Postcolonial India, Jewish Bollywood, and Lessons for Today: Yahudi (1958), Directed by Bimal Roy

Our latest episode dicusses one of the finest and heavily overlooked Hindi film Yahudi (English: The Jew) from 1958. Starring Dilip Kumar, Meena Kumari, Sohrab Modi, and Nazir Hussain, the film is a testament of postcolonial ethnic solidarity that shaped Bollywood. It is based on the play Yahudi Ki Ladki by the Urdu poet, playwright, and dramatist Agha Hashar Kashmiri,  a classic in Parsi-Urdu theatre. Wajahat Mirza's dialogues are outstanding while Shankar Jaikishan's melodies haunt. Directed by the socialist Bengali filmmaker, Bimal Roy and produced by the Jewish-Indian sound enginner Savak Vacha, the film imagines Jewish persecution in Roman Empire to tell a story of love, empathy, and the sheer idiocy of religious and hyper nationalist hatred. For Azhar, this film is a healing balm to the Indian population traumatized and wounded by Partition and Ankita thinks it is time we bring back the amalgamation of socialism, literariness, and melodrama back to Bollywood!  Hope you enjoy this episode!