Peshawar’s fragile links with Bollywood royalty are in ruins

On January 14, a demolition crew arrived in Dhaki Munawar Shar in the Pakistani city of Peshawar to resume taking apart one of the city’s most important cultural landmarks – the ancestral home of the Kapoor family, India’s most prominent cinema dynasty.

The house originally had six storeys and nearly 60 rooms, but the top three floors were demolished in the 1990s because of a “weak structure”. The Kapoor house stands close to Dakhi Nalbandi, the city’s highest point. Thought to have been constructed in 1890, it was once an imposing cream stone haveli with pale azure shuttered windows, painted floral murals on the façade, and ornate jharokas of the kind associated with royal palaces in Rajasthan. The house is also adjacent to Peshawar’s most famous area – the Qissa Khwani (Storytellers’ Bazaar).

The house stands exactly on the spot where Mahmud of Ghazni is believed to have pitched his tents when he invaded the city a thousand years ago. It is said that panoramic views of Peshawar are still on offer from what remains of the roof. But in its original state, the height of the building and its position on a small hill made it the tallest building in Peshawar.

Prithviraj Kapoor’s father bought the house in 1918. It was here that Prithviraj was married and where his first three sons were born. Two of them did not survive infancy while Raj Kapoor was born in 1924.

After Partition, with Prithviraj now settled in Bombay where sons Shashi and Shammi were born, the house was declared evacuee property and auctioned off in 1963. More than 50 years on, like so many of Peshawar’s old town properties, the Kapoor house is crumbling. The top floor has almost fully collapsed and its faded grandeur is more an attraction for film journalists from India than tourists from Pakistan.

But it seems that Peshawar isn’t going to let this cultural heritage go without a fight. Just after 8 am on January 16, a group of heritage campaigners managed to halt the latest demolition effort and temporarily keep the property safe from developers. A team from the Directorate of Archaeology and Museums visited the site and shortly afterwards, a First Information Report was lodged with the nearby Kabuli police station, where incidentally Prithviraj’s father, Dewan Basheshwarnath Kapoor, was once a senior officer.

The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government has repeatedly said that both the Kapoor house and the family home of Bollywood actor Dilip Kumar in the nearby Khudadad neighbourhood would be protected and eventually restored. However, it has apparently been unable to honour that promise. Those who live nearby say that demolition crews have a habit of turning up on weekends – when government officials are off duty – to take the house apart.

Peshawar in the backdrop

Many in Peshawar are perturbed that their fragile link with the origins of Indian cinema and Bollywood might be erased, but the house is of significance to world cinema audiences as well.

Prithviraj Kapoor’s son Shashi married British actress Jennifer Kendal, whose sister Felicity was also an actress. The first couple of India’s “international cinema”, they were at the forefront of creating its arts, cinema and theatre. The couple made numerous films with the Merchant Ivory film company in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

In India, Raj and Shammi Kapoor single-handedly shaped popular Indian cinema in the years after independence.

Peshawar’s links with Bollywood’s early days are not limited to the Kapoor family. Another famous scion is the legendary actor Dilip Kumar, who was born Mohammad Yusuf Khan.

In addition, Hindi film producer Surinder Kapoor, father of actor Anil Kapoor, also had a family house in the Qissa Khwani area.

Of a younger generation of Peshawar heritage is Shah Rukh Khan, whose father left for India before Partition. The Bollywood star’s cousins and uncles and great aunts, however, continue to live in their ancestral home.

Of the lot, Dilip Kumar has maintained the strongest links with the city and has often returned for visits. “Yes, I was born in the charming city of Peshawar in undivided India and I have many special memories of the place,” the actor, now 93, tweeted in December 2014.

Later that month, after terrorists massacred 141 schoolchildren in Peshawar, the actor said: “What the Taliban did to the children of Peshawar is a sin, unpardonable.”

At the end of Storytellers Market, a road leads to Mohalla Khudadad. Dilip Kumar grew up on a street named after the last Mughal governor of Peshawar, Nasir Khan. It is said that imperial elephants were once stabled here.

Although the roof has collapsed, the three-storey Kumar house with a narrow front is just about holding its own.

Shah Rukh Khan’s father Mir Taj Mohammad lived in the neighbourhood of Shah Wali Katal before 1946. The family was active in the Quit India independence movement. Mir’s older brother Ghulam Muhammad Gama was a supporter of the Frontier Gandhi, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, and his Khudai Khidmatgars, which in the 1930s represented the Pashtun non-violence movement for a united India. Of the two brothers, Gama was imprisoned by the British on and off over seven years. Mir left Peshawar before Partition.

Cultural transfer

The remarkable creative and artistic link between Peshawar and Bombay initially seems difficult to explain. But perhaps the notion that arts flourish in urban environments, in polyglot international cities that also act as a hub for incomers, ignores the fact that the impulse for some of the greatest storytelling comes from the landscape.

What Peshawar and Bombay share are the natural amphitheatres of their locations – Peshawar being bordered by purple-grey mountains and Bombay’s unusual peninsula suspending the city in a vast and infinite theatre of sea and sky.

Sheltered by natural geography from the arid frontier mountains, Peshawar sits on a broad fertile vale made emerald green in early spring by rains that shun the rest of the subcontinent. In the backdrop are the ever-changing hues of the mountains.

In the early 20th century, along with buildings of Raj-era Victoriana that the British had built, were Mughal gardens, bridges and havelis, boulevards lined with beautiful trees and a 1,000-year-old pipal tree at Shah ji ki Dheri, noted by the Chinese pilgrims of the first millennium for its “thick branches and the shade beneath sombre and deep; four Buddhas have sat beneath this tree.”

Anyone growing up in Peshawar before Partition would know that the North West Frontier Province was rich in history and stories. Peshawar’s heritage and creative talent ended up laying the foundations for Bollywood and energising India’s early cinema industry.

Many of the frontier towns and villages in the mountains running down the Afghan borders supported populations of all religions, often quite a long way south. There were Hindus in Peshawar, in Bannu-Kohat, and in Quetta. The epics of Hindu scriptures – the Ramayana and Mahabharata – were performed at the temples. Some were familiar with the Punjabi stories of star-crossed lovers and heroic tales that eventually became plot staples for Bollywood films.

Bombay, meanwhile, was the first Indian city to stage a Lumiere brothers’ silent film in 1896. In 1926, there were about a dozen moving picture production companies in Bombay. When Prithviraj told his father that he wanted to be an actor, his father went “purple with rage”. He called him a “kanjar” – a pimp, in the sense of prostitution, evoking the world of lower class courtesans and dancing girls through a word that was used dismissively in Peshawar’s male-dominated society.

Prithviraj, whose progressive views and socialism had been influenced by Gandhi in the repressive political atmosphere of British rule, was of a generation that saw things differently.

Not quite 23 years of age, he arrived in Bombay by train with just Rs 75 in his pocket in the late summer of 1928. He liked to recall that the first place he went was to the Gateway of India in Colaba. “God,” he said, “I have come here to become an actor.” And then he made a proposition: “If you don’t make me one, I will cross the seven seas and go to Hollywood.”