Outside the imagined community: Pashtun subjects in contemporary Pakistani cinema

ABSTRACT

In Pakistani cinema or Lollywood, the Pashtun subject is pejoratively represented as either the noble savage, the violent Islamist, the vengeful patriarch, the paedophile, or the simple-minded buffoon. Such representations are grounded in colonial discourse and in post-9/11 national and transnational political discourse, which is then inflected by historical legacies of Punjabi majoritarianism. Cinematic renditions play a critical role in depicting Pashtun subjectivities as excluded from the imagined community of the nation and the national body politic and re-affirm the hegemony of certain identities at the expense of other minoritarian identities. In this paper, I will focus on three popular contemporary Pakistani films – Khuda kay Liye (2007), Jawani Phir Nahi Aani (2015), and Karachi Se Lahore (2015) – in order to argue for the co-option of the national cinematic apparatus to construct a Pashtun/Punjabi binary where Punjabi identity functions as a placeholder for Pakistani national identity and the Pashtun is strategically expunged from the national imaginary as a balm to the nation’s extant anxieties relating to the presence of local and global terrorism in the region, the centre’s inability to consolidate a collective cultural and national identity and the persistence of ethnic inequality in Pakistan.

KEYWORDS:

• Imagined community
• Pashtuns
• rights
• Pakistani cinema
• Punjabi majoritarianism
• othering

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The Muslim call to prayer.

2. A traditional South Asian attire for women, typically worn at weddings.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rakhshan Rizwan

Rakhshan Rizwan is a postdoctoral researcher affiliated with the Research Institute of Cultural Inquiry at Utrecht University. She has a PhD in Comparative Literature from Utrecht University. Her research interests are centered around human rights and literature, decolonial legal fictions, and cultural memory. Her book Kashmiri Life Narratives: Human Rights, Pleasure, and the Local Cosmopolitan (Routledge 2020) looked at how Kashmiri authors used innovative languages of happiness to do human rights advocacy. Her poetry pamphlet, Paisley (The Emma Press 2017) was shortlisted for the Saboteur Award and the Michael Marks Poetry Prize. Her full collection, Europe, Love me Back (2022) was recently published with The Emma Press.