Several thousand Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs from India and Pakistan call Thompson, Manitoba home, with hundreds more arriving each year, yet the scale of their collective and growing presence is perhaps best appreciated through the lens of their religious and festive holidays, such as Eid al-Fitr, which began for the world’s almost 1.57 billion Muslims July 17, with the arrival of the astronomical new moon on the Islamic Hijri lunar calendar, with the crescent first visible over Chile July 16.
The Eid al-Fitr holiday that marks the end of the holy fasting month of Ramadan for Muslims is also traditionally celebrated by Hindi Bollywood cinema from Salman Khan and Thompson loves Bollywood and Salman Khan. Surprised? Well, mull on this for a minute. Statistics Canada’s voluntary National Household Survey (NHS) from the May 2011 census, the first results from which were released May 8, 2013, enumerated by way of example, that adherents of Hinduism outnumbered Pentecostals by 300 to 290 in Thompson, but they also outnumbered many other Christian denominations as well. Their growth in numbers has been and continues to be explosive.
There were 50 self-identified Hindus here as recently as 12 years ago. There were also more Hindus in Thompson in 2011 than there were self-identified Lutherans, Baptists, Presbyterians and Christian Orthodox. That, of course, may not be so much of a surprise to anyone who has been to Hindu Prathna Samaj of Thompson’s Navratri festivities in the fall.
There were also 130 Muslims and 80 Sikhs in Thompson enumerated, during that last voluntary Statistics Canada National Household Survey (NHS) four years ago, and their numbers, too, have surely increased since the 2011 census.
So, yes, Bollywood, a word used since the early 1970s to describe the Hindi-language film industry, based in Mumbai, formerly known as Bombay, in India, is a big deal in Thompson. The Strand Theatre, they city’s only movie theatre, and one of Thompson’s oldest entertainment spots, having opened at 111 Churchill Dr. in 1960, was packed Saturday night for the highly-emotive Bajrangi Bhaijaan, released worldwide only a day earlier for Eid al-Fitr, and starring Salman Khan, one of Bollywood’s biggest stars.
The narrative has the Indian character Pawan, played by 49-year-old Khan, portraying a devotee of the monkey deity Bajrang Bali, guiding home to her Himalayan village in Pakistan, Shahida, a lost and mute six-year-old Kashmiri girl, played by Harshaali Malhotra, who in real life just turned seven last month, and who becomes separated in the movie near the border frontier in India from her mother during a Lahore-Delhi train crossing from Pakistan to India. Given that Shahida doesn’t speak, Pawan must interpret the clues she inadvertently provides, such as feeling more comfortable around mosques than temples, and her elation when she sees Pakistan defeat its arch-rival India (both republics joined the Commonwealth in 1947) in cricket on television, to discover where exactly he is supposed to be returning her. The North American analogy would be looking for a needle in a haystack. And the perilous journey, of course, also plays out in an area fraught with international geo-political tensions and potential worldwide nuclear ramifications in any dispute on the sub-continent between India and Pakistan should it involve the Kashmir Valley, under Indian control behind the Line of Control, the de facto border established as the military control line between India and Pakistan in 1971.
While some of Bajrangi Bhaijaan was shot in New Delhi, Mandawa in the Jhunjhunu district and Shekhawati region of Rajasthan State in northern India, with its grand havelis, or private mansions, and maze-like bylanes, stood in for Pakistan, and much of the movie was shot in the Kashmir Valley, which has no cinemas of its own, in places like Pahalgam and nearby Aru, noted for its scenic meadows and located in the Anantnag district of Jammu and Kashmir State; atop the 11,700-foot Zoji La mountain pass at Srinagar, where it was a below freezing -2°C in mid-May during near final shooting; and the climax shot at the 10,000-foot level at the base of the Thajiwas glacier outside Sonamarg.
You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22
soundingsjohnbarker 