Media Watch: On banning Indian films

It would be difficult to explain to a foreigner why Pakistan doesn’t have much of a film industry. We’re one of the largest countries on the planet; the sheer numbers alone could carry even a passable film community onto the sort of sustainability that would then eventually translate into some good work.

The answer to that is simple, of course. A huge country we might be, but one placed next to the second largest nation in the world; eight times more populous. And — this bit being crucial to the issue at hand — one that speaks the same language, more or less.

Yes, India might also have a vibrant regional languages cinema, specially down south, but even they are a market for Hindi-language films. And even if one were to exclude them, the Indian Hindi-Urdu-Punjabi belt alone is massive.

The ban on Bollywood following the 1965 war could have meant that the thriving local network of cinema theatres would be able to sustain a film studio network. And, in a rickety manner, that did happen for a bit, till the introduction of VCR technology and bootleg, pirated VHS tapes of Bollywood fare. That was the death knell.

Our local film industry could still have survived but with the introduction of Punjabi gangster cult cinema, the studio eco-system fell into the hands of unsavoury types. These weren’t gritty films with rural gangland as a setting, but “broad” content eked out for the LCM. With only a specific demographic coming to the theatres, families were finding going to the movies a tad uncomfortable. Some have said that this is a classist assumption but the numbers really don’t back the argument that working-class families still frequented the theatres in the ‘80s and ‘90s.

By this time, the number of feature films produced in the country was trickling to a halt. Pashto films made up half of them (trivia: they had the same Lahori producers) and Urdu and Punjabi made up the rest.

The studio system has dried up. If you were to visit Evernew Studios or Bari Studios on Lahore’s Multan Road, when the old-timer staffers outside the near-deserted set-halls talk about the good old days, it takes a while to realise that it is not the ‘50s or ‘60s that they are talking about but the tacky ‘90s, when at least the living was good.

Now, you can rent their biggest set-halls on a day’s notice. Scratch that, you could even show up on the day of the shoot and still be facilitated.

Film theatres started closing down. Those not purchased under the cinemas act were razed and converted into shopping plazas and wedding halls. Some of those that were purchased under the cinemas act, and therefore legally bound not to have anything else constructed on them, played fast and loose with the law and refashioned themselves into commercial stage theatre of the Punjabi slapstick jughat variety. Others didn’t do even that and are simply empty, with property dealers wistfully sighing about such prime localities being locked up.

All this spiel above is common knowledge. Why am I drudging it up?

Well, in the recent tensions between India and Pakistan, some within the Pakistani film fraternity seem to think that our newly nascent film industry is strong enough to sustain the new multiplexes. And that the multiplexes are strong enough to sustain the film industry.

That isn’t true. The multiplex business only became a financially viable option when the ban on the Indian film industry was lifted. The mushrooming of the theatres was squarely a result of that. In fact, businessmen are actively scouting out locations in second-tier and even third-tier cities for multiplexes.

All of that will come to a grinding halt once the Indian films stop. The math behind it is slightly sketchy, but most distributors, even the ones who are for a ban, say that the number of local films required to keep the cinemas viable is around 50 to 60 a year; and these are commercial crowd-pulling flicks that we are talking about. At the moment, we don’t produce even a quarter of cinema-ready feature films to begin with.

This self-imposed ban on Indian films by the exhibitors should be discouraged. Not just because discretion is the better part of valour and that it would hurt our cinemas and, through them, our resurgent film industry. But also because it is the right thing to do. Humayun Saeed, one of the producers of Pakistan’s highest grossing film, put it well: if we do think the Indian ban is wrong, then why should we do the same?

And it’s not as if there is some international principle of reciprocity involved. That would have been the issue had it been the Indian government that had banned our films and artists; it is just some private film association.

At the moment, the quantum of trade between the two countries is huge and it won’t stop at all. The film industry is, at the end of the day, an industry, much like, say, light electrical goods. Why on earth treat it so differently? It’s not as if the Indian industrialists have agreed to a ban on trade of other commodities. Why do we apply different rules to filmmakers, musicians and athletes?