Lineages of Pakistan’s ‘Urdu’ cinema: mode, mood and genre in Zehr-e Ishq / Poison of Love (1958)

Abstract

The impossibility of fully disentangling cinemas identified as ‘Hindi’ from those designated ‘Urdu’ presents very specific challenges to the task of situating Pakistani Urdu cinema as an object of scholarly study. Although my intention is to address cinema from Pakistan after 1947, the persistence of intimate connections between Pakistani ‘Urdu’ cinema and Indian ‘Hindi’ cinema means linguistic labels tend to obscure important aspects of mutual imbrication. As an industrial form seeking mass address, it is debatable whether it is even possible to identify cinema produced in Bombay, Lahore and other sites as recognizably ‘Hindi’ or ‘Urdu’, either before or after 1947. A broader notion of cinema from South Asia that deploys Urdu would include numerous films from the 1930s to the 1970s from a number of production centres. Even before the onset of the talkies in 1931 in colonial India, commercial cinema from Bombay (that which is commonly labeled as ‘Hindi’ cinema) had long utilized writers and poets who wrote screenplays and songs in the Urdu script or deployed rhetoric associated with Urdu, but in a register that did not seek to foreground its separateness from Hindi. The two languages may be understood as marking inflections in a greater Indian linguistic register (written in separate scripts), where the move from sameness to difference in spoken language is modulated by habit but also by deliberate choices in vocabulary and rhetoric.