Sarah Niazi analyses rare archival material from the Urdu public sphere to explore how cinema was institutionalized, disseminated, and integrated into a pedagogical project. Focusing on the Urdu translations of film theory, she examines how global theories circulated and impacted performance in India during the early sound period.
You can join online via Zoom or in person in the IIAS conference room from 10:30 a.m. to 12:00 noon Amsterdam Time/CEST. Registration is required due to limited seating and to receive the Zoom link.
The Lecture Urdu language and its literary culture had a considerable influence in shaping the narrative and aesthetic vocabularies of cinematic practice in India. While film scholars have recognized the role of Urdu in film dialogues and lyrics, few have attempted to understand the crucial processes by which film culture was fashioned within the Urdu public sphere. This paper aims to show a few of those entanglements and bring forth the vibrant debates of the Urdu public sphere on cinema from 1930 to 1950.
The overlaps between the cinematic public sphere and Urdu literary culture produced a series of fascinating texts that fed into and shaped an Urdu discourse around film. Despite the rise in English education, Urdu was an important medium through which individuals and institutions were able to articulate the ideas emerging from the complexities of negotiating with colonial modernity. In this talk, Sarah Niazi focuses on two Urdu books, Film Acting Guide by Prithi Singh (1935) and Filmī Adakāri (Film Acting), a translation of Vsevold Pudovkin in Urdu by Balam Firdausi (1937). These textual artefacts highlight how cinema as an institution was formalized and disseminated in Urdu with an active engagement in values and codes of etiquette borrowed from an Urdu cultural milieu. Dr Niazi shows how these texts were produced with serious pedagogical intent to 'refine' the taste of cinephiles and, at the same time, make accessible global film theories through translocation and translation. Through these texts, she interrogates the ways in which the Urdu public sphere was responding to cinema (imagined as a 'western' import) and domesticating film theories on acting, stardom and performance.
The Speaker
Sarah Niazi is a film historian and media studies scholar. She received her PhD from the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM) at the University of Westminster in London. Her work maps the entangled history of cinema's relationship to the Urdu public sphere in India (1930- 1950) and explores questions of language, literary culture, gender and performance. Part of her research feeds into the co-curatorial framework of the exhibition, Chitramahal: Princely Encounters with Photography and Film (C. Yamini Krishna, Sarah Niazi & Rutuja Deshmukh). Her work has been published in international peer-reviewed journals such as Widescreen, Culture Unbound, BioScope and in books by Sage, Bloomsbury, and Routledge. Currently, she is working on her book tentatively titled A Language for Cinema. She is a Fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) at Leiden University and an Assistant Professor in Media and Journalism at FLAME University, India.
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