Umar Marvi and the Representation of Sindh: Cinema and Modernity in the Margins

Abstract

Umar Marvi, the first Sindhi feature film made in Pakistan, was released in 1956, in the context of the One Unit, when the merger of West Pakistan’s provinces pushed Sindhi intellectuals, students, and politicians to assert themselves in defense of their language and culture. By depicting the story of a famous folk heroine heralded as a patriotic figure by Sindh’s most prominent nationalist leader, we contend that Umar Marvi contributed to the construction of a modern national imaginary for Sindhis in post-Partition Pakistan. This imaginary rests on a narrative that conceives Sindhis as a peaceful and syncretic folk culture continuously occupying the mythicized land of the Indus. We show that Umar Marvi takes part in this narrative by portraying a certain image of an idealized community and by representing a fixed, folklorized heritage while attempting to master cinema as the medium of modernity.

Historical Continuities in South Asian Film Narratives:Contemporary Representations of Religious,Ethno-linguistic and Sexual Minorities

“…Since academic work on Pakistani films remains scarce, this article relies on three specific sources for secondary material—Mushtaq Gazdar’s survey of the growth and development of Pakistani films particularly since 1947; Iftikhar Dadi’s brief analysis of the crisis in Pakistani cinema; and Ahmad and Khan’s analysis of ‘cinema on the margins’ (2016). While there exist a few scholarly works on representation of regions (Sindh; Levesque and Bui 2014), masculinity, caste and gender (Sevea 2014) and most importantly the Partition in Pakistani films (Saeed 2009; Sundar 2010; Vishwanath and Malik 2009), the dearth of studies on the portrayal of religious minority groups in Pakistan remains glaring.…”

Film and Cinephilia in Pakistan: Beyond Life and Death

“…The nationalist aspirations of vernacular filmmaking in Sindh are equally interesting, even if their number and commercial success has been modest. Levesque and Bui’s close analysis of Umar Marvi (1956) (Levesque and Bui, 2014) suggests this film can be viewed within the same framework that Benedict Anderson places print-capitalism for its historic role in forging nationalism across Europe, Latin America, and beyond from the eighteenth century. The authors identify a curious dualism in the apparent self-consciousness of its particularism, which suggests an acute awareness that the rest of the country might also be watching.…”

Interrogating the Appropriation of Spaces of Caste in Pakistan: Ambedkarian Perspective on Progressive Religio-Political Projections in Sindhi Short Stories and in Everyday Politics

“…See: The Pioneer (21 July 201910 US Congressmen ask Trump to raise issue of Sindh with Pak PM Imran. URL: https://www.dailypioneer.com (accessed on 9 June 2019).See also India Today (22 July 2019) URL: https://www.indiatoday.in (accessed on 9 June 2019).22 The reinvigorated literary assertion of Sindhi nationalists during the 1950s that reframed the narrative of Marvi was also noticed byLevesque and Bui (2014) in their cinematographic study of first Sindhi movie 'Umar-Marvi' made in 1956. They argued that the movie 'contributed to the construction of a modern national imaginary for Sindhis in post-Partition Pakistan' (seeLevesque and Bui 2014, pp.…”