Rooted in the culture of its place every cinema hall has its own little history. In his study of cinema halls of Delhi titled “Delhi 4 Shows: Talkies of Yesteryear”( Om Books International, 2015), Ziya Us Salam offers an interesting perspective on the cultures associated with single-screen theatres. His work is pioneering in the sense that it throws open this subject for cultural historians in other cities. The narrative of the rise and fall of Tasveer Mahal, a cinema hall adjacent to the Aligarh Muslim University campus, carries forward Salam’s study.
Located on Anoopshahar Road which passes through AMU, Tasveer Mahal is close to a number of university hostels and other buildings which can be seen on both sides of this road. This cinema hall has traditionally worked as a kind of gateway to the university. Just as cliffs of Dover carry a special meaning of ‘home’, ‘arrival’ and ‘familiarity’ for Englishmen, Tasveer Mahal gives Aligarians a feeling of ‘on the doorstep of home’.
Cinema halls in small cities always work as landmarks, more than they do in a metropolitan city. And because of the public nature of entertainment that the cinema offers, a cinema hall is an important secular site in a small city. Despite the troubled communal history of Aligarh, cinema halls have always been the places where one could see people of all hues and colours and beliefs. Tasveer Mahal was no exception. It has been an important landmark in the city and an equally important cultural entity for people of Aligarh, especially those associated with AMU.
However, I was in for a rude shock when I decided to watch Farah Khan’s Om Shanti Om (2008) at Tasveer Mahal. The first thing that shocked me about the hall was its dilapidated condition. The balcony had a deserted look. There were hardly any spectators in the balcony. The chairs had no covering. Fans (no pun intended) were producing a lot of noise. The sound quality of the cinema hall made it difficult to follow the dialogues (Shah Rukh Khan’s hamming did not help either). And most importantly the small crowd consisted of uncouth elements who were hardly interested in the film but only in a loud conversation, swearing at each other and laughing uncontrollably at nothings. There were no university students, and certainly no faculty, in the audience.
A year later the hall shut down. I felt sad. My mind went back to all those occasions when watching a film at Tasveer Mahal was a rich experience in more ways than one.
In the early eighties there were 12 cinema halls in Aligarh, the number being greater than what it was in many cities which were considered bigger than Aligarh. Bareilly, a much bigger city than Aligarh had only nine. At that time as a movie fanatic teenager I evaluated the value and development of a city in terms of the number of cinema halls and Aligarh figured very high on this development index.
A little bit of planning, though only a little, was generally needed to see a film in other cinema halls of the city but in the case of Tasveer Mahal no such planning was needed. Most residential hostels of the university were at a walking distance from Tasveer Mahal, and some of the most famous chai and sweet shops were also close to this hall. There was the famous sweet shop of Musa Khan which was famous for its gulab jamuns (called kaale jaam in Aligarh). It was given close competition by Khandelwal Sweet Shop. Both shops would double as makeshift restaurants on the sidewalk and would do brisk business especially in the evenings. There were hardly any vacant chairs at both shops in the summer evenings.
American novelist Henry James considers summer afternoon as the two most beautiful words in English language. In Aligarh parlance those two words would certainly be summer evenings. All small tea shops and sweet shops on the University Campus are a crowded place in summer evenings despite the university administration frowning upon this practice. ‘Har Shaam hai shame Misr yahan’ (Every evening an evening of Egypt) are the famous lines of the AMU Tarana (anthem), written by Urdu poet Asrarul Haq Majaz, Urdu poetry’s answer to John Keats.
Eminent historian Irfan Habib says that Tasver Mahal was built in 1944-45 by Tufail Ahmad, a rich man who did not follow any definite profession as such. The hall showed both new as well as old films in its early years. Aligarh had a fairly liberal culture in the ‘50s and the ‘60s and for a Muslim to have built a cinema hall in 1944 – cinema business is still frowned upon by the conservative elements – must have been a radical decision. Prof. Habib recalls that Tufail Ahmad’s daughters did not observe purdah .
Many practices in cinema have evolved over a particular period of time. The fact that the cinema must tell a story is one of the evolved practices. In the same way the cinema visualises a particular kind of normative spectator and a particular kind of set-up in which to watch a film. The filmic experience is deeply dependant on many such factors. This spectator must watch the film in the dark. He must not make noise in the cinema hall. Occasional comments notwithstanding, the cinema spectator must largely focus on the screen. At any rate when she must talk it should normally be addressed to her neighbour in whispers. The normative spectator does not speak across the audience to somebody sitting in the other corner of the hall.
This normative spectator has undergone a transformation with the advent of the mobile phones. Spectators are gradually learning to live with the mobile menace in the cinema hall.
This normative spectator was not always present in Tasveer Mahal. The university students, particularly from the same hostels or neighbouring halls often ran into each other here. And as the proximity of the hall to their campus gave the students a feeling of security, or to put it correctly, a licence to indulge themselves freely, they did not think too much before shouting something loudly. Their jeers and cheers were expressed without any self-consciousness. The rejoinders to the film, informed by a very local intersexual element, were witty and were generally received well. Their world and the story element of the film often merged. Thus, to recall one incident, in one particular scene in Shammi Kapoor’s Professor (1962) when Lalita Pawar wants a tutor for beautiful Saira Bano, she says that this professor ought to be old and unimpressive – looking though, of course, educated. A mischievous student, who had seen a very serious looking, bespectacled colleague watching the film, said loudly…“There is a vacancy for you S….l”. Other students who knew our serious-looking, IAS aspirant, bespectacled young scholar (he is DIG Prisons in Bhopal now) would laugh loudly. Of course the IAS-aspirant bespectacled scholar was not amused.
Tasveer Mahal also played its role in eliminating class differences. In the eighties it mostly ran old movies already shown in the better halls of the city. Tickets would be cheap on the reruns of the movies. Some good movies would come to Tasveer Mahal after just a few weeks of their release and many students waited to see them at an affordable rate.
Unlike today when we hardly see cinema halls screening old classics till about the early nineties cinema halls like Tasveer Mahal routinely screened old movies. Dilip Kumar films were a hit at Tasveer Mahal and he had a huge following in the university town of Aligarh. Many of his films had numerous reruns at Tasveer Mahal. In the eighties the hall also routinely screened old hits like Jab Pyar Kisi Se Hota Hai (1961), Yaadon Ki Baaraat (1973), Hum Se Badh kar Kaun ( 1981 ), Palki (1967), Khilona (1970), Ghunghat (1960), Chaudhvin Ka Chand (1960), Junglee (1961), Do Badan (1966), Guide (1965) and Gora Aur Kala (1972). Some relatively ‘recent’ hits like Insaf Ka Tarazoo (1980), Deewar (1975), Bobby (1973), Qurbani (1980)and Razia Sultan (1983) would also play to a full house here.
Relieved of its original function, Tasveer Mahal remains a landmark in Aligarh, a Mahal nostalgically remembering its Tasveer.
(The writer teaches English at Aligarh Muslim University)
