Pashto cinema and drama: from Laila Majnoon to Pollywood

At a glance

• The first Pashto film, Laila Majnoon, was released in 1941, before Pakistan existed. Hamza Shinwari wrote its screenplay and dialogue, and its print is lost. [5, 6]

• Pakistan's first lasting Pashto success was Yousaf Khan Sherbano, released in December 1970 with Badar Munir and Yasmin Khan. [5, 7, 8]

• Dawn's Peshawar writer Sher Alam Shinwari dates the golden era to 1970–90. The Pashtun writer Saadullah Jan Barq says it lasted about three years in the mid-1970s. [7, 11]

• The Peshawar film historian Haji Muhammad Aslam Khan counts about 1,566 Pashto films by 2020 and leaves out more than half as unfit for his book. [5, 6]

• Pashtun critics, film-makers and viewers all describe a fall in standards from the early 1990s. They disagree on who is to blame. [5, 7, 11, 17]

• Cinemas in Peshawar were attacked in 2014, and most have since closed. Afghan Film, the state studio in Kabul, was reported dissolved in May 2025. [15, 16, 20, 21]

Laila Majnoon, the first Pashto film

The first Pashto film began as a play. Sher Alam Shinwari, reviewing Haji Muhammad Aslam Khan's history of Pashto cinema in Dawn, says Hamza Shinwari wrote a Pashto stage play of the Laila and Majnoon story, and its success led the singer and music director Rafiq Ghaznavi to turn it into a film. The set was built in Kolkata in 1939. Ghaznavi hired Hamza to write the screenplay and dialogue, and Aslam Khan quotes a letter in which Hamza says he was paid Rs 250. [5] The Pakistan Film Magazine lists Rafiq Ghaznavi and Habib Jan Kabuli in the cast. [3] Dawn says Hamza was meant to play the lead but his voice was too thin, so Ghaznavi played Majnoon himself, and a singer from Bannu named Habib Jana played Laila. [5] Radio Pakistan's account, given in the Hamza Shinwari article, adds that he also directed it and sang playback.

Dawn says the film took two years to finish and opened in 1941 at Peshawar's Imperial Talkies, a cinema built in 1925 in Qissa Khwani Bazaar by the Hindu businessman Acharch Ram Ghai and since pulled down. [5] It did not do as well as hoped, Aslam Khan's book says, because the Peshawar audience mostly spoke Hindko and because Ghaznavi was a better singer than actor. Seven of its ten songs, sung by Mohammad Wazir, were still hits. [5]

Some in Peshawar doubt the film was ever shown. Aslam Khan, whose 800-page book Pakhto Filmoona: Tareekh, Tahqeeq, Tanqeed (پښتو فلمونه، تاریخ، تحقیق او تنقید, "Pashto Films: History, Research and Criticism") he printed at his own expense in July 2020, answered that doubt on Radio Mashaal's Pashto service:

ډېر خلک فکر کوي چې ګینې لیلا مجنون فلم خپور شوی نه و، خو دا خبره سمه نه ده

Der khalaq fikar kawi che gine Laila Majnun film khpor shawai na wo, kho da khabara sama na da

"Many people think Laila Majnun was never released, but that is not right."

He said he had spoken to people who saw it in cinemas, that the poet Ghazi Sial told him he had watched it, and that Hamza Baba mentions it in his own book Naqsh-e-Hayat. He added that it was shown at the Imperial, later called Novelty, and in Bannu. [6] The release year is 1941 in Aslam Khan's account and in the Express Tribune. [5, 6, 10]

Pashto readers have been slow to buy such books. The writer Saber Shah Saber, who has also worked on the history of Pashto films, told Mashaal that Pashtuns pay 50,000 rupees for a mobile phone and 8,000 for sandals, but nobody will pay even 80 for a book. [6]

Teega and the cinema wagon

The second Pashto film, in Dawn's account of Aslam Khan's book, was Teega ("Ceasefire"), made after Partition by the Pakistani government's information department and released in 1959. It was not shown in cinemas. A screen was built on a wagon that went round the villages near Peshawar, to argue against blood feuds and for the jirga and reconciliation, and to interest villagers in cinema, which was generally looked down on as a place of evil. Umar Daraz Khalil, later a star, played a tribal leader. [5]

Yousaf Khan Sherbano and the start of an industry

Yousaf Khan Sherbano opened in December 1970. [5, 7, 8] Dawn's review says it was a hit with Pashtun audiences in Karachi and made its stars, Badar Munir and Yasmin Khan, famous at once. [5] The Daily Times says it ran twelve weeks in Peshawar. [16] The story is a folk love story. Dawn names the folk poet Ali Haider Joshi as its scriptwriter. [7]

Its director, Aziz Tabbasum, was interviewed by Dawn in 2024. He was born in Peshawar in 1944, studied at Edwardes College and went to Karachi to find work in films. He said the idea came from an Indian film in which Amjad Khan's father spoke a single Pashto word and the Pashtun audience in a Karachi cinema stood up and applauded; he thought a whole Pashto film would work. The budget was small. Badar Munir and the supporting players were each paid Rs 2,000, Yasmin Rs 3,000, and Tabbasum himself Rs 2,000, with costumes and cameras borrowed. [8] He went on to direct about 44 successful films, left for the United States in 1992 and received the Pride of Performance in 2023. [8]

The golden years and who made them

Sher Alam Shinwari puts the strength of the films in 1970–90 in strong stories and good music. He lists the actors Yasmin Khan, Suriya Khan, Shahnaz, Musarrat Shaheen, Badar Munir, Asif Khan, Niamat Sarhadi, Umar Daraz, Tariq Shah and Jamil Babar; the playback singers Khayal Mohammad, Hidayatullah, Gulnar Begum, Kishwar Sultana, Mahjabeen Qazalbash and Mashooq Sultana; and the composer Rafiq Shinwari among others. [7] Aslam Khan's book, as Dawn describes it, details about 700 of the best films and credits directors such as Aziz Tabbasum, Qaiser Sanubar, Nasir Raza Khan and Arshad Khan, and writers including Ali Haider Joshi, Amir Ghulam Sadiq and Murad Shinwari. It says the producers were then local Pakhtuns who knew their people's norms. [5] Murad Baba, an octogenarian lyricist who told the Express Tribune in 2010 that he had written 2,000 songs and about a hundred screenplays, said senior writers like him joined the industry in the early 1970s "to promote Pashtun art and culture on the big screen". [10] Asif Khan, whom Dawn calls the "chocolate hero" of those years, remembered that Hamza Baba once wrote a storyline and songs for their films. [7] That connects the screen to the poets: see the Hamza Shinwari and Khatir Afridi articles and the rabab, the attan and Pashtun music.

Where the films played is told by those who watched. The Daily Times says people came from Afghanistan, the tribal districts, Malakand and Balochistan to Peshawar for new films. [16] A viewer it quotes remembered going most evenings as a child for five rupees, with no empty seat and people standing for three hours. [16] Dawn says more than two dozen cinemas in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Quetta, Karachi and Kabul showed Pashto films. [5] Murad Baba said reels were smuggled to Kabul and some reached Europe and the Gulf. [10]

The dating is disputed. Barq, a Pashtun writer from Nowshera, told the Express Tribune that the film industry never truly entered its golden days, which he put at about three years in the mid-1970s. [11] Dawn's writer, as above, gives two decades. [7]

Why the films changed

Two accounts of the decline exist, and both come from Pashtuns who loved the earlier films. Murad Baba said that in the late 1980s and early 1990s "some elements with vested interests plagued the industry's artistic environment and began to present a distorted image of Pashtun society". "We raised our voice against it on many forums but nobody listened to us", he said. [10] Aziz Tabbasum gave other causes: lack of sponsorship, no official patronage and cinemas in poor condition. [8] Aslam Khan's book says the industry slid into "shoddy productions incompatible with Pakhtun social norms" from the late 1990s, with titles such as Da Spee Lakai ("The Dog's Tail") and Maar ("Snake"). Its reviewer adds that, in Khan's account, non-Pakhtun film-makers multiplied, writers and actors left, and cinemas became places for drug users and criminals. [5] Dawn's review adds that more than half of the roughly 1,560 films made from the 1940s to 2019 glorified gun culture, drug culture and vulgarity, and so were left out of Khan's book. [5]

The critics are plain. Hasan Ali Shah, a journalist, playwright and producer at a Pashto television channel, said that fighting, killing, revenge, vulgar scenes and dances were put into almost every Pashto film to meet the needs of commercialism, and that the censor board stayed silent. He said the later tele-films and CD dramas "portrayed Pashtuns as a cruel, murderous and terrorist nation". [17] The young journalist Kashif Malik, writing in the same article, set today's films against Pashto literature and said they show Pashtuns as conservative and narrow-minded. [17] At a Peshawar seminar reported by Dawn on 1 January 2024, the film critic Haji Aslam Khan said investors were bent on "tarnishing the image of Pashtuns", and the critic Azizullah Karwan blamed vulgarity, poor contents and a lack of professionalism. [9]

Viewers say the same thing more bluntly. Safdar Khan, 70, told Reuters in 2013: "But going to the cinema is considered a shame or bad thing today due to the obscenity." [12] The scriptwriter Nazir Bhati, Reuters notes, told a newspaper that he gave up his job when a producer asked him to include vulgar bits. [12] A Peshawar viewer, Amandar Khan, said that writers and directors do not know the cultural limits of Pashtunwali, and that no respected person now takes a family. [16] The same Reuters report quotes a Peshawar resident who said families had been known to kill a daughter who became a film singer: "People love the songs, but not the singers." [12]

The defence, and the blame on Punjab

The film-makers answer in two ways. Shahid Khan, an actor and producer, said in 2013 that the industry had been purged of obscenity, and in 2017 that the people who criticise their films do not dare to produce one that suits Pashtunwali, while the rich do not fund the industry and the province has no censor board. [7, 16]

The other answer is the blame on Punjab. In 2012 a CD shop owner in Peshawar's Nishtarabad market said the dancers in Pashto films come from Punjab and that Punjabi producers' taste for risqué entertainment had swamped social films. [11] Reuters wrote that most Pashto films are by then made in Lahore, and repeats the claim that Punjabi film-makers introduced the vulgarity. [12] Barq rejected the blame: "People with this commercial mentality are present everywhere, so we can't really blame one ethnic group". In his view, influential people from Lahore and Peshawar changed the pattern, smugglers were already in the trade, and the arrival of Afghan refugees after the Soviet invasion gave producers an audience for "scandalous films". He added that Punjabi heroes did enter the Pashto industry, though not at once, and that Punjabis respect their women, so the films their producers make do not show their values. [11] The average Peshawari, the Tribune adds, calls the whole matter "a conspiracy against the Pashtuns". [11]

Censors, bans and attacks

Pashto film-makers have complained that they had no authority to answer to. Khyber Pakhtunkhwa had no censor board of its own after the 18th Amendment, and producers took certificates from the boards of Sindh or Punjab. [13, 16] In August 2013 the Home and Tribal Affairs department banned five Eid releases, Zma Arman, Bhungi Lalay, Loafer, Shart and Qurbani, because they had no censor board approval. Producers said the films had already done record business and that the province had set up no board for them to go to. Culture minister Shah Farman said the producers had not obtained certification. [13] The ban did not stop the screenings. [13, 14] The Pashto film star Asif Khan listed "a fully functional and responsible film censor board" among what the industry needed. [7]

The MMA, an alliance of religious parties that governed the province from 2002 to 2008, acted against cinema culture itself. Dawn says Peshawar's Nishtar Hall was closed to all cultural activity and that cinema billboards and advertisements showing women were banned. [7, 16] Pashto tele-films and films on CD were soon on sale freely in the Nishtarabad market, and the private industry that grew from them earned the name Pollywood, with buyers in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the tribal districts, Afghanistan and the Gulf. [7] Cinemas were burned or attacked by mobs, the Daily Times writes, including Firdous cinema after an Islami Jamiat-e-Talaba meeting, and in 2006 and 2012 after protests against anti-Islam films abroad. [16]

The worst attacks came in February 2014. Three grenades went off inside Peshawar's Shama Cinema in Bacha Khan Chowk during a show on 11 February; Dawn reported 13 dead and at least 19 injured. [15] Shama and the Picture House cinema were attacked between 2 and 11 February, and the Daily Times puts the dead at more than 20 and the injured at 54. [16] Viewers stopped coming. [16] The Tribune had counted 17 Pashto feature films made in 2013, the first in high definition. [14]

Television and tele-films

Pakistan Television set up its Peshawar centre in 1974 in a makeshift building on Fort Road and opened a purpose-built one in 1982. [4] Peshawar also read PTV's news bulletins in Pashto and Hindko. [4] The centre's output for the national network was small: in 2004 its general manager, Mujahid Bin Syed Gilani, told reporters that headquarters had allotted it 125 minutes a quarter, that it had lacked modern equipment and that it had started a live Pashto show with audience interaction. [22] The serials he announced were a 13-episode drama, Ajnabi Raastay, Ajnabi Manzalain, by Nasim Nasir, and Kahani Des Des Ki, based on folk stories from around the world. [22]

The more visible television drama came by cable and disc. Hasan Ali Shah, quoted above, dates Pashto tele-films and CD dramas to the decline of the cinema industry. [17] Dawn's Sher Alam Shinwari says they brought new talent and the name Pollywood, and also violence and obscenity, and with them "the wrath of extremists and militants" who attacked the Nishtarabad shops and some performers. [7] Pashto channels and radio are covered in Pashto radio, television and press.

Afghanistan

Kabul never had a large Pashto film industry of its own. The anthropologist Chihab El Khachab writes that Afghan Film opened in 1968, after a collaboration with USAID that began in 1961 to build a film laboratory, and that most of its films were in Persian (Dari), "with a select few in Pashto". [1] He quotes a former head of Afghan Film as saying that until 2001 no more than 45 Afghan fiction films had been made. [1] Cinema still had a public: The notes of a 2002 talk by the film-maker Siddiq Barmak give Kabul 18 cinemas and 300,000 filmgoers in the mid-1970s, against seven cinemas in September 2002. [2]

For Pashto-speaking Afghans the films came mostly from Peshawar. Pashto reels went to Kabul, and a 2013 hit was reported to do good business across the border. [10, 14] Shahid Khan said that Kabul audiences prefer Pashto films to Bollywood, which is his claim. [7] The same notes record that when the Taliban took Kabul in 1996 they attacked cinemas and burned films, and that Issaq Nizami, director of Radio-TV Afghanistan, hid film archives with eight staff. [2] Amu TV reported on 13 May 2025, from four sources, that the Taliban authorities had dissolved Afghan Film and closed its offices; no statement was issued, and the archive's fate was unknown. [21] The wider situation is in Afghanistan and the Pashtun lands since 2021.

The cinemas today

Peshawar's cinemas have mostly gone. The Daily Times counted 16 in Peshawar and 60 in the province before; by 2017 it was seven and 24. [16] Dawn wrote in June 2025 that of 15 cinemas in the city about 12 had been dismantled in less than ten years, and that the year's Eid release, Badmashi Lewantub De, played at only three. [18] The Associated Press of Pakistan reported in July 2026 that Firdus Cinema on GT Road is now a shopping plaza, and that only a handful, including Arshad, Aaeena, Naz and Shama, still run. [20] It adds that audiences have turned to social media, and a cinema manager says weekends barely cover the electricity bills. [20]

There is still a trickle of new work. The Mafkkoora organisation held a Peshawar seminar, reported on 1 January 2024, on contemporary Pashto cinema where speakers asked for a stop to the demolition of cinemas, money for good films and the use of films against militants' narratives. [9] In May 2026 two Pashto films, Da Kar Di Bad Maari De and Da Dusmani Awar, both about the harm of family feuds, opened at Eid ul Adha after a two-year gap, with Arbaz Khan, Jahangir Khan and Shahid Khan. [19] Arbaz Khan is the son of Asif Khan and made his name from Meena Qurbani Ghawari (2003). [7] The report says cinema owners and film-makers hoped it would begin a gradual revival. [19]