With women writers riding the crest of recent successes on Pakistan’s TV shows, there is reason to celebrate the visibility of women in the world of popular Urdu script writing. This, however, does not necessarily mean any diminution of patriarchy in the dramas, writes Amina Yaqin. Edited excerpt:
Over time, TV viewership in Pakistan has grown, and since 2000 with the liberalisation of the media, private television networks have taken a firm grip over the burgeoning market of the Urdu drama. Networks like ARY, Hum TV and Geo TV now dominate the primetime. Pakistani Urdu dramas which have been long admired across the border have since 2014 been aired on Zee Zindagi TV in India promoting a crossborder cultural conversation. This people-to-people dialogue often leads to new breakthroughs the political leaderships fail to achieve.
Most noticeably, the girls from the lower middle-class homes, the heroines of these shows, are groomed by their mothers whose husbands have either passed away or entered into a second marriage. There is a strong focus on cousin marriages in some dramas highlighting the challenges of modernity and the rising urbanisation of Pakistani society.
Actors like Mahira Khan, Sanam Saeed, Ainy Jaffri and others have played the role of the woman-in-dilemma with perfect elan. The successful scripts have come from talented new writers like Umera Ahmed and Farhat Ishtiaq.
Evil mothers-in-law and villainous femme fatales who torment a good wife, a well-meaning sister and mother, are an extension of patriarchy in a different context. If a woman is party to the harassment of a young bride, she ceases to be gender sensitive and unwittingly endorses the patriarchal forces. In his seminal work, Kamran Asdar Ali, a left-leaning academic, interrogated the shifting values of family, sexuality and the individual in popular women’s magazines such as Pakeeza to highlight the complex issue of domesticity in popular Urdu fiction. His emphasis is on reading these texts as authentic examples of women’s lived experiences.
In Pakistan, the family has been a prominent feature of the state’s political discourse from the period of Field Marshal Ayub Khan’s martial law in the 1960s, during which he introduced the liberalisation of family laws, to the military regime of General Zia-ul Haq in the 1980s which implemented the Shariah laws. During the democratically elected Pakistan Peoples Party Government in 2011 the Prevention of Anti-Women Practices Act was passed; and another landmark step was this year’s Women Protection law which criminalises violence against women.
The melodramas Maat (2011) and Humsafar (2011), written by Umera Ahmed and Farhat Ishtiaq, are impressive with their wailing, silent, endlessly suffering, enterprising and utterly incorrigible women. The men come across as immature boys who are attached to their mothers’ apron strings, and though they may be entrepreneurial they are never quite a match for the enduring spirit of the women. The women seem to be ruthless in their pursuit of the perfect man who has shades of Mr Darcy with his wealth, dark good looks and an enigmatic charm. This is particularly apparent in Zindagi Gulzar Hai in which the heroine is repeatedly presented as a plain Jane.
The romance of Humsafar takes us into the lives of Khirad, Ashar and their daughter Hareem as they come to terms with their marriage and intra-family affairs. Maat is a classic story of sibling rivalry between two sisters, Aiman and Saman, as they fight over the same man. What is quite remarkable about Maat is the heritage of the gendered roles for women that were prescribed in the reformist period. The story nods in the direction of Maulana Nazir Ahmad’s Mirat-ul Arus (The Bride’s Mirror) as we see the plot line of the good sister versus the bad sister recycled in a modern version. Writer Umera Ahmed is a graduate of English literature from Murray College, Sialkot who has written over a dozen Urdu novels.
Zindagi Gulzar Hai is Ahmed’s best-known drama. In the adaptation, Kashaf’s simple inexpensive journal in which she writes with a fountain pen is contrasted with Zaroon’s conspicuous laptop driving home the economic divide between classes. Zaroon is depicted as a stereotypically aggressive male character and in contrast Kashaf’s anger is passively aggressive. In a heated exchange, Kashaf accuses Zaroon’s elite class of being pro-American, corrupt and unrepresentative of the 98 per cent of Pakistani population. This two per cent, she says, are the ones who benefit from Pakistan’s foreign aid and include the country’s top bureaucrats, industrialists and politicians.
Kashaf through her higher education sees the college degrees as something that will transform her life for the better materially; she is determined that she will not suffer like her mother at the hands of a man who took a second wife and abandon his daughters.
Westernisation is depicted through liberal attitudes to dress, most significantly an absence of the dupatta or veil. Zaroon’s sister Sara represents this binary attitude to dress as she shifts from wearing figure hugging T-shirts and jeans to shapeless salwar kameez. This change is emphasised after her break-up with her husband when she realises that it was her tarbiat that let her down. She blames her mother for having failed her by choosing to prioritise her career and push the children towards liberal modern values instead of a traditional moral upbringing.
These serials signify a changing cultural modernity from the 1980s dramas. Hasina Moin wrote in the era of General Zia deploying comedy to deliver light-hearted stories with strong female leads. Celebrating orphaned children in Tanhaiyan, Moin gave the nation the story of a family shattered by tragedy and the women who survived the trauma by building successful careers and falling in love again. Almost two decades later Ahmad has rejuvenated the screen romance with a critique of the liberal modernism that characterised Moin’ss heroines. These stories are necessary to the decentering of normative patriarchies that may come to define national culture as a singular category.
The writer is a Senior lecturer in Urdu and Postcolonial Studies, and Chair, Centre for the Study of Pakistan at SOAS, University of london