Asian Ethnology 83-1 | article Female Collaboration at Regional Junctions Traveling Pakistani Cinema and Unmoored Militarism in the 1980s

Esha Niyogi De

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This article examines the material culture of Urdu action heroine films released in the era of Pakistan’s Islamization (late 1970s through 1980s) by a woman-led company called Shamim Ara Productions, which was headed by the illustrious female star, director, and producer of the Urdu screen Shamim Ara. With titles such as Miss Hong Kong (1979), Miss Colombo (1984), Miss Singapore (1985), Lady Smuggler (1987), and Lady Commando (1989), the action films released by Shamim Ara Productions bear the imprint of a traveling culture of production roving through urban South and Southeast Asia. Not only do we find here a mobile industry, headquartered in Lahore, fostering collaborations between small-scale film and tourism entrepreneurs strewn across South and Southeast Asian cities (Colombo, Dhaka, Manila, Hong Kong), but we also encounter a hybrid cinema led largely by women and cross-fertilized by global images of female action and public mobility flowing into Pakistani cities with the video trade and its piracy, and satellite television (video and VCR having come to the country in the late 1970s). In this article, I situate the gender politics of the ensemble heroine narrative Lady Smuggler (1987) in its material culture of production and reception, with attention to the diverse locations of that culture.