Copyright by Madiha Haque 2016
The Report Committee for Madiha Haque Certifies that this is the approved version of the following report:
Silence and Madness: Resistance in Pakistani Drama Serials
APPROVED BY SUPERVISING COMMITTEE:
Supervisor: Syed Akbar Hyder
Shanti Kumar
Silence and Madness: Resistance in Pakistani Drama Serials
by
Madiha Haque, BA
Report Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of
Master of Arts
The University of Texas at Austin May 2016
Acknowledgements
Thank you to both of the members on my committee –Drs. Syed Akbar Hyder and Shanti Kumar —for their immense patience and guidance both on this project and throughout my graduate school experience. Thank you to my friends and family. There's an old saying about how it takes a village to raise a child-- similarly, it took a village to support my graduate school endeavors. Their support and patience throughout my time in graduate school has been invaluable.
iv Abstract
Silence and Madness: Resistance in Pakistani Drama Serials
Madiha Haque, MA The University of Texas at Austin, 2016
Supervisor: Syed Akbar Hyder
This MA Report examines the drama serials Dastaan (2010) and Humsafar (2011-12). Although Humsafar is set within contemporary Pakistan, Dastaan is a period piece about the 1947 Partition. Audiences have drawn comparisons between both serials due to the actor Fawad Khan's involvement. However, my site of analysis will be the main female characters within these serials. As women primarily make up the audiences for serials, drama serials tend to be about their everyday lives in domestic spaces. Dastaan deviates from this, however, as it is more a serial about the main character Bano and her relationship with the nation-state of Pakistan. Dastaan subverts the colonial and Partition era notion that women's bodies are representations of the nations and communities they come from; instead, each of the main male figures in her life become representations of Pakistan's contradictory dimensions. This liminal space of conflict and contradictions within the newly independent Pakistan robs Bano of her "sanity." Alternatively, Humsafar is about the trials the main character Khirad faces when a misunderstanding disrupts her marriage. Khirad’s strategic utilization of silence drives the serial's plot forward. I argue that both serials demonstrate ways that women enact resistance against normative notions of nationalism by breaking away from the hegemonic languages of sanity, patriarchy, and nation.
v Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION...... 1
Chapter 1: Resistance in the Space of the Zenana ...... 20
Chapter 2: Bano's Madness ...... 26
Chapter 3: Khirad's Silence ...... 33
CONCLUSION ...... 38
Bibliography ...... 40
vi INTRODUCTION
Recently there have been many transnational movements organized by young
South Asian feminists that involve women in South Asia attempting to reclaim public, urban spaces such as by eating at dhabas, loitering, playing sports in public, napping in parks, etc (Chatterjee 2015). The aim of these projects is to highlight how there is a double-standard for women's presence in public in spaces that have been demarcated as male; these movements also seek to highlight the discomfort women feel when they do try to inhabit these public spaces because they are subjected to micoaggressions, harassment, etc. These debates about women's presence and subjectivities in the inner vs. public are certainly not new ones and have been present in varying degrees since colonial times, but they continue to spark incensed reactions (Tahir 2016).
While I consider the aims of these movements to reclaim and create safe public spaces for women as incredibly valid and important, the recent debates surrounding these issues piqued my interest to look at how women also enact particular modes of resistances within private, domestic spaces. The women who have been organizing these social media campaigns around public spaces have not been demonstrating or protesting with picket signs or speeches at a pulpit, but are seeking disrupt the status quo through their presence in certain spaces. On this vein, I began to wonder about how women in domestic spaces find ways through everyday inactions or actions to assert their autonomy and rights in a way that disrupts nationalism and patriarchy. 1 An appropriate way to begin an intervention like this is through examining popular drama serials; serials make up a huge part of women's lives, shape their most intimate domestic experiences, and contribute to the development of their public and private lives. Despite a recent growth in transnational viewership, women in Pakistan have long made up the traditional consumers of drama serials, and the content of drama serials still reflects this. Because of their dominant viewership, the plots of drama serials tend to be about the domestic lives of middle-class women. Most dramas are also adaptations of fictional Urdu texts by female writers. These writers wrote in a colloquial and accessible style, and most of them had no affiliation with the male dominated literary circles that Urdu literature is known for within traditional academic discourses. I do wish to stress that both the serials and the literature that they have been inspired from are accessible to a particular type of women, such as those who are literate and/or can access a television.
However, given the importance these serials have on many women's everyday lived experiences, examining serials has an important social and academic function; it helps give insight into the beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors of Pakistani women from this particular segment of society. To refute one scholar’s observation on how these serials do not advocate a particular solution or resistance against patriarchy within Pakistan, I will demonstrate that though the serials do not provide any solutions, they do show that resistance is present within the frames of patriarchy that their lives exist in.
To demonstrate this, this report will examine the drama serials Humsafar (2011-
12) and Dastaan (2010). Due to the actor Fawad Khan’s involvement with both, there 2 have been comparisons made about both serials despite their different storylines and subject matters (Anwer 2015). Rather than focusing on comparing the content of both dramas or discussing Fawad Khan's involvement with both projects, I will be examining the main female characters of both of these serials, Khirad and Bano. Much of the existing analyses on drama serials has focused on the representation of women through dichotomous categories and has also sought to explore whether or not these representations are problematic (Hussain 2016). Non-academic discourses surrounding serials tend to reflect this as well, especially in regards to Khirad because of Humsafar's massive popularity. One commentator's view of Humsafar is that: "Humsafar's popularity is sad evidence of the systemic erosion of Pakistan’s social consciousness since the enforced piety of Zia’s days." This same writer referred to Humsafar as "an indicator of our endemic regressiveness," (Zakariya 2012).
According to my oppositional decoding of Humsafar and Dastaan, the women within drama serials are not powerless nor are their lives solely about romantic relationships or marriage. The drama serials are more about the women, their lives, and the choices they make. A nuanced reading into the roles they play shows that these women are not simply passive or compliant with the situations that befall them. While
Humsafar is a story about the misunderstanding between Khirad and Ashar, Khirad drives the plot of the drama serial with the decisions she makes (or does not make) on how to deal with Ashar. Dastaan alternatively primarily focuses on Bano and her struggles with entire episodes going by without her romantic interest, Hassan, making any appearances. 3 Khirad from Humsafar and Bano from Dastaan demonstrate their resistances against normative notions of nationalism and the family; they enact these resistances by breaking away from the hegemonic languages of sanity, nation, and patriarchy. In addition to theorizing their modes of resistance, I am also opting to discuss Khirad and
Bano through the framework of space and spatial theories given the emphasis that has been placed on women and space in Pakistan.
By examining recently popular serials, I will demonstrate the ways that these serials depict women engaging in modes of resistance to patriarchy and nationalism. The lasting impact of this study will be that it will add on to existing work on media in South
Asia, but will extend the site of analysis towards Pakistani media which has thus far had limited scholarship done on it. Although due to Pakistani serials' increasing transnational popularity, drama serials are becoming the subject of intellectual discourses in a manner that other media industries in the subcontinent already have been. 1 This study will show how the popular, the everyday, and the mundane can help contextualize the space of
Pakistan and how women embody these spaces.
Discourses circulating about recent Pakistani serials tend to revolve around their liberatory potential for women. I hope that this report will address that concern, and demonstrate that the fictional women in these serials, much like the young women reclaiming public spaces, are engaging in modes of resistance within the framework of the patriarchal and nationalist spaces they occupy.
1 See Desai (2003), Ganti (2012), Kumar (2006), etc. for more information. 4 Dastaan: Dastaan predates Humsafar, and it is one of the only recent dramas that is a historical fiction. Dastaan is a heavily politicized account of the 1947 Partition, which is when the British decolonized India and the modern nation-states of India and Pakistan were created. The lead female character, Bano (Sanam Baloch), is a young Muslim girl who, prior to Partition, lives with her family in Ludhiana (present day, Punjab, India). At her brother's wedding, she meets a young man, Hassan (Fawad Khan), who is involved in
Muslim League politics and the two become engaged despite initial opposition from
Bano's brother. As the communal violence of Partition begins to break out, Bano's family must navigate their allegiances to Congress Party or Muslim League and their ties to Pakistan. When Partition becomes official and the violence intensifies, Hassan is caught on the other side of the border. One night, Sikh and Hindu rioters raid Bano’s family’s house, and the entire family is murdered except for a distraught Bano and her mother. They are taken to a refugee camp by a Hindu neighbor, but the camp is also raided, and Bano's mother is killed. In the midst of this violence, a Sikh man kidnaps Bano and forcefully "converts" and marries her. Throughout these ordeals, Bano maintains her allegiances to Pakistan and Islam, and resists being appropriated to her kidnapper's family, faith, and country.
While living as an abducted woman, she gives birth to her kidnapper's son. As the years go on, her mental health begins to deteriorate. She is eventually able to get away from the Sikh family when her kidnapper dies in an accident and she is finally able to make her way back to Pakistan. However, in Pakistan she is met with more trauma and tragedies. A conflict emerges since Hassan has become engaged to another girl named Rabia. While Rabia, Rabia's mother, and his own mother want him to maintain the engagement and marry Rabia, he is torn by his love and duty to Bano. 5 Hassan looks after Bano until she runs away after hearing a heated conversation between him and Rabia about their recent engagement. A random family takes in Bano where she insists on helping to look after their house despite their protests. She eventually begins to seek outside employment, and the patriarch of the family helps her find various places to work. However, more misfortunate befalls her when she kills an employer who is attempting to assault her, and she is sent to a psychiatric hospital. The show ends on her reflecting that the Pakistan that she had dedicated her life to did not turn out to be what she was hoping for.
Humsafar: Alternatively, I am examining Humsafar because of its widespread popularity that many felt revived the "drama genre" and Pakistani television. Humsafar is about the suddenly arranged marriage between Khirad (Mahira Khan) and Ashar (Fawad Khan), after Khirad's mother becomes fatally ill. Although they are first cousins, they had very minimal contact with one another and are essentially strangers. After marriage, they initially have trouble connecting with one another, but begin to fall in love after they get married. However, the women in Ashar’s life, who object to what they perceive to be
Khirad’s lower class standing and her old-seemingly fashioned ways, orchestrate a misunderstanding to drive them apart. Ashar and Khirad (who, unbeknownst to Ashar, is pregnant with their first child) are driven apart, because he mistakenly believes that Khirad is involved with another man.
Years after their separation, their daughter faces health issues which require a substantial amount of money to treat. Khirad, who has been the sole financial supporter of her daughter, is forced to reach out to Ashar for financial assistance. As Ashar wants to 6 be a part of his daughter’s life, the two remain in contact with one another. Eventually it is revealed that a misunderstanding has occurred between them because the women in Ashar’s life had engineered a situation to put Khirad in a compromising position and drive Ashar away. Ashar begs Khirad to forgive him and take him back, Khirad obliges, and they reconcile. While the drama contains issues of class and urban vs. rural lifestyles, there is never any mention of the contemporary sectarian conflicts and security issues that are present within modern Pakistan. Instead, the serial is completely about the domestic issues that result from a misunderstandings and the reconciliations that occur after a child becomes involved.
Historical Background and Literature Review:
Dastaan takes place during and after the 1947 Partition, so it is useful to think about partition related scholarship. Recent scholarship has begun to re-evaluate partition as a historical event and also the narratives around them by analyzing it from a feminist and subaltern historical perspective. To do this, scholars have revisited archives, eyewitness accounts, and other historical records, in addition to conducting oral history projects and ethnographies. While there is now a wide dearth of work on the Partition, two significant works that give a broad overview on Partition are Yasmin Khan's The
Great Partition and Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar's The Long Partition.
Bano's experiences as an abducted woman during Partition is significant part of the serial that frames and tests her experiences of a post-colonial Pakistan. Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin’s article, “Abducted Women, the State, and Questions of Honor,”
7 provides a useful overview of this aspect of partition. According to the article, women were at the intersection of partition’s violence (Menon and Bhasin 2011). Abducting women was seen as a “retaliatory measure” amongst rivaling communities and it was also
“simultaneously an assertion of identity and a humiliation of rival community through the appropriation of its women” (Menon and Bhasin 2011).
While immediately following partition, there were efforts from both the Indian and the Pakistani government to bring back the abducted women, the abducted women’s reactions were notable. According to Menon and Bhasin, many of the abducted women were strongly resistant to and sometimes refused “to conform to the demands of either their own families, or their governments, to fall in line with their notions of what was legitimate and what was acceptable” (Menon and Bhasin 2011). One young recovered girl’s reaction to the idea of being sent back home was: “One marries only once – willingly or by force. We are now married – what are you going to do with us? Ask us to get married again? Is that not immoral?” (Menon and Bhasin 2011).
Many of the women and girls that the state tried to return back to their homes reacted in this manner, partially because they had grown accustomed to their new situations and partially because there was probably a fear that they would no longer be accepted by their families since they had been married into new communities (Menon and Bhasin 2011). Another significance of this resistance of women to the state is that it signifies that in failing to protect these women, the state no longer had the authority and legitimacy to intervene in their lives (Menon and Bhasin 2011).
The reluctance of women and girls to return back to their homes is also significant 8 because it shows that women during partition were forced to adapt to situations that were different from anything they had ever faced before, but they were still pawns of the state when it came to ideas of honor and purity. The states' attempts to rescue the abducted women is significant because it shows how the “state, in its articulation of gender identity and public policy, underlined the primacy of community identity and implicitly and explicitly departed from its neutrality to in assigning values to the ‘legitimate’ family and community ‘honor,’ and that it did so through a regulation of women’s sexuality”
(Menon and Bhasin 2011).
Issues of citizenship in regards to abducted women are also significant. Politicians on both side of the border debated whether or not women would become citizens of the country that their own family were citizens of, or whether or not they could even return.
Citizenship laws for abducted women were representative of “gendered rules of belonging in the nation-state,” and “placed women’s identity within a patrilocal familial order and did not allow for exceptions otherwise accommodated within unofficial kinship practices,” (Zamindar 2007:210). In the instance of women in Pakistan, because many of the abducted women had been forced to convert to Islam and had children with Muslim fathers, it was difficult for abducted women to have concise national identities. A result of this is that abducted women’s “identities were in a continual state of construction and reconstruction, making them, as one women said to us, ‘permanent refugees,’” (Menon and Bhasin 2011).
An overview of the relationship between women and the Pakistani state is also 9 useful, because it contextualizes the role Muslim women have played in the construction of national identity and also outlines the history of women's movements in post-colonial
Pakistan. There has been a wide range of work published on women and Pakistan.
Ayesha Jalal's chapter, "The Convenience of Subservience: Women and the State of
Pakistan," provides an overview of Muslim women's "compelling and paradoxical" relationship with the modern Pakistani state. She prefaces her discussion of women in contemporary Pakistan with a historical overview of how Islamic reformers such as
Maulana Thanvi and Sir Syed regarded women's education. She also discusses how during the nationalist movement for independence, the Muslim League’s engagement with women was often limited to upper-class women who had male relatives that were also involved in the movement.
In her article, she shows that despite the apparent shift in psychological balance between the genders brought about by developments in the electoral arena within modern
Pakistan, the relationship between women and the state in the Islamic social setting in
Pakistan remains substantially unchanged. As in other parts of the world, rural-urban differences, not to mention social, economic and regional disparities, divide women to as great a degree as the weight of religious precepts and local customs separate them from men.
In Pakistan, the class origins of those who have formed the vanguard of the
"feminist" movement have been the decisive factor in the articulation of feminist issues.
According to Jalal, educated urban middle and upper class women have toyed with
10 notions of emancipation but carefully resisted challenging their prescribed roles in society.
“the class origins of those who have been involved in the ‘feminist’ movement have been the decisive factor in the articulation of women’s issues at the level of the state. Educated, urban, middle and upper class in the main, these women have toyed with notions of emancipation but carefully resisted challenging their prescribed roles in society. Such deference is merely the outward expression of a deeper and largely subjective consideration: the stability of the family unit and by implication of the social order itself.”88
In order to trace the evolution of insecurities in women s position, it is necessary to understand the significance of the legitimizing role of Islam in the society and the political uses it has been put to in order to effect changes in the position of women. Taken into account are the years preceding the creation of Pakistan in 1947, the period of nationalist ferment, and the turbulent four decades after independence.
Afshan Jafar's article Women, Islam, and the State in Pakistan, seeks to show how the position of women within Pakistan is the result of a particular historical, political, and cultural trajectory and she seeks to analyze it as such. She does this by outlining the history of women's mobilization in response to different leaders' policies. She begins with women in the pre-independence movement to expel the British from the subcontinent, to post-independence Pakistan with particular emphasis on: Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, General
Zia ul-Haq, and Pakistani leaders after Zia’s regime (with leaders like Benazir Bhutto and
Nawaz Sharif). A landmark for women's rights after independence was when the
Government passed the Family Law Ordinance in 1961, which stated that a man could not divorce his wife through an oral proclamation as is Islamically ordained. Instead, he 11 would have to register the divorce within the courts. It also regulated polygamous marriages by stating that any man who wants multiple wives can only do so with the permission of his current wife/wives. However, only small group of professional, middle and upper-middle class women felt the impact of the new policies such as the Family
Law Ordinance (Jafar 2005).
During the period following independence, women began to enter the public sphere in larger numbers. However, their visibility and roles within the public sphere were still being shaped by already established social norms and attitudes for women, such as segregated environments. In 1977, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto was overthrown by General Zia ul-Haq in a military coup. Jafar argues that he sought to legitimize his military rule by using Islam as a “tool,” which needed to be drastic and visible. His most visible efforts to introduce Islamization was towards women in Pakistan who by that time had begun to be increasingly visible within public spaces. Zia introduced a series of legal changes that disproportionately impacted women, such as the Hudood ordinances, which made it impossible for female victims to prove that crimes had committed against them; this ordinance's most notable result was that impacted women who had been raped. In addition to these legal changes, Zia also enacted changes that limited professional women. For example, women’s employment began to be limited because he enacted a ban on women entering the foreign service and working at banks.
He also targeted women’s dress by mandating that all women who work for government offices must wear the “national dress” and wear chadars to cover their head.
This state mandated dress code was also extended to women on television, and whereas 12 women were concerned, the content of television was inadvertently altered. While before this, television had largely dealt with mainstream social problems or were adaptations of popular Urdu novels, after Zia, the representation of professional women shifted and they began to be depicted negatively. Furthermore, themes of marriage, family, and religion began to dominate (Jafar 2005).
Although Jafar contends that these policies in regards to women have shifted, that the ideas and views circulated by Zia’s regime has become entrenched into Pakistani society. Post-Zia, the two most prominent politicians in Pakistan were Zulfiqar Ali
Bhutto’s daughter, Benazir Bhutto, and Nawaz Sharif. Jafar appropriately refers to the period between 1988-1994 as a “Bhutto-Sharif-Bhutto-Sharif” merry-go-round. Although she contends that Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto was an outspoken defender of women’s rights, she faced a lot of obstacles in overturning the laws introduced by Zia. However, she was able to make symbolic steps towards women’s rights, such as by establishing a
Women's ministry and initiating a Social Action Programme (SAP). According to Jafar, however, Nawaz Sharif, was a protégé of Zia, and thus sought to enact policies that were introduced under Zia. For example, Nawaz Sharif introduced another series of Islamic laws, as a means of detracting from the serious economic and infrastructural issues that were plaguing Pakistan. Like Zia’s laws, these laws disproportionately impacted women’s ability to achieve legal justice for crimes enacted against them.
At the end of the paper Jafar contends that feminists in Pakistan are in a
“predicament,” because they must negotiate between tradition, culture, and feminist goals. Throughout her paper, however, she notes the important ways that women and 13 civil rights organizations responded to women’s marginalization, and contends that movements organized by women played a “critical role in the emergence of a strong civil society in Pakistan,” (Jafar 2005).
Amina Jamal's article Gender, Citizenship, and the Nation-State in Pakistan:
Willful Daughters or Free Citizens?, Jamal seeks to examine a court case referred to as the "Saima Case," where a young girl in Lahore Islamically married someone who her parents and family did not approve of. According to Jamal, this case is a "peculiar collaboration between the imperatives of nation-state formation and the cultural-political project of Islamization in which the courtroom became the site of construction and contestation of ideas about 'the nation,' 'Muslim woman,' and 'citizen,'" (Jamal 2006). An important part of her paper is that she seeks to explicate the challenges posed by "the assertion of women’s sexual agency to the ideology of the heterosexual middle-class nuclear family and thus to the nation-state, even as the demand for autonomy is couched within the language of citizenship." (Jamal 2006). According to Jamal, this complicated legal positioning of women within family, community, nation, and state has shaped the feminist discourse in Pakistan.
Work on media in Pakistan has been limited although there has been a recent interest in it. Kamran Ali's article Courtesans in the Living Room discusses the 2003 TV adaptation of the classic Urdu novel, Umrao Jaan Adaa, for the Pakistani television channel GEO TV. Ali interprets the modern depiction of this historical work about North
Indian courtesans as a statement about women's emancipation and a response to the
"homogenizing elements of Islamic politics," in contemporary Pakistan. 14 Another key article that discusses drama serials is From Genre to Zenana: Urdu television drama serials and women's culture in Pakistan by Shuchi Kothari looks at the way women's domestic spheres get portrayed and negotiated within Pakistani drama serials aired during the years of General Zia ul-Haq's regime, and the aftermath of his regime in the 1980s and 1990s. This essay explores the ways in which the zenana, or women’s sphere, was negotiated by these serials, particularly during the years of General
Zia ul-Haq’s regime and its immediate aftermath in the 1980s and 1990s. As mentioned in Jafar and Jalal's articles, legislative aimed at policing women’s visibility and participation in the public sphere was one of the key elements of his regime’s
‘Islamization’ project that continues to exert widespread political, social and cultural influence. However, according to Kothari, television’s domestic address and viewing context intensifies and complicates the relationship between the private and public; the very fault-line that causes patriarchal Islamism so much anxiety in relation to women.
Her essay focuses on the production, consumption, and textuality of Urdu drama serials in the 1980s and 1990s. The essay develops the concept of zenana to examine how these serials open up discursive sites where women resist, transgress and negotiate their prescribed limits in an Islamist patriarchal society.
Theoretical Framework:
The first framework I will be utilizing is from Stuart Hall’s work on encoding/decoding. Hall argues that within televisual discourses, “decoding” does not
15 necessarily follow from “encoding” and that there are three hypothetical positions from which the decodings of televisual discourses can be constructed. The first is the dominant-hegemonic position, in which a viewer’s interpretation of a text is consistent with the reference code that it has been encoded with. The second is the negotiated position, which is when the majority of audiences can understand what has been defined and signified, but the dominant definitions are hegemonic because they present views and definitions of situations that are “in dominance.” The third of these positions is oppositional decoding is when the viewer decodes the message within the text in a
“globally contrary,” way in which events that are “normally signified and decoded in a negotiated way begin to be given an oppositional reading,” (Hall 2005). I am interested in doing an oppositional decoding of these drama serials. Kothari's ethnographic work explores the potential for viewers to read these serials in oppositional ways to understand their own everyday lives, and doing an oppositional decoding of these serials in lieu of a proper reception analysis will give insight into the ways these serials can be read.
I am using the concept of space to frame my analysis of Khirad and Bano to examine the spaces they utilize to enact resistance. Within social and cultural theory, there has recently been a "spatial turn" in which prominent theorists have been reconfigured using geographical descriptions and metaphors. Space has traditionally been regarded in Euclidean/Cartesian terms (i.e. a space that is visible, traceable, mappable); this has enforced binary ways of thinking about space (inner/outer, for example).
However, re-thinking spatiality and broadening the discourse of space allows us to
16 consider how spaces are flexible, culturally relative, and imagined. According to Gwin
(8):
"Much recent thinking about space emphasizes that space is not an empty container that holds human activity but rather multiple fields of interaction created by social arrangements among individuals, groups, and nations -- arrangements that are always shifting and have everything to do with power relations, geographical locations, access to mobility, and a countless host of other factors. Considered this way, space, like the woman in the red dress, is always unstable and problematic; it is itself a configuration of fluctuating social relations that are constantly being unraveled and rewoven," (Gwin 8).
The space that Khirad from Humsafar occupies is one of silence as resistance. I draw from Gayatri Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak?" in which Spivak utilizes subaltern to refer to a disenfranchised and marginalized subjects who reside out of power.
According to her, western academic thinking is produced in order to support western economical interests. She holds that knowledge is never innocent and that it expresses the interests of its producers. For Spivak knowledge is like any other commodity that is exported from the west to the third world for financial and other types of gain. For
Spivak, leftist intellectuals romanticize the oppressed, and by this essentializing replicate the very colonialist discourses that they are trying to critique. To address this, she wants to explore how the third world subject be studied without cooperation with the colonial project since this subaltern subject does not speak in a vocabulary that will be heard in institutional locations of power. To demonstrate this, she uses the example of sati. She tells the story of Bhubaneswari Bhaduri's suicide, which to her indicates how Indian discourses offers no resources for successful communication from Indian woman. This
17 "speaking" occurs within the nexus of actions that include listening, responding, interpreting, and qualifying. She contends that the subaltern cannot speak when the West can not listen to anyone who does not speak a language consist with their own paradigm.
The space Bano occupies is one of madness. While Foucault's Madness and
Civilization can give insight into this madness, I am also opting to use the Sufi/Urdu literature trope of madness, where the one who is most enlightened is perceived as mad
(Haule 1990).
The theoretical frameworks I will be using to examine the broader space and place of Pakistan are phantasms and imaginative geographies. I am using “phantasm” similarly to the way Purnima Mankekar uses phantasm within her book Unsettling India.
In Unsettling India she states that she is pulling her usage of phantasm from multiple theories:
"Phantasms refer to the shifting meanings of the uncanny that irrupt into our conscious ways of thinking about the world. Agamben (1993) argues that the phantasm mediates between the imaginary and the real; phantasms render experientially accessible and bring into the realm of the everyday such abstractions as desire, absence, or loss. The genealogy of the concept of the phantasm as an analytic goes far back in Western social theory. In the work of Plato, for instance, the phantasm is opposed to the icon. As Favero points out, 'While an icon expresses a sense of likeness to reality, the phantasm is a simulacrum deprived of any ground in it," in contrast to the work of Aristotle who 'sees the phantasm as the sensorial instrument used by human beings to grasp abstract concepts.' Favero adds that for Lacan, 'the phantasm domesticates or perception. It helps us to make sense of and understand and accept the world that surrounds us.'"
Mankekar's own definition of the phantasm is that she "conceives of phantasms as
18 epistemological objects whose presence or absence cannot be definitively located but which nevertheless have material and tangible implications for lives and subjectivities," (Mankekar 2015).
19 CHAPTER ONE: RESISTANCE IN THE SPACE OF THE ZENANA
The first time the audience is introduced to the character, Bano, she is living in a joint-Muslim family in pre-partition Punjab. In these early scenes of Bano's life, the audience is given insight into the inner workings of a colonial era Muslim household that adhered to conservative ideas on women's decorum, purity, and presence in public spaces. (As demonstrated in scenes when Bano’s love interest, Hassan, is trying to romance her.) A central part of Kothari (2005)’s analysis of drama serials in the decades following Zia's rule is framed within an understanding of the zenana. The zenana was the demarcated physical space in a joint-family household for women who observed purdah.
Recent scholarship has revisited this zenana and has examined the ways that this space allowed women to form their own community that was "sociable" and "bustling with activity." According to Kothari,
the concept of zanaana embraces both production and reception of these stories. Therefore, Urdu drama serials negotiate the position of women from within an Islamic framework. Depending upon the writer, one finds different degrees of subservience and subversion of Islamic interpretations of women’s roles.
Given their class standing, these women within the zenana were likely to have been instructed on what their Islamic roles and duties were. The evidence for this stems from the widespread prevalence of the reformist text the Behisti Zevar by Maulana
Ashraf 'Ali Thanawi. Thanawi wrote the Behishti Zevar in the early 1900's as an instructional guide for girls and women on religious teachings, proper Islamic behavior, 20 and appropriate conduct of their everyday lives. The guide gained widespread popularity and was given to brides as a guide for their married life, and the text is still commonly found within Muslim households.
While Thanawi encouraged women to be subordinate and obedient to the men in their lives, he believed that education was a central part of women being good and proper
Muslims. According to historian Barbara Metcalf, his tenets for education were the same as they were for men; when asked if he will write an instructional guide for boys and men also, he responded that the contents of the Behisti Zevar would be sufficient (Metcalf
1990: 25). This was contrary to many opinions of the time, according to Metcalf:
The reformists' insistence that women should receive religious education, justified by the teachings of pristine revelation, went against conservative opinion of the time, however. Maulana Thanawi at one point in his text answers an imaginary critic, an older woman who, in her disapproval of religious education for girls, asks, 'Do you want to teach them to read and write to turn them into maulawis, like men?' Maulana Thanawi answers that this is indeed his goal but insists that education can at the same time enhance a girl's domestic role. Central to that role is knowledge of her place in relation to other human beings and to God.
Another significant work that sheds light into women’s role within the household and society is Partha Chatterjee’s inner and outer domains as discussed in his book The
Nation and Its Fragments. According to Chatterjee, the colonial world of nationalist elites became divided into two separate domains. One of these domains, the outer world, constituted the material domain, which involved statecraft and civic life and was governed and controlled by the colonizers. The inner world, or the spiritual domain, consisted of: religion, caste, women and the family, and peasants. According to
21 Chatterjee, the nationalist elites staked a claim to the inner domain to keep it pure and traditional, while the outer domain sought to imitate the West.
While the inner domain of the colonial times for Muslim women was still dictated by patriarchal constraints, texts like the Behisti Zevar indicate that women were not completely powerless in this inner realm, as they played important roles in managing the household's finances and maintaining social relations. Furthermore, by being educated in the same way as men, Muslim women could yield some degree of power through Islam.
(This is a phenomenon that Ayesha Jalal also describes in her article on contemporary women in Pakistan.)
Within the pre-partition scenes in Dastaan, the characters’ conversations about
Pakistan were framed as a necessary Muslim duty. In the beginning of the serial, scenes of women's domestic lives are often juxtaposed to scenes of men engaging in public debates about politics. The focal points of the early public discussions amongst the men was that they sought to negotiate their ties to the Muslim League Party, which advocated for a separate Muslim state, and the Congress Party.
However, as the violence of partition became more widespread, the idea of a separate state for Muslims seems inevitable. The community discussions began to include women, and the men who support the Muslim League actively try to mobilize women to join the struggle for Pakistan. These earlier scenes of domesticity in the inner realm and political activism in the public sphere are eroded, and it becomes women’s “Muslim duty” to also support the struggle for Pakistan. As reformist texts such as Maulana
Thanavi's Behishti Zevar had the same religious expectations between men and women, 22 being involved with anything in conjunction to the conception of Pakistan is something men and women would have been equally expected to do.
Even in these activities revolving around Pakistan, women in Dastaan do this while still maintaining honorable notions of Muslim womanhood, such as by listening, to an extent, to the men around them. For example, conflict emerges when Bano's brother,
Saleem, and Hassan disagree with the politics occurring amongst Muslims prior to
Partition. Hassan is a strong supporter of the Muslim League and the idea of a separate country for Muslims, while Saleem supports the Congress Party and is opposed to the division of India. Due to their differing views, Saleem forbids the women in his family
(including his wife who is Hassan's maternal aunt) from meeting with Hassan or anyone in his family. He also wants to prevent the women in his family from getting involved with the politics in support of the Muslim League.
The women's reactions towards this policing by Saleem is poignant. At one point,
Saleem overhears the women in the family discussing the possibility of going to a
Muslim League political rally which would have separate, concealed space for women.
Saleem angrily forbids them from going, and says that the family used to have women who behaved in acceptable manners. In regards to going to this rally, Saleem angrily says: "Whatever women did, they did with permission, and I do not give my women permission!” before storming off. Although the women do not question that Saleem has forbidden them from going to the rally, Saleem's mother who is the matriarch of the family angrily exclaims: "He doesn’t give permission?! First, listen to your father, then your brother, then your husband; and now your son comes before you and says that he 23 does not give his permission! This has been the limit!” She then tells the women that they will all go visit Hassan's household instead. Although this was another one of Saleem's restrictions, maintaining ties to Hassan was another way of supporting Muslim League’s
“Muslim Duty.” This scene is also important because it shows that even though women remained subordinate to men's jurisdictions, that they still found ways to resist them by engaging in other behavior that these men may disapprove of.
Another scene where the women in the family resist the policing of men involves
Saleem's wife, Surraiya. In this scene, Surraiya is in the middle of giving Bano her jewelry to donate to the Muslim League, when Saleem catches them and angrily confronts Surraiya. He angrily asks her what she is doing with this jewelry and demands to know who told her she could do anything with it. Surraiya responds that she is giving this jewelry to the Muslim League for the Muslims who have lost their homes due to violence. When Saleem almost strikes her in a fit of rage, Surraiya becomes indignant and tells him that she does not know or care if this money goes to Muslim League or
Congress, but that it is enough for her that the jewelry will go to help Muslims who are in need. In regards to this jewelry, she tells him that: “This is my jewelry, and giving it as charity is my duty and using it is my right. This a right Allah has given me. You can stop me from meeting my family, but you cannot take this right away from me.” She then angrily walks away, leaving a distressed Bano and still infuriated Saleem.
The importance of this particular line is in her evocation of zakat when discussing her right to give charity. Amongst practicing Muslims, there are five tenets obligations mandated by Allah; Muslims refer to these tenets as the “Five Pillars of Islam,” and one 24 of these is zakat, which is a form of charity. While Saleem can restrict his wife’s physical movements, there are certain things that Allah mandates from Muslim devotees that take precedence over a husband's will. It is also significant that she emphasizes that the jewelry is hers. It is possible that she received it from her own family before her wedding, in which case she is simply emphasizing that certain material possessions are hers rather than her husband’s. It is also possible that this jewelry is her mahr, which in Islam is a mandatory form of payment the groom's side gives to the bride. In theory, mahr supposed to be solely the bride's property and is supposed to serve as a form of savings in case something happens to her husband.
This insight into Bano’s pre-Partition life and the discussion of duty and rights within an Islamic framework is not meant to suggest that that Islam gives women more rights. Instead, I wish to use this framework of Islam to explain how women’s subjectivities within Dastaan are framed around their religious duties and rights before they are around the men in their family. I wanted to frame Bano around this discussion of
Islamic rights and duties because it demonstrates that Bano's attachments to Pakistan are not the result of the men around her. Instead, it is the result of a spiritually mandated tenet. While Jalal demonstrates that women's involvement with the League was contingent upon the men in their family, in this fictional representation of Partition, Bano and the women in her family work against the men in their family to support an independent Pakistan.
25 CHAPTER TWO: BANO'S MADNESS
While the dominant reading of plot of drama serials is that they revolve around the romantic relationship between a man and woman, my oppositional decoding of Dastaan is that it is a drama serial about the relationship between a woman and the nation-state. The idea of Pakistan and Bano’s attachments to it are the most central part of this drama serial, but this Pakistan becomes a space of conflict and contradictions for her.
Dastaan is not a neat, nationalist narrative of a pre-independence struggle and an azaad
Pakistan in which Muslims live together in peace and harmony.
The significance of Dastaan’s representation of post-colonial Pakistan is the absence of any sort of reference to a government in Pakistan. This government is absent both in "rescuing" Bano from her kidnappers in India, and in providing her with any sort of assistance or rehabilitation once she is able to reach Pakistan. Its absence within this fictional representation of postcolonial Pakistan is particularly ironic given that, in the real nonfiction world of Pakistan, the state has actively sought to regulate and police women within a framework of nationalism and Islam; the state did this when attempting to bring back abducted women and throughout the various historical regimes that have taken place in post-partition Pakistan.
Dastaan subverts the symbolic notion espoused by nationalist ideaologies that women's bodies are representations of the nations and communities that they belong to.
Instead, each of the main male figures in Bano’s life comes to represent a different dimension of Pakistan. This subversion of men's bodies as representations of nations and 26 communities is significant given that Bano's own experiences during Partition as an abducted woman was a result of the ideology that women are repositories for their community. It is this because Pakistan turns out to be a liminal space of conflict and contradictions that Pakistan loses her "sanity."
The idea of what Bano thinks Pakistan should be is a phantasm. She uses this phantasmic Pakistan as a way of comforting herself after she has been kidnapped by constantly reminding herself that she will someday reach Pakistan. She also uses it to resist her kidnapper, Basanta’s, attempts to take advantage of her. At one point, she angrily tells Basanta that she would have already gouged her eyes out if she did not still harbor dreams to see Pakistan. Basanta is a manifestation of what she perceives to be the nation-state of India, which is cruel, deceitful, and manipulative. To her, he represents the non-Muslim zulm that would have surely befallen Muslims had Pakistan not been made.
As previously mentioned, Bano’s introduction to the idea of Pakistan comes through Hassan and the other men in her family, but this movement for a separate and independent Pakistan became framed as a Muslim duty. At this point in the serial,
Pakistan is not a physical place Bano has ever been to, but instead a space that she has constructed and idealized as a way of resisting and protesting against her kidnapper.
While Bano's relationship with Hassan is a part of the serial, he becomes a manifestation of a particular facet of Pakistan. Hassan represents the initial Muslim League idealism that brought about the nation. Hassan’s (and by extension, the Muslim League’s) arguments for the state of Pakistan centered around the idea that a separate homeland for
Muslims was necessary because non-Muslims could not be trusted to have Muslim 27 interests at heart. However, this Muslim League's Pakistan does nothing to intervene when she has been abducted by a Sikh man in the midst of Partition’s carnage and chaos.
Her descent into madness begins when she is forced and coerced into marry her
Sikh kidnapper, Basanta. On her way to the marriage ceremony, Bano imagines that
Hassan is looking at her. This illusion of Hassan’s presence is significant; it is as with this glance she understands that this Muslim League Pakistan cannot protect her and this realization is distressing enough to start her descent into madness. The madness that starts when she is forced to marry Basanta, intensifies when she is impregnated with Basanta's child. Although she considers killing herself, she does go through with giving birth to him. However, she refuses to acknowledge the existence of her son. In one scene,
Basanta's mother angrily remarks: "What kind of mother is she, she won’t even take care of her own child?" As the years go by under her kidnapper's tyranny, she continues to not acknowledge her son except to occasionally tell him that she does not consider him her own son. At one point she tells him "You know what you are for me, right? You are a curse for me, and my people will take revenge on your father." When Basanta dies in an accident, she finally escapes for Pakistan with her young son in tow.
Upon her arrival in Pakistan, the reception she receives is mixed. While Hassan immediately wants to marry her, others feel alienated by her vocal displeasure with
Pakistan. Her first disappointment with Pakistan emerges when she realizes that there has not been any radical changes in people’s morality or in the way women are treated. In one scene she goes with a woman of the family that she is staying with to a birthday celebration. When she sees that this celebration involves entertainment provided by a 28 dancing girl, she becomes hysterical and asks, "These things happen here, too?"
Another example of her disappointment with Pakistan is when she is employed as an ayah for a rich family that encourages their children to be Westernized. This scene is a window into how the domestic space of the elite within post-colonial Pakistan has just become a continuation of colonial elite spaces in which elites performed being
Anglicized. The Pakistani elite’s continuation of Western practices is indexed by their encouragement that their children learn to sing western songs and speak English rather than learning, what Bano considers to be ideal things for Muslim children to learn, such as Urdu poet Muhammad Iqbal’s poetry or surah's from the Quran.
Another day, she runs out on the family that she is staying with, and comes upon a school that disadvantaged children attend. She notices how disarrayed and dirty they seem, and is disappointed that there are not more opportunities for them. Between seeing the presence of the dancing girl and the poor children, she becomes increasingly more hysterical and wants to confront Hassan, who with his Muslim League politics, had shown her this "dream" that Pakistan will be safe for Muslims and free of the corruption of from colonial India.
When she reaches Pakistan, her hostility towards the child heightens as she frequently becomes enraged because she believes that he is laughing at her and mocking her. For example, whenever people in Pakistan try to give her son a Muslim name, she becomes indignant, and tells them that he is not a Muslim and that he is actually
Basanta's son. This objection to calling this son a Muslim name, who represents an amalgamation of non-Muslim origins and the trauma of physical and sexual violence that 29 she had experienced, represents her anger at what the reality of a Pakistan is.
If Basanta was Bano's stand-in for India, then his child who has been conceived through the violation of rape is the bitter reality of Pakistan. In Bano’s eyes, this is an impure Pakistan that has been muddied with the non-Muslim and archaic elements from a pre-independence society. The presence of non-Muslim elements are corrupting her
Pakistan, and the visible signs of these corruptions are evident as soon as she arrives in
Pakistan.
While she wishes that she can forget her son's existence (and by extension, the reality of Pakistan), she does not abandon him and takes him with her wherever she goes.
And despite subjecting him extreme verbal and psychological abuse, sometimes to the disturbing point of asking others if she should kill him, she never acts on these inclinations. The linking of her son and the reality of Pakistan also sends a powerful anti- nationalist message; what duty does Bano have towards this Pakistan that she was forced to nourish and make sacrifices for, but one that ultimately turned out to be disappointing and tainted?
Different lens' can be utilized to read Bano’s madness. One way that madness has been read in the traditional Western academy is through the framework of Foucault’s theory of madness in Madness and Civilization, which details the history of madness throughout Western civilization. However, western theories of madness do not fully capture Bano's situation. Another reading of madness is that Sufi notion of madness that is prevalent within the Persio-Urdu literary tradition that is heavily influenced by Sufi theology. Within this tradition, there is the trope of a Lover and Beloved, with the 30 Beloved being some sort of unattainable ideal for the Lover (Haule 1990). In pursuit of this Beloved, the Lover faces unhappiness, depression, and madness. If we situate Bano's relationship with Pakistan in this Lover-Beloved framework of Persio-Urdu traditions, then Bano's madness is not truly madness but an understanding and perspective on reality that everyone else around her cannot comprehend (Haule 1990).
The people around her read Bano’s erratic behavior as madness; but like the figure Majnun, the crazed lover from the Islamic tragedy of Layla and Majnun, she is the only enlightened one who truly understands the world of Love and the Beloved-- which in this case is the idealized space of Pakistan that she had imagined.
Even the title of the serial indirectly supports this reading of her madness with a
Sufi/Urdu framework. The original title of the novel that Dastaan is adapted from is called Bano. A dastaan is a genre of Urdu storytelling that Francis Pritchett notes "had no official religious or social purpose within their culture," (Pritchett). Instead, their original subject matters were always razm o bazm (war and love) (Pritchett). The serial
Dastaan is a tragedy both in the Perso-Urdu sense and within the Western notion of one.
For the Western tradition, there are varying tenets of a tragedy that differ based on the thinker who is framing it; however, most definitions of tragedy involve a tragic hero who has a fatal flaw. Bano's fatal flaw is her duty and love for Pakistan.
The Urdu poet, Faiz Ahmed Faiz's poetry perfectly captures the possibilities of an ambiguous Beloved as the nation-state. Due to Faiz's involvement with leftist politics and political organizations, people interpret his poetry as a commentary on the political events happening around him. These couplets from two his nazms capture Bano's own 31 conflicted relationship with the state of Pakistan:
Ye daagh daagh ujaalaa ye shab-gaziida sahar
Vo intizaar thaa jis-kaa ye vo sahar to nahiiN
This scarred light, this dawn injured by night
That which we were waiting for, this is not that dawn
Mujh se pehli si mohabbat meri mahboob na mang,
Main ne samjha tha ke tu hai to darakhshaan hai hayyaat
Tera gham hai to sham-e-dahar ka jhagra kya hai
My Beloved, do not ask me for that love from before,
I had understood that if you are here then life would be shining
If I have the sorrow of you, what care would I have for the sorrows of the world?
32 CHAPTER THREE: KHIRAD'S SILENCE
Within Humsafar, the main conflict of the drama serial emerges when Ashar's mother and best friend both want to drive Khirad and Ashar apart. Their main objection is that they feel that Khirad is unworthy of Ashar because she comes from a different social background. While Farida, his mother, and Sarah, his best friend, are both working women, Khirad's life is largely confined in the domestic realm upon getting married.
After marriage, she busies herself with taking care of things around the house and spending time with her father-in-law. She also wears trendy, but traditional Pakistani clothes, covers her hair in public, works only when she must (such as when providing for her daughter as a single mother), and only seeks to further her education to please Ashar rather than out of any personal ambition.
The dominant decoding of Khirad's character would thus situate her as the serial's ideal woman; Sarah and Farida, on the other hand can be read as women who have become too Westernized and corrupted. A reductive way to read Khirad's character would be to regard her as passive and complacement, which is certainly how some viewers have regarded her (Asfaq 2012). This is certainly also how Ashar regards her at first. However, Khirad is neither of these things in whichever space she occupies. Rather than utilizing these dichotomous categories to pit Khirad against Farida/Sarah, as many have done, I want to do an oppositional decoding of her character. In the early months of their marriage, both Ashar and Khirad are unhappy about being arranged to one another.
However, while Ashar becomes angry over Khirad’s rejection of his attempts to being 33 friendly towards her, Khirad remains largely silent and dismissive towards him.
I read this silence as resistance, with Khirad as the subaltern subject whose words could not be heard by Ashar should she even utter them. In the beginning parts of the series, Khirad is lonely, mourning the death of her mother, and is unhappy about being arranged to Ashar. While she does not openly convey any of this to Ashar, she is open about it with her uncle/father-in-law, who is the only person the household that she has a connection with.
In one scene, Ashar overhears a conversation between Khirad and her father-in- law where she is telling him that he and her mother had done their children an injustice by hastily arranging their marriage to each other. By hastily arranging them, they did not take into account that Ashar and Khirad are two incredibly different and incompatible people, and that there could have been other ways to assure Khirad's well-being after her mother's death. When Ashar overhears this conversation, he is taken aback that the woman he had been regarding as small-minded and simplistic is capable of speaking for herself and is also equally unhappy about the marriage. It is because he does not speak her language that he is unable to understand the significance her silence and reverence towards him as her way of protesting against their marriage.
Similar to the women in Dastaan's zenana, Khirad's silence is operating within the framework of patriarchy. Her enactment of silence is her way of disrupting the marriage, and protesting against the patriarchal constraints that brought it about. As Jamal notes in her paper, "the heterosexual middle-class nuclear family" has come to represent the nation-state in post-colonial Pakistan. Since Khirad's strategic usage of silence is her way 34 of disrupting and resisting the "the heterosexual middle-class nuclear family" it can therefore be read as a disruption of the nation-state.
Khirad, as the foil to both Farida and Sarah, occupies a drastically different space than them. In scenes where these spaces intersect, Khirad is largely out of place. For example, when Ashar takes her to Sarah's birthday party, she dresses in traditional
Pakistani clothes, while all of the other women (including Sarah) are wearing Western clothes. One of the women, to detract from Sarah's veiled condescension towards Khirad, tells her, "Don't mind Sarah. Anyway, you look great. Are you going to some wedding?"
While Khirad becomes immediately embarrassed, Sarah is gleeful over this social blunder by Khirad. This exchange indicates a particular social code in which women from this social class dress different ways in different spaces. Khirad’s outfit, although a plain white Anarkali style shalwar kameez, is still out place in this sea of professional working who are dressed in cocktail dresses.
There is a difference between Khirad's language towards Ashar and Farida/Sarah, though. When Farida orchestrates a misunderstanding between them, Khirad does confront Farida about her false accusations and lies. However, when Ashar comes to believe that she is involved with another man, he refuses to listen to Khirad's attempts to defend herself.
Khirad uses her silence again when they are forced to reunite many years later due to their daughter's health problems. Although, Khirad and Ashar are both hostile and bitter towards one another, Khirad does not attempt to explain what had really transpired a few years ago. Nor does she offer an explanation for Ashar's ignorance about their 35 daughter's existence, and about how she had tried telling him about her pregnancy.
However, Khirad does use this knowledge about what really happened when she was accused of adultery as leverage against Farida who is angered that Khirad has returned. The insinuation of this is that even though both occupy vastly different spaces,
Khirad can speak a language of resistance that Farida understands, even when Ashar reverts back to not understanding (or even caring to understand) her silence.
To both Farida and Ashar, however, Khirad frequently makes it clear after priorities after returning back into their lives is her daughter and her daughter’s health.
Furthermore, she emphasizes that she is not interested in maintaining any sort of relationship with her estranged husband. This emphasis on her daughter rather than attempting to re-piece the "the heterosexual middle-class nuclear family" is, again, another way that Khirad is disrupting the nation-state's idea of what a family should be.
Any sort of media analysis of Khirad has either referred to her as submissive or as strong-willed/independent. My oppositional decoding of her character is that she is strategic, both in when she uses her silence and when she uses her speech. Khirad's silence is demonstrated by these two Urdu couplets:
Faiz Ahmed Faiz:
iss tarah apni khamoshi guunjii, goyaa har simt se jawaab aaye
36 Like this my own silence echoed,
As if/so to speak, from every direction came a response
Mirza Ghalib:
rahi na taaqaat-e-guftaar, aur agar ho bhi toh kiss umeed se kehiye, ke aarzu kya hai
The strength to speak did not remain, and even if it did, with what hope could I say what my desires are?
37 CONCLUSION
While there is a long history of the transnational consumption of Pakistani drama serials, they have become more accessible in the past decade with the introduction of a legal satellite channel in India that focuses only on Pakistani serials, as well as through satellite programming for Pakistani television channels that has become more available in the U.S. Additionally, many of these serials are directly available on YouTube, which bypasses any piracy related restrictions. Since YouTube was banned in Pakistan from on and off from 2008 to 2016 (Perry 2016), this maneuver was likely an attempt to promote and support international viewership. Perhaps due to this transnational popularity, serials have begun to receive more attention in more traditional academic discourses. Within my own project, there were many issues that I did not go into further detail about. The historical nation-building project of Pakistan has focused on the regulation of women (in regards to dress, work, body, and familial roles). Thus, a range of political factors have influenced the trajectory of drama production and content within Pakistan, such as General Zia ul-Haq’s Islamization project, economic liberalization under Pervez Musharraf, U.S.’s involvement in Pakistan after 9/11, etc. It would thus also be worthwhile to look at the production of these drama serials vis-à-vis the political climate, but this is not something I felt I could take on without diverting too much from this specific project. I wanted to frame my textual analysis around this potential of understanding the domestic lives of Pakistani women, because the next step I wish to take in this project is extending it to reception analyses by exploring the multi-generation reception of these serials both amongst women in Pakistan as in the Pakistani diaspora. I do foresee potential limitations of this based on my own positionality as someone who is, although
38 of half-Indian and half-Pakistani origins, American born and raised. This positionality will be especially relevant in framing the conversations I wish to have about them. A potential methodological limitation of reception studies can occur when the researcher and the audience overlook that gender is not a category that independently exists and is instead a category that articulates with class, religion, and language. While feminism is not mutually exclusive or contingent upon a male-centric viewpoint of women's submission of men, in doing reception studies, it is important to understand how the audience understands feminism, resistance, etc.
The complicated ways that different labels for identity and how these are culturally articulated is demonstrated within an interview given by Momina Duraid, the CEO of the production company that produced Humsafar and Dastaan. Duraid comments that she has been branded a feminist due to the sort of television serials that she is involved with. She says she chooses to approach this label, she says: “I believe that behind every successful woman there is a man. In our dramas we show both kinds of men, who are supportive as well as malicious. I won’t say that women should rebel because God has made them this way—compromising. But at the same time they mustn’t be completely submissive,” (Anwer 2015). This quote complicates my analysis of the drama serials, and this is something I wish to further address in future projects.
However, for now, I maintain that like the young women engaging in movements to occupy public spaces, the fictional women in drama serials discursively challenge normative notions of patriarchy. While the women in the online movements disrupt public spaces by engaging in something as seemingly ordinary and mundane as taking a nap or eating a meal, Khirad and Bano do so by breaking away from the hegemonic languages of sanity, patriarchy, and nation, through their respective silence and madness.
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