ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has taken a very long time to research and write, and I have accumulated innumerable debts that this short note cannot adequately acknowledge.

Over the years, Kamran Asdar Ali’s friendship and his abiding encouragement and feedback have been most valuable for my engagement with Urdu cinema. He has been a vital interlocutor in cinema studies of Pakistan, which essentially did not exist as an academic field until a few years ago and in whose establishment he has played a pioneering role. His scholarship on the organized left in Pakistan and its cultural manifestations has been crucial for my own thinking about commercial cinema as a form and its entanglements with society and politics. Lotte Hoek and Sanjukta Sunderason have provided detailed and generous feedback on Jago Hua Savera in workshops in Edinburgh in 2016 and Austin in 2017, and subsequently. Hoek’s work on cinema in Bangladesh/East Pakistan before and after 1971 and her study of industrial exchanges between Dhaka, Karachi, and Lahore have been deeply illuminating. Ravi Vasudevan’s writings on midcentury Bombay cinema have been extremely salient for my own thinking about the social film in Lahore. Moreover, his indefatigable initiative as founding editor of the leading journal BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies has immeasurably enriched the study of cinema across South Asia since its founding in 2010. Vasudevan kindly invited me to serve as an editorial advisor of BioScope at its launch, and over the years I have greatly benefited from this association. A central formulation for this work draws from Ashish Rajadhyaksha’s conception of the Lahore effect. Rajadhyaksha elaborated on this at the Lahore Biennale 01 Academic Forum I had organized in 2018 in Lahore, and in our subsequent communication. I deeply appreciate Lalitha Gopalan’s advice and counsel over many years. Her influential analysis of Bombay action cinema has been formative for the discipline and for my own thinking. Aamir Mufti’s perspective on Faiz’s Urdu lyric poetry has shaped my understanding of the central role of the song in the social film. Zahid Chaudhary read parts of this manuscript and offered incisive suggestions. He has been unfailingly generous with his feedback over the years and also counseled on the title of this study. Sonal Khullar has been gracious with her thoughtful advice and has offered ongoing methodological and practical guidance in bringing this project to completion.

I have presented aspects of this work in multiple venues. At the Beyond Crisis: A Critical Second Look at Pakistan workshop at Johns Hopkins University in 2006, I received thoughtful advice from organizer Naveeda Khan, respondent Aamir Mufti, and several of the other participants. Kamran Asdar Ali has made it possible for me to present on multiple occasions at the University of Texas at Austin. Ravi Vasudevan invited me to present at the conference The Many Lives of Indian Cinema: 1913–2013 and Beyond: Disciplines, Histories, Technologies, Futures at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), New Delhi, in 2014, which proved to be an opportunity to meet many established and emerging scholars. I thank Vazira Zamindar and Asad A. Ahmed for including me in the program of the film festivals on Pakistani cinema they organized, at Brown University in 2014 and at Harvard University in 2015. I thank the organizers of the plenary session of the forty-eighth Annual Conference on South Asia in Madison, Wisconsin, in 2019 for inviting me to present on Zinda Bhaag. Meenu Gaur has been most helpful in answering my queries on the making of Zinda Bhaag, at the film festival at Brown and later at Princeton University on Zahid Chaudhary’s invitation. Ali Khan and Ali Nobil Ahmad’s publishing initiatives on scholarship on Pakistani cinema (and including my own work) have enabled the field to become more established. My conversations with Salima Hashmi on Lahore cinema of the sixties and seventies have been insightful in gaining a sense of the ethos of that period.

Others who have offered advice and support at various junctures or whose work I have drawn from include Tariq Omar Ali, Isabel Huacuja Alonso, Shaina Anand, Anjali Arondekar, Nilanjana Bhattacharjya, Moinak Biswas, Arif Rahman Chughtai, Raza Ali Dada, Manishita Dass, Esha Niyogi De, Madhuri Desai, J. Daniel Elam, Haris Gazdar, Durba Ghosh, Will Glover, Zebunnisa Hamid, Rabia Hassan, Syed Akbar Hyder, Usha Iyer, Ayesha Jatoi, Nadeem Khalid, Naveeda Khan, Gwendolyn Kirk, Khalid Mahmood, Naila Mahmood, Parvez Mahmood, Ranjani Mazumdar, Monika Mehta, Rini Bhattacharya Mehta, Farina Mir, Chris Moffat, Debashree Mukherjee, Madhuja Mukherjee, Hira Nabi, Tejaswini Niranjana, Asif Noorani, Hoori Noorani, Rauf Parekh, Mustapha Kamal Pasha, Geeta Patel, Nasreen Rehman, Yousuf Saeed, Salma Siddique, Harleen Singh, Layli Uddin, Hasan Zaidi, and Mazhar Zaidi.

The appeal of Pakistani films from the 1950s through the 1970s can be gleaned from the recollection and career of two friends, whose later work is not normally associated with this cinema. Both are now unfortunately deceased. In many conversations, Saba Mahmood, a leading scholar of anthropology and religion, would fondly recall her cinephilia for Urdu cinema when she was living in Karachi during her early years. And it is not generally known that I. A. Rehman, a foremost public advocate for human rights in Pakistan, was a film critic for about a decade, writing a weekly column in Pakistan Times from the mid-1950s, and whose writings addressed Hollywood, Indian, and Pakistani films.

Abdul Ghaffar (“Ghaffar bhai”) at Rainbow Center, Karachi, made available DVDs of many of the films discussed in this work. Anjum Taseer kindly supplied me with a DVD copy of Jago Hua Savera. Khawaja Irfan Anwar, Guddu Khan, and Haroon Siddiqui provided rare archival materials. In Lahore, Qudsia Rahim has generously enabled my research on multiple occasions. I thank Aimon Fatima and others at the Lahore Biennale Foundation for procuring hard-to-find publications. I express deep thanks to Naila Mahmood in Karachi for her encompassing help in multiple field research trips and in sourcing materials, and for supervising Asim Muhammad Ameen, who assisted me in fieldwork. Ateeb Gul has transliterated the Urdu text, and Harris Khalique and Aamir Mufti have offered valuable advice on translating key terms and lyrics.

I thank the Global South Asia series editors, Padma Kaimal, K. Sivaramakrishnan, and Anand A. Yang for their support of this project. Comments by the two anonymous reviewers on an earlier draft of the manuscript have greatly improved the book in numerous ways. Lorri Hagman, Joeth Zucco, and the team at the University of Washington Press that includes Chad Attenborough, Beth Fuget, Kait Heacock, and David Schlangen have expertly brought this project to realization. Carole Stone copyedited an early draft of this manuscript, and Elizabeth Mathews carefully did the final copyediting. I thank Lisa DeBoer for preparing the index. This volume has been made available in open access format with the support of a TOME (“Towards an Open Manuscript Ecosystem”) award from Cornell University Library.

Colleagues at Cornell University’s Institute for Comparative Modernities (ICM) have provided sustained encouragement and advice over the years. Friend, mentor, and colleague Salah Hassan has been unfailing in his support for my academic, scholarly, and artistic work for over two decades. My colleagues at ICM, especially Esra Akcan, Fouad Makki, Natalie Melas, and Viranjini Munasinghe, have been enthusiastic in their support. I thank Daniel Bass, manager at the Cornell South Asia Program, for his work in bringing speakers and performers on South Asian music and cinema to campus. Bass is also a DJ of Monsoon Radio on WRFI 88.1 FM, keeping the South Asian film song regularly on air in Ithaca. Colleagues at the Department of History of Art have been very supportive of my research for many years and have provided a most hospitable environment for faculty and graduate students to research neglected and emerging areas in art and visual culture.

Research for this project was financially supported at Cornell by the Department of History of Art, the South Asia Program, and the Society for the Humanities. I am deeply grateful to Cornell University Library for making available materials from their own collections and through interlibrary services. Their services have been essential in finding rare publications from their own collections and those scattered in various libraries across North America. The American Institute of Pakistan Studies has assisted me in numerous ways in conducting research in Pakistan.

Above all, Elizabeth Dadi has been a constant partner in a scholarly and artistic engagement with cinema. Our collaborative art practice for over two decades owes much to our understanding of the cinematic as a mode of production and perception and as it unfolds in diverse genres and global sites. A selection of these projects can be found at our artistic website www.dadiart.net. Rehan Dadi assisted in multiple ways in research and over the years has enjoyed his exposure to the social and the masala film.

My mother, Dr. Shamim Dadi, was born in Bareilly and educated in Lucknow and at the Aligarh Muslim University, before moving to Karachi, where she attended Dow Medical College in the wake of the Partition in 1947. She worked for many years as a physician at the Lady Dufferin Hospital and subsequently established a private practice serving largely low-income and Afghan refugee communities. She was also a serious student of Hindustani classical music, with ustads who would come to our house every afternoon during the week for many years. She was also a devoted fan of cinema songs from the golden age of Bombay and Lahore. Throughout her adult life, she remained a vociferous critic of the destructive and divisive effects the Partition has had on society and culture in South Asia. This book is dedicated to her memory.

Chapter 1 (with minor changes) has been previously published in Lotte Hoek and Sanjukta Sunderason, eds., Forms of the Left: Left-Wing Aesthetics and Postcolonial South Asia (London: Bloomsbury, 2021). Chapter 4 is an expanded and revised version of the essay published earlier in Vazira Zamindar and Asad Ali, eds., Love, War & Other Longings: Essays on Cinema in Pakistan (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2019).