1941 Meerut, India

Anjum Zuberi

1941

Meerut, India

Interviewed on February 2, 2022(Translated from Hindi)

by Sameer Sultan

I was either 6 or 7 years old when I went to watch my first movie, Dil Lagi. I was in a small town without a movie theater, and yet even there we heard about the buzz of new and popular films. Before cars or even rickshaws, there were horse-drawn vehicles called ikkas that would travel along the roads and advertise upcoming movies. My friends and I, running around as kids do, would surround these ikkas and gawk at the colorful posters, not entirely understanding, but getting some sense of wonder from what we were looking at. Sometimes, there would be a man on the ikka, yelling through a cone, “a film is coming, a film is coming, come to the hall for the film and great music!” To really get people excited, he would yell, “there will be great violence!” knowing that children and adults alike were attracted by great fights and conflict.

Going to the film was a great occasion. By the time I was 15, I had only been maybe 4 or 5 times. My siblings and parents and aunts and uncles would all come with us to travel to Meerut where the movie hall was. We took a tonga, another horse-driven vehicle, that would take around 30-45 minutes to get to the city. Dil Lagi was a huge movie– I mean, my family would only go if it was a very popular movie. I remember the movie hall being absolutely full. Every seat was filled. There was not much food or drink, just soda, and a ginger drink that would have a little ball in the bottle that the kids would love. The hall was gender-segregated, and many women would wear burkas when going to watch the movies. 

With age, I can look back and laugh at how stupid the movies back then were. There was so much fighting and crying, it was all so stupid. But of course, this didn’t matter. I remember everyone, including me, just sitting there, mouth open, eyes open. It was amazing. Everyone in the packed theatre was entranced. Kids would be not even sitting, just standing or squatting in the aisles. At that age, I understood very little about what was actually going on with the story. I got the sense that not many people genuinely cared. Maybe my parents did. It was all about the spectacle. Why are they fighting?! They shouldn’t fight. They are saying this, saying that. Why did they do that!? All this unreasonableness that makes you want things to go right and for everyone to stop fighting. I don’t remember much about the story. I remember distinctly being confused, however, about why the heroine, the female lead, was crying all the time. She was always so sad, and yet she was so beautiful and grown-up that none of it made any sense. I thought that she was an adult and had no reason to be so emotional. Looking back, I was wisely thinking about how melodramatic the women in the movies are.

Nothing was so memorable as the music, though. I can still hum some of those songs from back then. Every movie back then had to have 6-16 explicit songs(Dil Lagi has 12). Upon leaving the theater, they would hand us the lyrics so that we could sing along at home. The stories and characters did not last. The music was always on the lips of my family, however, in both huge celebrations and in the small mindless hummings of everyday life.