Daily Times

In Travels of Bollywood Cinema: From Bombay to LA (edited by Anjali Gera Roy and Chua Beng Huat, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2012), the argument I have advanced in my article, The Lahore Film Industry, is that although Bombay, Calcutta and Madras emerged as filmmaking cities earlier than Lahore, the latter enjoyed an advantage and seemed poised to become the second most important filmmaking city. The reason was that while Bombay was the undisputed capital of Hindi-Urdu or rather Hindustani films, it was located far away from the Hindi-Urdu language heartland of northern India. Calcutta was essentially the cultural capital of the Bengali renaissance while Madras catered for the Tamil speaking audiences of southern India.

On the other hand, Punjabis were conversant in Hindustani, the actual lingua franca of northern India with linkages even in southern India such as Hyderabad Deccan (Tariq Rahman, From Hindi to Urdu, Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2011). Consequently, besides talented Urdu-speaking beautiful Punjabi men and women, who became the icons of mass audiences, a variety of Punjabi professionals were absorbed readily by the Bombay film industry. In the 1940s some very successful Urdu-language films were produced from Lahore. Among those were Khandaan, Khazanchi and Daasi. Such developments further enhanced the reputation of Lahore as a competitive film-making city. Khandaan was a Noorjahan-Pran starrer. The future bad man of Bombay (otherwise a thorough gentleman) Pran started his career in Lahore.

The growing Punjabi colony in Bombay consisted of K L Saigal, Prithviraj Kapoor and his sons, Shyam, Dilip Kumar (Hindko-speaking), Surinder, Karan Dewan, Dev Anand, Balraj Sahni and many others. Among female artistes from Punjab were Khurshid, Mumtaz Shanti, Veena (Tajour Sultana), Begum Para, Noorjahan, Meena Shori, Suraiya and Manorama (a Christian from Lahore). Kamini Kaushal had acted in one film in Bombay but not yet shifted to that city. Shyama (Khurshid Akhtar) of Baghbanpura outside Lahore was to make a name for herself in the 1950s but it is not clear when she arrived in Bombay.

AR Kardar moved to Bombay in the early 1940s where he established the Kardar Studios. Kardar’s assistant, fellow Bhaati Gate resident M Sadiq, actor Suresh (Nazim Ahmad) and many minor actors such as Amar (Dilip Kumar’s father in Mela), a Muslim young man also from the Walled City of Lahore, set up hearth and home in Bombay. Dev Anand’s elder brother Chetan Anand was also in Bombay.

Legendary singers Mohammad Rafi and Shamshad too shifted to Bombay in the early 1940s; music directors Jhandey Khan, Master Ghulam Haider, Pandit Amarnath and his brothers, the famous duo Hunslal-Bhagat Ram, Hans Raj Behl, Mohinder Singh, Feroz Nizami, Khurshid Anwar, Khayyam and Vinod (Eric Roberts) were part of the growing Punjabi music community in Bombay.

Ghulam Haider transformed film music by introducing Punjabi beats and tempo. He was undoubtedly one of the greatest innovators in film music. Vinod composed the famous hit song Lara Lappa Lara Lappa lyee rakhda/ Additappa, additappa payee rakhda. Another Punjabi stalwart among music directors in Bombay who began his career in Lahore was Shyam Sunder, whose immortal songs in films such as Gaon ki Gori (1945), Lahore (1948) and Bazaar (1949) have earned him a lasting place in the annals of Hindi film music. Both Vinod and Shyam Sunder died young.

Directors Kidar Sharma and OP Dutta, script and story writers Saadat Hasan Manto and Krishan Chander; lyricists Qamar Jalalabadi (Om Prakash), DN Madokh and Tanveer Naqvi started in Lahore and then went to Bombay. Songwriter and music director Prem Dhawan studied in the FC College and then went to Bombay. Many artistes worked in both places.

The rioting of 1947 set in motion irreversible, irrevocable migration. B R. Chopra and I S Johar were planning films in a big way for Lahore but had to run for their lives. Ramanand Sagar left in July, so did Gulshan Rai. Character actor Om Prakash (of Fateh Din fame, an all-time favourite skit relayed for years by Radio Lahore), comedian-bad man Jeevan and many others also left Lahore for Bombay. O P Nayyar recorded his immortal song Preetam Aan Milo/ Dukhia Jiya Bullai, Aan Milo at the His Master’s Voice studio in Lahore. He left Lahore only in 1948 when it became clear that people with the wrong religion were not going to return to their homes on either side of the Punjab. Writer Rajinder Singh Bedi escaped, sitting on top of a railway carriage carrying loads of Hindus and Sikhs out of Lahore. Song-writer Naqsh Lyallpuri began his literary career in Lahore as a journalist but had to leave in 1947. Punjabi singers, the sisters Surinder Kaur and Prakash Kaur, and Pushpa Hans also left Lahore.

Migration in the other direction also took place. Nazir and his wife Suranlata, Noorjahan and her husband Shaukat Husain Rizvi, character actor Alauddin and many others headed for Lahore. Manto came in January 1948, music directors Ghulam Haider and Khurshid Anwar followed some years later and director M. Sadiq probably in 1969 or 1970. Meena Shori, Khurshid and Mumtaz Shanti also immigrated to Lahore. Some Pakistani actors in Lahore continued to use Hindu filmic names. Santosh Kumar (Musa Raza) and Sudhir (Shah Zaman), the two most famous heroes of the 1950s and 60s represented such practice. On both sides, initially considerable goodwill existed between the two film communities.

Some families were divided. Thus for example, while Nazir shifted to Lahore, his nephew K. Asif stayed on in Bombay. Kardar stayed on but his brother Nusrat Kardar and son Rauf Kardar returned to Lahore. While Suraiya, her mother and grandmother settled in Bombay, many of her other relatives shifted to Lahore. Rafi stayed on to reign supreme in Bombay while his parents and siblings were in Lahore.

There were some cross-religion marriages that created peculiar challenges. Raj Kapoor’s maama (maternal uncle) Mr Mehra married a Muslim, converted to Islam and stayed in Lahore. A unique case of reverse migration took place as well: poet Sahir Ludhianvi (Abdul Hai) left Lahore for India. I will be taking up some of these stories in the forthcoming articles. The Lahore-Bombay connection was not snapped entirely notwithstanding the politics of confrontation that soon afterwards ensued between Pakistan and India. Rather it resurrected from time to time.

The writer has a PhD from Stockholm University. He is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science, StockholmUniversity. He is also Honorary Senior Fellow of the Institute of South AsianStudies, National University of Singapore. His latest publication is: The Punjab Bloodied, Partitioned and Cleansed: Unravelling the 1947 Tragedy through Secret British Reports and First-Person Accounts (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2012; New Delhi: Rupa Books, 2011). He can be reached atbillumian@gmail.com