Anarkali ruled Pakistani hearts, too

Mohan Singh

The recent telecast of the 1953 blockbuster, Anarkali, brought back memories of the times when it ran to packed houses for two years, including a few days of nonstop screening in Amritsar for Pakistani visitors who had crossed the border in 1954, ostensibly to watch an India-Pakistan hockey match but didn’t want to miss the golden opportunity to watch the precursor of K Asif’s Mughal-e-Azam. The two countries were on friendly terms then and there was no visa system before 1964.

A friend and I went to the spot of ‘disembarkation’ for the Pakistanis, opposite the railway station. We introduced ourselves to a group of eight young boys who were glad to be welcomed in a strange city, the language of interaction being chaste Punjabi. I was in my third year in college and the boys from Lahore were also college students. Coming home on a tonga, they said they were not interested in sightseeing or any match, but had come mainly to watch Anarkali, the crowd-puller, for its Urdu dialogues and Shailendra’s lilting lyrics, under the baton of C Ramchandra.

This movie had 14 hit songs, including the immortal ‘Ye zindagi usi ki hai jo kisi ka ho gaya’ sung by melody queen Lata Mangeshkar and filmed on ravishing beauty Bina Rai. The black-and-white thriller didn’t boast of expensive sets but was a box-office hit.

We provided reasonable accommodation to our guests, who were more curious about the film, where each customer was given only two tickets in order to check their sale in black. They wanted one of us to accompany them into the hall for the sake of safety, and thus I had to watch Anarkali twice in consecutive shows: 3-6 am and 6-9 am.

In those days, Amritsar’s railway overbridge was closed for two years for repairs, and cyclists had to make a detour via level crossings. Well-built boys would flaunt their muscles and lift the bicycle through the two small gates meant for pedestrians; some of them even offered this free service to girls. When our Lahore friends saw this interchange among strangers, they were amazed, because the girls back home were not permitted to move out unescorted, much less pedal their own bikes, and that too bareheaded.

While returning, the guests took with them huge packs of betel leaves, just as they had brought with them whole lengths of unstitched textiles wound on their bodies. When we went to Lahore the following year to watch a hockey match, we, too, skipped the match in favour of a different version of Anarkali, the well-known business plaza of Lahore, from where The Tribune was launched in 1881. I ‘imported’ two hand-fans made of straw, out of the Rs 20 that I had taken with me to visit Lahore. Alas, all that changed after 1958, and with that, all cultural relations.