandaan (Lineage, 1942), an ‘all-India’ film produced by Pancholi Art Pictures, one of the major family-based film companies of Lahore. She argues that the representational claim involved in a Lahore-produced all-India film was similar to the contest evolving in the political realm between the All-India Muslim League and the Indian National Congress (p. 38). Furthermore, this chapter vividly evokes the vibrant film city that was Lahore in the 1940s, and how the entrepreneurialism and experimentation in narrative and technique underway was cut short by partition. The centring of a pre-partition all-India film from Lahore subtly and deftly undercuts the hegemony of Bombay in existing scholarship on colonial film cities as it looks at the ‘creative energies’ of Lahore during a brief period in the 1940s.
The next two chapters are grouped under Part One of the book, ‘The Secular Stance of Bombay’, which reveals how contests over Indian nationalism were constitutive of the Bombay film industry, with the film enterprise both reflecting and participating in the wider political arena. Chapter two, ‘Hindu Camera, Muslim Microphone’, juxtaposes two sources: filmindia, the leading film magazine in English of the 1940s, founded and edited by the Hindu Baburao Patel, and the Urdu memoirs of two Muslim filmmakers, Shaukat Hussain Rizvi and M. Luqman, who migrated to Pakistan in 1947. The increasingly inflammatory and openly anti-Muslim stance of filmindia’s prose provides a context for the memoirists’ accusations of prejudice as they narrate the existence of professional networks and factions based on politicised religious identities within the Bombay film industry of the late 1930s and early 1940s. Chapter three, ‘Stages of Partition’, explores the limits of secular nationalism through the plays of the Prithvi Theatre, founded in 1944 by Prithviraj Kapoor, a leading actor of the Bombay film industry. Siddique analyses the first four plays of Prithvi Theatre (the Partition Repertoire) to argue that their ideological content endorses a Hindu worldview, reserves the representation of partition suffering to the Hindu-Indian community, and targets Muslim political formations (pp. 99–100). Collectively, these chapters rigorously investigate the origins of the much-celebrated secular stance of the Bombay film industry to reveal how partition, and a ‘belligerence to the idea of Pakistan’ (p. 101), are central to Bombay cinema’s secular credentials.
Part Two, ‘Between Bombay and Pakistan’, turns its attention to filmmakers, film genres, artists and actors who moved between Bombay and Lahore in the 1940s and 1950s, and changes in personas and practices because of this movement. Chapter four, ‘The Partition Wish’, is dedicated to unearthing the neglected oeuvre of the Fazli brothers, who were the earliest ‘self-conscious producers’ of the Muslim social (p. 114), a genre that represented the religious and cultural distinctiveness or particularity of Indian Muslims through focusing on contemporary Muslim lives and families. Siddique provides a useful genealogy of the genre’s early history. Ultimately, she shows us how we might rethink existing scholarship on Muslim socials within South Asian film studies, which has focused on the post-partition cycles of the genre and presented these articulations as the classical instantiation of the genre. Taking us to the years between 1940 and 1947 when there was an explosion of the Muslim social, Siddique skilfully argues that the genre can be better identified as an example of the Muslim political film since its emergence was intimately connected to the ascendancy of a subcontinental Muslim nationalism and desire for Muslim independence during this time.
Chapter five, ‘The Partition Romance’, moves from socials to screwball comedies of the late 1940s– early 1950s through a focus on Meena Shorey, who acted in many of these films (which were modelled on Hollywood screwball comedies), and on her partnership with Roop Shorey, who made these films. Siddique sees the collaboration and relationship between a Muslim (Meena) and a Hindu (Roop) as an example of ‘visceral cosmopolitanism’, their mixed sexual-romantic relationship speaking to the ‘permeability of ethnic and social borders’ (p. 145). The chapter goes on to make a compelling case for these screwball comedies to be read as ‘partition films’. They were made by personnel whose collaboration covered the pre- and post-partition years, and whose evacuee and refugee experience infused their work. The films are instances of coping mechanisms, that is to say, the sublimation of partition anguish, of ‘historical trauma negotiated by humor’ (p. 145). The partition ‘imprint’ in these comedies can be seen in their chaotic energy and edgy, cynical humour, a good deal of which comes from the specific partition experience of uncertainty and dislocation, such as jokes around homelessness, loss of property or the inability to trust anyone. Furthermore, the gendered trauma of partition provides the background against which to read Meena Shorey’s stardom. The figure of the abducted woman forms the ‘historical underside’ of the unruly and volitionally mobile screwball heroine that Meena played in her films. This figure also underlines her personal, offscreen history, where she actively changed names (Khurshid, Meena, Kiran), religious identities and national locations (p. 145). The figure of the abducted and recovered woman was further inflected by Meena Shorey reconverting to Islam, changing her name to Khurshid, and becoming a citizen of Pakistan in 1957.
The last chapter sheds light on the pervasive phenomenon of Pakistani remakes or copies of Indian films, unflatteringly referred to as charbas in post-partition Lahore. It does so by focusing on the biography of Rattan Kumar (born Syed Nazir Ali), a child actor from India who migrated to Pakistan in 1957 and who starred in many of these films. Siddique uses the concept of the doppelgänger to rethink the categories of the charba and fantasy together with Rattan’s stardom, which was remade through his performance of double roles in these films. Siddique argues that the competitive and nostalgic impulses, or the logic of disavowal and appropriation governing these films, allowed for acting out and working through the strain of partition. She locates the emergence of these remakes in the context of challenging material conditions facing the Lahore film as it was being relaunched as Pakistan cinema after partition. Through historical contextualisation and careful close reading, Siddique revaluates this category of ‘minor’ films to show the strategies and complex motivations behind their deliberate and purposeful engagement with the ‘originals’.
Evacuee Cinema is a much-needed intervention in studies of early film cultures of the South Asian subcontinent. The book is a project of recovery and reappraisal. It retrieves lost, unstudied or understudied filmmakers, films, stars, genres and production histories; simultaneously, it disrupts existing consensus – whether around a certain genre (such as the Muslim social), the idea of silence around partition in film, or the secular stance of the Bombay film industry. In the face of a fragmented and patchy availability of archival institutions and sources, what Siddique achieves here is especially remarkable. Siddique’s book is essential reading for film studies scholars and for non-specialists interested in the shared and intertwined film histories of India and Pakistan, in the impact of cataclysmic historical events on cultural production, or in transnational and cross-border media flows in general.