Pakistan’s forbidden romance with Bollywood

Though officially banned, the Bollywood film Raees is sure to find its fans in Pakistan one way or another, pirated for viewing on small screens if not formally approved for big ones.

Shop owners say unauthorised “master-print quality” DVDs of the movie, starring Shah Rukh Khan and Mahira Khan, can be had for 100 rupees (HK$7.40).

“Raees arrived in the market in January,” the middle-aged owner of the shop at the Clifton Arcade, a market in Karachi’s seaside area, said. “We had it in stock before it was banned from the cinemas,” he added, on the condition that neither he nor his establishment was named. It is illegal to sell pirated films in Pakistan, but the authorities tend to look the other way.

Battleground Bollywood: film industry becomes flashpoint between India and Pakistan as tensions heighten over Kashmir

Nuclear-armed and arch rivals, Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan have fought four wars but have many common cultural characteristics, including shared languages. In their spoken forms, India’s Hindi and Pakistan’s Urdu are practically identical. During a decade of detente between the two countries that lasted up to last year, Pakistani singers such as Atif Aslam and Rahat Fateh Ali Khan became favoured recording artists for Indian film producers. All Bollywood films include half a dozen or more lavishly produced musical scenes in which the leading couple lip-sync and dance to songs ­– often the determining factor in commercial success.

These Pakistani singers helped open doors in Bollywood for a select group of Pakistani actors. Singer Ali Zafar acted in eight Indian films between 2010 and 2016, followed by Fawad Khan’s debut in the 2014 romantic feature film Khoobsurat (Beautiful), turning the Pakistani actor into an instant heartthrob in India. Mahira was Fawad’s co-star in several popular Pakistani television dramas before she got her Bollywood break.

However, the build-up to Raees and Fawad’s second Bollywood film, Kapoor & Sons, was marred by a spike in tensions following an attack last September on an Indian military camp in the disputed Himalayan territory of Kashmir, in which four suspected Pakistani militants killed 17 Indian soldiers. The attack sparked anger in India and the worst border skirmishes since the nations agreed on a ceasefire in 2004.