South Asian Filmscapes

New political realities and shared histories connect film cultures across borders

In South Asia massive anticolonial movements in the twentieth century created nation-states and reset national borders, forming the basis for emerging film cultures. Following the upheaval of the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 and the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971, new national cinemas promoted and reinforced prevailing hierarches of identity and belonging. At the same time, industrial and independent cinemas contributed to remarkably porous and hybrid film cultures, reflecting the intertwining of South Asian histories and their reciprocal cultural influences. This cross-fertilization within South Asian cultural production continues today.

South Asian Filmscapes excavates these complex politics and poetics of bordered identity and crossings through selected histories of cinema in South Asia. Several essays reveal ways in which fixed notions of national identity have been destabilized by the cross-border mobility of filmed arts and practitioners, while others interrogate how filmic politics intersects with discourses of nationalism, sexuality and gender, religion, and language. Together, they offer a fluid approach to the multiple histories and encounters that conjure “South Asia” as a geographic and political entity in the region and globally through a cinematic imagination.

Elora Halim Chowdhury is professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston and author of Transnationalism Reversed: Women Organizing Against Gendered Violence in Bangladesh. Esha Niyogi De is a lecturer in English at UCLA and author of Empire, Media, and the Autonomous Woman: A Feminist Critique of Postcolonial Thought.

Introduction. Transregional Archives, Cinematic Encounters: Filmscapes across South Asia

Elora Halim Chowdhury and Esha Niyogi De

Part I: Nations and Regional Margins

1.) National Identity and Cinematic Representation: Independent Films in Bangladesh

Fahmidul Haq

2.) Female Friendship and Forbidden Desire: Two Films from 1960s Pakistan

Kamran Asdar Ali

3.) Bringing Back Sikhs after the 1984 Pogrom: The Politics of Picturization in Hindi Cinema

Amit Ranjan

4.) Silencing Films from the Chittagong Hill Tracts: Indigenous Cinema’s Challenge to the Imagined Cultural Homogeneity of Bangladesh

Glen Hill and Kabita Chakma

5.) Pakistan, History, and Sleep: Hassan Tariq, a Progressive Patriarch, and Neend

Nasreen Rehman

Part II: Transregional Crossings

6.) The Public in the Cities: Detouring through Cinemas of Bombay, Calcutta, and Lahore (1920s–1930s)

Madhuja Mukherjee

7.) Cross-Wing Filmmaking: East Pakistani Urdu Films and Their Traces in the Bangladesh Film Archive

Lotte Hoek

8.) Action Heroines and Regional Gifts: Authorship Crossing Pakistan

Esha Niyogi De

9.) Realism and Region in South Indian Cinemas, 1947–1977

Hariprasad Athanickal

10.) "This Is London, Not Pakistan!": Articulations of the Diaspora in Pakistani Punjabi Film

Gwendolyn S. Kirk

11.) The Birth of a Cinema in Post-9/11 Pakistan

Zebunnisa Hamid

Part III: Fractured Geographies, South Connectivities

12.) Zahir Raihan's Stop Genocide (1971): A Dialectical Cinematic Message to the World

Fahmida Akhter

13.) Gender, War, and Resistance: The Case of Kashmir

Alka Kurian

14.) Cinema That Raises a Critical Consciousness: The Films of Alamgir Kabir

Naadir Junaid

15.) Ethical Encounters: Friendship and Healing in Contemporary Films about the Bangladesh Liberation War

Elora Halim Chowdhury

Contributors

Index