I am, like, BARELY qualified to write this. I read a couple articles, I did a grad school seminar that discussed Pakistan history, and I’ve seen maybe a half dozen Pakistani films. So really, not a lot of knowledge! Any less and I would refuse to write this at all. I encourage you to go out and learn from others, and to comment and teach me more if you know more, this is just a starting point.

Non-Usual Disclaimer: Please please correct me if I say something factually wrong, and add on additional information as you have it in the comments. This is a new topic for me and I am not an expert.

I’m gonna start with basic Pakistan information, in case you need it (those of you who already know basic stuff, feel free to skip). In the ramp up to Independence of India, there was a group called the Muslim League who represented the interests of the Muslim minority community within the independence movement. The leader of the Muslim League was Muhammed Ali Jinnah, a brilliant man. He and Nehru and other leaders met with Lord Mountbatten (the last Viceroy) to figure out what the map of a non-British South Asia would look like. Somehow, because of mistakes and rushes to decisions and pressure from outside, what ended up happening was that South Asia was split in half, “India” became what we now have, and “Pakistan” was a made-up word used to describe the area to the west and east where there was a Muslim majority population. If you look at the original map and think “what a weird weird way to arrange two countries”, you are a wise person who has immediately grasped the issue. As we all know, this rushed decision lead to the greatest mass migration in human history, and hundreds of thousands of deaths, as everyone sorted themselves within their new national borders.

Pakistan post-Independence struggled to find an identity, just as India did. There was a large group of Marxists and communists, another group that was committed to capitalism, feudal powers in the rural areas who had no interest in giving up their control, and the Army. It was also torn between the West, America who was its new buddy, and the older trading ties to the fellow Muslim countries of the middle east. And there was the constant difficulties with East Pakistan, where most of the development was located and none of the central government powers. In 1971, East Pakistan broke off and became Bangladesh. By this point, the biggest power in Pakistan had turned out to be the army. The army owned factories, stores, everything. Along with having the best and most prestigious positions in the government. It wasn’t a matter of brutal violence taking control, it was that the best and the brightest people, technology, everything was increasingly within the Army as other areas of society lagged behind. In 1977, the head of the Army officially took control of the government and, at the same time, began to make the country increasingly religious.

Something to keep in mind with Pakistan, and really all countries, is the difference between religion and culture. Pakistan has dowries, has forced marriages, and has honor killings. None of those things are Islamic. They are cultural. And they vary greatly place to place, family to family, even village to village. On the other hand, the drive towards religion in the 1970s and 80s cut Pakistan off from other cultures and stopped the progress that could have helped with their social issues. And the country itself, instead of a drive towards education and science and the future, began to focus more internally on a drive towards religion. The social issues are related to the religious reforms, but not caused by them.

Since the 1970s, Pakistani politics have gone through many many upsets, I won’t try to list them all. But through out it all there has remained a deep desire for democracy, for freedom, for progress. I’ll put it this way. While Indian politicians over and over again point to the villages of India and the old ways as what the country should be doing, Pakistani politicians look to the cities and to new ways. With a strong helping of religion on top, of course.

The Lahore film industry pre-dates 1947 and the creation of Pakistan and India. But in the early years, it suffered from constant talent drain down to Bombay and the Hindi industry. The Hindi industry was largely founded by Urdu speakers. The ability to speak Urdu fluently translates to an ability to speak Hindi with greater beauty and precision. Dilip Kumar, for instance, got his first break as an actor largely because he could speak Urdu. In the same way, the Urdu poets (like Javed Akhtar) were in high demand within the Hindi industry for dialogue writing and song lyrics. It wasn’t that speaking the Urdu dialect allowed you to navigate in the Hindi industry as well as if you spoke Hindi, it was that it allowed you to navigate BETTER than if you spoke only Hindi. And so the people from the northern parts of Punjab up into the hills flowed down into Bombay and created the industry we know today, full of tall pale-skinned people named “Khan”.

But some folks stayed in Lahore. It was their home, after all. And a little film industry sprung up pre-1947 and continued to struggle along. After Partition, suddenly it changed. The talent that had flowed down to Bombay, flowed back to Lahore, at least a little bit. And the audience for their films suddenly massively expanded from the small local market of Urdu speakers-who-weren’t-interested-in-the-latest-Hindi-release that they used to capture.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaVI4U1Trtw

(Noor Jahan, arguably the greatest singer ever to come out of South Asia, was born in what is now Pakistani Punjab. She went to Calcutta and then Bombay as a small child, persuing a career in film. She became a major actress in the 1940s, but moved from Bombay to Pakistan after partition. She was the first female movie director in Urdu cinema and starred in 14 films (10 Urdu and 4 Punjabi) post partition before retiring as an actress to focus on singing. She married and divorced twice and had 6 children, was honored by the government of both India and Pakistan for her contributions, and was considered by Lata Mangeshkar herself as the superior singer.)

Pakistan in 1947 had 6 major ethnic groups. There were the Bengalis and the Punjabis, who had been living in the northern half of the Bengal and Punjab regions and were cut off from the southern half by Partition. There were the Sindhis and the Pashtos who had always lived separated from what was now India, north of the Punjab region. And there were the Balochs, a minority community with ties to what is now Iran. And post-partition, there were the Muhajirs, the refugees from India who clung together in urban areas.

All of this should be familiar if you have previously read about the history of India and language (for instance, on my post here). Like India, Pakistan is a loose collection of ethnic and language groups. And like India, multiple film industries sprang into being in the new country to reflect these multiple groups.

The Urdu film industry is the one that was most closely tied with the Bombay industry, and like the Bombay industry, it was the one that became the default “national” industry, despite not using a language that was common. Only 7% of people in Pakistan speak Urdu as their first language. But most of that 7% are located within cities, meaning near movie theaters and probably with disposable cash income. Moreover, Urdu was the shared language of the Muhajirs, the refugees who rapidly grew within the industry post-Independence.

The Urdu industry grew by leaps and bounds post-1947 and then got another big boost after the 1965 conflict when Pakistan stopped importing Hindi films. Soon, there was an actual distinctive style for Urdu films. They were romantic, lyrical, pretty. Handsome young heroes and pretty young heroines singing beautiful songs to each other. A fairy tale kind of world.

But Urdu films weren’t the only options. The Punjabi industry in Pakistan was growing almost as rapidly, Punjabi being by far the majority language in the country. The Punjabi films were a bit raunchy, funny, rough. And there was a small Baloch film industry too, those movies got a reputation for being extremely rough, almost pornographic. And finally, the Pashto industry. The Balochi and Pashto industries were late comers, arriving in the 1970s, with only a few films a year. But the Urdu and Punjabi industries were giants, especially Punjabi.

Lahore, in Pakistan, was the capital of the Punjabi industry since the 1920s. Post-partition, while the Indian half struggled to survive, the Pakistani half of the industry exploded. Urdu and Punjabi films moved forward in Pakistan together, one attracting the urban audience the other the rural (with the expected mixing of the two along the edges).

Pakistan itself in the early years was also a bit of a mix. Within the country the forces of capitalism, socialism, and Islam all struggled for a place, along with the confusions of these various ethnic groups and extremely varied geography trying to find their place. The Muhajir community in particular struggled, people who had come from places of established power in colonial India now trying to carve out their own space in a new country.

The first big moment of shattering came with the split of East Pakistan into Bangladesh in 1971. Followed by the coupe in 1977. Suddenly the Urdu film industry, and films in general, came under attack as irreligious and wrong. Movie theaters were burned or forcibly closed in cities. The Urdu industry, a decades old industry, was almost dead within years. Meanwhile, the Punjabi industry survived, their rural viewers did not care about the political upsets and fight for a pure Islamic nation, they just wanted to watch movies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBa85mH2dXY

By the 1990s, the Lahore Urdu industry was essentially dead. Almost no one was making films any more, and there were no theaters to screen them anyway. But then, you can’t really kill art, it will always find a way. Kerachi, the city by the sea, the place of artists, discovered digital camera technology. Slowly through the late 90s into the early 2000s more and more artists used this new technology to create their visions and the Kerachi short film community was born, the community that eventually developed into a new birth of Urdu cinema.

There was something else far more important happening in the 70s and 80s, something that started with one woman who has probably had more influence on Pakistani culture than any other woman in Pakistan. Haseena Moin, a young teacher in Karachi who wrote radio plays in her free time, was asked to try writing a television drama for the Karachi based state channel in 1969. Her first serial was an adaptation, as were all Pakistani TV dramas at that point. Pakistani TV followed a format of taking a famous novel and turning it into a limited number of episodes with an original script. But Haseena changed that with her second drama, Kiran Kahani, the first fully original script for any Pakistani TV drama ever.

Haseena wrote 34 separate serials, and 19 telefilms between 1969 and 2012. Her work had beautiful dialogue, complex plots, and (most importantly) complex complicated female leads. While the movie industry was dying outside, within homes Pakistani families were introduced to a world of working woman, true love stories, divorce, economic injustice, moral ambiguities, personal growth, unclear gender roles, and all the other ways that art could open minds and open a society. Her serials had plots such as a woman obsessed with making money to buy back her ancestral home, who ends up isolated from her family after achieving career success. Or, a frivolous young woman at her first job torn between the local boy she does not respect and her new boss who she slowly comes to love despite him being married. Or, a young female medical student who fights for respect from her male supervisor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gGwd9gVD94Y

( Oh oh! The young medical student one is on youtube with subtitles! Let us all now give up the next 20 hours of our lives and watch it, and then reconvene and try to understand why women’s hair looked like that in the 80s. )

Another important part of popular culture in Pakistan is the music, the live performances and recordings and the TV shows. While in India the playback singers are hidden away, in Pakistan most of the actors have a history as musicians. And the music based TV shows such as “Coke Studios” have massive audiences

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=af9RjcwwDCE

(I don’t think I can oversell the importance of Nazia Hassan, a Pakistani teenager who sang this song and became a mega star through out South Asia, through out the whole world. She and her brother had their on music TV show on Pakistani television, before she married, had a child, divorced, started working for human rights with Unicef, and then died of cancer at 35)

The slow rebirth of the Urdu film industry, and quietly brilliant Telefilms of the Urdu television, came together in 2011 with the movie Bol. Directed by Shaiob Mansoor, who came out of a TV tradition, it brings with it the female focus and groundbreaking social statements of the serials, along with the new workers of the Pakistani film industry. It is the story of a woman, oldest daughter of 6, and brings in issues of prostitution, Hijras, love marriages, and most of all, a woman’s right to choose what she wants with her own body (early in the film, a middle-aged woman who is trapped in an endless cycle of pregnancies has a secret tubal ligation).

That same year, Humsafar released on Pakistani Television and initiated a new kind of golden era of TV. The high quality writing and performances were nothing new, but what changed was the audience and the budget. With the arrival of satellite television, suddenly Pakistani serials were available through out the world. They had always had an international audience among the diaspora who struggled for VHS tapes and fuzzy long distance broadcasts, but now they found an entirely new audience outside the diaspora, in India and in the middle-east and even in countries like America and Russia. Humsafar was the first major success, after that the budgets and promotions for subsequent serials went up and up.

The television industry which in the 1980s and 90s helped to kill the films, by providing a safer easier alternative, is now helping them come back to life. The stars who came out of TV drive interest in these new films, not just within Pakistan but all over the world. Of course, the films themselves are also of a wonderful quality level. The Urdu tradition of film gives them beautiful words, the Pakistani music scene can provide wonderful songs (I think the Teefa in Trouble soundtrack may be the best one of 2018 in India or Pakistan), and the strong complex characters and situations from the TV shows. Plus a spattering of fun silliness from the Punjabi film industry.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve got! And I know it really isn’t everything, or even close to everything, that you need to know. But hopefully people in the comments can help to clear up the rest.