This article excavates Urdu cinema from East Pakistan from the Bangladesh Film Archive. Neglected within the scholarship on Bangladeshi cinema history, I ask what shape the forgetting of East Pakistani Urdu films, and the worlds in which they were made and seen, has taken. I will suggest that the political watershed of 1971 limits the possibilities for excavating the past of Bangladeshi and Pakistani cinema and produces deeply personal forms of forgetting of this particular cinema. I will show how, contrary to accepted film historiography, the cinema of East and West Pakistan was deeply connected, that there was a Bengali reading audience for Urdu films and that Bengali filmmakers in East Pakistan debated the question of Urdu cinema. I use the film Son of Pakistan to suggest that the peculiar opacities around this film direct us to pay attention to those fragments of visual culture that refer not just to a disappeared past but an actively forgotten world of everyday pleasures and aspirations.

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In this introduction to the special issue of Ethnography, we argue that the South Asian city is not an inert backdrop to the lives of its various inhabitants. Living cities change and morph, their instability and transformation demanding a concomitant openness to change from its inhabitants. The open-endedness of the living city in South Asia requires an open and exploratory ethnographic approach unburdened by inflexible terminology, formats or concepts. We call for creative forms of writing to do justice to both such an ethnographic practice and to the city itself. Keywords South Asian city, openness to change, living cities, ethnographic writing One reaction that the cities of South Asia commonly produce-among both visitors and longstanding residents-is bafflement. Anthropologists commonly write of their disorientation upon arriving in their research sites. Yet for their natives, cities are no less likely to seem, at times, opaque and bewildering. Hardly inert backdrops, cities are commonly talked about as actors: more anthropos than topos. Thus the urban environment, containing an overproduction of ambition and desire, seems to make its own involuntary demands. Foremost among them is that diverse communities settle their scores in a competitive, shared environment. In such a milieu, sociality is hardly a predictable affair, despite the diligent

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