At last, "the federal government has decided to revise the script of Jinnah, a film being made on the life of Mohammad Ali Jinnah", said Mushahid Hussain, the Prime Minister's Advisor on Information and Media Development. But this decision, according to the writers and artists community, should be taken as 'pre-censorship', and hence resisted outrightly. If the government feels the need of script revision, then a script scrutiny committee comprising senior writers i.e. Ahmad Nadeem Qasmi, Safdar Mir, Dr Jameel Jalibi, Shaukat Siddiqi, Intizar Hussain and Ashfaq Ahmad should be constituted before issuing the government orders for stopping the shooting of the film, to look into the reportedly objectionable parts of the film script and other matters. However, after completion of the film, the government may allow the film to go through the normal screening process of Film Censor Board for granting the no objection certificate to the film exhibition in  

One xenophobic column writer of a Urdu newspaper and playwright himself has raised three objections about the script 'Jinnah' which quite understandably, could not be taken seriously as to why Ex- Foreign Minister, Sahibzada Yaqub Khan or a senior journalist Qayyum Ehtisami, should be taken in place of Christopher Lee as Jinnah. So far as the last objection of Jinnah meeting with a few world leaders of today i.e. Yasar Arafat, Nelson Mandela and Saddam Hussain is concerned, it is, according to him, an extremely meaningless thing" and could, of course, be considered as a propaganda gimmick by the writer and director of the film, because, firstly, meeting of Quaid with these leaders in the script is controversial. So the film Jinnah makers should avoid to make this film controversial by overlooking its rather global appeal. So it should be considered, although out of xenophobia but a decent proposal, in the age of a general paranoia everywhere.

The controversy over the authorship of the script of Jinnah has come up with conflicting opinions: one section of the press questions the authorship to the extent that whether Farrukh Dhondi, a British citizen of Indian origin, or Salman Rushdi himself are behind the script. According to another section of press, the script is jointly written by Akbar S. Ahmad and Jamil Dehlvi-not by Farrukh Dhondy, commissioning editor of London's Channel Four who has requested amendments to the script, and certainly not by Salman Rushdi, who has absolutely no connection with the film---- plays a subtle game with the image notion without distorting the truth. Jinnah is presented, as a feeling, caring man, not as a 'sanctified fanatic'. But it has raised another controversy by labeling the film Jinnah as a feature film not a documentary. Akbar S. Ahmad, the executive producer of film has stated that the Jinnah film is a 'docu drama', a documentary film. Why everybody is saying contradictory things about the nature of the film Jinnah? Anyhow, a serious consideration should be given to the apprehensions expressed, sometimes back, by Suzanne Goldenberg of the Gaurdian, London, alleging that there is a sound possibility making "Jinnah" a propaganda film. 

Of course Akbar S. Ahmad or Jamil Dehlvi are no David Lean or Kalvin Costner etc who produce internationally famous biographical films. Out of more than six thousands biographical films ever made in English language, Jinnah is unique in the sense that it has faced a heated controversy over the selection of Christopher Lee playing the leading role of Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah. The objection of the Pakistani media against "Jinnah" is simply that some Pakistani or Muslim actors looking like Quaid-i-Azam should play the leading role, in the film rather than the Dracula- fame British actor Christopher Lee or Indian actor, Shashi Kapoor as narrator of Arch Angel Gabriel in the film. 

There is a long list of biographical, historical, religious and political film but no film saw protestation against the actors playing the leading role in these films. The Muslims merely objected the basic idea of making film on such historical stories. Interestingly enough, they never demanded the directors/producers for casting Muslim actors playing the role of religious heroes and historical leaders. 

The film's idea is triggered by the making of Gandhi film in which Ben Kingslay played the character of Ghandi successfully. It was in line with Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago.

But interesting enough in the late nineties films made on Nixon, JFK, Malcolm X etc., are more powerful than their predecessor Gandhi. The writers who praised the biographical stories of these political movies maintained that "the basic reason for success of all the biographical films have nothing to do with the historical record of the heroes but they tried to uncover the human potential, not discovered so far by any historical source. For example, Gandhi was not a historical record, but, a breathing living document; depicting the full and truly human aspect. One thing is certain that the character of Gandhi is not as some book of history tries to remind us. Celluloid Gandhi is, in no way, similar to the real. So far as the film Nixon is concerned, it is a film told in mosaic style, jumping back and forth in time, we get a vivid picture of a driven man beset by insecurities installed in him during his youth. There is another film JFK, the basic theme of the film does not unmask the secrets of the Kennedy assassination. The achievement of the film is not in that it answers the mystery of the Kennedy assassination. Its achievement is that it tries to marshal the anger that ever since 1963 been gnawing away on some dark shelf of the national psyche. So far as the historical drama of the film Doctor Zhivago is concerned, its director David Lean did nothing less than re-create Moscow and its countryside, at the time of the Russian revolution, using locations in Spain and Canada. So the unreal looks like the real one. Once a poet, then says, "history has no room for personal feelings". Doctor Zhivago believes that history should have a lot of room for personal feelings. Another example of Malcolm X is sufficient to make my point. According to a critic, Spike Lee doesn't use sentimentality or political clichés, but shows how his characters live, and why. He is not interested in congratulating the black people in his audience, or condemning the white ones. He puts human beings on the screen, and asks his audience to walk a little while in their shoes. There is another film named Lawrence of Arabia, which according to some of critics is not a simple biography or an adventure movie. Another controversial film, 'the Last Temptation of Christ' is worth reading here. Its director Scorsese and screen writer Schrader have not made a film that panders to the audience as almost all Hollywood religious epics traditionally have. They have paid Christ the compliment of taking him and his message seriously, and have made a film that does not turn him into a garish, emasculated image from a religious postcard. Here he is flesh and blood, struggling, questioning, asking himself and his father, which is the right way, and finally, after great suffering, earning the right to say, on the cross, " it is accomplished."

Now let us take the case study of film Jinnah to be made by Akbar S. Ahmad and Director Jamil Dehlvi. Quaid-I-Azam has of course no resemblance with above mentioned films but so far as the general technique of portraying the leading role or, for that matter depicting the main character is concerned, no body can deny a hero the basic right of being a man, firstly and foremostly, guiding the nation to deliverance. Here starts the real controversy about the film "Jinnah" as to how to create the character of Quaid-i-Azam on the celluloid? Should he be the political and historical character of Hector Bolitho & Stanley Wulpert or the Jinnah of Shariful Majahid and The Jinnah of Dr. Akbar S. Ahmad etc. Anyhow the screen play writer should be kept at liberty to conceive the hero creatively which may or may not be identical with the sketch of some renowned history writer. A Pakistani TV playwright Munnoo Bhai has rightly pointed out in his newspaper column that "like short story and poetry where the elements of fiction and poetry are considered the basic ingredients of poetics, so all the elements of film should be ingrained into the film on Jinnah. The main character of Jinnah should not be super natural or angelic but rather one needs to see him as a man with whom he should identify with love and affection." Here I remind you of a French author, Flaubert who once disliked 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' because the author of that book was constantly preaching against slavery. "Does he have to make observations about slavery?" he asked, "depicting it, that's enough" and then he added, in another book "must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere". Is this not a better way to act upon for escaping the blame of propaganda? This is not a pre-censorship on the screen, writer or the producer/director of film Jinnah. As selection of the cast etc is the exclusive prerogative of the producer and director, so is the freedom of the writer to conceive main character of any drama or film with his imagination and without considering the authority of an historian or scholar etc. It is ludicrous to cry "Oh Lord, what are we coming to? Using fantasy and creativity to project a real historic figure like Jinnah, to distort the real man to make him presentable to the young generation". Of course, a real great man like Jinnah, a man of flesh and blood, should be not supernatural, consequently, as being a struggling man, sometime suffering for the accomplishment. Does it not become a deserving case presentable to the new generation? How you can exclude the human dilemma from the political drama of real life heroes" No doubt the basic technique evolved for writing the film script should be imaginative and innovative but, with one condition that at least the Quaid should come out alive both as a 'human being' and a 'political giant' which is possible only if we do not relegate the authority of poetic justice to the political historian. The script may be poor politically but it should be powerful artistically for making it a successful debut on celluloid history. It may be kept in mind the film Jinnah under production in Pakistan should not have been "hidden away or destroyed" after once those were completed in 1976 & 1984. So the script and the main character of Jinnah, in addition to the basic technique with which the whole film making process is conceived and carried upon would be the decisive factor for success of this film in the international film market.

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