A film city in business parlance is an enclave dedicated to film work, where infrastructure, labour, and capital organization are oriented towards the production of films. The usage of the term ‘film city’ has transformed with the changing global media landscape. Cities like Bombay with long histories of film production are often referred to as film cities. The financial capital of India, Bombay is a hub of several economic activities. However, due to the symbolic significance of film, it is often characterized as a film city. The second usage is film studios being named as film cities. For example, Y. A. Fazalbhoy's studio operational in the 1930s was called Film City Studio. There is also a third use of the term that amalgamates the first two: a studio, an enclosed space, which simulates the city and incorporates the wide cluster of film-related activities. A film city here is a large enclave almost comparable to a ‘real’ city or district in its area, a peculiar urban formation of planned development.

Film city as an enclave was first imagined in Hyderabad by the Andhra Pradesh state government in the 1960s through the Brahmananda Chitrapuri plan. It was, however, unsuccessful. The second and successful attempt happened with the involvement of the Telugu Kamma capitalist Ramoji Rao with the creation of Ramoji Film City (RFC).

INTRODUCTION

One of the largest manufacturers of gold jewellery in the world, India's jewellery manufacturing sector remains firmly rooted in the informal economy – also known as the unorganised sector. The gems and jewellery sector which contributes an estimated 7 per cent to India's gross domestic product (GDP) is dominated by small, ‘hole in the wall’ workshops, where artisans practise their craft without any formal contract. Meanwhile, the jewellery retailing industry is becoming increasingly organised – registered and state-regulated – in the post-liberalisation period, especially with the entry of corporate retailers. While there is no official estimate of the number of jewellery manufacturers in India, the industry estimates that the country is home to between 20,000 and 30,000 manufacturing units (WGC 2022). In 2022, the World Gold Council (WGC) notes that while in 2017, less than 10 per cent of units operated as organised, large-scale facilities, now around 15–20 per cent of units operate in this manner (WGC 2022). The WGC attributes this rapid transformation in status to three distinct factors: rapid capitalisation, an increase in exports and state-incentivising regulatory measures. However, contradictory processes appear to be operating here.

Collections of objects of Sikh history and Sikh art exist in the hands of both private individuals and institutions. The most famous examples of private collections include those of the maharajas of Patiala and Nabha in India, the Kapany Collection and the Khanuja Family Collection in the USA (Taylor and Dhami 2017) and the Toor Collection in the United Kingdom (UK). A selection from the Khanuja family's private collection is now displayed in a dedicated gallery in the Phoenix Art Museum in Arizona, USA (Taylor 2022), and, similarly, a part of the Kapany Collection is housed in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in Montreal, Canada. Recently, in 2022, the Lahore Museum in Pakistan inaugurated a Sikh Gallery with objects from the time of Ranjit Singh (Ahmed 2022). The items in these collections range from handwritten and illustrated manuscripts (including of the Guru Granth Sahib), miniature paintings, sculptures, clothes, weapons, jewellery, coins, pieces of furniture—mostly associated with the court of Maharaja Ranjit Singh and the colonial period, including paintings done or commissioned by colonial officials and early photographs of the Sikhs and their shrines (c. mid-nineteenth to early twentieth centuries). The Sikh Gallery at Lahore Museum, for example, displays portraits of the members of the royal family (of Ranjit Singh), administrative records of the court and even personal items like prayer beads of the maharaja. Illustrated folios of a nineteenth-century Janamsakhi are among the paintings available in the Kapany Collection. Some collections also include modern art by Sikh artists such as the UK-based Singh Twins and some of the artists whose works were discussed earlier in the book (such as Sobha Singh, Jarnail Singh, R. M. Singh and Devender Singh).

Years before British India contained any political unit called Bihar, the people living there already referred to it as a province. A convenient shorthand is one thing, however, and political reality is another. Though Bihar had been a province of the Mughal Empire before being absorbed into the Bengal Presidency in the eighteenth century, administrative boundaries had not produced a strong Bihari social or political identity. The region was diverse in language and in other respects; the Bhojpuri-speaking region in western Bihar was linked to eastern UP, Maithili-speaking northern Bihar had ties with Bengal and southern Nepal, and the Magahi-speaking region around Patna edged into the Chota Nagpur Plateau. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, though, some middle-class men began to see themselves as Biharis. More and more, they objected to the dominant role played by the Bengalis with whom they shared a province. The political demands they made as Biharis ultimately led to the creation of the new province of Bihar and Orissa in 1912, with Patna as its capital.

Patna was at the center of these transformations in middle-class subjectivity and political expression. Especially crucial were the city's English-medium schools and colleges. Many of these had been founded and nurtured with support from the aristocrats of Patna City, but by the turn of the century, they were thoroughly tied to the fortunes of Bihar's emerging white-collar elite.

An Experiment in Governance

In the 1970s, the city of Chandigarh in the Himalayan foothills faced a pressing problem: Sukhna Lake, a large artificial reservoir and recreational spot in the city, was beginning to silt up. In trying to locate the source of the problem, conservation experts landed at Sukhomajri (‘dry/happy little village’), a small gujjar settlement some 15 kilometres from the town. It transpired that Sukhomajri was the site of a badly denuded watershed. Here, rainwater found little resistance from vegetation and was released with great force, causing damage to arable land. These floods contributed directly to the silting problem in Chandigarh, for rather than flowing into Sukhna, rainwater was inundating the fields of Sukhomajri's villagers. Preserving the lake was thus tied to soil conservation in Sukhomajri and other settlements in the area. It became apparent, however, that any project of conservation would also have to deal with the sociopolitical dynamics of rural subsistence in Sukhomajri, whose residents practised a mixture of rainfed cultivation and livestock grazing. Like many rural communities dependent upon dwindling pastures and erratic monsoons, they earned just enough to subsist upon. They were therefore unwilling to cooperate with projects such as controlled grazing or laying orchards, whose benefits could only be reaped in the long term and which directed precious resources away from day-to-day needs.

Urban studies scholarship has marked liberalization as the turning point in the lifeworld of cities in India.1 Neil Brenner and Nik Theodore associate it with government policies that enable the free flow of capital and with cities being modified to attract international financial capital. Globally, liberalization is marked by competition between cities for investments. However, contrary to this understanding, we see a race between cities to establish the film industry in India pre-dating the liberalization in the 1990s. As shown in Chapter 3, as early as the 1940s and 1950s Bombay and Madras were competing to become the most important production centre for film. After the formation of linguistic states, with the emergence of new film production centres such as Hyderabad, there was competition between Madras and Hyderabad. The competition between cities is thus not just a post-liberalization phenomenon but is a continuum in different phases of capitalism. The difference, however, was in the nature of global capitalism at these different points. In the 1940s, Madras and Bombay were operating in the colonial world. Starting from the 1960s, Hyderabad and Madras were competing for regional capital within the nation. All these distinct capital relations produced distinct cities. In the post-liberalization phase, the film industry forms a nexus with the tourism and real estate sectors and participates in producing the city as a constant spectacle to attract international capital.

The Bengalis in Pakistan are starving…. One in ten is suffering from an absolute shortage of food. Twice that have protein and vitamin deficiencies, including women and children…. Harassment and discrimination have become part of everyday life…. The great impact has been to upper-class Bengalis, who are now treated as ‘niggers,’ or lower class…. But the small amount of additional discrimination to the lower classes affects many more people already at the edge of the cliff….

These are the observations of Jack Smith's report ‘Stranded Bengalis in Pakistan: The Winter 1972’, which provides ordinary Bengalis’ post-war experiences in Pakistan, detailing the despair the community faced and its response to it, from resilience to resistance. Even though most ordinary Bengalis were not interned, they were still under strict surveillance by the Pakistani government. They were not only subjected to curfews, censorship and exclusion from sensitive areas, but were also barred from leaving the country. Their experiences remain outside mainstream historiography. This chapter examines the internment experiences of Bengalis beyond camps and their discursive efforts to establish self-support networks while maintaining connections to their motherland, Bangladesh. It examines how the Bengalis responded to their wartime adversity by building a self-sustaining support system in captivity through a proliferation of Bengali associations, particularly through the actions of the Bengali governing body of the BWRC.

This chapter shows how the Bengalis drew upon their own meagre resources for a time and organised a rich array of assistance projects, such as free kitchens, schools, loan schemes and medical facilities, for those who needed help during the long post-wartime captivity, 1971–1974.

To place film in the urbanization of Hyderabad, a brief history of milestones of urban transformation of the city is needed. The two important markers for urban change in Hyderabad city in the twentieth century were the Musi river floods and the work of the City Improvement Board. The Musi floods of 1908 was the beginning of Hyderabad's spatial transformation with planned development. The area to the south of the Musi was where the densely populated walled old city of Hyderabad was located. In 1908, Hyderabad city was the fourth largest city in India after Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras, and had a population of more than 400,000. The Musi floods devastated the entire area and there was a huge loss of life and property. The actual loss could not be ascertained but estimates point to about 15,000 people losing their lives and 19,000 homes being destroyed. The floods called for a massive restructuring of the city. Along with the relief work, the then Nizam, Mir Mahboob Ali Khan, wanted to ensure that such a disaster would not repeat in future. Sir Mokshagundam Visweswarayya, B.A., L.C.E, M.I.C.E, C.I.E, who was the dewan of Mysore at that time, was hired to draw up a plan for the new city. Employing Visweswarayya was acceptable to both the Nizam and the British, as he was an Indian but educated in the Western system. Visweswarayya made suggestions for drafting a new city, avoiding future flooding, and constructing a drainage system.

The conclusion brings together the argument of expatriate social mobility with the historiography of British imperial benefits and costs, advancing the case for expatriate influences on British social structure. It links this larger account to the complexities of upward mobility abroad, underlining the tensions incurred for Edgar especially, and, with reference to Lambert and Lester’s work on ‘imperial careering’, notes the relevance of the book to the history of emotions, establishing the connection between imperial history and love. It stresses the ways in which the love story was shaped by expatriate life, with relevance to the history of heterosexuality, and to the concept of companionate marriage between the wars. The Wilsons return in England was bound up with their expatriate identity, coloured by nostalgia, but for Edgar an idealisation of domestic settlement, contrasting with Winifred’s father’s adherence to an expatriate masculinity preoccupied with global wanderlust. The succeeding generation of this mobile ‘expatriate clan’ followed their parents’ mobile habits but gradually returned to England, adopting Edgar’s model of the domestic ideal, enhanced by the prosperity and social status generated by Edgar, Winifred and William’s expatriate ventures, illustrating the power of expatriate social mobility.

In April 1971, twenty-two-year-old Alak Chandra was dismissed from work in the Karachi Textile Mills and his residence, along with ten other Bengali employees who were domiciles of Faridpur district of East Pakistan. His luggage and cash, totalling Rs 900 – savings of his last five years – were snatched away. In desperation, he tried twice to cross from Sindh into Barmer (Rajasthan, India) and Indian border security forces sent him back to Pakistan. The third time he refused to budge, declaring that he would rather be shot dead in India than go back to Karachi. ‘If I am shot in India, at least my body will be burnt’, he told the Indian border authorities, ‘but if I am shot in Pakistan, they will leave my body for the dogs.’

This was the start of a trickle that by the summer of 1972 saw close to 20,000 Bengalis escape from Pakistan overcoming the hurdles of passport and foreign exchange controls.2 An editorial in the Dawn on 3 December 1972 underlined the hardships facing the ‘stranded Bengalis’ in Pakistan and their ceaseless attempts to escape thus:

Organised in three sections, this chapter starts with the anticipatory flight of wealthy families from West Pakistan before moving to the different ground and maritime routes of escape. It concludes with the state response to the Bengalis’ escape.

Bhai Mati Das Museum has a large collection of paintings on display (169) and a majority of these were not prepared for the purpose of exhibition in a museum. They were made over a period of three decades, from the 1970s to early 2000s, by the Punjab & Sind Bank (PSB) for publication in their annual calendars. These canvases which lay in the bank's collection for several years were subsequently donated to the Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Management Committee (DSGMC) for display in the Bhai Mati Das Museum. This chapter addresses three main questions: Why does a prominent public sector bank commission calendars on Sikh history? How were these paintings made and who made them? What is the relationship between the bank, the museum and Sikh heritage?

The PSB was founded in the year 1908, during the rise of the Singh Sabha movement, by three prominent Sikhs: Bhai Vir Singh, Sardar Trilochan Singh and Sardar Sunder Singh Majithia.

The Singh Sabha was a highly influential reform movement among the Sikhs which began in the 1870s in Punjab. The main objectives of the movement were social, religious and educational improvement of the Sikh community. The emphasis was on returning to a pure, original form of Sikhism, away from the influences of other religious traditions, which were considered deviant or corrupt. This was done through the establishment of several institutions to guide Sikh religious and educational practices and the publication of popular tracts on Sikh history and religion.

Film City Urbanism in India is about the reciprocal relationship between film and the city as two institutions that constitute each other while fashioning the socio-political currents of the region. It interrogates imperial, postcolonial, socio-cultural, and economic imprints as captured, introduced, and left behind by the politics of cinema. Film City Urbanism in India is located at the intersection of film history and urban history, setting up a dialogue between them. While telling the story of film in Hyderabad, the book also tells the story of makings and re-makings of the city. The term ‘film city urbanism’ is used in two ways in the book. The first, to discuss the role of the film industry, its labour, infrastructure, capital, and audience in the making of the city. The second, to discuss the phenomenon of ‘Film City,’ enclaves dedicated to film production. For clarity, the book uses the full name of the particular Film City such as Ramoji Film City and M.G.R. Film City to refer to the specific enclave under discussion and uses the term ‘film city scheme’ while referring to the general urbanization pattern through these enclaves.

South Asian historiography is dominated by the study of British India. The histories of colonial India stand in for cultural histories of modernity. Historians preoccupied with colonialism and nationalism have often relegated to footnotes other geographies (such as princely states) that are not conducive to telling the story of the nation.