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. In this talk, Iftikhar Dadi focuses 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), Dadi argues 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.

Iftikhar Dadi is the 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.

Iftikhar Dadi, John H. Burris Professor and Chair of Cornell University’s Department of History of Art