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It is not often that a solitary article spawns two international seminars, and two excellent edited volumes. But Mukul Kesavan is exactly the kind of thinker who can set off big intellectual currents with throwaway remarks. His 1994 article Urdu, Awadh and the Tawaif: the Islamicate roots of Hindi Cinema provided the impetus for Ira Bhaskar and Richard Allen’s 2009 collection Islamicate Cultures of Bombay Cinema which studied Bombay cinema through the lens of the “Muslim Social, the Historical, the Courtesan film and the new wave Muslim social.’ It was critiqued for “confounding the very motivation of Kesavan’s article” which had maintained that the very nature of Bombay cinema, and not just some genres or aspects of it, had been determined by an Indo-Muslim or Islamicate culture. This latest, comprehensive collection is a response to that critique, and emerged out of a workshop in 2009 in the New York University, Abu Dhabi.

The cinema produced by Bombay, sometimes known as Bollywood, today faces its acutest existential crisis. The assault is not only technological viz the rise of digital platforms, or the debilitating popularity of films from the South and from Hollywood, but ideological. It is daily discredited and assaulted for its liberalism, its apparently anti-Hindu content, and for the Muslims who dominate it. I follow some twitter handles dedicated to “exposing” Bollywood, sometimes disparagingly dubbed “Urduwood”, and not a day goes by when the industry and its icons are not demeaned. We saw this heady counter revolution and blood lust on national prime time when Sushant Singh Rajput’s death became a pretext for all and sundry to take down the whole industry. Bollywood is losing not just its sheen, or numbers, it already seems to have lost its iqbal, the prestige that briefly made filmmakers and actors more than stars-- trendsetters, opinion makers, influencers. Therefore it is supremely ironic, and also consoling, to read a collection of articles celebrating Bombay cinema’s Islamicate roots.

The term Islamicate, coined by Marshal Hodgson, is used to describe cultures and aspects of culture influenced by Islam which are not necessarily Islamic, or Islamist, like ghazal poetry, or qawwali. Kesavan’s contention was that not just the themes, but the very nature of the films made in Bombay, especially in depiction of scenes of love, dialogues and ways of comportment was Islamicate. I shall add my two bits to this by highlighting the deep, pervasive, and abiding presence of the notion of sharafat, and of sharif people in many different kinds of films, across the ages. In Awara, Prithviraj Kapoor asserts, “Sharifon ki aulad hamesha sharif hoti hai... aur chor daaku ki aulad hamesha chor daaku hoti hai.” In Deewar Amitabh Bachhan curtly informs Iftekhar, “Main aaj bhi phenke huwe paise nahi uthata, Dawar Saheb” but the idiom and the expression are here still laced with the language of sharafat, an Islamicate value par excellence. It is a notion of comportment, of upbringing, conduct and exemplary behaviour which continues to imbue a family/protagonist with values, even in these blighted times. How this notion of sharafat interacts with the notion of sahebi needs pondering.

In its early years, much of Bombay cinema, and of other regions, adopted the conventions and tropes which were first developed by Parsi Theatre whose heyday lasted from roughly 1870 to the 1930s. The late Kathryn Hansen, who devoted many years to studying it, writes here about how Parsi and Gujarati stage entrepreneurs were drawn to Urdu, which had already seen an indigenous theatrical success under Wajid Ali Shah’s patronage in Awadh. The production, a musical pageant by Amanat Ali called Inder Sabha became so successful that it evolved into a genre unto itself. Hansen maintains that Urdu poetry’s oral, performative tradition, and the use of rhymed speech in Dastangoi and Qissagoi traditions made it an attractive language for a stage without mikes. The rhyming refrains and the stylised delivery contained in Urdu performative culture were more suited for voice projection and bodily contortions. This was so especially in proscenia where even the expensive boxes were some distance from the stage. It was Parsi theatre that first developed the genres of the mythological, the musical, the historical, the Muslim social, the Persianate love stories and others. It was unabashedly hybrid and was so successful that companies would hire entire trains to themselves, attract viewers by the thousands, and its biggest performers commanded a higher price and more star power than film stars. Its musical conventions later passed into cinema.

Sunil Sharma writes about the popularity of films inspired by Persianate literary traditions ie the stories of Shirin Farhad, Laila Majnun, Rustam Sohrab and of Alexander the Great. Many of these were Persian masnavis, long narrative poems, by such stalwarts as Amir Khusrau, Nizami and Firdousi. But they proved immensely popular with Indian audiences. At least nine Laila Majnun films were made in the six decades after 1920, including the first Malay film called Leila Majnun in 1933 by BS Rajhans of the Motilal Chemical Company of Bombay. Numerous films were also made on Shirin Farhad, the archetypal lovers, and on other themes from Firdousi’s great epic Shahnama. Prithviraj Kapoor’s Sikandar e Azam was a monstrous hit, as were several films on Rustam, especially by Dara Singh, who was bestowed the title Rustam-e Hind for his wrestling feats. Later, Dara Singh appeared in a series of Rustam films which had nothing to do with the Persianate original. Some of these films were dubbed in Persian to be shown in Iran and other places and the earliest Iranian films were also made in India. The ability to discern Persian from Arabic, non-Muslim Iranian from Muslim was seemingly, never a concern for these films or audiences. Some of the earliest editions of the Arabian Nights, in the original Arabic, were published in India and they generated a genre unto themselves.

These Persianate films were different from the genre of the Oriental. Rosie Thomas writes that the key to “India’s oriental fantasy film was its setting within an imaginary world outside India. Although sometimes coded as quasi Arabian and/or ancient Iranian, this was in fact a hybrid never-never land.” The story of Ali Baba was especially popular right from the beginning and Rosie suggests that India’s first full-length feature film could well have been Hiralal Sen’s Alibaba in 1904. India’s first gramophone recording of 1902 by Soshi Mukhi and Fano Bala comprised song extracts from popular theatre shows of the time, including Ali Baba. Tales from the Arabian Nights were long a staple of British and European theatre, but the Indian filmmakers drew “eclectically on both transcultural orientalist trends and local traditions.” They drew upon a Hollywood genre of music called “Arab Spice”, which was not Arab music, but Arab music as presented by Hollywood. Homi Wadia, of Nadia, the Hunterwali fame, recalls spending hours watching sets of Oriental films produced in Europe. Scalloped arches, Arab spice music, international look, the Ali Baba films inspired such high brow artists as Modhu and Sadhona Bose, sometime associates of Tagore, as well as low brow and popular films such as made by Wadia Movietone. This exotic orient is set somewhere to the West of India but can easily be domiciled in India’s cultural traditions. Thomas delineates its registers as “international orientalist” (seen as Modern), “Urdu Islamicate” (seen as regressive) and Bombay mainstream, but here the Islamicate is really stretched and segues into the Orientalist. It could thus appear international and modern, but also nationalist and traditional.

Shikha Jhingan writes with elegance about the rise of the ghazal in Hindi cinema, with the coming of sound, and its textual, musical and sonic journey. KL Sehgal was the first artist to produce independent records of ghazals by Ghalib and other poets, and his success influenced his persona and performance on screen. When he sang ghazals, his voice was the dominant part of the musical ensemble, thus allowing the lyrics to assume supremacy, but lyrics which were presented throbbing with life. Later, singers like Talat Mahmood and Rafi assumed that role for Dilip Kumar, and others, whose looks and films allowed the lyrics of the ghazal to dominate the music in the vibrating timbre of Talat Mahmood’s voice. Mehdi Hasan recalled once that his career was launched after he chose to sing two of Talat mahmood’s ghazals at a concert in Rawalpindi. He notes, “It was through the vocals of Talat saab, that I discovered the gold mine in my throat. It was some time in 1952, when Dilip Kumar was as much the tragedy king to the people in India as to us in Pakistan. And Talat saab those days was the voice of the great lover. These two, Talat and Dilip left a lasting impression on me in my early years.”

Jhingan writes also about the performative way in which these songs were picturised, as if a mehfil was in progress with listeners who participate with gusto. Sometimes the audience is incorporated in the mehfil too as the melancholy ghazal style took over. The radio too was adapted to the style of the mehfil. Jhingan quotes Ravikant to mention the “cross-over” of different entertainment forms between print media, gramophone recordings, live performances, Parsi theatre, cinema and the radio. One reason why ghazal singing became a genre unto itself in film music was because the gramophone industry preferred to work with individual singing artistes like Gauhar Jan, Zohra Begum, Kali Jan, Inayat Khan Pathan, Miss Dulari and others, encouraging them to present their repertoire in diverse genres.

Ira Bhaskar contributes an excellent essay on the popularity of qawwali in cinema and how it continues to straddle the delicate boundary between divine love and its profane, earthly version. She shows how the dargah has been central to qawwali presentation through the years, but also how qawwali was adapted for cinema, how it morphed into a singing competition between men and women, and how the audience within the film interacted with the gaze of the camera and the gaze of the audience in the cinema hall, as well as the audience who were the auditors within the scene in the film. Analysing films such as Fiza, Veer Zara and Dil Se, she writes how the “Sufi qawwali evokes an entire emotional, imaginal, devotional, and ideological realm that crucially generates a different set of associations about Islam from those that associate it with militancy or terrorism.” And now we have Sufiyana singing, and qawwali style songs, which deviate fundamentally from the original impulses of a qawwali and seem more to be a source of kinetic, visual and aural pleasure, which has been described as “hedonistic sexualised fantasy but [with the] simultaneous consumption of both pleasure and devotion.”

This book comprises many excellent articles, of which I only mention a few. There is an incisive study of Shantaram’s Jhanak Jhanak Payal Baje by Philip Lutgendorf, where he shows the purposive elision of Urdu and the figure of the tawaif. Lutgendorf demonstrates that Shantaram’s ideological views were based on a “master narrative constructed by Oriental scholars such as Sir William Jones, that the contemporary Indian music and dance, were but the degraded versions of ancient, Brahmin-inspired and temple-based performance traditions, now wholly lost. These theories were adopted by 19th century Indian Nationalist reformers, the majority of whom were from upper caste Hindu backgrounds.” Richard Allen writes about the poetics of parda and its depiction in films down the ages. Shohini Ghosh presents an excellent study of Salman Khan and his passionate appeal, especially to the Muslim underclass. Ranjani Mazumdar proffers a superb, theory-laced analysis of conspiracy films centering around terrorism and surveillance such as Aamir, A Wednesday, and Anurag Kashyap’s Black Friday, and teases out the Islamophobia that characterises these films. Ghosh provides a quote from the brilliant film scholar Ravi Vasudevan, who says:

“Bombay popular cinema with its strong pedagogic insistence is able to capture the transitions in the cognitive map more powerfully than art of parallel cinema. The latter speaks a language of conscientisation in order to strengthen a civil social discourse of reasoned representation, communication and debate whereas the power of popular cinema lies precisely in outflanking such a discursive terrain.”

Urdu still deeply influences Bombay cinema, as it has done for nearly a century. Urdu poets and writers dominated its writing, they created the character of the self-destructive poet (as in Pyaasa and Devdas, or many of Amitabh Bachchan’s characters), the lyrics, the dialogues, the songs of Bombay cinema have all been shaped by the Urdu literary culture. This happened in part because Urdu was already a lingua franca in the 19th century, had been a predominantly urban language, its poetic tradition was already performative, and it is the language of romance par excellence. The word shayrana exactly expresses the modes associated with Urdu, something that tugs at your heart. Like all stereotypes, and archetypes, there is an underbelly to this, but the success of the progressive movement in Urdu, and its angst ridden writings also allowed Urdu to become a critical censorious voice to itself (for instance in Sahir Ludhiyanvi’s Taj Mahal poem which castigates the monument and its maker) and thus it could appropriate the dissent too.

This is an excellent book about Indian cinema, especially its tremendous hybrid roots before independence, many of which were uncontainable even within the Congress-style inclusive secularism. My only quibble is that there is no mention here of the consumers, the people who watched these films, who gushed about them, who wrote farmaishes to the radio, who wrote fan letters and watched films 10 times over, first day first show included. What did they make of it all? Be that as it may, at a moment when its Islamicate roots seem more of an embarrassment to Bombay, I wonder how long before these associations become anathema, even unmentionable. Only last week, my sister-in-law sent me a video containing vox populi where Shah Rukh, Aamir and Salman are abused, and people hatefully assert their intention to boycott their films. Where we go from here at a time of RRRs and Rajamoulis and KGFs is difficult to tell. On the other hand, a recent cover of Mehdi Hasan’s famous ghazal Mujhe Tum Nazar Se Gira to Rahe Ho by two young Indians Lisa Mishra and Adarsh Gaurav has rapidly amassed 9.9 lakh views on YouTube. There is that too.

Mahmood Farooqui’s latest work is Dastan-e Raza, a Dastangoi presentation on the life and times of Syed Haider Raza, one of the greatest painters produced by modern India.

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