In the years following independence, Bombay's popular films sought to create a unified, seamless nation where ruptures like Partition were made invisible and the hero figure remained Hindu and upper caste. Realism remained at the margins of this celluloid text since it did not fit this dominant discourse. Urdu writers, many of them Muslims, who were often part of the leftist progressive writers' movement, questioned these seamless narratives. This paper tries to reopen the history of realism in Bombay's popular cinema by exploring the role of the Urdu writer of this period by engaging with a recent film, Khoya Khoya Chand and its protagonist who appears to have been moulded on Saadat Hasan Manto.
