Gursharan Singh and people's theatre
The dramatist who took political plays to the villages of Indian Punjab, known to millions as Bhai Manna Singh.
Gursharan Singh (1929–2011), an engineer by training, built a theatre of short, direct plays about landlords, police, debt and religious hatred, and performed them on village stages and in fields across Indian Punjab, often without a set. Punjabi drama itself had begun in the 1910s with the Irish teacher Norah Richards at Lahore.
His television serial Bhai Manna Singh made him a household name, and he went on performing through the insurgency years when speaking out was dangerous.
More cinema and theatre
Lahore made films before Bombay was the capital of Indian cinema, and after 1947 became the heart of Pakistani and Punjabi film.
The Punjabi action film that made Sultan Rahi a legend, and whose 2022 remake became the highest-grossing Pakistani film ever.
From Prithviraj Kapoor to Yash Chopra, many of the founders of Hindi cinema came from the Punjab and the frontier.
Travelling comedians and mimics who played at weddings, fairs and courts, mocking landlords, priests and officials.
The Lahore theatre company founded under military rule, whose play Bulha brought Bulleh Shah to the stage.
The film that revived Punjabi cinema in India, a family drama of faith starring Prithviraj Kapoor.
Lahore's great film of Waris Shah's Heer, with Firdous and Ijaz and songs by Noor Jehan.
A serious Punjabi film about a landlord, his tenant and the wrong done to a woman, made by a team of art-cinema talents.
The boom of the 2010s, when Punjabi films from Mohali and Lahore filled cinemas from Ludhiana to Brampton.