Meena Shorey: The Droll Queen of Partition

Salma Siddique1

Abstract

This article is a star study of actress Meena Shorey, whose career navigated the tortuous itinerary of a divisive decolonization, travelling amongst cities and nations, identities and communities, and refugees and citizens. Becoming famous as the “droll queen,” Meena appeared in a number of romantic comedies in post-Partition Bombay, which were directed by her husband and refugee filmmaker Roop K. Shorey, and loosely modeled on the Hollywood screwball. With unconventional gender dynamics and Meena as the ultimate star of these comedies, I argue that the Shorey films were sublime renderings of Partition social relations fissured along community and gender. Ek Thi Ladki (1949), in particular, is a Partition screwball that carries the historic imprint through a cynical humor, the nostalgia for Lahore and the reorientations of national perspectives. As the interfaith romance and marriage between a Muslim Meena and a Hindu Roop constituted a utopian alliance that informed the circulation of these films, it also served as a discursive site for communal and national tensions. Using archival sources accessed in both India and Pakistan, including Meena’s memoir, the article recovers the productive cosmopolitanism that characterized the short-lived Meena–Roop collaboration, which ended with the actress’s migration to Pakistan.

Keywords

Partition, Bombay film, Lahore studios, cosmopolitanism, Lara lappa girl, Meena Shorey, Roop Shorey, comedies, Punjabiyat

Introduction

A sequence from Ek Thi Ladki (Once there was a Girl, 1949): Two liveried retainers pursue a plump, pretty girl dressed in a salwar-kurta, her hair braided in two.

Hiding behind walls and parked cars, she flees through a marketplace, colliding with pedestrians and vending carts. In the midst of the market, she spots an incongruous ladies’ boutique, the Paris Fashion Store, and rushes inside to a counter featuring European mannequins sporting trendy hats. The pursuing duo reach the store and are guided to the hat display by a shop assistant. The girl, assuming a statuesque pose, has switched places with the mannequin at the center of the display (Figure 1). Here,

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1 Doctoral Candidate, School of Media, Art and Design, University of Westminster, London, United Kingdom.

Corresponding author:Salma Siddique, School of Media, Art and Design, University of Westminster, London, United Kingdom. E-mail: salmasid9@gmail.com

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the two men pause to admire the technological marvel of “dolls” that move their eyes on cue. Rolling her eyes and flashing a lopsided smile, the girl engages her pursuers in a ludicrous game that displays her superior wit and guts, and her chameleon-like attributes.

Such was Meena, remembered as the Lara lappa girl after the popular song from the same film. Large quizzical eyes, pert expression sug-gesting a trick up her sleeve and an air of aban-don, Meena’s face could break into a grin or grump with equal ease. Brazenly pouting through many roles, her appeal lay in an endearing com-edy of incompetence, inadvertent success and a disregard for received ideas of feminine elegance. While owing her popularity to the

romantic comedies made in Bombay between 1948 and 1956, by her husband Roop K. Shorey, a refugee filmmaker from Lahore, the actress’s career spanned a quarter of a century. From 1940 to 1965, it straddled a tumultuous period in the history of the subcontinent and across three political contexts—colonial India, independent India and Pakistan.

Meena’s career navigated the tortuous itinerary of a divisive decolonization, travelling amongst cities and nations, identities and communities, and refugees and citizens. Belonging to different religious communities during colonial India’s Partition, the Hindu Roop and Muslim Meena conducted a conjugal and professional collaboration that spoke of a cosmopolitan subjectivity, which was increasingly to come under strain from tightening national allegiances. Once considered the “top comedienne of the Indian screen…second only to Raj Kapoor in the hierarchy of comedy artistes” (Filmfare, September 5, 1952, p. 19), Meena’s stardom in India abruptly ended with her migration to Pakistan in 1956. Putting her fame as the “droll queen” together with her destiny as a refugee, we may observe a striking instance of historical trauma negotiated by humor. Ek Thi Ladki, which launched her into the comedienne star orbit, is a case in point. An office romance between a boss and his new secretary, the film is organized around a world turned upside down and fraught with the lineaments of loss, dislocation, and a perilous freedom. Against the typification of early cinematic mediations of Partition in terms of a “ghostly pall [that] enveloped the cultural field” (Sarkar, 2009, p. 114), Ek Thi Ladki sublimates Partition anguish into a sparkling screwball comedy.

Extending the ambit of cultural negotiation beyond the territorial and temporal confines put in motion by the Partition,1 I will explore two ways of complicating our understanding: one related to periodiza- tion and the other to gendered experience. Drawing on the shifts in Meena’s identity between the period 1940 and 1956, I extend further Vazira Zamindar’s understanding of a “long Partition,” which includes “the bureaucratic violence of drawing political boundaries and nationalising identities” (Zamindar, 2007, p. 3). In the new coordinates offered by Meena’s biography, the beginnings lie not in 1947 but in 1940 when Meena started out under the tutelage of filmmaker Sohrab Modi. This is a periodization that runs parallel with other conceptions complicating Partition’s time frame, including the articulation of the demand for Pakistan at the Muslim League Lahore session in 1940 (Pandey, 2001). In terms of women’s experience, the procedures of religious conversion and religious recovery, pivoting on the patriarchal construction of women as community essence and national property (Menon & Bhasin, 1998), were symbolically enacted in Meena’s image. While the Meena–Roop

Figure 1. Screen Still from Ek Thi Ladki (1949, DVD).

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alliance forms a critical backdrop to the publicity and reception of the frothy Shorey comedies that featured an eccentric heroine vigorously overcoming impediments to romance, it could also serve as a discursive site for communal and national tensions.

As against the stark identity logics of Partition, a productive cosmopolitanism surfaces in the Shorey comedies of post-Partition Bombay. In some accounts seen through the lens of colonial modernity, cosmopolitanism has been defined as a “form of improvisation, involving openness and mobility” (Van der Veer, 2002, p. 165). Away from this intellectual cosmopolitanism, Mica Nava proposes a vis-ceral one, based on the “feelings of attraction for and identification with otherness” (Nava, 2007, p. 8). Exploring race relations and anti-Semitism in the twentieth century, Nava finds that conviviality and empathy have always coexisted with the most hostile manifestations of racialization, and mixed sexual–romantic relationships provide instances of a visceral cosmopolitanism that has allowed greater perme-ability of ethnic and social borders. Meena’s star personality fashioned through the Shorey comedies displays both these modalities, enmeshing the intellectual with the emotional, and producing a novel cosmopolitanism that could instinctively play with identities without being bounded by them. Key here was her use of her body and the way the films draw upon the cultural iconography of Punjab or Punjabiyat. Mobilized as a regional aesthetic, Punjabiyat provides dynamic notations of cultural continuity amidst the territorial and temporal rupture the Shoreys and their collaborators experienced in their dislocation from colonial Lahore, their original site of filmmaking.

While the year 1947 saw the highest incidence of Partition film migration between Bombay and Lahore, discrete (and often discreet) migrations continued till the late 1950s, as in the case of Meena. A research respondent cursorily characterized the migration of personnel from India to Pakistan in terms of cinema couples, musical men, and singing women.2 Delightfully, Meena remained perennially resistant to easy pigeonholing. She neither captured the aural imagination of the subcontinent as “Madam Noorjahan” did nor was she imbued with the aura of “mysterious Neena,” who accompanied her filmmaker husband W.Z. Ahmed to Pakistan. In contrast to her later obscurity, there is no dearth of popular contemporaneous material on Meena, which includes available films, magazine articles, center spreads, photographs, star profiles, and newspaper stories (Figure 2). Apart from facilitating the recon-struction of a star career, however beset with gaps, such material is also crucial to understanding the discursive role of the star in cultural negotiations of Partition.

As this research accessed archival sources in both India and Pakistan, it became evident that Meena was framed differently in the two countries. In Filmindia, an amused and condescending tone marked most reports on her, often commenting on her bulk and hinting at a lack of formal education or grooming. Despite her overtly transgressive traits, Filmfare conventionalized her as an affectionate companion who converted to marry and became a doting mother of two adopted kids. In contrast, the press in Pakistan, though largely in retrospect, saw Meena as having defied many social boundaries. Obituaries and later appraisals suggested a wayward life whose transgressions could meet only a lamen-table end. A revealing instance of this was the publication of Meena’s photograph below a news item in Nigar about a teenage girl who ran away from her home to act in films (Nigar Weekly, October 15, 1956). While the girl had been “saved” by the Karachi police, the seemingly unrelated photo of the star published beneath the news item seemed a potent reminder of the fate of those who could not be saved. Likewise film historian Mushtaq Gazdar’s tone, otherwise generous, tends to be censorious in briefly narrating the story of a much “pampered Meena” who left Roop “heartbroken” and “empty-handed,” and finally died a pauper herself (Gazdar, 1998, p. 53). But most compelling of all is her life narrative, published in the mid-1980s in Lahore.3 Purportedly retrieving Meena from public and institutional neglect, it proceeds to tell how the tables were turned on her, of hunter becoming prey. The account, laced with a nostalgia for the loss of youth and pity for a decrepit

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Figure 2. Full-page colour photograph published in Filmfare, May 16, 1952

Courtesy National Film Archives of India, Pune.

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old age, is prefaced with the aging star’s self-disparaging words that evoke a stock view of films as disreputable business.

After listening to my story, no respectable girl will join films. Let alone respectable, even the bad ones won’t.

Richard Dyer speaks of stars as specific significations that are realized in media texts (Dyer, 2009). Perhaps in keeping with his argument that the image should be separated from the person in analyzing star discourse, Dyer avoids the complications introduced by autobiographical texts. In this study, such texts are seen as very relevant, enabling an exploration of Meena’s life narrative as a star text where “the felt quality of an actor’s life, [her] construction of self and others, [her] modes of performing her identity are on display” (Smith & Watson, 2010). Despite the contrite veneer imposed on her life narrative, Meena’s independent voice as an actress, “an atypical figure in history” (Viv Gardner, 2007, p. 173), emerges as she selectively engages with lived experience and situates her social identity.

Her memoir misses several details, including any reference to two of her five marriages, and the kids she adopted with Shorey. It also makes no mention of her brief theater stint in Calcutta before her time in Bombay, touched upon in a Filmfare article of the mid-1950s. Possibly these omissions relate to the memoir’s claim that more details were being saved for a book-length life narrative. I read the 1980s memoir alongside contemporary commentary on Meena in the 1950s, to explore the changing accounts of filmmaking in an industrial context driven by antagonistic communal identities and national divides.

“Emotional yet Candid”

Meena’s memoir proceeds chronologically, recounting a childhood marked by hardship and her parents’ unstable marriage. Born as Khurshid Jahan in the early 1920s in Raiwind, a village close to Lahore, she was one of five children. Early in her memoirs, she categorically denounces her father and elder brother, a theme that will continue in the troubled relationships she would have with men both professionally and personally. Emphasizing the lack of educational and professional options available to young women of her class at that time, Khurshid noted that films offered a possible way out from her oppressive family situation.

At the age of eleven, I happened to watch Acchut Kanya (1936). Devika Rani and Ashok Kumar were the lead protagonists of the film. After this, Ragini’s beautiful image in Roop Shorey’s Dulla Bhatti (1940) created in my impressionable mind a desire to shine on screen. How would this come to be, was beyond my comprehension.

If Roop Shorey’s Lahore film Dulla Bhatti inspired the young Khurshid, her actual acting career started in Bombay. Following her parents’ estrangement, she accompanied her mother to the city. There, her brother-in-law took her to Sikandar’s mahurat where filmmaker Sohrab Modi spotted her.4 Being of modest means, Khurshid had agonized over appropriate attire for a gathering of the rich and famous. Living in a multiethnic and still cosmopolitan Bombay, she confided in her next-door Arab neighbor.

When I shared with her my dilemma, she lent me a white coloured Arab maxi and styled my hair in a manner so striking that she herself exclaimed, “Khurshid, you look divine!”

Amelie Hastie’s study of women’s recollections and film history notes that key to a star’s investment in her own stardom and place in film history is her fascination with herself as a visual image

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(Hastie, 2007). Describing her entry into the mahurat set at Minerva in dramatic detail, Khurshid found herself the cynosure of all eyes.

The guests mistook me for Sikandar’s heroine. Even though it was the result of confusion, I was thrilled and proud of my charismatic personality.

A keen Sohrab reportedly lost no time in signing her for a studio contract at a monthly remuneration of 600 rupees as “he was looking for someone to fill actress Naseem’s shoes.” He also gave Khurshid her nom de plume, after chancing on the letter “m” in Avesta.5 A name without clear derivation from religious identity, the versatile “Meena” replaced an obvious and onerous Muslim name. If Hindu majoritarian pressures have been understood as influencing name changes during this period (Das, 2006, p. 463; Sarkar, 2009, p. 77; Vasudevan, 1994, p. 109), then a Parsi studio proprietor such as Modi consulting the Zoroastrian religious book to launch a Muslim actress reveals a complex matrix of multiple identities at play on and off the Indian screen. While the name changes were a gesture aimed at the cinema public, the original identities resurfaced, especially once actors and actresses became relatively popular and subjects of fan curiosity. In her memoir, Meena does not discuss why Modi thought her name should be changed and the sheer joy of getting into films appeared to make name changing a procedural detail.

In Sikandar (1941, Sohrab Modi), Meena played the patriotic princess Sadhna who rebels against her brother and joins the Indian King Porus to resist Alexander’s offensive. Reading Sikandar as an anal-ogy for India’s struggle for independence, Priya Jaikumar refers to Meena’s character whose “obedience to an abstract higher authority disrupts her assimilation within an existing familial structure, while con-solidating her allegiance to a future, utopian state” (Jaikumar, 2006, p. 215). As Jaikumar notes, this “admission of conflicting interests” in colonial historical romances, permitted female characters to make choices that exceeded and even conflicted with their domestic loyalties. This would change after inde-pendence, with films symbolically realigning the interests of nation-state and family. In enacting trans-gressions made possible by the “crisis of loyalties” in historical romances (Sikandar and Prithvi Vallabh), Meena’s beginnings foreshadow her later persona. A rebellious tone also marks Meena’s recollection of her start in films. Her family, especially her estranged father, did not approve of the decision. However, her regular film salary, by no means modest, quietened any further objections from a financially hard up family.

As a regular employee of the studio, Meena acted in several Minerva films during the early 1940s, such as, Phir Milenge (We’ll Meet Again, 1942, Sohrab Modi), Prithvi Vallabh (1943, Sohrab Modi), and Pattharon ka Saudagar (The Stone-Trader, 1944, Sohrab Modi). In Prithvi Vallabh, she played the royal maiden Vilasvati betrothed to crown prince but in love with Vallabh’s poet. It was around the making of Pattharon ka Saudagar that Meena made a decisive shift. Finding her options limited by a stifling studio contract with Minerva, she left Bombay for Lahore. While her memoir does not mention a precise date, it must have been around late 1944 or early 1945. This was preceded by a court case she filed against Sohrab Modi, involving prolonged and bitter negotiations with the studio owner, who had allegedly taken advantage of her lack of education and not made the terms of an iniquitous contract explicit. Recalling this vulnerable phase, Meena claims to have lost out on films, such as, Humayun (1945, Mehboob Khan) and Lal Haveli (Red Mansion, 1944, K.B. Lal). Actor Al-Nasir, then her hus-band, was working in a Roop Shorey production, Shalimar (1945, Roop Shorey) in Lahore and she decided to accompany him. Once in Lahore, Meena signed a contract with studio owner and producer Dalsukh K. Pancholi at 7,000 rupees a month for Sheher Se Dur (Far from the City, 1946, Barkat Mehra). It was Pancholi, who helped Meena out of the Minerva studio tangle but not before Sohrab had

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slapped damages on Pancholi for recruiting her in Lahore. Meena went back to Bombay once more to finally settle the matter. Meanwhile, other projects in Lahore had materialized, and she returned to the city in no time. In pre-Partition Lahore, Meena appeared in Shehar Se Dur, and started work in Arsi (1947, Dawood Chand), Patjhad (Autumn, 1948, Dalsukh Pancholi), and Rut Rangili (A Colorful Season), which as we will see underwent several destructions and new starts during the process of Partition.6 Through Meena’s account, also corroborated by the newspaper coverage, Lahore emerges as a busy center of film production during the mid-1940s and had not been entirely absorbed by Bombay studios.7

While Pancholi’s Patjhad and Shorey’s Rut Rangili were being made, the Partition plan was announced. Meena had by then divorced a swinging Al-Nasir and describes herself heartbroken by his indiscretions. What she does not mention are two other short-lived marriages, one to actor Zahoor Raja and another to her coactor in Shehar Se Dur, Raza Mir (Filmindia, April 1942, p. 49). In mid-1947, when Meena left Lahore and moved to Bombay, it is most likely that she also parted ways with Mir (Nigar, 2009, p. 140). As a Muslim hailing from west Punjab, it is certainly striking that Meena did not choose to stay in Lahore, though the reasons are not hard to discern. The abandonment of the studios in the city, largely owned by Hindus, did not leave artistes with much hope. Having seen her film associates Shorey and Pancholi leave Lahore, Bombay may have appeared to be a sound professional choice, which also reveals that she did not identify with the Partition plan and the new state.

On reaching Bombay, Meena signed Actress (1948, Najam Naqvi), Dukhyari (Unfortunate Woman, 1948, D.K. Rattan), and Kale Badal (Dark Clouds, 1951, Anant Thakur). In Filmistan Studio’s Actress, she played a stage actress Ragini, who wishes to protect her sister from the pitfalls of a performer’s life. When the two fall in love with the same man, Ragini bows out of the love triangle by first feigning death and then laughing off such tragic dénouements. Around this time, Meena heard about Shorey and his tremendous loss from their common friend Majnu (Harold Lewis) who too had migrated to Bombay. In late 1946, Roop Shorey had embarked on an ambitious studio construction at Multan Road with the latest technological facilities and spread over a very large area (The Tribune, September 8, 1946, p. 7). As a “Hindu property” in Lahore, this new Shorey studio had been attacked in the Partition riots and set on fire. Forced out of a volatile Punjab, Shorey moved to a hotel in Bombay and was reportedly looking for collaborators to make a film. A striking sense of agency emerges in Meena’s narrative at this point. She claims to have paid Shorey’s hotel bill of 6 months, brought him to her flat, and offered astute advice.

I advised Shorey Sahab to make a Punjabi film as it was economical. I would be the heroine and we would cast a low priced hero. He liked my counsel.

The Punjabi film Chaman (1948) was Roop and Meena’s first collaboration in independent India. Even though the hero played the title role of Chaman, in her memoirs Meena insists on the prominent role she played not merely as actress but also in production decisions. This “low-priced hero” was Karan Dewan and the producer was his brother Jaimini Dewan, who a year later made the Partition film Lahore (1949). Also set in Lahore, Chaman pivoted on electoral rivalries and turned out to be a profitable venture. Meena played a Punjabi girl Shanti out to avenge her father’s humiliating defeat in local elections but ends up falling in love with the electoral rival. Encouraged by Chaman’s success, Meena and Roop made their most popular film Ek Thi Ladki (1949) followed by Dholak (Drumbeats, 1951), Ek Do Teen (One-Two-Three, 1953), Aag Ka Darya (River of Fire, 1953), and Jalwa (Luster, 1955). These were all Shorey Art Productions and were often referred to as “noisy stunt comedies,” “fast entertainers,” and “slapsticks” in the reviews. Aag ka Darya was the only exception to the “gay romance

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and rollicking comedy that filmgoers [had] come to expect in Roop Shorey’s pictures” (The Times of India, December 13, 1953, p. 3). Apart from acting in husband Roop Shorey’s productions, Meena also appeared in similar roles in Shri Naqad Narayan (Money is God, 1955, I.S. Johar), Shrimati 420 (Trickster Wife, 1956, G.P. Sippy), and Awara Shahzadi (Vagabond Princess, 1956, Pyarelal) and was the associate producer of films, such as, Ek Do Teen and Mukhda (Face, 1951).

When Ek Thi Ladki released, Meena and Roop went to Calcutta for its publicity. After an evening at the nightclub and a stroll in a park, an already married Roop proposed to Meena. In contrast to the idyllic backdrop described by Meena herself, she pointedly denies harboring any romantic affection for Shorey and portrays the marriage as her qurbaani (sacrifice) for a besotted collaborator whom she respected. Never inclined toward self-effacement, Meena the star claims to have told Shorey as much, professing herself to be “emotional yet candid.” The memoir’s account appears to have been retrospec-tively motivated to explain her later decision to part with Roop and also suggests a cooling off of the relationship by the mid-1950s. However, in 1949, Roop and Meena decided to go ahead with the marriage in Calcutta itself, as Bombay laws were stringent against bigamy. While Roop suggested either a civil marriage or an Islamic ceremony, Meena surprised him by arranging an Arya Samaji one in a local temple (Figure 3). In her first-person narrative, Meena reflects on giving up her Muslim iden-tity by characterizing the choice of a Hindu ceremony and associated conversion as poori qurbaani

Figure 3. An artist’s impression of the wedding published in Filmfare, September 5, 1952.

Courtesy National Film Archives of India, Pune.

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(complete sacrifice). If this account seeks to reconcile her past to the project of recovering a Muslim and national identity, it also involves an ironic putdown of her relationship to a family ever dependent on her, and offering little in return.

After the marriage, Meena took on a new name yet again and became Kiran Shorey in her offscreen public life. In the actress’s narrative, her association with Roop came to be marked by the losses he sus-tained during the Partition and her attempts to make a worthwhile life for them in Bombay. Her claims resonate with the tongue-in-cheek gossip published in Filmindia in early 1950, which however may also hold a further clue to Meena’s “sacrifice.” After Partition, the magazine had started taking Muslim film artistes to task, especially actresses in Bombay, for their alleged lack of contribution to national refugee relief.

Meena, the Pakistan-born Muslim actress is reported to be doing better refugee-relief work than the Government of India. They say that she earns a lot of money doing hard work and with it helps a refugee producer to produce pictures and to relax when he is tired. Wish we could say the same about other Pakistan-born Muslim actresses. (Filmindia, March 1950, p. 23)

While “Pakistan-born” may have the makings of Filmindia’s deliberate anachronisms, it also signals the “domicile” and “birth” criteria of Indian citizenship introduced in late 1949. Vazira Zamindar’s work reveals that by making “domicile” a condition of citizenship, the Indian citizenship of women was subject to the location of their fathers and husbands (Zamindar, 2008). With Meena’s father and last husband in Pakistan, her continued livelihood in Bombay could be contingent on an Indian citizenship. Thus, her marriage to Roop would have offered a means to overcome the restrictions devised by new nation-states on a colonial west Punjab-born Meena wishing to work in, what was now, an Indian Bombay.

Meena locates a turning point in her career and national location with the 1954 “Jaal agitation” in Pakistan against the import of Indian film.8 Till then she had arranged for a portion of the profits of her films exhibited in Pakistan to be sent to her family living in Lahore. This arrangement was devised to overcome the hurdles in monetary transactions between the two countries where artistes found it difficult to claim their dues and royalty.9 The increasing restrictions on the import of Indian films jeop-ardized this circumvention of official repatriation. When J.C. Anand, the Karachi-based distributer of Shorey films in Pakistan, invited Meena and Roop to make a film, it offered a way out of the embargo dilemma and a solution to Meena’s family’s financial troubles.

In 1956, Meena and Roop undertook the fateful trip to Pakistan to make Miss 56 (1956, Roop Shorey). In her account, this trip does not appear different from earlier ones:

In those days I used to book three-four rooms in Lahore’s most expensive Faletti’s hotel and live there.… During the making of Miss 56, I constantly moved back and forth between Lahore, Karachi and Bombay.

But 1956 was not 1946, a time only a decade ago when Meena had casually shuttled between different cities, settling legal matters with Minerva in Bombay and completing shoots at Pancholi and Shorey studios in Lahore. Bombay and Lahore now lay in two different and mutually suspicious nations. On reaching Karachi, she signed the film Sarfarosh (Defiant, 1956, Anwar K. Pasha), which was produced in Lahore and released before Miss 56. During this trip, Meena decided to stay on in Pakistan and left with little option Roop returned to India after completing Miss 56.

The national industrial action, led by the producers of “Pakistani films,” which compelled Meena to travel to Pakistan to act in a locally produced film, was but one manifestation of the increasingly protectionist posture of Lahore film enterprise, now transformed by happenstance into the producer

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of Pakistani cinema. Once in Lahore, Meena recalls meeting with hostility reserved for itinerant Indian artistes working in Pakistan, something which may have accelerated her decision to settle down in Pakistan permanently.

Till the time I awaited a Pakistani citizenship, most people here (film industry of Lahore) hoped that I would return to India.

It was through the good offices of Prime Minister H.S. Suhrawardy, who Meena mischievously characterizes as “horny” in the same grateful breath, that she got her Pakistani citizenship by the end of 1957.

Meena’s decision to work in the Pakistani film industry was accompanied by the news that she had separated from Shorey and reconverted to Islam (Nigar Weekly, September 19, 1956). She went back to being Khurshid Jahan, while retaining Meena as her screen name. The distinction between the personal and professional motives underlying these changes is hard to locate. At the time, it was reported that the marriage was a decision that Meena had not been comfortable with and she had decided to terminate her relationship with Roop Shorey the day her mother passed away. While this is not corroborated by the memoirs,10 Meena does express her unease at remaining in India as a “Hindu forever.” However, captur-ing the complexity of the situation, the memoirs are also unequivocal about Roop Shorey’s liberal cosmopolitanism and their overall indifference to religious faith. It was not a trifle to write of such an outlook as the readers of her memoir in 1980s Pakistan were living through the years of General Zia’s Islamization.

Shorey was far from a fanatic Hindu. He kept the religious books of all faiths. In our house we would equally celebrate all festivals like Idd, Shabbarat, Holi and Diwali. We had a Muslim cook, a Sikh driver, a Hindu bearer and a Christian nanny. However, neither did he ever visit a temple, nor I, a mosque.

That the division of 1947 did not alter Meena’s personal and professional stakes in Lahore and Bombay brings us back to the important Partition question: “do women have a country?” (Menon & Bhasin, 1998, p. 251). However, by 1956, “belonging” with all its ambivalence, could no longer be adjourned or evaded. The so-called choice Meena had could only be an exercise in exclusion; either India or Pakistan, either Hindu or Muslim, marking her into the property of one nation and community over another. This was in complete contrast to her screwball persona in Shorey films, where she stood for no one but herself.

The “Shorey Technique” and the “Bug of Hindu–Muslim Romance”

The Indian film press identified a “Shorey technique” in the comedies produced and directed by Roop Shorey in Bombay. The Shorey films had a consistent team of artistes, many of them collaborators from the “palmy Lahore days,” now film refugees in Bombay. The team regulars were actors, such as, Meena, Majnu, Motilal, Kuldeep Kaur, and Karan Dewan, scriptwriter I.S. Johar, lyricist Aziz Kashmiri, and music director Vinod. Apart from an identifiable cast which included secondary characters in different permutations across a body of films, the other markers of the “Shorey technique” were long climactic chase sequences, exaggerated stunts in incongruous locations, and mind-boggling twists and turns to sustain the humorous momentum of the story. The characters in these films were always on the move, travelling to different cities, some directly specified, others suggested. The songs were either frothy duets or ensemble performances involving, for example, a gang of girls in a neighborhood, colleagues in an office, or students in a college. A “forceful dig in the ribs,” “bubbling with wit,” and “oodles of

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fun,”11 the films were reminiscent of the Hollywood comedies that regularly made their way into the colonial Indian market during the 1930s.12 These shared similarities of mood, character types, and eccentric misunderstandings of screwball comedies, such as, It Happened One Night (1934), The Awful Truth (1937), His Girl Friday (1940), and Mr. and Mrs. Smith (1941).

What accounts for a refugee navigating the dislocations of Partition turning to comedy film routines? There are several obvious reasons. First, Roop Shorey had a predilection for comedy from the start of his career, as in his first Lahore-made film, Majnu (1935) a spoof on the legendary Laila Majnu. Second, his collaborators Meena, Majnu, and crucially the satirical writer I.S. Johar seemed to thrive in the genre. The huge success of Ek Thi Ladki would have undoubtedly assured its makers that their filmmaking future lay in these comedies.

However, it is the biographies of dislocation these figures share that suggest the strongest context for the narrative patterns, restless energy, and madcap antics of the Shorey comedies; these life histories point to the underlying motivation of finding resources to navigate a world defined by the debilitating effects of Partition. In the process, they willy–nilly put together a progressive gender politics or, at least, a destabilization of dominant gender regimes. Exploring the adversarial contest between male and female within marriage, breakup, and remarriage, the screwball is characterized by verbal duels and physical mayhem, also evident in the local assemblages of the genre in Bombay. Through the “female dominated courtship” involving a “less assertive, easily frustrated male” (Gehring, 1983, p. 1), the Shorey films work out a comedic and cinematic transformation of the social. Innovating on the tropes of role reversal, unstable unions, and the eccentric heroine, the Shorey comedies featured the democratic couple and embodied the possibility of equality. A more companionate and quirky courtship was the highlight of these films. The plot of such films often depended on the desire of women to achieve parity, and the publicity and reviews of films that followed the trend set by Shorey comedies appeared to be conscious of this dimension. The disapproving review of Shrimati 420 calls the picture “one long argument stretch-ing 12,000 and odd feet and asserting that women have the right to do all that men do” (Filmindia, June 1956, p. 43). The publicity page of Shrimatiji (My Lady, 1952) introduces the film as “a social story produced by Filmistan Ltd., is a riot of girls—young and beautiful girls who decide to live like men a free and independent life in free India” (Filmindia, 1951). The tagline for Shri Naqad Narayan acclaimed it “a delightful satire on men and manners” (Filmfare, September 2, 1952, p. 38). And above all this collective drive to refigure women characters and gender relations was captured in Meena’s persona in these films, which with the “chaotic force of the screwball heroine defied convention and male prerogative” (Glitre, 2006, p. 1).

Famously called the “comedy of remarriage” (Cavell, 1981), the screwball operates through confusion around states of union, often treating marriage as an afterthought. If we extend such analyses to the register of fan curiosity opened up by speculations on the relationship between the on- and offscreen, we will observe letters regularly enquiring about the status of the relationship between the actress and the director.

What will happen to Shorey when Meena dies? (Filmindia, August 1957, p. 16). I always see film actress Meena with Roop K. Shorey. What is the relationship between them? Where is her husband if she has any? (Filmindia, January 1950, p. 26)

The “seeing” refers to the strong visual presence of the couple in magazine cartoons and photographs, with Meena photographed and sketched alongside Roop Shorey. I suggest that this interfaith romance and marriage constituted a utopian alliance that informed the circulation of these films, the romantic lead on screen “seen” as encoding the romance of Meena and Roop. “Somehow our artistes act more realistically with their directors than with their heroes” noted the Filmindia caption underneath a “glimpse of human relationship” between Roop and Meena (Figure 4).

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Figure 4. Filmindia, September, 1949.

Courtesy Reuben Library, British Film Institute, London.

Meena and Roop’s intercommunity marriage was not a rare one in the film industry at that time—in the 1940s Nazir and Swarnlata, and Durga Khote and Mohammed Rashid provide other examples. However, to risk a generaliza-tion based on the limited archive of Filmindia’s more partisan prose after 1947, such marriages and the adjustments they entailed, especially the conversion, mostly of women, were increasingly under attack. In 1951, the magazine reported a “Hindu–Muslim bug” doing the rounds in the film industry, anticipating the recent Hindu right-wing campaign of love jihad, which while attack-ing a wider incidence of Muslim men marrying Hindu women, also targets cases from the Hindi film industry.13

That the Hindu–Muslim bug of romance is drawing blood and tears, the way a Pakistan conscious

Muslim hero is reported to have induced a Hindu film girl to fall in love with him. (Filmindia, January 1951, p. 15)

The magazine in its several subsequent issues carried warnings for the “Don Juans,” that is, young Muslim men who seduced Hindu women away from their communities. However, Filmindia was not unequivocal in condemning all interfaith marriages and in the case of Roop and Meena, noted with satisfaction that she had been converted during the wedding ceremony (Filmindia, May 1950b, p. 18). As Charu Gupta points out, this was consistent with the imagination sustained by popular Hindi literature in the late-nineteenth century, where “the Muslim male was maligned for abducting and forcefully converting Hindu women; in contrast stories of love and romance between a Hindu man and a Muslim woman provided titillation and a general sense of elation” (Gupta, 2001, p. 241). In this discursive regime, for a Hindu man to marry a Muslim was not wrong; it was seen as recovering Muslim women for something better by their conversion to Hinduism.

In Pakistan, many years later, Meena was said to have converted in order to protect herself against the threat of a communal backlash in Bombay. And yet her insistence that she scripted and carried out her own conversion, may point to elements of female agency, in which she deployed conversion “as a mode of coping with, challenging and within limits transgressing an oppressive social order” (Gupta, 2001, p. 327). Against the background of Meena’s sustained critique of her family, and in her taking responsibility for her conversion rather than attributing it to Roop, we can assert that Meena charted an arena of independent action in crossing religious boundaries. Yet, in keeping with her irre-pressible personality, Meena did not take her transgressions too seriously either.

As far as faith was concerned, I considered myself a Muslim. When the priest was officiating our marital vows around the ritual fire, I had psychologically treated it akin to a film shoot. All this while I was laughing inside.

The coverage of Meena’s decision to stay on in Pakistan after 1956, in the Pakistani-Urdu film magazine Nigar Weekly as well as the Indian-English Filmindia reveals that the separation made the Meena–Roop

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alliance a potent site for playing out communal and national tensions. A Nigar cartoon showed Roop willing to embrace Islam for Meena and vindictively called the producer a filmy behroop or impersonator. Coded as “Hindu” with a tilak and tikki, the cartoon depicted Roop wielding “a Muslim mask” complete with the Liaquat Khan cap while Meena sat far away14 (Figure 5). The gap between the Roop represented in Nigar and the one that emerges in Meena’s account could not be more striking. Back in Bombay, Filmin-dia cast Roop in the dubious light of a spy whose close links to Pakistan had to be monitored (Filmindia, July 1956, p. 38), and called Meena, Pakistan’s very own Panchali.15 It lost no time in crudely recasting the marriage as one of many ongoing contests between the countries, this time with sexual overtones.

That what Nehru and his Cabinet colleagues could not do during the last 9 years, Producer Roop Shorey and his wife Meena are reported to have done. With Meena deciding to become a citizen of Pakistan and Shorey of course, remaining the most loyal Indian citizen ever known, they have succeeded in putting India and Pakistan in the same bed. And India is still on the top, of course (Filmindia, October 1956).

“The Full Meal for the Non-vegetarians in Romance”

This appraisal of Meena’s (Filmindia, June 1953, p. 48) Ek Do Teen in a film review captures how her comic performance was centerd on physicality and the attractions of slapstick. She played the working

Figure 5. Nigar Weekly, September, 1956.

Courtesy S.M. Aslam Illyas, Nigar Magazine, Karachi.

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girl or one in search of work with an in-your-face attitude and robust agency. An office secretary in Ek Thi Ladki, a music teacher in Dholak, and a shop assistant in Shri Naqad Narayan, Meena was rarely seen within domestic space. The lead couple were collaborators, whether it was Meena and Ranjit sharing household chores as “servants” in Ek Thi Ladki or competing in a singing contest in Dholak where Manohar composed and Mona sang. If in Dholak Manohar rescued Mona from a galloping horse gone berserk, then in Ek-Do-Teen Roma saves Ranjit from the gallows if, inimitably, in perhaps the most leisurely race against time on-screen: she drives a bus, a tractor, a rail-trolley, and finally a train in order to rescue Ranjit. As the train runs out of coal, Meena and her friends ingeniously proceed to chop the wooden carriages and feed the engine fire while crooning a train song.

Meena’s comic performance was based on a style that alternated a noncommittal, offhand presence with wild and incongruous gesticulations. She would often attract qualified appraisals, such as, “Droll Queen Meena Shorey who can make you laugh when she cries and cry when she laughs” (Figure 6) or the one published in The Pakistan Times a year later: “In the mobility of expression and freedom, Meena leaves everybody behind. She has interpreted the role fairly well but her performance lacks restraint. At moments the audience wishes there was someone to check her a bit” (The Pakistan Times, June 22, 1956, p. 6). Meena’s antics were regularly photographed and published in the film magazines, for instance when she proudly posed next to a vanquished wild boar in Filmfare (May 29, 1953, p. 4). If the challenge was “big game” during Aag Ka Dariya featuring a fantastically realist scene of her pulling a thorn out of a tiger’s paw, then for Ek-Do-Teen she was reported to have learnt how

to drive a tractor. “The secret of her success is that she is utterly without fear and without nerves” surmised a publicity insert in Filmfare (May 29, 1953, p. 4). The attributes of physical daring along with manic slapstick presence made Meena quite unconventional in terms of prevalent norms for leading female characters.

Meena’s overweight body was eloquent with possibilities, her “avoirdupois” used both for standard comic effects and to develop the particular pleasures of incongruous romance based on the comedy of unevenly matched bodies. This was noted by an article in Filmfare which attributed the success of the star pair of Motilal–Meena, to the comedy of a fat woman and her frail spouse (Filmfare, January 7, 1955, p. 4) (Figure 7). The cartoons that appeared regularly in Filmindia also commented on her bulk and referred to her as the “family bal-loon” (Filmindia, August 1952, p. 22) and “bag of wheat from Punjab” (Filmindia, June 1954, p. 17). These features also carried publicity sto-ries from the film shoots of these comedies in which anecdotes about her weight causing med-ical emergencies for her coactors were retailed with great amusement. Filmindia reported how Meena knocked Majnu out with a single blow

Figure 6. I.S. Johar and Meena, Filmfare, March 4, 1955.

Courtesy National Film Archives of India, Pune.

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Figure 7. Filmfare, January 7, 1955.

Courtesy National Film Archives of India, Pune.

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Figure 8. Filmindia, August 21, 1954.

Courtesy Reuben Library, British Film Institute, London.

during a shoot. “Is it a fact that Majnu fainted on receiving a blow from Meena while acting in a scene in Ladaaki (A Combative Woman)?” asked a reader in Filmfare.16 Similarly, Motilal was reported to have dislocated his shoulder after carrying her around for Ek Do Teen. The film inverted normal gender expectations by having Meena carry Motilal in a scene. A recur-ring motif of film publicity, Meena’s playful bodily combat was not limited to her male costars but included women too. One such instance was a suggestive cartoon of Meena

wrestling with Begum Para, with Shorey “directing” from ringside17 (Figure 8). There are intimations here of an erotic polysemy to Meena’s persona which predate the Shorey comedies and may even have extended beyond the comedy and erotics of male/female inversion to speculations about same-sex attrac-tion. This is suggested in the bemused review of Pancholi’s Shehar Se Dur starring a “fresh-faced Meena.”

Where a girl meets another girl and falls in love with her. There is the usual romance between a youth and a girl in the film, but it is only in the background… (The Motion Picture Magazine, March 1947, p. 85)

This is particularly evocative in the wake of the Lihaaf obscenity case in Lahore in the early-1940s.18 Scaling walls, jumping off balconies, and fighting her attackers, Meena’s weight and size never

interfered with her mobility. That her girl with gumption was mostly thrown into such situations and was not quite in control became the source of humor. While these feats made Meena stand apart from more conventional heroines of social melodramas at the time, such as, Kamini Kaushal, Suraiyya, or Noorjahan, it was the lack of composure and control that distinguished her from stunt stars like Nadia (Thomas, 2014). Meena’s body was distinctive for her image as the “droll queen,” with humor evoked through a comic play on the limits and potential of such a body.

In part, the forerunners of Meena’s persona lay in the modern girl cinema icon of Indian cinema of the early 1930s. Priti Ramamurthy argues that this cosmopolitan icon had faded from the screens by the end of the decade for she was seen as “unfit for the all-important job of nurturing cultural national-ism” (Ramamurthy, 2008, p. 166). In modern girl films, women lived in a metropolitan world, loved adventure, and frequently transgressed religious boundaries. In their pursuit of romantic love, modern girls appeared to disregard roles of dutiful daughter, mother, and wife. Meena similarly was all that and yet had a distinctive earthiness to her. Dressed in a salwar-kurta, albeit with sneakers and hair braided in two, the Meena image traversed a narrative landscape that ranged from the traditional world of rural Punjab to the postcolonial metropolis. For instance, her sideways clap in Lara lappa and percus-sive hand tapping on office tables introduced a familiar cultural resonance and rhythm to the routinized protocols of the workplace that ordinary women in Shorey films had to negotiate. Improvising on the resources of her cultural origins in Punjab, Meena’s screen personality opened up a sense of how to develop the cultural conditions of existence in a changing world.

The Partition Screwball: Ek Thi Ladki (Once there was a Girl, 1949)

Ek Thi Ladki set in motion the star image that Meena would continue to deploy in her non-Shorey films as well as those she made in Pakistan. It was Roop Shorey’s first production in Hindustani after Partition.

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A massive commercial success, it was called a “slapstick comedy” and the reviews of that time did not miss the significance of a refugee filmmaker making comedy films (The Times of India, January 8, 1950, p. 14). Perhaps this suggests the importance of thinking through how such films provide a transfer of motifs and energies from social life and personal experience into a specifically comic register.

In “Ek Thi Ladki,” Roop Shorey refugee from the Punjab Partition Terror, with little cause for laughter and much for weeping were he the weeping kind, put down a new milestone for the industry by providing it with its first true slapstick farce. (The Times of India, January 21, 1950, p. 10)

The central protagonist of Ek Thi Ladki is a young woman Meena (Meena Shorey), in search of a job who is wrongly implicated by two conmen in a murder. Escaping the conmen as well as the police, Meena is hired by Ranjit (Motilal) who is desperate for a personal secretary and tolerates Meena’s quirky inadequacies. The two travel to Delhi on work where Meena spots her pursuers at a hotel and cancels her reservation. Homeless and at their wits end, Meena and Ranjit pose as married house servants to live with a rich, elderly couple. Their relationship is made up of squabbling over domestic chores but undergoes a romantic transformation and the two decide to marry in Srinagar, Ranjit’s ancestral home. The conmen follow Meena and decamp with the wedding jewelry. In a comic yet thrilling climax, Meena chases the crooks in a motorboat down Dal Lake and retrieves her wedding jewels. Reunited, Meena and Ranjit sail in a shikara against the backdrop of the scenic Kashmir valley.

Ek Thi Ladki was a remake of Shorey’s prepartition film Rut Rangili (A Colorful Season). Made in Lahore over 1946–1947, Rut Rangili seemed to be a jinxed venture, as it was destroyed twice. First, the film suffered in the Shorey studio fire in mid-1946. When the new studio at Multan Road emerged, the film went under production again but the Partition riots of 1947 interrupted its completion. Ek Thi Ladki was the third reincarnation of Rut Rangili and was finally released in early-January 1950 in India. Roop Shorey, Meena, and I.S. Johar had been part of the Rut Rangili project right from its inception. Many years later, Roop Shorey would remake Ek Thi Ladki as Ek Thi Rita (1971), this time without Meena and as his last film.

Ek Thi Ladki is arguably a Partition film, though not a direct or even allegorical representation of the terror of Partition. To be more precise, it was a Partition screwball. It is in stray references secondary to the main plot that we may discern that the emotional and experiential coordinates of the film lay in the Partition and its dislocation of people’s lives. Here, the Partition imprint was registered through a cynical humor, the nostalgia for Lahore, and the reorientations of national perspectives. Gags abound in Ek Thi Ladki, from the slapstick lighting of matchsticks against baldheads to the swindling of unsuspect-ing targets by a play on words (The Times of India, January 21, 1950, p. 10).19 However, right from the start, with the prison release of the two con artistes, a distinctive edge emanates from a cynical humor around the meaning of the new azaadi or freedom, and many of the quips and humorous refrains evoke the Partition experience. Jokes around homelessness, lack of housing, and nonavailability of servants as a result of demographic changes are all part of the Partition landscape at different social levels. Evicted by her landlady, Meena sleeps atop her boss’s desk in the office on the first night of her getting a job. That all the hotels in Delhi are full may gesture to the influx of unforeseen visitors or refugees. As a result, Ranjit and Meena must spend their first night in Delhi crouching together underneath a bench in a public park. Both agree to live as servants in order to get a roof over their heads and their employers are ready to put up with inept help, because servants of any sort are rare to come by. Meena as the fake royal, the Princess of Champatpur or abscond-ville, is a light-hearted reference to the uncertain times faced by the princely states with the attainment of freedom and yet another instance of political readings offered by the film.

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In terms of regional identity, Punjabiyat infiltrates this Bombay-Hindi film in many registers. These range from the heavily accented speech of its actors (Meena, Majnu, Johar, Kuldip Kaur) to the use of colloquial Punjabi words and music in the film including the song that made Meena famous, Lara lappa lara lappa lai rakh da. Ranjit who is unfamiliar with the language, asks for a clarification:

Ranjit: What sort of a language is—Lara lappa and Addi tappa? Meena: Punjabi! Lara lappa means dilly-dallying and Addi tappa is unnecessary quibble.

The clothes and fashion within the film are customary to the region and Meena’s dress leaves little doubt about her Punjabi origins. The policemen dressed in Turrah Pagris or linen turbans with pleated fans, recall the significance of this item of clothing in Lahore, one that coded social class and identity. Nostalgia for that city is also evident in the variety program presented at the hotel where Meena poses as the Princess of Champatpur. The first item is a ventriloquist’s act featuring the puppet Patay Khan that would carry a special resonance for old Lahoris. By the 1930s, the name Patay Khan in Lahore had become synonymous with power and influence.20 Appropriately enough, Patay Khan’s jokes about contemporary times were also in sync with the experience of many who had lived in Lahore once: “Nowadays one can find God but not a house.”21

The other relevant component of the variety program was a short song performance Dilli Se Aaya Bhai Tingu/“Brother Tingu arrives from Delhi” featuring Honey O’Brien, an actress of Anglo-Indian descent. While never made explicit, from the lyrics it is clear that Lahore is the city where three brothers or intimate friends with nonsensical names Tingu, Pingu, and Shingu arrive.

The three set out on Mall Road, with a swinging gait Oh dear how they strode Hand-in-hand, the three roamed together Singing the refrain “Our Hindustan is the best in the world The apple of all eyes-Hindu, Muslim, Sikh and Christian”22

The Mall Road was a celebrated one in Lahore and held attractions for tourists and locals alike. As remembered by Pran Neville in his memoirs of the cosmopolitan, colonial city, the road had some magnificent views with prominent shops, restaurants, and the built environment of the colonial state in the High Court, Telegraph Office, the Reserve Bank of India, and the General Post Office (Neville, 2006). The song and Tingu’s story end abruptly with this stanza.23 Its nostalgic past tense conveys the end of an era where one could stroll along with a sense of easy belonging and innocent beliefs, now gently lampooned with an implicit awareness of being separated forever from that condition. Here, the film encapsulates Aamir Mufti’s formulation of the postcolonial predicament where “the past of the self is another country” (Mufti, 2007, p. 218). In terms of the female protagonist, Meena’s past is composed of a flashback made up of images of land caving in, houses collapsing, trees falling, and bodies under debris. This memory locates her origins in Quetta when she lost her parents and home in the earthquake, and which, after Partition lay in Pakistan. A vivid recollection on screen revisits the massive earthquake that struck Quetta in 1935, and mobilizes a pre-Partition sensorium, that would carry intimate meaning for the Quetta-born Roop Shorey.

Interestingly, the film’s resolution takes place in Kashmir where a motorboat chase unfolds. Srinagar happens to be Ranjit’s hometown and he proudly claims to be as pure a Kashmiri as pashmina.24 But it is Meena who chases the conmen on a boat crossing inlets and creeks under low and narrow bridges. Risking her life, she reaches the conmen’s hideout and the room where she had relived her memories of

Siddique 19

the earthquake. I suggest that Meena’s instinctive knowledge of the terrain and ability to handle the enemy evoke a faculty to negotiate symbolically charged sites of competing claims. As the bone of contention between India and Pakistan right from 1947, Kashmir has been regarded as the “unfinished business of Partition.” Ek Thi Ladki was one of the earliest films to be shot extensively in the valley and this informed its publicity too. The sequences of surfing and shikara rides on the lake were combined with ethnographic shots of the locals dressed in traditional clothes. In bringing Kashmir to the screen in a form akin to tourism documentary, this cinematic representation constituted an assertion of presence and proprietorship on behalf of India. The other side of making cinema a vehicle of territorial presence and possession lay in seeing it as endangering territorial security by disclosing visual informa-tion. This territorial paranoia was given voice in the hypernationalist alarms raised by Filmindia over film shoots in the Kashmir valley. Targeting Ek Thi Ladki along with Barsaat (The Monsoon, 1949, Raj Kapoor), the magazine saw these films causing a serious security lapse by representing an “impor-tant military objective” and “the cockpit of national pride” on screen (Filmindia, May 1950a, p. 15). Kashmir and the military imperative elsewhere featured in publicizing how the Shorey team were “setting a fine example of patriotic responsibility” by entertaining the army men on active service in Kashmir. Despite torrential rains, Meena acquiesced to the soldiers’ requests and the stage show went on (Filmfare, September 5, 1952, p. 21). From a wistful nostalgia for a past homeland to aligning desires with the new nation, Ek Thi Ladki represented the old and new geographies that emerged in the wake of the Partition of the subcontinent. While humor could well be the coping mechanism of the refugee film team achieving cathartic release, reviews declared the extreme popularity of the “Shorey–Meena triumph” to have “wiped the local eye” (The Times of India, January 21, 1950, p. 10). Perhaps this sug-gests a tabula rasa, the possibilities of a new vision and geography of mobility within which to constitute the national imaginary.

“The Swan Song”

Meena and Roop’s Bombay years were marked by what Mica Nava calls “an intimate or visceral cosmopolitanism.” But the fragility of cosmopolitanism lies in not only deeply felt desires but also in conflicting attachments (Blasco, 2010). This collaboration, which resisted parochial pressures of community and nation for nearly a decade, finally came to an end in 1956. With unconventional gender dynamics and Meena as the ultimate star of these comedies, the Shorey films were sublime renderings of partitioned social relations and geographies. Making films loosely modeled on the Hollywood screwball, this team of refugee film artistes in Bombay transformed dislocation into a volitional mobility of the characters, resisting boundedness and fashioning a cosmopolitan subjectivity.

The “swan-song” of the Shoreys was Miss 56, a film made in Pakistan and no longer available (Gazdar, 1998, p. 53). A contemporary review reveals that it bore the “mark of Shorey technique” where “Meena plays a gifted and intelligent girl who falls in the hands of two swindlers” (The Pakistan Times, November 23, 1956, p. 7).25 The film had Meena astride a camel in hot pursuit of the rogues as they fled in a jeep, suggesting a familiar Shorey imprint of mismatched and incongruous elements in the composition of the chase sequence! Perhaps even more noteworthy was Meena’s making herself over into a French woman complete with a “false nose and wig.”26 Recalling the plot and pleasures of Ek Thi Ladki, including its Paris Fashion Store, the French woman act in Miss 56 could well be an ode to the “quicksilver charms” of an instinctively camouflaging Meena, who had successfully under-mined clear identity protocols of womanhood, religious affiliation, and national belonging in the way she conducted her life.

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Ravi Vasudevan and the external reviewer for their valuable suggestions.

Notes

1. The need to think of South Asian film histories beyond the territorial and ideological parameters of the nation has been persuasively argued by Vasudevan (2010).

2. The migrating “cinema couples” included Noorjahan–Shaukat Hussain Rizvi, Neena–W.Z. Ahmed, and Swarnlata–Nazir. The “musical men” included Ghulam Haider, Feroz Nizami, “singing women” apart from Noorjahan included Mallika Pukhraj and Mukhtar Begum.

3. The collection in which Meena’s memoirs appeared is Out of Date. Published in Urdu, the title refers to the film personalities who at one time were famous, all with careers dating back to pre-Partition film production in Bombay and Lahore. The collection was designed to record the testimony of old and forgotten stars who constituted the cultural history of the subcontinent. “Meena Shorey” in Muneer Ahmad (1986).

4. Mahurat is the auspicious ceremony that marks the commencement of a film’s production, incorporating features from Hindu ritual worship. For details, see Ganti (2012, pp. 247–250).

5. Avesta is the collection of sacred texts of Zoroastrian faith. 6. While Arsi released in 1947, Patjhad was restarted by Pancholi and was completed only in 1948 and

Rut Rangili suffered twice: once in a studio fire and other left uncompleted due to the start of riots in Lahore. Though one history of Punjabi cinema claims that Rut Rangili was released briefly in Lahore’s Nishat cinema, the rest of the accounts, including Meena’s, claim it never saw the light of the day.

7. Explaining the expansion of the Bombay industry in a transregional context, Kaushik Bhaumik locates the high point of the Punjab film industry in 1931, and collapse by 1933 as the film people in Punjab had been absorbed by Bombay. Kaushik Bhaumik (Unpublished thesis, 2001). Ravi Vasudevan notes that the Lahore studios were active during the Second World War and the city was still an important production center, which Bhaumik concedes was a brief revival. See Vasudevan (2010).

8. Jaal agitation refers to the protests conducted by actors, producers, and directors of the Lahore film industry in 1954 demanding the ban of Indian films in Pakistan. The agitation was so named because the protestors were seeking an immediate withdrawal of the Indian film Jaal (1952) from local theaters.

9. The difficulty in monetary transactions is also mentioned in Ayesha Jalal’s work on writer Saadat Hasan Manto. “The imposition of the border was never more intrusive than in the difficulties it created for writers and artistes in the two countries who were due royalty and other payments,” writes Jalal (2013, p. 134).

10. According to the memoir, Meena’s mother passed away before she moved to Bombay in 1947 and much before she married Roop Shorey.

11. Press quotes taken from Filmindia (1953, p. 47), Filmfare (January 7, 1955, p. 4), and The Times of India (January 8, 1950, p. 14).

12. Newspaper classified and reviews in The Times of India attest to the presence and popularity of Hollywood comedies of the 1930s, such as, It Happened One Night (India release 1935), Bringing up Baby (India release 1938), and The Awful Truth (Indian release 1938). The releases seem to have lessened considerably by the early 1940s.

13. Love jihad is the appellation given by Hindu right-wing activism to intercommunity marriages in India involv-ing Muslim men and Hindu women. The campaign, which made strategic use of social media, identified film actors like Aamir Khan and Saif Ali Khan as waging love jihad. The latter felt compelled to write an article on intercommunity marriages in a daily newspaper. See http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/intermarriage-is-not-jihad-it-is-india/

14. Part of Hindu ceremonial observances, Tilak refers to a ritual mark, mostly in vermillion in north India, while Tikki is a careful hair extension at the back curve of the male head, connoting high caste status and/or orthodoxy.

15. Panchali refers to Draupadi in the Indian epic Mahabharata, who was married to the five heroic brothers or Pandavas (Filmindia, August 1957, p. 11).

16. Filmfare (May 28, 1954, p. 30). It seems Ladaaki was either renamed Jalwa or could not be completed.

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17. An unpublished research paper by Sabeena Gadihoke “Peripheral Stars, Cinephilia and Evolving Archives of Cinema” discusses Begum Para as a reference for speculations about lesbian attractions in Hindi Cinema during the 1940s and 1950s. Presented at Moving On, University of Westminster, London, June 12–14, 2014.

18. Written by the Urdu writer Ismat Chughtai, Lihaaf vividly portrays the lesbian relationship between a neglected wife of a princely lord and her female house servant, through the childhood remembrances of a woman narrator. When the story was published in 1942, it created a public controversy and Ismat was charged with obscenity. The trial at Lahore lasted for 2 years and finally the case was dismissed since the court could not find any exact incriminating word. See Tahira Naqvi’s introduction in Chughtai (2013).

19. The review notes the “brazenly borrowed gags from foreign films mostly Abbott and Costello.” 20. Patay Khan in common parlance in Lahore refers to a local powerful person who is also boastful. The character

is a familiar presence in traditional theater and puppetry from the region. Additionally, the newspaper Lahore Punch was earlier published as Patay Khan, with the family who owned it later being associated with the name. See Wahid-ud-din (2011, p. 3).

21. Original dialogue in Ek Thi Ladki: Aajkal khuda mil jaata hai lekin makaan nahin milta.22. Original Song in Ek Thi Ladki Teeno nikle Mall Road par matak matak ke chalte the… O Rama! paaon patak kar chalte they Haathon mein daale haath phirte they saath saath Gaate they yeh baat Hindoostan humara hai yeh sab duniya se nyara hai Hindu Muslim Sikh Isaayi sab ki aakh ka taara hai23. Magazine columns in the early 1950s also mention a son adopted by Meena and Roop, nicknamed Tingu.

Meena’s memoir however makes no mention of her adopted sons in India.24. Pashmina is a fine variety of wool procured from a special breed of sheep found only in the Himalayan region.25. In Mushtaq Gazdar’s book, Miss 56 is incorrectly likened to “Miss 55 (sic), a Madhubala–Guru Dutt venture

from Bombay.” The review of Miss 56 published in The Pakistan Times details a very different plot from what Gazdar was presumably referring to, Mr. & Mrs. 55 (1955).

26. In one of her later Punjabi films in Pakistan, Behroopia (The Impersonator, 1960), Meena repeats a similar act of the “gori memsahib” or the white colonial woman.

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