Portrayal of Women in Pakistani Cinema

PORTRAYAL OF WOMEN IN PAKISTANI CINEMA

Talk at Arts of the People IV “Lollywood- Pakistani film posters” Fukuoka Asian Art Museum 2006

By Durriya Kazi

Many of you will not have seen Pakistani films. So I will first explain the style. Like Indian Films, they are all musicals. The songs are very a important part of the film and sometimes the most memorable part. A very ordinary story can be a box office hit if it has good songs, while a good story without good songs may be a flop. The songs are not sung by the actors but by a playback singer who is sometimes more famous than the stars, such as Madame Noor Jehan, who has sung for films for 50 years, like India`s Lata Mageshkar. Along with songs dance is also an important ingredient, but maybe not as important as in Indian films which have really fantastic dances. In fact I know someone who fast forwards the dialogue and just watches the dances of Indian films. If you see them you will know why!

The films are very long about three hours yet watching films is an important part of everyone`s lives, at home if not at the cinema. This is especially true for women, who may watch even two films a day at home in the afternoon or late at night.

Pakistani film can be viewed as a public acknowledgement of private desires - desires for social justice, for the freedom to love, for the empowerment of the underdog, whether that is a poor farmer, factory worker or a wronged woman.

In this sense Pakistani film ha s an important role to play in diffusing some of the frustrations in a society with feudal, legal and religious restrictions. While Pakistani films do not have the sophistication and technical quality that the thriving Indian Cinema has, the stories are nevertheless bold and challenging.

In order to understand this statement, I will give a brief summary of Pakistani society. Pakistan was created in 1947 from the Western and Eastern borders of India for its disenfranchised Muslims, when the British colonizers finally left.

In 1971 East Pakistan seceded to become Bangladesh. So today Pakistan consists of four provinces: Sindh, Baluchistan Punjab and the North West Frontier Province. Each has its own distinct language, food, dress style, music and ceremonies. While in ancient history major civilizations existed here, in the current history, these were primarily rural areas. Lahore was the only major cultural city, and Karachi was a busy port city. The country was dominated by Feudal Landlords whose control was inadvertently affected by first the exodus of the Hindu population to India and the arrival of millions of Muslim migrants from India, who brought their own languages and cultures. They settled mostly in cities and a new urban culture developed so that today there is a fairly equal distribution between urban and rural populations.

The pull between urbanization and urban values and rural culture continues to be a source of tension in the country. There is a huge gulf between the status of women in urban and rural areas. Urban women are generally emancipated, socially and economically. Both in urban and rural settings, the rich and politically powerful, mostly feudals, control the economy, legal system and policy matters.

This was further compounded by the imposition of a rigid interpretation of Islamic values during the 11 year dictatorship of General Zia ul Haq. It was an Islam imported from the Middle East and post revolutionary Iran which attempted to replace the more porous South Asian style of Islam. More and more women started wearing the Irani/middleeastern style of hijab rather than the south Asian dupatta or head covering and burqa. More men have beards and kifafa or Arab head covering, creating a boring homogeneity in a richly diverse cultural context.

The most obvious resistance to this is seen in Pakistani films, popular art and rural life styles which somehow remain untouched. Maybe this is because they are considered politically irrelevant.

From the posters in the exhibition, you may think I am talking of another country!

The posters show women who are sexy, proud of their bodies, active, open with their emotions, physically expressive with men. The majority of women would never be so bold. Yet so many Pakistanis identify with the characters in the films. The stories, although presented in a heightened reality, are in fact reflective of real problems and desires. I believe that the stylistic device of lifting these stories to an above- reality level, allows the privacy to acknowledge they exist without feeling publicly challenged. Most people in Pakistan feel they are powerless to change their lives. If the settings were too real, it would cause greater distress. This is more true for women.

On screen women ride horses and motorbikes, dance in public, reveal themselves as lovers, prostitutes, seductresses, express their love, run off with lovers, drink, smoke, show a lot of their bodies, take bloody revenge on their rapists, know martial arts, how to use guns, and talk back!

In real life they lower their eyes, ride side saddle on motorbikes behind their men, cover their bodies in layers of clothing, never dance in public, never run around the hills, singing for all to hear, usually marry the man chosen by their parents, in other words make sure they are invisible.

Pakistani film makers have great compassion for problems faced by women, by the underdogs of society – the poor and powerless. They are not morally judged. The prostitute is seen as a misunderstood woman, the bad girl who smokes and dances in clubs is shown often as a woman driven by an unjust society. The oppressed villager who turns gun on gun to protect his own is a hero. Some part of this attitude may be because the people in the film industry identify with the characters. Being in the films is not considered a respectable choice. Even as far back as the 50s the government expressed reservations about a Pakistani film industry because it was not appropriate for Muslims to make films. Luckily it was ignored. Many of the female stars began as courtesans themselves; songwriters were poets whose could not otherwise live by their art. The musicians, dancers did not really have a place in mainstream society. One could say that those who turn to a career in film in Pakistan are not businessmen but idealistic romantics.

It is interesting to note that women have been producing and directing films even in the early 50s, and some cinema theatres are owned by women. Two of the most successful directors of the eighties were women who gave up their roles as heroines.

According to Rizwan Burney the editor of the well known film magazine, Nigar Weekly; there have been only 10 stories in Indian and Pakistani commercial cinema. To date the 11^th has not been written and there are only two roles for women, either they are good or they are bad! Films are box offices or flops because of the strength of the scriptwriter, the songs and of course the skills of the director.

The female stereotypes represented in Pakistani films are: the poor mother, the scheming mother or sister in law, the jealous woman in a love triangle, the village girl, the bad girl, the prostitute, the madam of the brothel, the wronged woman shunned by society and forced to take revenge, occasionally the confident modern woman who takes control of her life … until of course she falls in love..

Some well known characters are Choti Begum, symbol of the intelligent wife who uses good humour, unwavering devotion, and her wits to win the love of her husband; Umrao jan Ada, the famous 19^th C courtesan poetess of Lukhnow to whom the best families sent their sons to learn social graces, Madam Bovary ( nothing to do with the French novel… the name was selected because in Urdu bavari mean crazy) a woman who waits for adulthood when she uses her feminine appeal to lay a trap for the rapists of her mother, Zarqa, the heroic Palestinian liberation fighter who withstood torture but never betrayed her cause. An unusual film that has taken the place of a cult film is aurat raj or Women Rule! in which the women’s political party win, all the men are changed into powerless women with a new “weapon”, and all the women get the strength and voices of men!

Even those films that do not have primary roles for the female characters are really centered on women. The men are either falling in love with women, dancing with women, fighting over women, avenging the honour of women; they are protecting their defenseless mothers, or defending their wives from the injustices of a mother-in-law; they are falling in love with courtesans or insulting them, raping women or protecting them from being raped. Men are also shown to be weak where in public life they must appear strong – they cry if their mothers reject them, they weep with sorrow if their beloved dies, in love they show their softer side.

In fact these are common themes of the genre of melodrama in every cinema industry. In Pakistan it stands out because it is the only genre. There are no all male films, no real history films, and no films for child audiences, no purely comic films, hardly any horror or science fiction films. Again, it stands out because it is in such contrast to the social reality.

There is the less publicized genre of Pushto porn. The women in these films are extremely fat, perform provocative dances mostly in lycra suits, in defiance of all known images of sexually desirable females! Pushto is the language of the very manly men of Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province, where women rarely get out of the house, and home to our most conservative and religiously extreme citizens. So what is that all about? I really cannot tell you.

Many Pakistanis feel embarrassed by the open sexuality of Pakistani and Indian films, nevertheless they continue to be viewed - Indian films (which are officially banned from import) on Indian satellite channels, or pirated DVDs and VHS in the home, Pakistani films in the cinema. A new channel on cable called Filmazia shows only Pakistani films and allows viewers to revisit vintage films.

Pakistani society is conservative and male dominated. While the women have grown with the times, the men are mostly still restricted by their defined roles, and today feel even more responsible for preserving traditional ways as satellite television brings in influences from India and the west. In recent Pakistani films, unlike their Indian counterparts, the men rarely dance, but gaze at the females who dance around them, almost as if it would be unmanly. Dancing heroes were more common in earlier films when society was more relaxed and culturally diversified.

In terms of their influence on society, Pakistani television dramas, which are more realistic, probably have more influence on women than films. However, Indian films have considerable influence. This is mostly in terms of language, expression of love and other hidden dimensions. The clothes of women in contemporary film are a little too outrageous; however men certainly emulate the hairstyles and fashions as well as dialogues of film heroes, both Pakistani as well as Indian. As relations thaw between these two sister countries, many collaborative films are planned. We should see some changes in Pakistani films, but it is early to say what these might be.

A final word about the artists who are really responsible for transmitting the messages of Pakistani films even to those who do not go to the cinema. During my conversations with them, I found that they were more than simply artists working for a client. Each had a special understanding for the style of films, knew of the lives of actors, and immersed themselves completely in the story of the film whether it is Pakistani or from another country. They pick out images from stills given by the distributor of the film who commissions the poster. They decide which scene is the best “trailer” for the film, whether the hero and villain are equally pitted, in which case they are shown in the same size, who are the secondary characters, who are then shown in the background, or smaller in size, and of course, what parts of the anatomy to exaggerate! The men are made manlier or more romantic, women’s curves are more accentuated, and their clothes may even be made more revealing than they are in the film. In this exhibition only the work of poster artists is shown.

In addition, another group of artists design and paint the giant billboards, which are painted in the same style and may be as large as 300 ft by 100 ft. These are placed on the frontage of the cinema theatre which is usually in main city centers. These images are a part and parcel of daily life, and co-exist with the increasingly conservative dresses of women. While women in revealing clothes on advertising billboards are constantly targeted by religious groups, the cinema billboards and posters escape condemnation. Perhaps Pakistani cinema is ironically, the last bastion for the free woman.

Karachi February 2006