The Economics of Absence: East Pakistan, Structural Decline, and the Myth of Islamisation in Pakistani Cinema

Abstract

The received wisdom in Pakistani film criticism and in much of the scholarly literature holds General Muhammad Zia ul-Haq's Islamization policies responsible for the near-death of the country's cinema from the 1980s onward. This article challenges that consensus on empirical, legal and comparative grounds. Drawing on Mushtaq Gazdar's foundational filmography, primary legislative texts the Cinematograph Act of 1918 and the Motion Pictures Ordinance of 1979 comparative evidence from post-revolutionary Iranian cinema, production statistics, interviews with practitioners, and the author's own filmmaking experience documented in The Friday Times, the article argues that the structural cause of Pakistani cinema's collapse was the loss of the East Pakistan market in 1971, which halved box-office revenue overnight and left producers too financially constrained to experiment with new stories, new actors, or new technology. Compounding this was the illegal conversion of cinema-house land to commercial plazas, the failure of directors to transmit craft to a younger generation, and the distorting influence of television conglomerates on post-2010 production. The so-called revival after 2010 is shown to be partial, fragile, and commercially overstated. The article concludes by reading The Legend of Maula Jutt (2022) not as a rupture but as a vindication of the very commercial logic class-based, melodramatic, rooted in Punjabi sensibility that the industry abandoned in the 1980s when it could no longer afford the risk of innovation.

Keywords: Pakistani Cinema, East Pakistan 1971, Zia Ul-Haq, Islamisation, Film Economics, Lollywood, Punjabi Cinema, Motion Pictures Ordinance 1979, The Legend of Maula Jutt, Cinema Houses