Cover of Iftikhar Dadi, Lahore Cinema: Between Realism and Fable ( University of Washington Press, 2022 ) . Banner for Iftikhar Dadi vertical bar Romanticism and Politics in Mid-Century Lahore Cinema

Iftikhar Dadi | Romanticism and Politics in Mid-Century Lahore Cinema

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Lecture

Tue, Sep 29, 2026

4:30 PM – 6 PM EDT (GMT-4)

Louis A. Simpson International Building, Room A71

Princeton, NJ 08544, United States

Details

Cover of Iftikhar Dadi, Lahore Cinema: Between Realism and Fable ( University of Washington Press, 2022 ) . Flyer for Iftikhar Dadi vertical bar Romanticism and Politics in Mid-Century Lahore Cinema
Mid-century commercial cinema in South Asia has served as among the most powerful vectors of social and aesthetic modernization. By anchoring social change across deeper cultural imaginaries, this cinema has played an influential progressive role by constituting publics beyond existing social divides, forging a shared and expanded experience of modernity that extends beyond regional, ethnic, and sectarian affiliations, and affectively challenging the selective amnesia of nation-state ideologies. Here I focus on the contributions of Khurshid Anwar (1912-84), who worked in Bombay cinema and later in Lahore cinema. His music, writing, and direction in Lahore ostensibly center on the conflict between the “East” and the “West.” However, Anwar renders this tension distinctive through the role music plays in inviting healing from the unbearable implications of this divide. In a further twist, the “East” here has a prelapsarian evocation that harks back to a conception of South Asia before the Partition in 1947. By closely analyzing Ghoonghat (The Veil, 1962), I argue that Anwar’s youthful political activism inspired by Bhagat Singh (1907-31) is deeply salient to understanding his later melancholic romanticism, and that it nevertheless offers an implied address that is sharply at variance with the claims of post-independence nationalism.

Where

Louis A. Simpson International Building, Room A71

Princeton, NJ 08544, United States

Speakers

Iftikhar Dadi's profile photo

Iftikhar Dadi

John H. Burris Professor and Chair, Department of History of Art, Cornell University

Iftikhar Dadi is John H. Burris Professor and Chair of Cornell University’s Department of History of Art. He has authored Lahore Cinema Between Realism and Fable (2022), Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia (2010), and edited The Lahore Biennale 01 Reader (2022) and Anwar Jalal Shemza (2015). He has co-edited the Lahore Biennale 02 Reader (2024); Art and Architecture of Migration and Discrimination: Turkey, Pakistan, and Their European Diasporas (2023); Lines of Control: Partition as a Productive Space (2012); and Unpacking Europe: Towards a Critical Reading (2001). Co-curated exhibitions include Pop South Asia: Artistic Explorations in the Popular (2022–23) and Lines of Control: Partition as a Productive Space (2012–13). As an artist, Iftikhar Dadi collaborates with Elizabeth Dadi to make work that explores questions of identity and borders, and the capacities of the informal urban realm in the Global South.


Hosted By

Program in South Asian Studies | View More Events
Co-hosted with: Princeton Institute for International & Regional Studies, Program in South Asian Studies (OWNER)