The Songs That Went Away

A question Professor Dr Rukhsana A Siddiqui asked me, some time ago, has stayed with me. Did the loss of East Pakistan cost Pakistan something specific in its musical and artistic life, not in a vague, sentimental sense, but in documentable, traceable ways? 

Let me state plainly, at the outset, it is not an argument that losing East Pakistan is the reason Pakistani music declined. That claim doesn't survive contact with the historical record. The single explanation most historians and musicians themselves point to for the institutional marginalisation of music during 1977–88,  the shrinking of concert space, a wave of classical performers relocating  for work. That is a distinct process, with its own causes, arriving a full six years after Dhaka fell in December 1971. Conflating the two would be intellectually dishonest.

What I can trace, carefully, is narrower and more useful, specific institutions, specific collaborations, specific people who moved between Dhaka, Karachi, and Lahore in a single, functioning cultural market before 1971, and what happened to those particular threads when the country split. That's the response Dr Siddiqui's question deserves.

Pakistan's split from what became Bangladesh followed a period of intense political crisis between the country's two wings. The human cost remains genuinely disputed to this day, and I won't adjudicate that dispute here, it isn't this essay's subject. What concerns us is narrower, the cultural and musical infrastructure that existed before that rupture, and what specifically became unreachable after it.

Before 1971, East Pakistan had its own film industry, built with state investment. The East Pakistan Film Development Corporation– established in 1957, gave Dhaka a studio and processing infrastructure that filmmakers had previously needed Kolkata or Lahore to access. Between 1956 and 1971, that infrastructure produced roughly 154 Bengali and 53 Urdu-language feature films– a genuine, functioning bilingual cinema, not a token gesture.

Its finest hour is a film most Pakistanis today have never heard of ‘Jago Hua Savera’ (1959). Shot entirely in a fishing village near Dhaka, it was scripted by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, directed by A.J. Kardar, and became Pakistan's first-ever submission for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. It won a prize at the Moscow International Film Festival, was screened at institutions from the Flaherty Foundation to the University of Southern California, and stands today, by the assessment of international film critics and archivists, among the finest works of neorealist cinema produced anywhere in South Asia. It was, in the fullest sense, a joint achievement: West Pakistani poet, West Pakistani director, East Pakistani setting, cast, and crew, East Pakistani production infrastructure. That particular kind of film, Urdu-scripted, Dhaka-produced, internationally minded, simply cannot exist again in its original form, because the single country that made it possible no longer exists.

Commercially, the same infrastructure produced films like Chakori (1967), released simultaneously in Urdu and Bengali "double versions" for audiences on both sides of the country– evidence of a real, functioning, cross-lingual audience and distribution network, not a hypothetical one.

If you want a single human thread that shows exactly what this bridge looked like in practice, follow the career of Robin Ghosh. Born in Baghdad to a Bengali Hindu father and an Arab Catholic mother, raised from age six in Dhaka's Wari neighbourhood, Ghosh started at Radio Pakistan's Dhaka station in the late 1950s, composed his first film score for the Bengali picture Rajdhanir Bookay (1960), and married the actress who would become Shabnam, the most successful leading lady in West Pakistani cinema for two decades. Ghosh followed her west, first to Karachi and then Lahore, and kept composing. His score for Aina (1977), made six years after Bangladesh's independence, became one of the biggest commercial successes in the history of Pakistani cinema, running for roughly 400 weeks in theatres. He won seven Nigar Awards, Pakistan's top film honour, across a career that spanned both countries.

Ghosh's story complicates any simple "we lost it all" narrative in an important way: talent that had already crossed over before the split largely stayed, and kept working, for years afterward. What ended wasn't Bengali musical talent's presence in Pakistani cinema overnight, it was the pipeline that had produced people like Ghosh in the first place, a shared training ground, a shared radio station network, a shared audience spanning both wings of East and West Pakistan, that no longer had a mechanism to keep feeding new talent westward after 1971.

The clearer case of direct loss is Runa Laila. Born in Sylhet in 1952, raised largely in Karachi where her father was posted as a civil servant, she trained in classical music and Kathak from early childhood. Making her film playback debut at 12, by her mid-teens Laila was, by multiple contemporary accounts, second only to Noor Jehan in the affection of Pakistani audiences, performing regularly on PTV, hosting her own show, singing for major Urdu films including Umrao Jaan Ada (1972). In 1974, her family relocated to newly independent Bangladesh. She went on to have a legendary career there and across India, but the specific thing Pakistan lost was concrete and dated; a teenage prodigy, fully formed by its own broadcasting and film institutions, whose subsequent decades of work happened somewhere else.

The premise that East Pakistan's cultural presence simply enriched a receptive, harmonious "one nation" musical fabric doesn't fully hold up. The most documented cultural flashpoint of the pre-1971 period runs in the opposite direction. In 1967, Pakistan's information and broadcasting ministry, under Ayub Khan's government, formally restricted the broadcast of Rabindranath Tagore's songs, Rabindra Sangeet– a cornerstone of Bengali musical and literary identity– on Radio Pakistan and later on the newly launched PTV, on the grounds that Tagore's work carried "Indian" and Hindu cultural associations incompatible with Pakistani ideology. This wasn't a fringe decision; it followed nearly a decade of official unease dating to opposition against Dhaka's plans to mark Tagore's birth centenary in 1961, and it became one of the specific grievances Bengali cultural organisations, including Chhayanaut, founded in 1963 specifically to keep Tagore's music alive in public life, cited in the years leading to the independence movement.

I raise this not to relitigate 1971, but because it changes what the honest answer to Dr Siddiqui's question actually is. Pakistan, as a state, did not simply enjoy unrestricted access to a rich Bengali musical inheritance and then lose it through separation. Part of what it lost, it had already been in the process of pushing away, a state apparatus in Islamabad and Karachi treating an entire musical tradition as ideologically suspect while people like Robin Ghosh and Runa Laila were simultaneously, and genuinely, thriving within the same country's film and broadcast industry. Both things were true at once. That contradiction, official suspicion of Bengali high culture running alongside real commercial and artistic collaboration in cinema and radio is a more honest, and frankly more interesting, story than a simple tale of harmony interrupted.

So, to answer the question as narrowly and defensibly as the evidence allows, Pakistan lost a functioning bilingual film and broadcast market roughly twice the size of what remained, with its own studio infrastructure in Dhaka that West Pakistani productions had begun to draw on. It lost a specific generation-defining talent pipeline, musicians, composers, and playback singers trained in East Pakistani conservatories, liturgical music, and radio stations, several of whom, like Ghosh and Laila, had already proven capable of producing work that topped the charts. It lost the possibility of further Faiz-calibre East-West artistic collaborations of the kind that produced Jago Hua Savera. And it lost, this is worth being honest about, a chance, foreclosed years before the actual war, to fully and officially embrace Bengali music as part of a shared national inheritance rather than treating it as a suspect import.

What it did not lose, in any simple sense, is its own capacity to make music. West Pakistani classical and film music had its own robust, independent lineages, the different gharanas, Roshan Ara Begum, Mehdi Hassan, Noor Jehan, that owed nothing to East Pakistan and continued, largely undisturbed, through the 1970s. The steep institutional decline of concert culture, classical patronage, and public musical life that people rightly associate with Pakistan today has a clearer, better-documented cause sitting six years later on the calendar, Zia's martial law, and the slow retreat of the state from supporting music as a legitimate public art. 

The human insight here isn't nostalgia for a lost golden age, it's a lesson about what shared institutions quietly do. A single national broadcaster, a single national film certification and distribution system, a single national conservatory-adjacent training pipeline, does something that no amount of individual goodwill can replace afterward, it forces talent from different corners of a country to keep meeting each other, whether the state fully means to enable that or not. Ghosh didn't move to Lahore because Pakistan had a coherent cultural policy welcoming Bengali composers. He moved because a director in Dhaka happened to hire him, and love and ambition did the rest. The infrastructure created the conditions for the encounter; it didn't guarantee the outcome, and it didn't stop the state from simultaneously banning Tagore on the same airwaves.

The practical action for anyone thinking about Pakistan's musical future now is to stop waiting for a unifying national institution to hand talent a stage, and to build the smaller, unglamorous versions of what EPFDC and Radio Pakistan's Dhaka station once did by accident, cross-city, cross-language training pipelines and distribution networks that don't depend on ideological approval to function.

The better question to ask is: which of the cultural bridges we still have today between provinces, between languages, between forms of music the state considers respectable and the ones it doesn't? Are we currently one step away from losing the way Radio Pakistan lost Tagore, quietly, years before anyone called it a rupture?

I don't have a comfortable answer to that one either. But I leave you with an honest one.

 

The writer is a music enthusiast and cultural critic. He writes about the intersection of music, society, and the human condition. He can be reached at brian.bassanio@gmail.com

All facts and information are the sole responsibility of the writer