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Decades of political divide and wars have failed to check the love for Indian THE streets of Anarkali Bazaar in Lahore are always crowded, teeming with people shopping for jewelry, clothes, and carpets; all this is what the bazaar has been famous for since its beginnings about 200 years back. In one prominent corner of the bazaar, called Paan Mandi, sits a paanwala, Aatiq, who has been making paan for the 30 years and traces his presence at Anarkali to his family who, he claims, were paanwalas for the Mughal emperors when they made Lahore an important cultural and political centre of the Indian subcontinent.
In my recent trip to Lahore, I went to visit Aatiq, who specialises in Lakhnavi and Benarsi style of making paan, and was not surprised to listen to him play a CD in his shop of Lata Mangeshkar’s songs and bhajans. During my earlier visits, Aatiq had confided that he was an ardent fan of the Mangeshkar sisters and, like many of his countrymen and women, grew up on a diet of Hindi films and songs. Despite five decades of hostilities between the countries, Pakistanis continue to enjoy Bollywood and its cultural products. Every attempt by Islamabad to deny its people access to Indian entertainment has been a dismal failure, as Aatiq himself testifies. Bollywood films, soap operas, film songs and Indian pop groups have been the staple entertainment diet of majority of the Pakistani society. "Pakistan’s link with Indian films is not new," says Nadeem Omar Tarar, Professor of Media Studies at Lahore Art College, "Every Saturday, for years, people have lined up video rental shops all over Pakistan because that is the day new Hindi films, released all over India on Friday, hit the markets in Pakistan, smuggled most of the time via Dubai." What is ironic, says Tarar, even highly patriotic Indian films, sometimes clearly anti-Pakistan, get enthusiastic release and reception; films like Fanaa and Mission Kashmir have done well in the healthy and booming black market. It is not unusual to see posters of the latest Bollywood films plastered on public spaces and young men on sidewalks selling bootlegged copies of old and new Hindi films.
After the 1965 war, the Pakistan government imposed a ban on screening Indian films and the 1970s continued to be a tumultuous decade for Pakistan. First came the war with India over the formation of Bangladesh and then Zia-ul-Haq era and the so-called Islamisation of culture during which anything even remotely related to entertainment was considered "anti-Islamic". The scenario began to change in the 1980s, first with the advent and easy accessibility to VCD and internet, and the establishment of the cable industry in the 1990s. It is against this backdrop that Pakistan witnessed an unprecedented agitation by cable operators in 2006 in support of their demand for lifting of the ban on Indian entertainment channels. Though the agitation quickly fizzled, it was a unique moment: a country, which had historically defined its identity by its anti-India stance, witnessed a strike for Indian entertainment. With the legalisation of the cable industry in 2000, Pakistan Television (PTV), which had thus far total monopoly in the television industry, gave way to the presence of private channels uplinked from outside of Pakistan but catering to Pakistani and diasporic audiences. These private channels, like ARY and Indus which operate from London and Geo TV uplinked from Dubai, are struggling to establish their own identity and in their desperate bid for audiences have began airing Indian look-alike programs (one genre which seemed to agree with audiences on both sides of the border is the indomitable Kyunki saas bhi kabhi bahu thi). During my visit there, I went to watch What’s your Raashee?, a Bollywood movie, at the newly built cinema in Lahore’s up-scale DHA locality. Despite the threat of suicide bombings, the nine p.m. show on a weekday drew packed audiences of university students, working professionals and well-to-do failies who filled the nicely designed hall. In 2008, Pakistan government finally allowed for theatrical release and exhibition of limited number of Bollywood films. The mood in the hall was almost festive. I watched as youngsters whistled and hummed to the familiar tunes of the film, men and women clapped at the dialogue, and tapped their feet during the dance sequences. It seemed that the decades of political divide, wars, and religious animosity had vanished in the darkness of the movie theatre.
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