Nigar Hai Toh Industry Hai: Notes on the Morale and Mortality of Pakistani Film

Abstract

Combining archival and ethnographic fieldwork, this piece reflects on the scope of film publicity through the author’s conversations with the proprietor-editor of the oldest film magazine in Pakistan, The Nigar Weekly. Offering a larger view from post-colonial Karachi of political and national transitions, Nigar’s brand of film commentary in the 1950s and 60s, reveled in connecting and cohabiting the multiple film centers in South Asia: Karachi, Lahore, Dhaka and Bombay. Foregrounding the muhajir background of its founders and its self-styled relationship with the film industry, the piece draws attention to a distinctive characteristic of the publication: its satirical visual content. The magazine while borrowing select content from a Bombay film magazine in its early years, vividly commented on issues such as film trade with India, censorship and public morality in Pakistan, cross-border film intimacies, film exhibition practices, and local production strategies. The cartoons, while directly connected to the written content, could also exaggerate and provoke as can be expected of visual satire. And it is in this less restrained feature of Nigar that a cautionary critique and a calculated celebration of the Pakistani cinema emerges.