Contemporary South Asia 15(4), (December, 2006) 453–471

Partition and Punjabiyat in Bombay

cinema: the cinematic perspectives
of Yash Chopra and others
SRIJANA MITRA DAS

ABSTRACT Focusing on the post-1947 cinematic depiction of Punjabis by the director Yash
Chopra and other commercial Mumbai filmmakers, this article examines the self-censorship
applied by them in the presentation of what is termed ‘Punjabiyat’, or sense of being Punjabi.
The silence surrounding the Partition of Punjab has led to the construction of a curious
Punjabi world almost exclusively occupied by Hindu Khatris, and the near-non-representation
or demonising of Sikh and Muslim ‘Others’. The discussion considers the emergence of this
Punjabiyat and situates its implications for understanding the history of Partition, Punjabi
identity and contemporary South Asian politics.

This article explores the post-1947 cinematic depiction of Punjabis in financially

successful hit films by director Yash Chopra and other commercial filmmakers in
the Mumbai film industry (or Bollywood) of India. The article discusses important
cinematic themes and background factors such as cultural heritage, regional pride,
strategic colonial discourse, dislocation and re-settlement, and powerful post-
colonial political dramas used by filmmakers1 in their depiction of Punjabis. In
particular, it focuses on the self-censorship of Mumbai filmmakers as applied to
the presentation of Punjabi culture on-screen, hereafter referred to as ‘Punjabiyat’,
or sense of being Punjabi.2
Such censorship was not explicitly applied or demanded by government
regulations or social organisations, but instead emerged from Mumbai filmmakers’
self-applied silence on the violence, loss and cartographic rupturing caused by the
1947 Partition of the Punjab. This silence stems from a sense of political and

Correspondence: Srijana Mitra Das, Department of Social Anthropology, Cambridge University, Clare Hall,
Herschel Road, Cambridge, CB3 9AL. E-mail: sd276@cam.ac.uk. An earlier version of this paper, entitled ‘‘‘Say
Shava Shava!’’: self-censorship, changing states and the cultural economy of Punjabiyat in Bombay cinema’,
won a Special Commendation for paper presentation by a student at the British Association for South
Asian Studies Annual Conference 2006. For further details, see hhttp://www.basas.ac.uki.

ISSN 0958-4935 print; 1469-364X online/06/040453–19 Ó 2006 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/09584930701330048
SRIJANA MITRA DAS

personal loss and betrayal, shame and disgust with ‘the games of politics’ (siyasi
khel), as well as a clear estimate of the commercial (non-)viability of ‘bitter
memories’ (karwin yaadein). The silence on Partition has been accompanied by
the gradual unfolding of a particular kind of Punjabi world in film, displaying the
delights, modern aspirations and traditional values of Punjabiyat as remembered,
imagined and commercially estimated by mainstream filmmakers. This Punjabiyat
is positively embodied almost entirely by Punjabi Hindu Khatris (the Punjabi
adaptation of ‘Kshatriya’, one of the four castes of Hinduism), with the near-total
invisibility or caricaturing and/or demonising of the Punjabi ‘Other’; that is,
Punjabi Sikhs and Muslim.
This Punjabi world has become the backdrop to most contemporary,
commercially successful Mumbai films. Its implications for contemporary
understandings of Punjabi culture, Indian identity and South Asian history, the
relevance of state boundaries, and the internal politics of India are significant.3 Its
origin and gradual formation, however, have been enduringly shaped, given and
denied space and meaning, by the 1947 Partition of Punjab. This article focuses
upon this origin of contemporary cinematic Punjabiyat, contrasting a powerful
silence within this vivid cinematic culture with its flourishing imagery of Punjabi
culture as an eternal fount of rejoicing, resilience and revival.

Side-stepping Partition and notions of the Other

Gyanendra Pandey writes of violence in Indian historiography having been treated
either as representing aberration or absence. He speaks of ‘aberration’ here as ‘a
distorted form, an exceptional moment, not the ‘‘real’’ history of India at all.’4
Instead, the country’s real history has been given its (homogenising or
normalising) contours by a centralised state that, Pandey writes,
has spoken . . . more and more brazenly on behalf of a get-rich-quick, consumerist ‘middle
class’ and its rural (‘rich peasant’) allies . . . The ‘fragments’ of Indian society . . . ‘minority’
cultures and practices—have been expected to fall in line with the ‘mainstream’ (Brahminical
Hindu, consumerist) national culture. This ‘mainstream’ . . . in fact a small section of the
society, has indeed been flaunted as the national culture.5

Pandey analyses ‘nationalist’ historiography in India as affording further

legitimacy to this state, creating ‘oppositional’ demarcations of thought, analyses
and practice via ‘neat binary categories’ such as secular/communal, national/local
(‘local’ being anti-national), and progressive (economic)/reactionary (cultural).
This ‘modern’ historiography, he writes, has ‘elevated the nation-state . . . to the
status of the end of all history, so much so that ‘‘History’’ in schools, colleges, and
universities in India, still ends for the most part in 1947’.6
The power and patronage enjoyed by this kind of history-writing has been
remarkable. Its historiographical meta-narrative has presented an appealing picture
of an essentially peace-loving and secular people led in unity towards freedom and
modernity by an inherently progressive and equal, Gandhi-inspired (Congress-
constituted) state. Pandey critically examines the role of this meta-narrative in

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creating major and perhaps culpable absences in both Indian history and (urgently
required) contemporary understandings of identities, communities and violence
based upon these. He emphasises that the grave silences actually surrounding
crucial moments of mayhem in Indian history, especially the all-too-critical
Partition of 1947, have led to serious gaps in understanding and knowledge,
leaving academics and others unable (even unwilling) to fully explain, account for
or act against contemporary communal violence.
In his writing, which is academic, anguished and angered, Pandey tries to
explain the complex and enduring silences around 1947’s Partition:
Differences and strife between Hindus and Muslims persist . . . there is the real danger of
reopening old wounds . . . there is no consensus . . . about the nature of Partition . . . no means
of representing such tragic loss, nor of pinning down—or rather, owning—responsibility for
it. Consequently, our nationalist historiography, journalism, and filmmaking have tended to
generate something like a collective amnesia . . . they have represented Partition . . . as an
aberration . . . an accident, a ‘mistake’—and one for which not we but ‘others’ were
responsible. (Emphasis added)7

The ability to blame Others for the very occurrence and gruesome events of the
Partition has survived, taking on a convenient role in contemporary situations.
Pandey finds this tendency oft-repeated in his difficult travels through the
remnants of the Bhagalpur riots of 1989 (which saw nearly 1000 Muslims lynched
and 40,000 people moving into relief camps as their property was looted and
destroyed). As a member of a People’s Union for Democratic Rights investigative
team, Pandey found himself confronted either by sheer silence on this chaos, or by
loquaciousness on the topic of Others. The Others here were a motley group of
actors, including ‘criminal caste’ gangs from ‘outside’, villainous political leaders
in Patna and Delhi, and a vicious and corrupt administration.8 Pandey quotes from
newspaper articles:
The Bhagalpur riots are not so much the product of sectarian [communal] feelings as a
calamity brought about by the criminals . . . The criminals are armed with rifles, guns, bombs,
axes . . . and the blessings of [powerful] political leaders. What can the people do? . . . [B]oth
[Hindu and Muslim] communities wished to live together in peace and friendship but the
criminals ultimately succeeded in spreading the poison among them. (Emphasis added)9

How did ‘the criminals’ succeed? How did differences in religious faith
suddenly, in one cataclysmic moment (or, perhaps, after months of preparation)
become far more critical than social proximities, shared physical spaces, emotional
ties, and values of decency, goodness, humanity and the dignity of the self and
others? In seeking answers to these questions, the People’s Union for Democratic
Rights team came up repeatedly against the other aspect of reporting violence in
India; that is, silence. It is this silence that makes us return again to the question of
self-censorship; of how the Mumbai film industry dominated by Punjabis—many
of whom can trace their roots to areas that are now part of Pakistan—has produced
only one commercial blockbuster (Gadar [The Riot], 2001)—explicitly on
Partition in all of the 60 years after the event.

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Tricks of memory: Partition’s many silences

As the exiting British Raj allocated areas to the new nations of India and Pakistan,
massive rioting broke out in 1947. Over 6,000,000 Muslims crossed over from
India to Pakistan, while more than 4,000,000 Hindus and Sikhs made the opposite
journey. In 2 months, more than 12,000,000 people switched between the two
newly independent countries, often on foot in columns (kafilas) that included up to
400,000 people. Arson, lynching, looting, rapes, kidnapping and forced
conversions broke out between the three communities. Women were violated,
their breasts cut off, foetuses ripped out of wombs, human beings torn apart and
trains dispatched full of corpses. Nearly 1,000,000 people died, including
hundreds who took their own and their (usually female)10 relations’ lives rather
than undergo violation, capture and/or killing by those of another faith. Close to
100,000 people found themselves in refugee camps where, once the borders had
been finally drawn, representatives of both the new states arrived to ‘recover
captured women’ from ‘their side’.12 Property, honour, values, lives and even a
basic trust in humanity were all lost. Crucially, so too was ‘memory’. Even some
50 years after 1947, researchers confronted silence from victims and their families
while attempting to unearth experiences of Partition.11
In presenting his case for Partition having been sheer violence (as opposed to a
political process that was ‘accompanied’ or ‘overtaken by’ violence), Pandey
posits the possibility of 1947 being India’s historical ‘limit case’. The highly
personalised aspects of the butcheries of Partition take it beyond explanation,
leaving people reluctant to remember their experiences of the same and so turning
it into an ‘incomparably unique’ event that defies too much detail of its horrors.
Thus, Partition has been studied in India as an event that had its origins, causes
and effects; but not as a mass of actual actions, a body of traumatic experience
itself. In a sense, Pandey writes, this method of re-shaping recollection enables
survivors to endure the event and move beyond it.12
This, however, is evidently a highly open-ended way of coping. Pandey himself
states that the Partition created the post-colonial Hindu, Muslim and Sikh, imbuing
each with a popular set of characteristics largely based upon the communities’
roles, as remembered and recounted, in the violence of 1947.13 How, then, can we
understand the operation of silence with the long shadows of Partition still
looming powerfully over the contemporary creation of religious categories?
Following Partha Chatterjee’s argument about modernity and tradition being
compartmentalised in colonial Bengal, each neatly segmented into ‘the home’ and
‘the world’ that held their own necessary demands,14 I suggest Partition history
takes on two forms. The first is inner history; that is, the most personal memories
of the violence and shames of 1947 that can be said to deal with the body and its
desecration, and/or the violation of one’s own honour as a human being, gendered
person and kin member. These are kept mostly to oneself and shared, at most, with
close family members (who also understand the need to keep these well-covered
with silence). The second form of Partition history is outer history, which is not as
disturbing—and perhaps not as personal or physical—and so can be shared with

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the visiting historian, recorded in the existent archive and passed on (in terms of
‘they’ and ‘them’, ‘us’ and ‘we’; very rarely as ‘I’ or ‘me’) into popular parlance.
It is possible that many Partition survivors categorised their memories in such a
way, choosing to speak of one set and silencing the Other.
Not all witnesses of Partition have been silent, however. Writers such as Saadat
Ali Manto,15 Bhisham Sahni16 and Amrita Pritam17 have written true-life accounts
and fictionalised versions of the horrors of 1947. In post-1947 India, the Progres-
sive Writers Association and the Indian Peoples Theatre Association engaged with
prose, poetry, drama and other forms of representation (and lament) about Partition.
Stories by noted writers such as Manto and Ismat Chugtai,18 both of whom
recounted Partition and also urgently questioned existing social hegemonies (of
patriarchy, religion, sexuality and class), were quickly denounced as subversive or
dangerous, and both were tried for ‘obscenity’ in India and Pakistan, respectively.19
All-too-neat demarcations were set in place: radical, flamboyant, outspoken, left-
leaning artistes and creative rebels talked about Partition and 1947’s perverse,
grotesque pleasures of rape, torture, abduction and murder, while mainstream or
conventional society did not. This large social category, bound together as a body
by notions of decency and shame, consisted primarily of middle-class families
earning livelihoods from salaried professions or respectable trades. This segment
was closely followed by an eagerly-emulating lower-middle class who sought to
both escape and block off the miseries of slum life. Conventional or good
conversation avoided explicit public discussions of sex, violence or any disturbing
ruptures, and was a clear marker of such middle-class belonging and aspiration.
The mainstream Mumbai cinema industry largely targeted this conventional
middle class in the production and marketing of its films, preferring to provide
cinema consumers with safe entertainment rather than controversial and disturbing
pasts and presents.20 Madan Gupta, a film distributor, told me that he:
would never back some ‘period film’ which drags people into depression and sadness (dukh
aur pareshani). Those films rarely run anyway (flop ho jaati hain). Who wants to see all
that? It’s much better to make films which give people a positive message (acchi soch), a
good time (mazaa).21

Interestingly, Gupta rejected the radical/conventional categorisation:

Who is truly ‘radical’, the people who moan about the past and how terrible everything is?
Or the people who work hard to give others beautiful dreams, strength, positiveness? I think
the latter. The film industry has consistently given Indian public messages of courage and
hope, of celebration and not to keep crying over what has happened, but to move on. The
night which has passed is gone, the morning beckons to me now (jo raat gayi, so baat gayi,
ab subha mujhe bulati hai). That’s my own personal motto and that’s what a lot of people,
inside and outside the industry, like to see in our films also.22

1947–1962: memories of Partition

In 1947, the Mumbai film industry was also undergoing flux. Many of its leading
artistes would have to leave for Pakistan. Interestingly, several Muslim cinema

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professionals decided to stay in Mumbai, while the film industry also witnessed
the arrival of non-Muslim Punjabis from the playhouses, radio stations and
colleges of Lahore, Multan, Peshawar and Rawalpindi.23
In her detailed biography of one such arrival, Yash Chopra, Rachel Dwyer
describes the ‘mainstream’ producer-director as:
one of the most powerful people in the Hindi commercial film industry . . . a leading
figure . . . for over 40 years . . . he is a public figure, not only in the film industry but also as a
representative of the industry to the wider world . . . his name is synonymous with romance,
glamour and beauty. (Emphasis added)24

In his conversations with Dwyer, Chopra identifies himself as completely Punjabi:

I’m proud of being Punjabi. I was brought up as a typical Punjabi . . . I was in Punjab before
I came to Mumbai, I know its culture or atmosphere better than any other, its music,
costumes . . . robust food . . . its characters. The Punjab is a state of five rivers, panch ap, the
people are robust, healthy and extrovert. The land is fertile. It’s not the Punjab now; two
rivers are on that side [in Pakistan]. Its culture is great, its music mind-blowing; romance,
passion and beat are there. Punjab has kept its culture . . . Punjabis were the first to shed
barriers . . . They are very enterprising. (Emphasis added)25

Interestingly, while Chopra emphasises the fact of ‘the Punjab’ no longer being the
same geographical entity he was born and raised in, he stresses the vitality and
survival of its ‘culture’. This is a popular understanding of Punjabi culture as
having survived even the geographical splitting of the region, living on in and
being recreated by its people. Culture here takes on a form of its own, becoming a
living, breathing, organic entity; a being that has survived and prospered after a
major physical trauma. It is noteworthy that many Punjabis who survived Partition
themselves personify culture in this way, making it a valuable thing, imbuing it
with a heroic soul of its own.
Chopra himself was brought up in a Hindu Khatri family belonging to the
lower-middle-class urban and professional strata of undivided Punjab. (Typical
Khatri surnames are Chopra, Khanna, Dhawan, Kapoor, Malhotra, Puri and
Tandon.) Khatris are described by Malcolm Darling as ‘allied to the great warrior
caste of the Kshatriyas’,26 and as having been famous administrators, courtiers and
the founders and teachers of the Sikh religion. He also describes the Khatris as one
of the three main money-lending castes of the Punjab (the ‘insidious Bania’ and
the ‘oppressive Arora’ being the Others), estimating the Khatri as ‘a trifle more
human’ than his rivals in the business of finance.27 Darling categorises the Khatris
as ‘the most influential’ group in the Punjab, about whom the popular proverb
stated: ‘Even if a Khatri puts ashes on his head . . . he will make a profit’.28
While Dwyer describes the Khatris as ‘a dominant caste in the post-
independence film industry’,29 she notes that Chopra’s family also belonged to
the Arya Samaj (Society of Nobles or Honourable Ones). The Arya Samaj in
Punjab had two main areas of focus; the first was social reform (education, widow
remarriage, ending child marriage, idolatry, etc.),30 re-affirming the kshatriya-tej
or martial valour of Aryas (Hindus related to ‘manly Aryans’). The Arya Samaj

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accepted the (conveniently linear) colonial narrative of European ‘masculinity’

having ‘rightfully’ overcome a weak, feminine, even hermaphrodite-like India
(which had been previously emasculated by ‘Muslim invaders’). The only way this
enslavement could be ended was by referring back to the ‘golden past’ of
Hinduism and being unafraid to stress its more virile aspects.31 The second focus
of the Arya Samaj was on Hindu religious protectionism, communal organisation
(around one priesthood, one book and one belief along the lines of monotheistic
Christianity and Islam) and the religious conversion (or ‘re-entry’) of those who
had ‘strayed’ from the Hindu fold.32
Enjoying a tense relationship with local Muslim and Sikh groups, the Arya
Samaj in Punjab became allied with the paramilitary extremist Hindu group, the
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) (National Volunteer Corps). As a teenager
in 1946, Chopra was a member of the RSS, viewing it, reports Dwyer, as a ‘sports
club’33 where boys performed a daily drill and practiced yoga. However, the young
Chopra also learnt how to make petrol bombs—‘Presumably as part of the RSS
efforts . . . for use in riots’34—which he once forgot to inform his sister-in-law he
had stored in her clay oven (tandoor). He also indulged in some 1946-mayhem,
joining a band of looters in a watch shop, and so on.
However, Chopra’s darker recollections of the Partition make apparent the
enduring and disturbing quality of the impressions of violence made upon his
mind (as opposed to what otherwise appears interestingly as juvenile high-
spiritedness). Dwyer records Chopra’s recollections of 1946–47:
I have vivid memories about this time. I remember seeing killings, lootings, burning—so
much killing, the whole of a train being butchered. During the riots, there were bodies
everywhere. People would stop the train, killing people. There was a strange fever against the
other community. A strange hatred came to my mind.35

Worried by his own activities (which, beyond the making of bombs and shop-
looting, remain unclear), Chopra’s family decided to send him away to relatives
stationed in Rohtak, India. Chopra’s memories of this time indicate the ghostly
emptiness left behind by the communal catharsis:

I couldn’t go anywhere, couldn’t get food . . . we had only dal [lentils] . . . all the fields were
empty, everyone had fled because this was a Muslim area . . . we couldn’t go out. There was
no one there . . . I used to walk around all day . . . there was nothing else to do.36

Chopra eventually moved south to join his elder brother Baldev Raj Chopra in
Mumbai in 1950.
Chopra initially assisted his elder brother, who was already a well-known film
director who had used his Arya Samaji social concerns to make ‘social dramas’
(films serving a social purpose). In 1959, Chopra directed his first film, Dhool ka
Phool (Blossom of Dust), which portrayed the upbringing of a child who had been
deserted by his unwed mother who, in turn, had been abandoned by her lover. An
elderly Muslim raised the boy, and the song Tu Hindu banega na Musalman
banega/Insaan ki aulaad hai/Insaan banega (You will be neither Hindu nor

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Muslim/You were born of human beings/You will be a humane being), written by

Chopra’s close friend the well-known Urdu poet Sahir Ludhianvi, became famous.
The film was a hit, featuring one of the most enduring and significant themes of
Mumbai films; the lost-and-found protagonists whose religious and class identities
are often lost or interchanged, remaining somewhat unclear and open-ended even
after being found.
The success of Dhool ka Phool encouraged Yash to begin his second project
Dharmaputra (Son of Duty; 1962), one of the few Mumbai films that referred
directly to the Partition. Its convoluted plot depicted a Muslim boy adopted by a
Hindu family. During Partition, the protagonist joins anti-Muslim rioters. He is
suddenly informed of his own Muslim parentage and, as a mob descends upon
him, he is saved by the police. Chopra tells Dwyer how ‘I passed through the riots,
1946 and ’47. I was going around the roads seeing it with my own eyes. I portray
it on screen . . . We had to create the atmosphere of 1947 in a studio’.37 Signifi-
cantly, Dharmaputra won Chopra a National Film Award for both Best Hindi
Film and Best Director in 1962, marking the state’s approval towards films that
dealt with the thorny issues of Partition and religious difference, albeit with an
end that emphasised unity, friendship and ‘Indianness’. However, the film was
not a commercial success. Its disappointing failure at the box office appears to
have sharply affected Chopra’s initial footsteps down the avenue of realistic,
reform-orientated cinema, leading him to discover the path of ‘glamorous
Punjabiyat’ instead.

1965–1995: The cinematic unfolding of Punjabiyat

In 1965, Chopra released Waqt (Time), the first Hindi–Urdu film with multiple
stars, which went on to become a huge commercial success. In the film, the
patriarch Lala Kedarnath, a prosperous, self-made Punjabi merchant, is separated
from his wife and three sons by a devastating earthquake that kills thousands of
northern Indians, forcing its victims into relief camps and towns far away from
their loved ones. Waqt depicts the separate journeys and travails of each family
member, their incidental, unknowing encounters with each other and, finally, their
emotional re-union.
Waqt broke new ground in the style, cinematography and characterisation of
Mumbai cinema. Chopra used foreign touches (from Hollywood pictures, art
magazines, jazz music, etc.) to depict a confident and upbeat post-Partition Punjabi
elite enjoying the comforts of plush bungalows, manicured lawns, five-star hotels,
flowery orchards, private motorboats and fast cars. The film abounded in Mehras,
Vermas, Seths and other Khatri characters and, while its men were handsome and
strong, its most famous song eulogised its women as being ‘sparklingly beautiful’
(zohra jabeen). Waqt made no apologies for the luxuries its characters possessed,
the camera instead capturing the softness of a velveteen bedroom, the delicacies of
crisp, folded napkins, the pulsating excitement of a thrilling race between
magnificent, leather-upholstered, gleaming convertible cars. The film also stressed
the privations of Kedarnath’s wife and youngest son, who (minus an older male

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Figure 1. A scene from Waqt (Time; 1965) depicting the post-Partition Punjabi elite. The film
featured luxurious and modern domestic interiors as reflecting the community’s upwardly mobile
lifestyle.
Source: Illustration courtesy of Yash Raj Films.

relative) struggled to make ends meet. However, the underlying notions of

Punjabis-on-the-move, their energy, optimism, resilience and ability to make good
run throughout the film. Upon being re-united, the aged and impoverished
Kedarnath and his sons once again establish a successful business (this time in
Mumbai), fearing only the whims of changing times.
Waqt indicates that, by 1965, the central preoccupation of Chopra’s (emerging)
cinematic Punjabiyat was not so much Partition as class; his films thereafter have
been consistent in their (defiant, then normative) portrayal of Punjabis as rich,
upbeat and modern. Subash Ghai, one of Mumbai’s most famous director-
producers, explains the dominance of Punjabi characters in commercial films with
reference to the variety of roles represented by the Punjabi:
It’s natural that Punjabis dominate the film industry. No-one can tell stories of love and war
better than them! You see, the Punjabis are frontier people, they have always been exposed to
violence, sex, hardships and romance. All of Punjabi folk culture revolves around these
themes. Therefore they make the best movies, great action thrillers, great love stories.38

In 1965, what did please (and influence) Chopra very much was the commercial
success of Waqt: ‘The public liked it. People copied the clothes, hairstyles,
dances . . . all these small things became the rage. We follow trends and we set
them. We take from life and life takes from us’.39
Through the 1960s and 1970s, Punjabiyat continued to consolidate itself
on-screen, fleshed out by films targeting a young and trendy audience that desired

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Figure 2. Another scene from Waqt (Time; 1965) depicting the easy relationship with nature enjoyed
by the post-Partition Punjabi elite, achieved through both modern recreational activities (picnics,
racing, sailing, etc.) and traditional settings for the accoutrements of love-stories (poetry, songs,
dreams, etc.).
Source: Illustration courtesy of Yash Raj Films.

the delights of pop music, nightclubs, travel and Coca-Cola. The 1970s saw
Chopra direct hit films such as Kabhi Kabhi (Sometimes; 1976) and Trishul (The
Trident; 1978) where Khatri heroes emphasised their Punjabi joie de vivre,
strength, optimism and romantic sides. Indeed, many of the popular actors and
actresses in the 1960s–1980s were Punjabi themselves, including Rajendra Kumar,
Manoj Kumar, Sunil Dutt (to be followed by his son, Sanjay), Dharmendra Deol
(and later, his sons Sunny and Bobby), Shammi and Shashi Kapoor (followed by
their nephew, Rishi), Jeetendra Kapoor, Anil Kapoor, Vinod Khanna, Rajesh
Khanna, and others.40
Yet Chopra’s cinematic construction of Punjabiyat also included many aspects
of Indian Muslim culture. His Punjabi hero of these decades expressed himself
often through Urdu poetry (shayari). and his heroines wore tight churidar kameezs
(traditional Muslim clothing, popular across Indian communities in contemporary
times).41 This cinematic construction of a composite Punjabiyat, which included
the best of Indian Muslim culture, is even more fascinating when set against the
practice of major Muslim stars like Dilip Kumar, Madhubala and Meena Kumari
adopting Hindu screen names. The actor Aamir Khan comments how:

Those times were extremely sensitive and a lot of filmmakers were not ready to take
commercial risks, just because of someone’s name. So actors like Yusuf Sahab took
on names like Dilip Kumar. The funny thing is, everyone, the filmmakers, the audiences,

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everyone knew they were Muslims! So it’s not clear how that really worked. Perhaps it
didn’t make a big difference either way but they wanted to cover the risk factor.42

That it was well known but tolerated that these stars had adopted Hindu names
perhaps can be attributed to a need felt to display a public attitude of flexibility
or broad-mindedness regarding religious identity. More controversially, one
could suggest that this taking-on of ‘Hindu’ screen names was a kind of
public conversion whereby Muslim stars merged with the Hindu mainstream,
ensuring popular support. By the 1990s, however, as the top three commercial
stars of the Mumbai film industry (Aamir, Salman and Shahrukh Khan) were
clearly Muslim, it is evident that the religious identity of cinema actors
does not represent a risk factor for film professionals any longer. Whether it
actually constitutes a kind of benefit, however, is the topic of my research
elsewhere.
In any event, Yash Chopra’s Punjabiyat made considerable progress through
the 1970s. Even his ‘angry young man’ films—Deewar (The Wall; 1975), Trishul
(Trident; 1978) and Kaala Patthar (Black Rock; 1979)—featured Khatri heroes
who contested right and wrong as laid out by society and the post-colonial State.
Punjabiyat remained, however, more a means of basic location for the hero—who,
in the Punjabi way, was usually fair, tall and sharp-featured—than the central
theme of a plot. This remained the form of engagement the hero had with the state
or his/the heroine’s family in duels over love (read class). It was only in the 1990s
that Punjabiyat changed and thrived on-screen, becoming the mirror and
propellant of film celebration and self-fashioning.
Note that, despite its depiction of a posh Punjabiyat lifestyle, Waqt may also be
read as Chopra’s second (although vastly more successful than the first,
Dharmaputra) cinematic metaphor for Partition. He was away shooting his new
film when his wife Pamela commented to me:
You know, I don’t think anyone has ever asked him directly about whether the earthquake in
Waqt was actually Partition! I assumed it was a reference to the Quetta earthquake of the
1930s. But it could well be about 1947, what with the lost brothers and the migration to
Bombay . . . he [Chopra] doesn’t like to talk much about those times.43

Chopra’s lack of communication on Partition has gone together with his disavowal
of politics:
I don’t believe in politics and bloodshed in the name of religion. You should not kill, but they
have only one reply to every argument: kill him! You have to take sides. I don’t want to
make a political film where you have to comment. (Emphasis added)44

Who is the ‘they’ Chopra refers to here? Politicians, religious leaders, sectarian
rabble-rousers? Once again, we find shadows of the Others reported by Pandey,
those on whom eruptions of communal violence in ‘peaceably co-existing’
communities can be blamed.
Along with Chopra’s brushing aside of politics (and presumably, his own
political past) and his explicit choice to not make political films, we find the

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filmmaker annoyed at government attitudes towards the affluence portrayed in

Waqt. He recounts how he went to release the film overseas:
We went . . . in London . . . [to] the Indian Film Society established by Krishna Menon. I was
very excited because the Indian High Commissioner was coming. However, he just spoke
against the film and the industry. I say that we have rich too, not just weeping and poverty.
Should we publicise ourselves as a country of snake charmers and Pather Panchali? I was
very, very upset . . . It’s not a crime to be rich. The upper classes behave better. For romance
and complex emotions, it’s better to appear rich. (Emphasis added)45

Government disapproval in the 1960s of cinematic celebrations of richness and

consumption were transformed with the economic liberalisation and growth of the
1990s, and Chopra and his production house have been given various state
honours.
Until the 1990s, however, state attitudes remained a crucial part of cinema. On-
screen Punjabiyat was seen as a colourful but secondary cultural detail. Instead,
negotiating citizenship and modernity remained the central preoccupation of most
Mumbai films. Even in Waqt, the separated family members find each other in a
court of law, embracing tearfully under the benevolent auspices of a witness (or
perhaps, catalyst) state. Through the 1960s, Raj Kapoor and B.R. Chopra’s films
earned both commercial success and official approval with themes revolving
around the nature of the (expanding) post-colonial socialist state, the contra-
dictions therein and the possibility of citizen-heroes fulfilling the potential for
social equality and reform. While these films were also upbeat and modern, their
confident heroes were far from rich and stylish Punjabis, and their settings were
usually rural communities or the proletarian margins of urban existence. Meghnad
Desai analyses B.R. Chopra’s 1957 film Naya Daur (New Era) thus:
Dilip Kumar . . . played a rustic character who takes on the challenge of development and
progress. The film, with its background of community development, was quintessentially a
product of the Nehru era . . . a valorization of collective effort. Naya Daur was a mega
hit . . . Dilip Kumar playing the rural young man . . . as a dynamic go-getter . . . India itself had
changed with him.46

1995–2005: postmodern Punjabiyat

Punjabiyat in Mumbai cinema changed sharply in the 1990s. Earlier, the films of
Chopra and others had emphasised the spirit of being Punjabi, the resilience of
Punjabi composite culture, and the placement of the Punjabi against the much
vaster backdrop of a modernising India. Now, directors introduced the Punjabi
Diaspora into the equation, and were less afraid about confronting sensitive
political issues surrounding ideas of citizenship and the nation.
In 1995, Aditya Chopra, Yash’s son, released his first film Dilwale Dulhaniya
Le Jayenge (The Brave Will Take the Bride), one of the biggest Mumbai film hits
of all time, and one that features a love story between characters hailing from
Britain’s Punjabi Diaspora. The plot concerns the hero, Raj Malhotra, and his

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pursues of the heroine, Simran, from Britain to the Punjab where her traditional
father insists upon arranging her marriage to another. Both Simran and her mother
plead with Raj to elope with Simran, but he insists she play-act her engagement
while he properly tries to win her father’s approval. Naturally, the film ends with
Raj and Simran together. However, the two do not settle down to live in the
Punjab but are shown departing on a train at the start of their return to London,
cheerful and victorious after their brush with ‘our traditions’.47
Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge is also notable for portraying Punjab as the
homeland of its characters, with India relegated to an imagined repository of
cultural and gendered values of modesty and propriety. Indeed, the film opens
with Simran’s homesick father expressing his deep desire to return to ‘his Punjab’,
before rolling out to a backdrop of lush mustard fields, dancing Punjabi peasants
and a train chugging along to the song Ghar aaja pardesi/Tera des bulaye re
(Return home, oh foreigner/Your country calls to you [emphasis added]).48 The
Punjab of Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge is a place of beauty, richness and great
traditions that do not require outright challenge but, rather, gentle persuasion into a
more liberal (yet consistently patriarchal) lifestyle. The Punjab of the film is also
overwhelmingly Hindu and Khatri, containing only a tiny number of Sikhs who
faintly inhabit the peripheries of three scenes.
Cinematic Punjabiyat saw another significant train journey in the 2001
blockbuster Gadar: Ek Prem Katha (The Riot: A Love Story), the only com-
mercially successful Mumbai film made entirely around and within the events of
Partition.49 The film is also remarkable as it concentrates Sikhs and Muslims, with
Hindu characters virtually absent from the screen. Gadar opens with a train full of
murdered Sikhs arriving from Lahore into Amritsar in 1947, motivating the Sikhs
at the station to begin a frenzied ‘revenge-lynching’ of Muslims. During the
rioting, the film’s Sikh hero, Tara Singh, pauses for a moment to look into the
anguished eyes of Sakina, a young Muslim girl he had previously fallen in love
with. Later, when Sakina gets separated from her family during their escape to
Pakistan, Tara Singh saves her from another murderous Sikh mob by supposedly
converting her into a Sikhni and marrying her. Her life and honour thus saved,
Sakina soon falls in love with Tara and the couple marry. However, their peace is
short-lived because after Sakina contacts her father,50 now a major politician in
Lahore, he devises a scheme to take her to Pakistan and marry her to a Muslim
once she has forgotten the exigencies of Partition. Tara Singh follows Sakina to
Lahore where, for the love of his wife, Tara agrees to convert to Islam. The last
straw comes, however, when Sakina’s father demands that Tara denounce India in
public. The ‘dam of his tolerance’ (sabhar ka pul) is broken and, with Sakina’s
wifely approval, Tara Singh runs amuck, meeting Muslim violence with greater
violence, eventually rescuing his wife from an oppressive Other.
In both Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge and Gadar, as well as in a of hit ‘Khatri
dramas’ throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s—including Kuch Kuch Hota
Hai (Something Happens; 1998), Kaho Na . . . Pyaar Hai (Say It’s Love; 2000),
Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (Sometimes Happiness, Sometimes Sadness; 2001),
Kal Ho Naa Ho (Tomorrow May or May Not Be; 2003), Chalte Chalte

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SRIJANA MITRA DAS

Figure 3. A poster for Gadar (The Riot; 2001); the title reads ‘A saga of love during Indo-Pak
Partition’.
Source: Illustration courtesy of Bollywood501.com, hhttp://www.bollywood501.comi, accessed
October 2006.

(While Travelling; 2003), Baghban (The Gardener; 2003) and others—Punjabiyat

has been celebrated but in an altered form. Introductory film titles, which
previously appeared in Hindi, English and Urdu, now appear largely in the first
two scripts.51 The previous usage of Urdu poetry has been increasingly replaced
by Punjabi folk songs, proverbs and slang. The film heroine now performs key
(gendered) Punjabi–Hindu rituals of prayer and fasting. The Khatri hero has
taken over Punjabiyat almost entirely (Gadar being one notable exception), and is
now almost always defined by his wealth as measured by his designer clothing,
luxury cars and access to Duty Free rather than sense of duty to the nation. The
look of the films also celebrate conspicuous consumption, using ever-more
expensive props, elaborate sets for ‘simple’ song sequences, and exotic foreign
locations.
The Punjabiyat of the past decade or so has been powerfully shaped by real-
world socio-economic and political events, including the Green Revolution and
Khalistan crisis in Punjab, clashes over caste-based reservations, the triumphant
arrival of aggressive Hindutva (Hindu nationalism), and the approval granted by a
withdrawing state to a consumerist middle class.52 Interestingly, it is as the
economic and rhetorical space of the state shrinks that this cinematic Punjabiyat
expands. As the political challenges to the Indian State grow more urgent, this
Punjabiyat takes on the form almost of a doxa (common belief) where it is no
longer a matter of note that commercial cinema’s most successful characters are all
upper-caste Hindus. Indeed, as complex social tensions and pressures narrow areas
of identity while widening zones of economic opportunity in the country,

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 PRESENTATIONS OF ‘PUNJABIYAT’ IN BOMBAY CINEMA

Figure 4. A scene from Kal Ho Naa Ho (Tomorrow May or May Not Be; 2003) showing Punjabiyat
in America.
Source: Illustration courtesy of Dharma Productions.

Figure 5. Veer-Zaara (The main protagonists’ names; 2004) showing glowing imagery of Punjab
and Punjabiyat protagonists united in love against the one-ness of nature and culture, and the
seeming futility of man-made borders.
Source: Illustration courtesy of Yash Raj Films.

cinematic Punjabiyat both cuts out the regional (and historical) Other and includes
and celebrates ‘non-Indian Punjabis’.
An interesting case here has been the elder Chopra’s 2004 hit Veer-Zaara (The
main protagonists’ names), the love story of Squadron Leader Veer Pratap Singh,

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SRIJANA MITRA DAS

an Indian Sikh (although a mona-Sardar, short-haired Sikh) hero and Zaara

Haayat Khan, a Pakistani Muslim heroine. Set in the 1970s, the film makes no
mention of Partition, violence or military aggression while expounding fulsomely
on the natural beauties of the Punjab, its overarching ‘unifying’ culture, and the
power of love that makes mustard fields bloom and turns national borders into
weak and rubbery lines. Veer-Zaara is thus a significant example of the
contradictions (and possibilities) inherent in cinematic Punjabiyat; the film
invokes cultural nativism but avoids the nation, accepts nationhood but
emphasises love and agency between individuals that can circumvent the same.

Conclusion
Cinematic Punjabiyat—and the self-fashioning of a community that views itself as
physically displaced, yet economically and culturally flourishing—began and
continues to be dominated by a significant silence stemming from self-censorship
of Partition as experienced in Punjab. The Punjabiyat of commercially successful
Mumbai films has also been marked by complex choices about the identity and
culture of Punjabis—Hindu, Sikh and Muslim—in, and responsibility towards,
independent India versus the region, as well as evolving attitudes towards
consumerism and the Punjabi Diaspora. As such, the continued evolution of
cinematic Punjabiyat makes for crucial political viewing.

Acknowledgements
The author is very grateful to Manoshi Mitra Das and Aishwary Kumar for their
lively interest and bracing critiques, which have enlivened this paper. The author is
also grateful to Beth Ahlering for her reading of this paper, as well as to Aamir
Khan and Shyam Benegal for further enriching the same. Acknowledgement must
be made of Arvind N. Das and the Bombay film industry as perennial sources of
inspiration, and of profound enjoyment. Any errors in the article are entirely the
author’s own.

Notes and references

1. For detailed analyses of the ‘performance’ and internalisation of roles as per norms set by culture, gender,
colonial discourse, and so forth, see Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of A Theory of Practice (translated by Richard
Nice) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the
Judgement of Taste (translated by Richard Nice) (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984); Pierre Bourdieu,
The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993); Judith
Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (London: Routledge, 1997); Eric Hobsbawm and
T. Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Edward Said,
Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978); Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and
Anti-structure (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969); and Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and
Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974).
2. ‘Punjabiyat’ refers to a commonly held, all-encompassing view of Punjabi culture, society and being Punjabi
as an individual. The term thus refers both to larger structures of social or community organisation (such as
kinship networks, caste identities, religious beliefs and practices, understandings of gender roles, etc.), as
well as to individual Punjabi values (such as bravery, resilience, honour and heartiness). For more on

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 PRESENTATIONS OF ‘PUNJABIYAT’ IN BOMBAY CINEMA

Punjabiyat, see Denzil Ibbetsen, Panjab Castes (Lahore, 1916; reprinted Delhi: Low Price Publications,
1993); Malcolm Darling, The Punjab Peasant in Prosperity and Debt (London: Oxford University Press,
1925; reprinted New Delhi: Manohar Book Service, 1977); Malcolm Darling, Rusticus Loquitur: The Old
Light and the New in the Punjab Village (London: Oxford University Press, 1930); Malcolm Darling,
Wisdom and Waste in the Punjab Village (London: Oxford University Press, 1934); Prakash Tandon, Punjabi
Century, 1857–1947 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961); Paul Hershman, Punjabi Kinship and Marriage
(Delhi: Hindustan Publishing, 1981); Mark Juergensmeyer, Religion as Social Vision: The Movement against
Untouchability in 20th-Century Punjab (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982); Richard Fox,
Lions of the Punjab: Culture in the Making (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Robin Jeffrey,
What’s Happening to India?: Punjab, Ethnic Conflict, and the Test for Federalism (Basingstoke: Macmillan,
1994); Joyce Pettigrew, Robber Noblemen: A Study of the Political System of the Sikh Jats (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975); Joyce Pettigrew, The Sikhs of the Punjab: Unheard Voices of State and
Guerilla Violence (London: Zed, 1995); Amrik Singh (ed.), Punjab in Indian Politics: Issues and Trends
(London: Oriental University Press, 1986); and Ian Talbot, Freedom’s Cry: The Popular Dimension in
the Pakistan Movement and Partition Experience in North-West India (Karachi: Oxford University Press,
1996).
3. Cinematic Punjabiyat has in fact been further fuelled by the successes and failures, the imagery and
ideologies, the triumphs and tragedies of the Green Revolution of the 1970s, the Khalistan crisis and caste-
based reservations of the 1980s, and economic liberalisation and Hindutva in the 1990s. See Tejaswini
Ganti, Bollywood: A Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema (London: Routledge, 2004); and Ashish
Rajadhyaksha and Paul Willeman (eds), Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema (New Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 1999).
4. Gyanendra Pandey, ‘In defense of the fragment: writing about Hindu–Muslim riots in India today’, in Ranajit
Guha (ed.), A Subaltern Studies Reader, 1986–1995 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp 1–34.
5. Ibid, pp 2–3.
6. Ibid, p 3.
7. Ibid, p 8.
8. Gyanendra Pandey, ‘In defense of the fragment’, pp 10–14.
9. Ibid, p 15. Newspaper extracts from Navbharat Times, 19 November 1989; and Sunday Mail, 14 October
1990.
10. Veena Das, Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India (Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1995), p 187.
11. Das analyses such silence about Partition experiences from both individuals and groups as ‘collective
censorship’. This silence could ensure the formation of strategies to deal with female victims of the Partition
by enfolding them again within old and new familial structures. Thus, Das terms such silence as part of the
‘practical kinship’ in Punjabi communities displaced and traumatised by the Partition. Elsewhere, Das also
analyses such silence as language itself having been ‘struck dumb’ by the horrors witnessed in Partition
violence. See Das, op cit, Ref 10, pp 63–64, 72, 80, 184, 188. Greater discussion, analyses and narratives of
such silence and self-censorship (revolving around notions of honour, shame, agency, pain, loss, pollution
and survival) can be found in Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices From The Partition of India
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2000); R. Menon and K. Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries: Women in
India’s Partition (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998); and Gyanendra Pandey, Remembering
Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
12. Pandey, op cit, Ref 11, pp 45–64, Gyanendra Pandey, Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and
History in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
13. Ibid, p 16. See also Sunil Khilnani, The Idea of India (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1997).
14. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1993), pp 116–122.
15. Saadat Ali Manto, refer to Manto’s famous and controversial stories on Partition including Thanda Gosht,
(1950) and Toba Tek Singh, (1955).
16. Bhisham Sahni, refer to Sahni’s novel Tamas (Darkness), (1975).
17. Amrita Pritam, refer to Pritam’s Pinjar (Skeleton).
18. Manto, op cit, Ref 15; and Ismat Chugtai, refer to Chugtai’s Lihaaf (The Quilt), (1941).
19. Priyamvada Gopal, Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence
(London: Routledge, 2005), pp 65–69, 91–112.
20. The targeting of the lower-middle and middle-class, conventional and family-based audiences by commercial
Mumbai films has been analysed in detail; see, among others, Ashis Nandy (ed.), The Secret Politics of Our
Desires: Innocence, Culpability and Indian Popular Cinema (London: Zed Books, 1998); M. Madhava
Prasad, Ideology of the Hindi Film: A Historical Construction (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998);
Lalitha Gopalan, Cinema of Interruptions: Action Genres in Contemporary Indian Cinema (London: BFI,

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2002); and Ravi Vasudevan (ed.), Making Meaning in Indian Cinema (New Delhi: Oxford University Press,
2002).
21. Research conversation with Mr Madan Gupta, film distributor, Mumbai. This conversation was held in
March 2004 as part of my anthropological fieldwork towards a doctoral dissertation on the construction and
portrayal of ‘Punjabi culture’ in commercial Mumbai cinema, post-1947. The fieldwork was multi-sited and
involved participant observation in a Punjabi village (where the audience reception of cinematic Punjabiyat
in commercial Mumbai films was analysed) and in the Mumbai film industry itself. The latter part of the
fieldwork included holding conversations with several members of the film industry as well as detailed
observation and recording of the creative, financial, marketing, distribution and other impulses acting upon
the depiction of Punjabiyat in commercial Mumbai films.
22. Ibid.
23. Prominent among these were Prithviraj Kapoor (a major theatre and film actor whose sons, Raj, Shammi and
Shashi, would become legendary film stars; the family’s fourth generation is now in films), the Chopras
(Baldev Raj and Yash, who would become extremely successful producer-directors; they head the second
generation of Chopras in films), the Anands (Dev, a popular film star, and his director siblings, Chetan and
Vijay), G.P. Sippy (a major film producer; the Sippys remain involved in films), lyricist Anand Bakshi, actors
Sunil Dutt, Manoj Kumar and Balraj Sahni, and the producer-director of several ‘mythologicals’ and social
dramas Ramanand Sagar. Sippy is the father of Ramesh Sippy, director of the legendary blockbuster Sholay
(Embers; 1975). Interestingly, Ramesh Sippy also made Buniyaad (Foundation; featured on Doordarshan in
1987), a major television soap opera that chronicled the journey of a Hindu Punjabi refugee family settling
down in post-Partition India. The other remarkable television drama also made in the late 1980s was Tamas
(Darkness; also shown on Doordarshan in 1987), based on the 1947-centred novel by Bhisham Sahni. Tamas
was directed by the well-known ‘art film’ director Govind Nihalani (whose own family had also migrated
from Pakistan to India). Tamas’ scenes of Partition violence led to real-life sectarian tension and conflict (as
well as public interest litigation lawsuits) in parts of northern India.
24. Rachel Dwyer, Yash Chopra: Fifty Years in Indian Cinema (New Delhi: Roli Books, 2002), Preface.
25. Ibid, p 25.
26. Darling, The Punjab Peasant in Prosperity and Debt, op cit. Ref 2, p 177.
27. Ibid, Ref 32, p 26.
28. Ibid, p 177.
29. Ibid, p 26.
30. Kenneth Jones, Arya Dharm: Hindu Consciousness in Nineteenth Century Punjab (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1976), p 77 and passim.
31. Ashis Nandy, The Intimate Enemy: Loss and Recovery of Self Under Colonialism (Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 1983), pp 24–25.
32. Jones, op cit, 30.
33. Dwyer, op cit, Ref 24, pp 34 – 35.
34. Ibid, p 35.
35. Ibid, p 34.
36. Ibid, p 35.
37. Ibid, pp 54–55.
38. Research interview with director-producer Subhash Ghai, during ethnographic fieldwork in Bombay,
November 2004.
39. Ibid, p 63.
40. A major exception was Amitabh Bachchan, the most charismatic and enduring (and, interestingly, the most
‘angry’) star of the 1970s, who has been publicly identified more with his father’s Uttar Pradesh Kayastha
background, and not as much with that of his (Punjabi Sikh) mother.
41. While Chopra had initial reservations about this choice of dress, thinking it would look ‘too Muslim’, he
changed his mind during Waqt. See Dwyer, p 58.
42. Research interview with the actor Aamir Khan, during ethnographic fieldwork in Bombay, April 2005.
43. Research interview with Mrs. Pamela Chopra, during ethnographic fieldwork in Bombay, September 2004.
44. Ibid, p 35.
45. Dwyer, op cit, Ref 24, pp 60–63.
46. Meghnad Desai, Nehru’s Hero: Dilip Kumar in the Life of India (New Delhi: Roli Books, 2004), pp 42–43.
The thespian Dilip Kumar, popularly referred to as ‘Tragedy King’, is considered to have made a significant
shift as, from Naya Daur onwards, he shifts from his successful earlier roles as a passive and depressive
‘victim-hero’ to a modern and upbeat achiever.
47. This is rather different from an older and similar film, the highly successful Purab Aur Paschim (East and
West; 1970), which depicted the Punjabi-speaking Bharat, an idealistic Indian student in London bringing the
‘foreign’ Preeti (a chain-smoking, hard-drinking, mini-skirted blonde of Indian origin) back to India with

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him. Preeti’s encounter with India, terrifying at first but eventually physically cleansing and spiritually
calming, results in her choosing to marry Bharat and live on in ‘pure India’. The difference in the climax and
portrayal of overseas Indians (as well as India itself) in both films is indicative of a significant change in
Indian viewers’ and film-makers’ perceptions of the West and the (increasingly commercially powerful)
Indian Diaspora, as well as the ‘mother country’ itself.
48. Dipesh Chakrabarty describes similar imagery about ‘Bengal’ found in nineteenth-century prose—which
depicted Bengal in harder, more ‘real’ terms—and poetry—which dwelt more ‘idyllically’ on the province’s
evocative natural beauty and emotional power. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial
Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp 170–172, 178.
49. Other notable films on the Partition—including Earth (1998), Shaheed-e-Mohabbat Buta Singh (Martyred-
in-Love: Buta Singh; 1999), and Pinjar (The Skeleton; 2003)—have been produced in recent years to
commercial success and/or critical acclaim. However, these have been either produced outside the Mumbai-
based Hindi cinema industry (Shaheed-e-Mohabbat Buta Singh, for instance, is a Punjabi film, while Earth
was made by a Canadian production company using a mix of film professionals) or have been commercially
unviable. Therefore, these are not included for analyses in this article, which focuses only on Mumbai films
that have met with commercial success and, therefore, have been unambiguously enjoyed by a large,
increasingly global, film-viewing public.
50. Interestingly, both the stern and highly ‘traditional’ patriarchs of Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge and Gadar
were played by the same actor, Amrish Puri, who was renowned for his talent and ‘authoritative’ voice.
51. See Ashraf Aziz, Light of the Universe: Essays on Hindustani Film Music (New Delhi: Three Essays
Collective, 2003).
52. See Ganti, op cit, Ref 3); and Rajadhyaksha and Willeman (eds), op cit, Ref 3.

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