हीर राँझा के गीत — लाहौर की पहली टॉकी

Collective entry for the songs of Heer Ranjha (1932), commonly cited as the first talkie made in Lahore — directed by A.R. Kardar with Rafiq Ghaznavi composing and playing Ranjha. Punjab's qissa repertoire reached film microphones for the first time. Production thinly documented; no audio survives; 1932 recordings are public domain.

Rafiq Ghaznavi was the complete early-talkie package: a trained, fashionable singer-composer handsome enough to play Ranjha and able to score the picture himself. His material was the richest seam in northern folk music — the Heer melodies that every Punjabi villager could raise from memory — now passed for the first time through film microphones in Lahore.

Heer-Ranjha is to Punjab what Laila-Majnu is to the ghazal world: the love that indicts society. Waris Shah's eighteenth-century qissa gave the legend its canonical verse — Heer's defiance of clan and clergy, Ranjha's flute, the poisoned wedding sweet. A talkie of the tale needed no lyricist so much as an editor: the songs were already in the air of every fair and harvest in the province.

Abdur Rashid Kardar had spent years trying to will a film industry into existence in Lahore — silent productions on borrowed money, premieres in rented halls. With sound, he mounted Heer Ranjha (1932), commonly counted Lahore's first talkie. The industry it seeded grew slowly through the thirties, but the line runs straight from this film to the Lahore school of the forties — and to Kardar's own later Bombay empire at Kardar Studios.

Hindi-Urdu cinema would film Heer-Ranjha again and again, and Punjab's musical idiom — from Ghulam Haider's rhythms to the bhangra-inflected present — became one of film music's main bloodstreams. The 1932 film stands at the head of that stream: lost, barely documented, indispensable.