Building Pakistan and Filmmaking

Abstract

This, the second of two remarkable essays by Muhammad Hasan Askari (1919–1978) translated in this volume, was originally published in January 1949 during the second, Pakistani phase of Askari’s life and career. With it, his expansive canvass of cultural references is extended to encompass French documentary realism of the 1940s, early modern Indo-Persian Islamicate music and Indo-Muslim literary fiction, and cinema under colonialism. In contrast to his earlier piece on the usage of color in film, here Askari is concerned with cultural identity and thematic content rather than matters of form and aesthetics. His usual sophistication of thought is evident throughout the essay, which begins with a poignant anecdote from the aftermath of Partition, in which the question of who and what was to be considered Pakistani rose its head almost immediately, leading to confusion about such basic questions as the place of nonMuslim heritage—specifically, the statue of Ganga Ram, the defacement of which was subsequently written about by Saadat Hassan Manto in a typically ironic Partition sketch. Although Askari’s essay includes clear evidence that he envisaged an inclusive Pakistan where minorities and peripheries were to be brought on board the national project with the help of a diverse national cinema culture, his tendency to link post-colonial Pakistan to the recent and distant past of Muslims in South Asia somewhat unproblematically bears hints of early Pakistan’s Islamic cultural nationalism that alienated key figures associated with the Progressive Writers Movement. Askari’s patriotic certainty about what had to be done for the forging of a unified national identity clashed violently with Leftist ideals that stressed class conflict and solidarities beyond the nation, as Sadia Toor has documented in a recent study of the cultural Cold War which casts Askari in an altogether less flattering light than Mehr Afshan Farooqi’s sympathetic probing; both works make important contributions to recent lively debates on the early cultural history of Pakistan (Farooqi, 2012; Toor, 2011; see also Asdar Ali, 2011). Perhaps most striking, in terms of the essay’s relevance to contemporary debates in film history and theory, is the sense of outrage Askari appears to have felt about the stereotypical representation of Muslims in Hindi cinema before Partition. The Islamicate ethos of classical Indian cinema, he seems to suggest, had been restricted to shallow depictions of a premodern, decadent, and ornate courtly culture that was symbolic rather than genuinely representative of the lived experiences of flesh-and-blood Muslims. Askari thus foreshadows more recent controversies about the dynamics of Bombay cinema’s Hindu majoritarianism, whilst providing clues as to the roots of his ardent and uncharacteristic instrumentalism about the need for cinema to help build a cohesive Pakistan. However reasonable it may sound, the autocratic centralism with which it went on to become associated is cause for critical reflection on the general thrust of Askari’s argument. The very day after I arrived in Pakistan, I witnessed something astonishing. It was October. The violence had cooled down, but the threat of attacks on vehicles remained at all times. People’s minds Archives