A treasure regained

A lost neo-realist film from Pakistan, Jago Hua Savera, made from a screenplay by legendary Urdu poet and leftist intellectual Faiz Ahmed Faiz, is back from the dead. The miracle — the result of a painstaking, decade-long restoration project undertaken by a foundation named after producer Nauman Taseer — has more than just retrieved a cinematic gem for posterity.

Here was a masterpiece that could have redefined Pakistani cinema for good and brought it up to speed with experiments with modernism that were on elsewhere in the world in the 1950s. Sadly, filmmakers in the newly created country did not take the path illuminated by Jago Hua Savera. A digitally restored print of Jago Hua Savera (The Day Shall Dawn, 1958), directed with unwavering rigour by Aaejay Kardar, was screened in the Cannes Classics section of the 69th Cannes Film Festival in mid-May. By showcasing a facet of early Pakistani cinema that has rarely found mention in popular discourse, Jago Hua Savera provides a testament to the creative urges that drove a small segment of the film industry in Pakistan only to be jettisoned in the 1960s and 1970s.

Jago Hua Savera was a unique collaborative effort that brought together talent from Pakistan, India, Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) and the UK to deliver a human document of immense historical value.

Set in the poverty-stricken fishing community of Saitnol, a village on the banks of the Meghna, 30 km from Dhaka, the black and white film eschewed melodrama, employed minimal and naturalistic dialogue and extracted lifelike performances from a cast of amateur first-timers. The only professional actor that director Kardar used in the film was Tripti Mitra, stage and screen actress from Calcutta. While the lines spoken by the actors are predominantly Urdu with a smattering of Bengali, Mitra’s character had very little dialogue.

“The film’s negative was lost after the production companies in Karachi and London closed down,” says Anjum Taseer, the producer’s son. “Luckily we found a 35 mm positive in a British archive and used it for the digital restoration.”

“I knew that one day I would find the film and show it to the world as an unforgettable piece of art,” says Taseer, who was helped in the restoration project by French researcher Philippe Jalladeau, co-founder of the Three Continents Film Festival in Nantes.

Taseer recalls: “The film was released in Pakistan on December 16, 1958. But because almost everybody involved in its making was left-oriented, the military rulers sought to suppress it. Jago Hua Savera wasn’t a commercial success.” Faiz’s elder daughter Salima Hashmi, who was also present in Cannes, recalls that her father could not attend the film’s London premiere because he was imprisoned by the government. “So it is a very sentimental moment for me to see the film in Cannes 58 years later,” she said ahead of the screening.

During the restoration process, Jago Hua Savera was screened in Nantes in 2007, the New York Film Festival in 2008 and the Kolkata Film Festival in 2012. The film was also screened in Karachi and Lahore to mark its 50th anniversary. The print screened in Cannes was the final restored cut.

Adapted by Faiz loosely from a novel by Bengali writer Manik Bandopadhyay, Padma Nadir Majhi (The Boatman of the River Padma), Jago Hua Savera was shot by Oscar-winning, German-born British cinematographer Walter Lassally. With Faiz himself contributing the lyrics, the music for the film was composed by Timir Baran, who was part of a New Theatres triumvirate that included RC Boral and Pankaj Mullick. The songs were sung by an amateur crooner, Ghazanfar. “He was a friend of my father’s,” says Taseer. “He never did anything else as a singer.” 

Jago Hua Savera was not only Pakistan’s first Oscar submission — it went before the Academy in the same year as Satyajit Ray’s Apur Sansar — it also won a major prize at the Moscow International Film Festival, giving the country’s movie industry a big shot in the arm. “The director had seen Ray’s Pather Panchali and was deeply influenced by the film,” Taseer told this writer after the Cannes Classics screening of Jago Hua Savera. Aaejay Kardar was the brother of Indian filmmaker Abdur Rashid Kardar (credited with setting up a movie-making centre in Lahore in the 1920s) and a first cousin of international cricketer Abdul Hafeez Kardar, who turned out for both India and Pakistan. 

In terms of both style and substance, Jago Hua Savera marked a clean break from anything that filmgoers in Pakistan had seen before. Faiz took elements from the novel and developed a screenplay that focused on the struggles of a fisherman to buy a boat of his own in the face of grinding poverty, brazen exploitation by a fishing contractor and his rapidly deteriorating health.

Into its humanist core, the writer wove a tale of a family grappling with issues of day-to-day survival and social pressures as a relationship develops between the male protagonist’s rebellious brother and his sister-in-law.

Opening with a long sequence of fishermen out in the river making their way around at night, the film cuts to a chaotic dawn fish market buzzing with activity. But for the men whose haul is on sale, the returns are pitiably meagre. While Faiz’s screenplay takes no time to establish the precarious existence of the impoverished fishermen, his lyrics capture both hope and despair. One of the songs goes thus: Tham gaye aansoo thak gayi hain aankh/Ab chhodo gham ki baat beet chali hai raat (The tears have stopped as the eyes are exhausted/let’s forget our sorrows, the night is on the way out). But even as the light of dawn pierces the darkness and the horizon is bathed in a bright glow, the misery of the hardworking fishermen refuses to end.

“What is remarkable and sad,” says Taseer, “is that not much has changed for the fishing community portrayed in the film. Their struggle for a better life continues to this day.” For Pakistani cinema, however, the trough of the 1980s and 1990s is now well in the past. For filmmakers in Lahore and Karachi seeking fresh inspiration, the rediscovery of Jago Hua Savera couldn’t have come at a more opportune juncture.