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

Introduction

Pashtuns are a Pashto-speaking ethnic minority who reside in ‘the region that lies between the Hindu Kush in northeastern Afghanistan and the northern stretch of the Indus River in Pakistan’ (‘Pashtun’). Pashtuns occupy what is dubbed to be ‘one of the most inhospitable terrains in the world – a forbidding landscape of towering mountains, narrow valleys and rocky barren wasteland’ (Benson and Siddiqui 109). The construction of a Pashtun/Punjabi binary, albeit with varying degrees of emphasis emerges as a collective trend in these three films, and I will analyse this trend by examining the narrative, formal and visual characteristics of the cinematic works in my chosen corpus. ‘Full incorporation [into a society]’, according to Chavez, ‘depends … on the larger society’s willingness to “imagine” them as members of the community’ (259). I contend that in Lollywood films, Pashtun minorities have been imagined as members who operate outside or, in certain cases, at the margins of the national community. I will be discussing the films Khuda kay Liye (2007), Jawani Phir Nahi Aani (2015), and Karachi Se Lahore (2015) in this article. The three films I have chosen for my analysis have been heralded as the creative work of ‘a new generation of moviemakers … in Pakistan’ and, as such, are credited with reviving Pakistani national cinema, which had been facing a steady decline in the last three decades (Bilal 22). Contemporary works of Pakistani cinema or Lollywood remain a neglected site of inquiry that deserve scholarly attention and I intend to unpack how three popular and commercially successful contemporary films articulate Pashtun identity within the state of Pakistan. I have chosen these specific films because they prominently feature Pashtun characters in supporting roles and devote considerable screen time to their depiction. Moreover, the chosen corpus of movies was especially commercially viable both among local Pakistani movie-goers and also with diasporic Pakistani audiences abroad, and as such is worth dissecting based on their widespread appeal and influence in constructing new, cinematic publics.

Despite being Pakistani nationals, Pashtuns share long-standing and deeply entrenched cultural, linguistic, and historical ties with Afghan Pashtuns. The Durand line, an arbitrarily drawn and hotly-contested colonial border, was instituted by the British in 1893 to enforce a division between Pashtuns residing in Afghanistan and modern-day Pakistan (Yousaf 180). It runs ‘from the Persian frontier to the Wakhan, the little area on which the British insisted to keep a distance between the British and Russian Empires’ and functions as the de facto international border between the two countries, although it has never been formally accepted by the government of Afghanistan (Omrani 178, 185; Rahi). The Durand line split a dozen villages and divided tribals in half, especially the Mohmand tribal regions, and as such remains the source of sustained bilateral tension between the two countries (Omrani 186). By its very nature, the line divides families and villages, is extremely porous and not demarcated by natural topographical formations, and for these reasons, is extremely difficult to surveil and enforce and leads to skirmishes and border violations on an ongoing basis (186).

Colonial cartographic formations aside, Pashtuns residing in the ‘mountainous region between Afghanistan and Pakistan’ continue to closely identify with one another and follow tribal customary law or Pashtunwali. Pashtunwali has been typified as ‘an unwritten code of social values, norms, and behaviours’ which include speaking the Pashtu language, ‘having and doing Nang (loosely translated as principled …), Milmastya (generosity), Ghairat (courage), Zhjaba (keeping true to one’s word), Ezaat (respect), [and] Singeeni (modesty)’ (78). The term Nangialay is used for a person ‘who had nang and safeguards [the] honor of his family’, with predictably adverse consequences for those accused of having lost their nang (Khan and Afsar 420). Instead of being viewed as a regressive tribal code, Pashtunwali has also been theorized as ‘a decentralized system of maintaining order within and in between the tribes … without the authority of a coercive state’ (Benson and Siddiqui 108). Pashtunwali emerges as an alternative system of law that is generated bottom-up instead of being enforced top-down by the discursive authority and instrumental decree of the modern nation-state (108).

The Pashtun suspicion of centralizing and occasionally repressive sources of authority is rooted in a long-standing history of resisting encroaching empires; the tribal belt or the Afghan North-West Frontier Areas have been invaded more than any other region of South Asia (110). Pashtuns repulsed attempts to be fully brought under the bureaucratic and legislative ambit of the British colonial state or the postcolonial Pakistani nation-state, foiling efforts to establish centralized authority and governmental control over the region (110).

Pashtun subjects residing in FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Areas) have a tenuous connection with the Pakistani state insofar as they have ‘never been effectively governed … by any Pakistani regime’ (110). The precariousness and complexity of this relationship was enshrined in the law of the land: FATA, for instance, was ‘excluded from the constitution of Pakistan and governed under the colonial-era Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR) – a legal framework enacted during the British Raj to control Pashtun tribes’, which was only recently repealed by the Pakistani government in 2018 (Yousaf 173, Tanoli). The extraordinariness of the region’s former legal status was further coupled by the extraordinary levels of political volatility and violence that FATA and other Pashtun-majority regions experienced within postcolonial Pakistan. For example, during Zia’s military dictatorship between 1979 and 1989, Pashtuns in the tribal areas and FATA were used for the launching of the Afghan jihad against Soviet forces, and this period of instability was followed by a new wave of guerrilla militancy in the aftermath of the US-American invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 (Yousaf 170, 173).

It is worth emphasizing that FATA’s loose existence within Pakistan’s national polity and the legacies of resistance and armed violence that define the region also impact Pashtuns, who live outside of the tribal belt. Recent estimates indicate that there are currently 30 million Pashtuns living in Pakistan, most of whom are concentrated in Karachi, the provincial capital of Sindh, and collectively constitute 15% of Pakistan’s cumulative population of 212 million people (Dhume). Despite being Pakistani nationals, Pathan subjects do not always have access to the range of civil and human rights, which are their due as full citizens of the country (Alimia). Since the 73 years that have elapsed following Partition, the Pakistani state has ‘stressed upon a singular identity, revolving around Islam and Urdu’ which functions as ‘ready-made glues in the face of ethnic diversity’ instead of trying to craft an inclusive national identity, which would be reflective of a multi-ethnic and multi-religious society (Khan 64). The main ethnic communities living in present-day Pakistan include Punjabis, Sindhis, Sindhis, and the Baloch, among others (61). Provinces – which are named after these ethnic enclaves – Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Balochistan, and Sindh – often level charges at the largest and most populous province, Punjab, and the Pakistani government, for not allowing them to adequately participate in the economy and denying them equal rights guaranteed by the country’s constitution (62). Throughout the history of the country since the decolonial moment, different ethnic groups, including Pashtuns, Urdu-speaking Mohajirs, Baloch, and Sindhis, many of whom were at the helm of the Pakistan movement, have been accused of being disloyal subjects and double agents for the perennial enemy across the border – India (63).

I have chosen to focus on the representation of Pathans/Pashtuns in this article, because much of contemporary cinema in Pakistan focuses on Pathan subjects, choosing to either vilify or infantilize them, and I hypothesize that the reason for this focalization on Pashtun bodies is connected to the global War on Terror, and the performative violence meted on Pathan bodies, which became a permanent fixture of life in post 9/11 Pakistan. In addition to this, since 2017, the question of Pashtun marginalization and collective identity in Pakistan has been brought to the fore by human rights movements such as the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement (PTM). The PTM is a non-violent movement, which demands the rights of Pashtuns primarily in FATA but also outside of the tribal lands, in the urban centers. The movement was sparked by the extrajudicial killing of an aspiring Pathan model, Naqeebullah Mehsud, in Karachi, at the hands of a rogue police officer, Rao Anwar, and eventually spread throughout the country, mobilizing both Pathans and non-Pathans on the streets. Over time, the movement has become a ‘focal point for the accumulated grievances of Pakistani Pashtuns’ against imperial and colonial forms of governance and warfare which are administered in Pathan-majority regions (Jiwani and Mallick). As the call for Pashtun rights intensifies in the country, it is equally exigent to examine the entangled issue of Pashtun representation and to uncover the role played by aesthetic works in articulating, imagining and usurping Pashtun civil and human rights in a diachronic perspective. I demonstrate how it is important to dissect the role of cinematic imaginings of Pashtuns as operating outside the imagined community because these play a significant and unacknowledged role in reinforcing, reifying and distributing hegemonic colonial and postcolonial stereotypes of Pashtuns in the local public sphere and through this, discursively enable the removal of Pashtun bodies from regimes of rights and citizenship. I argue that such depictions serve as an imagined (in the sense of a visualizable but also fictitious) justification for depriving rural and urban Pashtuns of full enfranchisement as rights-bearing citizens within the Pakistani nation-state. As an Urdu-speaking, second-generation Punjabi-Pathan, I consider the limitations of my own subject position, and do not claim to be free of anti-Pathan bias, but instead attempt to critically engage with my own perceptions of the films that are discussed and to foreground the voice (or voicelessness) and representation of the Pashtun subject in the subject matter I consider, wherever possible. In line with this, the reader is expected to focalize on the subject position of the Pashtun/Pathan character in the films that are discussed herewith, as opposed to adopting dominant and hegemonic ethnic perspectives, which are privileged by the films. Lastly, I retain the terms ‘Pathan’ and ‘Pashtun’ when mentioning this specific ethnic minority and use them interchangeably. The term ‘Pathan’ is usually specific to Pashtuns in South Asia, whereas ‘Pashtun’ is used as a transnational marker of Pashtun identity, across national borders, in Afghanistan, India and Pakistan. Pashtuns are a transnational ‘ethnic group based in both Afghanistan and Pakistan’ (Yousaf 1). In switching between terms, I wish to emphasize the specific issues that are faced by Pathans in the Pakistani nation-space while also drawing attention to their broader cultural, social, political, linguistic and historical ties with Pashtuns in Afghanistan and in the diaspora.

Khuda kay Liye: The Pashtun/Punjabi binary

Khuda kay Liye (2007) is a Lollywood film directed and produced by Shoaib Mansoor and successfully released both in Pakistan and abroad. It was the first Lollywood film to be released in India in the last four decades (Waila). Lollywood is the unofficial name of the Pakistani film industry which is largely based in Lahore and produces films in Urdu or Punjabi (Waila). Khuda Kay Liye was critically acclaimed and won numerous international awards including the Award for Best Picture at the 31st Cairo International Film Festival, the Best Foreign Film award at the Muscat Film Festival and the Roberto Rossellini Award in Rome. Netflix which has been making inroads in South Asia and began its operations in Pakistan in 2016 (‘7 Pakistani’). Since then the three films discussed in this article as well as other Lollywood films have been periodically available to a local as well as international viewership via this streaming service and as such, the audience of these movies has expanded.

The film Khuda kay Liye is centred around the life of a Sunni, middle-class, sophisticated and urbane, Punjabi family who lives in Lahore. The film, a quasi-biblical saga, follows the conflicted and divergent coming of age of two brothers, Sarmad and Mansoor, both of whom are depicted as popular and well-established Pakistani musicians, performing concerts across the country and making appearances on daytime television. While Mansoor eventually moves to the United States to pursue an education in music, Sarmad abandons his musical predilections, becomes radicalized by a Pashtun imam, re-locates to FATA, forcefully marries his English cousin Mary against her will and subjects her to sexual violence which eventually leads to the birth of a child. Mary, Sarmad’s paternal cousin, is lured by her father to travel to Pakistan on the pretext of a familial visit. His actual reasons involve convincing his brother to arrange a marriage between Mary and one of his sons to prevent her from marrying her non-Muslim, English boyfriend, Dave.

Sarmad is introduced to Maulana Tahiri, the cleric responsible for his fundamentalist transformation, by his Pathan friend Shershah, who has been similarly persuaded by the cleric to abandon his musical talents for the sake of achieving religious and moral piety. The film privileges the male heterosexual Punjabi subject as the focus of the narrative and their perspective as the dominant point of view, whereas Pashtun subjects are constituted as the object of their gaze. Shershah lives and works in Lahore but despite this, is visually othered in the film, only appearing in a Peshawari turban and camouflage vests which cover his baggy, white salwar kurtas. This othering is compounded by Sarmad’s starkly different appearance including his casual black T-shirt and jeans and fashionably coiffed hair. For reasons that are never explained, Shershah’s permanent place of residence is in a part of Afghanistan that borders on FATA, and his wife and extended family also live there. Such imaginings further the stereotype that even urban Pashtuns, who have strong cultural, economic and social ties to major Pakistani metropolitan cities are not properly integrated into these cartographies, because for them ‘home’ and belongingness is synonymous with Afghanistan, FATA and/or the Pashtun tribal regions. Khuda Kay Liye presents Pakistani viewers with problematic tropes of metropolitan Pashtuns as pre-modern Islamists and closet renegades, who despite being connected to urban geographies and living and working alongside their Punjabi counterparts in the city, continue to have exceptionally close ties to Afghanistan and the Pashtun borderlands and a latent desire to engage in holy war. Maulana Tahiri is also another example of an unintegrated Islamist mullah. Spending half of every month in the Punjab, he claims to be religiously and spiritually associated with Masjid Wazir Khan, a historical seventeenth-century mosque in the heart of andaroon – or old Lahore – and delivers Friday khutbas or sermons at Badshahi mosque, another iconic masjid and an enduring symbol of the city of Lahore. Despite being deeply entrenched within the transnational sacred and architectural topographies that define Lahore, as the former seat of the Mughal Empire, he obliquely and mysteriously continues to operate in the tribal regions where he is actively involved in the induction and religious training of future jihadists.

The opening scene of the film features Sarmad and Mansoor in the living room of their farmhouse in Raiwind, a town on the outskirts of Lahore, strumming a Punjabi tune on their guitars, while their parents hum alongside, swaying with the beat and snapping their fingers. The song is a Punjabi version of Pakistan’s former pop idol, Junaid Jamshed’s hit single from the 90s, Sanwali Saloni, which contemplates the tawny brown allure of an attractive dark-skinned girl. In the Punjabi version of the song, the colourism which the original song set out to invert is restored to its rightful place: ‘chitti wari nee nee tay kalian wangaan/aina wangaan sharang keeta (white shinned girl with dark bangles/your bangles clink)’. The familial unit, constituted by a moderately Muslim, cosmopolitan, musically-inclined Punjabi family which includes a heterosexual couple and their handsome, able-bodied sons, functions as a stand-in for the Pakistani nation. Here, the biological Punjabi family functions as ‘an ideological construction and as a fundamental principle of social organization’ (Collins 63). Families, according to Collins, can be viewed as ‘primary sites of belonging to various groups … to geographically identified racially segregated neighbourhoods conceptualized as imagined families … [and] to the … nation-state conceptualized as a national family’ (63). The depiction of the family-as-national-community is ‘frequently figured through the iconography of familial and domestic space’ (McClintock 63). Rather than conceiving of the nation as an ‘imagined political community’ in which ‘members will never know their fellow members … yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion’, this film represents the national community as an affluent Punjabi family performing national identity through the enactment of popular songs in Urdu and Punjabi within the private sphere of their home (Anderson 49).

The Punjabi familial unit in Khuda Kay Liye is irreparably fractured by Maulana Tahiri’s proselytization. Following a session of brainwashing at the Wazir Khan mosque, Sarmad refuses to perform at a concert with Mansoor and the family experience their first of a successive series of unpleasant, ideological disagreements, which ultimately fragment this formerly idealized locus of the national community. Lailooma Wardak argues that, ‘present-day western preoccupations with the Pashtun ethnics are not disconnected from colonial ways of thinking race; [and] the ongoing discourse about the Pashtun ethnic is a colonial legacy’ that has been ‘transferred wholesale into US intelligence agencies, foreign policy-making networks, and military institutions’ (Wardak 84; Hanifi 386). However, I attempt to extend the scope of her argument and demonstrate that colonial discourses about Pashtuns are not relevant only with regard to the relationship between the United States and Afghanistan or, more broadly speaking, the West and Afghanistan, but have also been inherited by the Pakistani state and continue to drive political policy in FATA, determining the rapport between the centre and the Pashtun peripheries and impacting the way in which Pashtun subjects are perceived and treated within mainland Pakistan.

The shot of Mansoor and Sarmad performing their latest song on television with the inviting and beguiling musical refrain phir gao na (‘sing again’), is immediately juxtaposed against a soundbite of Tahiri discussing the forms of weaponry provided by the United States government during the Afghan-Soviet War. In other words, mainstream music performed by city-dwelling Punjabis is presented as the binary opposite and the natural antidote for violent radicalization purported, promoted and exported exclusively by Pashtuns from the tribal hinterlands. The Punjabi/Pashtun opposition constructed through the film positions the Punjabi as the secular, moderate, modernizing, young and pleasure-seeking counter to the retrograde, pessimistic, self-destructive and eternally backward-looking Pashtun subject.

Khuda kay Liye is set in the background of the 9/11 attacks and the anxiety-inducing figure of the terrorist Muslim produced in the wake of this tragic event, is superimposed onto the body of the Pashtun who is shown to be profoundly uncomfortable with markers of modernity and youthful exuberance. In fact, Sarmad’s transformation from a musician to a jihadi, is frequently cast as a type of Pashtunization with clothing playing an essential role in signalling this problematic rite of passage. Mansoor declares his fears of Sarmad’s gradual radicalization in the words: Bhai sahib maulvion kay kehnay mein aa gaye hain (‘Brother dearest has been swayed by the message of the maulvis’) and here, the shadowy, pathologized figure of the Islamist maulvi/mullah is posited as a Pashtun subjectivity, who by placing Pathan headgear onto Sarmad’s head at Wazir Khan mosque, concludes the Punjabi musician’s radical metamorphosis. This event also marks a dramatic turning point in the film because in the next shot, Sarmad is presented as reciting the adhaan¹ wearing the Pakol, the cap which is largely worn by Pashtuns from Pakistan and Afghanistan and travelling to Pakistan’s troubled northern border on horseback to forcefully wed Mary and prevent her from going astray. The Pashtunization of the privileged, farmhouse-dwelling Punjabi subject is undone in the film’s denouement when Sarmad symbolically removes the Peshawari turban from his head, crumples it and places it on the ledge of the wooden witness stand, while bearing tearful witness to the misguidedness of his traditionalist conversion at the hands of Maulana Tahiri. The adoption of Pashtun physical and cultural markers, as espoused through clothing, is accompanied by the championing of extremist beliefs and dangerous, fundamentalist ideals in the film.

‘This [meaning a forced marriage] will not be possible in Lahore. In fact, our tribal regions are ideal for this sort of thing’, warns Tahiri when Sarmad relates his uncle’s request of saving his daughter from eternal damnation through marriage. Here FATA, the purported authentic homeland of all Pathan/Pashtun subjects is evoked as a lawless, peripheral hinterland and the abode of misogyny and female repression, whereas Lahore, where honour killings and forced marriages are frequently reported by the local press, is presented as a beacon of rights and progressive gender attitudes (Gannon). According to Wardak, in discussing and explaining Afghanistan, George W. Bush often deployed a ‘constructed dichotomy of “Good Muslim, bad Muslim” or “good Afghan, bad Afghan” … [in which] the “bad Muslim” image of the Pashtun “warrior” … [was] reinterpreted as a violent religious fanatic who impose[d] their barbaric style of Islam on the rest of society and enslave[d] women’ (Wardak 86). A similar binary of good Muslim/bad Muslim is brought to the fore in Khuda Kay Liye in which the good Muslim is the exuberant, musically inclined, modern Punjabi subject, and the bad Muslim, responsible for acts of global terrorism such as 9/11, is the violent, barbaric, anti-women, jihadi Pashtun subject, residing on the literal and metaphorical fringes of the imagined community of the Pakistani nation-state, and refusing to participate in the pleasures of modern, urban life in the major metropoles of the country.

The familial unit and the nation-state

This convenient jettisoning of national anxieties related to Pakistan’s problems with homegrown terrorism and insurgency through the casting of religious extremism as a Pashtun problem, provides comfortable and palatable viewing for urban, Punjabi cinema-goers and offers little in the way of confronting existing biases regarding Pathans, Afghans, the Taliban and Pashtuns. In fact, these categories are made deliberately collapsible and synonymous with one another in the film. Upon discovering that Sarmad has left Lahore with Shershah, the mother verbalizes her apprehension about her son’s activities in FATA/Afghanistan with a monosyllabic, fearful enunciation: ‘Taliban?’ This deliberate conflation of Pathans/Pashtuns and the Taliban leads to an erasure of the intersectional identities of different Pashtun subjects and the projection of a singular, monolithic Pashtun identity. It also ignores the lived experiences of Pathan subjects within Pakistan and sidesteps the ‘varied pre-colonial, colonial, and contemporary experiences of Pashtuns in different geographic spaces, such as the “settled” areas, FATA … [and the] historical mobility of Pashtuns … across Central and South Asia’ (Alimia). In the film’s concluding frame, which intentionally mirrors the opening shot, the brothers are shown to have returned to the familiar, urban fold of Lahore. With the threat of the fanatical Pashtun permanently removed from their lives, the family, despite being considerably altered and jaded by their experiences, are represented as attempting to recover from trauma through the healing power of music.

Jawani Phir Nahi Aani (abbreviated hereon as ‘JPNA’) was directed by Nadeem Baig and went on to become highest-grossing Lollywood film of 2015. It had its first screening at the Cinestar Imax Theatre in Lahore and the event was attended by famous Bollywood directors and actors, thus showing its cross-border, pan-South Asian currency and potential viewership (‘JPNA’). Subsequently, the film was released in Karachi and went on to have an international screening Dubai, New York, Chicago and Los Angeles (‘JPNA’). In the film, the marital union between a Punjabi man and a Pashtun woman is shown as being a violent, repressive and mutually dissatisfying liaison. JPNA, a romantic comedy, inverts the power relations between three married couples for comic effect by featuring three oppressed men and their domineering, sexually frigid and excessively suspicious wives who are not undermining and emasculating their partners at every turn. This reversed gender dynamic is further complicated by the ethnic identity of the main couple: the female Pashtun partner, Gul, is positioned as the dominant partner and the male, Punjabi husband, Sheikh, as the subordinate one. In contrast to the harmonious, moderately religious Punjabi familial unit that we encounter in Khuda Kay Liye, which is posited as an aspirational metonymic stand-in for the nation-state, in JPNA the viewer is presented with a Pashtun-Punjabi romantic coupling in which Punjabi masculine dominance has been subverted, and Pashtun feminine matriarchy established, leading to the erosion and breakdown of the domestic unit. The Pashtun subject here is deliberately put forward as feminine, uncivilized, pre-modern, emotional and excessively at ease with wielding a Kalashnikov to resolve minor, matrimonial disputes. The implication is that to restore order back into an anarchical world, the social organization of the family needs to consist of a heterosexual Punjabi couple, or one in which the dominant partner is male, middle-class and Punjabi and the subordinate is female and a minority subject.

Through this portrayal of a fragmented family unit, which could potentially lead to wider scissions within the imagined community of the nation, the film makes a case for the reclamation and re-establishment of Punjabi majoritarianism. Punjabi majoritarianism in Pakistan can be traced back to the ‘Punjab’s importance for the Raj … due to its location and position in the British security state in North West India’ (Yousaf 177). Such colonial territorial hierarchies were adopted by the state of Pakistan, where upper and upper middle-class Punjabis were the ‘main recruits to the civil bureaucracy and, especially, the military – thus exacerbating the problem of constructing a state structure capable of accommodating diverse linguistic and socio-economic groups’ (Jalal 185). The centre has been unsuccessful in representing ‘non-Punjabi regional interests’ because of which disaffected provincial minorities including ‘Bengalis, Pathans, Baluchis and Sindhis have … considered the merits of formally exiting from the national mainstream’ (185). Punjabi supremacy is maintained through offensive caricatures of Pashtuns in popular Pakistani films as incompetent, clueless and casually homicidal romantic partners.

In one of the opening scenes from the film, which is meant to induce hilarity, but in effect makes for uncomfortable viewing, Gul chases her husband around the house nonchalantly with a gun, firing several shots as a reprimand for missing a family dinner at her aunt’s place. Gul and Sheikh’s young child watches his deranged, mentally unstable mother narrowly murder his father, while unperturbedly consuming a bar of chocolate. Through this representation, the film attempts to minimize the horror of the situation and to suggest that this type of interaction is utterly commonplace and only nominally upsetting for their toddler son. Ultimately, Gul stacks away her Kalashnikov, throws Sheikh’s bedding downstairs and threatens to summon her brother to punish him. Sheikh recalls his last encounter with his brother-in-law, in which he appeared on the latter’s doorstep holding a bouquet of flowers as appeasement. The brother-in-law dressed in a woollen cap worn by Pashtuns – a Pakol – responds to his greeting with an inappropriate catcall: ‘Piece bara tight hae!’ (What a sexy piece!) and smiles lasciviously at the visibly discomfited, heterosexual Punjabi male subject. In JPNA, The Pashtun male’s desire for his Punjabi brother-in-law is not presented as romantic or sexual attraction but is codified as a desire to emasculate him through the threat of sodomy to sustain his sister’s matriarchal Pashtun dominance over the Punjabi domestic unit. In this ‘comedic’ exchange, JPNA deploys another trite and damaging stereotype of the Pashtun/Pathan as a frustrated, sexual deviant, a ham jins parast (homosexual), a launday baaz (homosexual interested exclusively in young adolescent boys) or a bachay baaz (paedophile) who targets young, defenceless male victims to fulfil his ever-growing and unrequited sexual desires. Within post-9/11 media discourses, for example, Afghan Pashtuns were often represented as ‘sodomiser[s] and paedophile[s], reeking of Oriental lasciviousness’ (Manchanda, Queering 13). As I have demonstrated, these tropes recur with noteworthy frequency within popular and mainstream Pakistani films in which a similar deployment of Orientalist discourses can be observed with respect to the depiction of Pathan subjects.

Aberrant sexualities

According to Manchanda, the othering of the Pashtun as a ‘sexually deviant, (improperly) homosexual’ man serves as a justification to discipline and punish Muslim male bodies through the continued perpetration of literal and epistemic violence in Afghan/Pashtun regions (Queering 1–2). She argues that the obsessive figuring of the Pashtun as a sexual miscreant also alludes to a desire to ‘remake [them] in our image’, to unscramble the confounding and paradoxical ‘Eastern’ codes of sexual conduct and to re-align Afghan sexual politics with Western liberal discourses of sexuality (2). In sharp contradistinction to this view, I argue that cinematic representations of the Pashtun male as a closeted homosexual are not an attempt to bring Pashtun sexual behaviour in line with the normative codes of sexuality prevalent in Pakistan. In fact, these representations seem to be aimed at deliberately stoking existing homophobic sentiments within local Pakistan publics. By highlighting their innately different (and degenerate) sexual preferences and the alterity of their fluid sexual orientation, films, such as JPNA foreground the unworthiness of accommodating Pashtun bodies within the Pakistani geo-body.

The trope of the Pashtun as a homosexual predator is mined in a more sustained way in the film Karachi Se Lahore, Lollywood’s first and only road movie (Hassan). The film was directed and produced by Wajahat Rauf and was a box-office success. It was the only Pakistani film to be have a premiere in Hollywood (Choudary). Zaheem, the film’s Urdu-speaking, Karachite, protagonist is rejected by his long-time girlfriend, Ayesha because of his stunted upward social mobility. She instead decides to travel to Lahore and marry her more affluent, Canadian-Punjabi cousin with a deliberately Anglicized name, Timmy, a member of Lahore’s upper-class nouveau riche, in order to gain access to a more prosperous life. This event motivates the plot of the film which involves Zaheem, his best friends, Sam and Moti, their neighbour, Mariyam, and her brother, Zeezo, to embark on a road trip from Karachi to Lahore, locations signposted in the title of the film, in a bid to storm Ayesha’s wedding and win back her affections. Road movies typically ‘aim beyond the borders of cultural familiarity, seeking the unfamiliar for revelation, or at least for the thrill of the unknown’ with the road functioning as a potent signifier of ‘the course of life, the movement of desire, and the lure of both freedom and destiny’ (1–2).

Road movies emerged as a genre in American cinema in the late 1960s with the release of iconic films, such as Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Easy Rider (1969) and since then, have since become a transnational cinematic form (Laderman, Driving 3–4). Within the genre of the road movie, Laderman identifies a subgenre of the ‘quest road movie’, which focuses on ‘roaming itself, usually in terms of some discovery; [with] the tone suggest[ing] a movement toward something (life’s meaning, the true America, Mexico)’ (20). Instead of rebelling against conservative societal norms and cultural beliefs, the protagonists in Karachi Se Lahore are motivated by a very specific goal – disrupting Ayesha’s impending nuptials – and hence, the film can be classified as a quest road movie. I would argue that the personal journey in Karachi Se Lahore is an idiom for the quest for Pakistani national identity and the plot of the film is a visual and narrative exercise in demystifying and exploring the limits of this identity.

There is a well-documented link between Hollywood’s road movies and the American tradition of transcendentalism and pastoralism: the American canon of road movies are an extension of American literary and cultural pastoralism insofar as they are ‘driven’ by the pastoral impulse of ‘escap[ing] American’s congested, confining urban centers’ (Laderman, Driving 18). In fact, the road movie’s connection to cultural and national identity is more pronounced within Latin American road movies which, instead of ‘focus[ing] on the ‘hyperindividualized, outlaw couple’ as their Hollywood precursors often did, are ‘marked more by a quest for a meaningful, authentic sense of nation’ and ‘convey a search for national identity more desperate and politicized – more explicitly focused on finding and (re-) creating national identity – than in most American films of this genre’ (Laderman, The Road 79). Karachi Se Lahore is a mainstream romantic comedy, without such overtly political aspirations, but despite this, it is a deeply political film, which concerns itself with imagining the cultural contours of the Pakistani nation-space and of separating the national in-group from the out-group. Zaheem’s ex-girlfriend, Ayesha, is most likely Punjabi or half-Punjabi because her maternal family is from Lahore, but she is never culturally othered in the film in the way that Sheikh’s Pashtun wife, Gul is in JPNA. In fact, the difference in their linguistic and cultural identity is never highlighted or foregrounded as a source of interpersonal tension.

On the contrary, as inhabitants of Pakistan’s most populous metropolis, Karachi, the characters in Karachi Se Lahore are marked as Karachites above anything else. The imagined community of the nation instead of a harmonious or disjointed familial unit is visualized as a fun-loving, selfie-taking, young and raucous group of best friends belonging to Karachi’s middle-classes. Unlike the ill-fated friendship between Sarmad and Shershah in Khuda Kay Liye which leads to the derailment of a formerly blissful Punjabi family, the camaraderie between Zaheem, Moti and Sam is represented as joyful and purpose-driven. This, I argue, functions as a commentary on subjects who can be befriended and included within the national community, and those whose friendship is not an enabling possibility but in fact, robs the Punjabi subject of agency and social mobility.

The addressee of the film’s title song, Aja Re Aja, is an anonymous yaar (‘friend’), which ties in with the fact that the imagined community of the nation is visualized as a collective of friends. With a bright blue jeep functioning as the locus of the action, Zaheem and his compatriots drive (and occasionally sing and dance) across the dry, burnt landscape of the Sindh and the green pastoral fields of the Punjab, until they encounter their first, significant obstacle in a highway dhaba (‘eatery’). This obstacle appears in the form of a libidinous and leering, middle-aged Pashtun, clad in a brown salwar kameez and waistcoat with a Pakol perched on his head, who loiters behind Moti, attempting to make sexual overtures as he is about to relieve himself at the dhaba’s public urinal. Flustered, the stuttering Moti requests him to step back and cease touching himself: here the sexual connotations are shockingly direct for a Pakistani film, reaching beyond the form of innuendo and insinuation that one encounters in JPNA.

By not explicitly naming the Pashtun subject and referring to him as an anonymous khan sahab (‘esteemed khan’), the film positions him as an anxiety-inducing signifier of Pathan sexual and cultural otherness. ‘Hold this’, the Pashtun male instructs Moti, who resists this request by squeamishly protesting that he is not ‘that kind of boy’, in response to which the threatening subject brandishes a gun in his face. Moti covers his eyes to shield them from viewing the Pashtun subject’s penis, and here the Pashtun phallus and his gun are conflated with one another symbolizing Pashtun sexual intentionality, toxic masculinity and the possibility of homoerotic violence. In other words, the Pashtun man’s request to ‘hold this’ is kept deliberately ambiguous in the film such that it can encapsulate his predilection for committing unspeakable acts of violence as well as licentiousness. Zaheem and his friends are chased by the Pathan subject and his accomplices, who begin openly shooting at them. They are eventually captured by the Pathan khan sahab en route Lahore and forced to barter Sam, who the lustful Pashtun has taken a fancy to, in exchange for their safety and security. The Pashtun male is, once again, presented as the virulent and virile other, and apprehended and understood primarily through an ‘Orientalist … framework, in which accusations of “deviance” and “queerness” take centre-stage as organising principles in making sense of the “Other”’ (Manchanda, Queering 14). This image of the Pashtun as a serial sodomite can be traced to modern European anthropological discourses about Western and Oriental sexuality in which ‘representations of sexuality became a boundary of civilisation and central to discourses of cultural and religious difference’ (Owens 45). In a similar vein, Pashtun sexual otherness is used to mark their minority bodies as fundamentally foreign and deserving of being emplaced outside the boundary of the ‘civilized’ nation-state. Such imaginings of Pashtun bodies in contemporary film give creative licence to the denial of meaningful participation and citizenship to Pashtun/Pathan subjects within the national community by upholding the formidable figure of the Pashtun male as barbaric and violent enough to emasculate, femininize and sodomize unthreatening Punjabi and Urdu-speaking subjects, who are positioned as the authentic citizens of Pakistan. The inheritance of such polarizing and dated colonial discourses by the Pakistani state, and their further perpetuation through its national cinema is an anomalous phenomenon in a postcolonial country, which has itself been equally implicated in a post-9/11 world and is often lumped together with Afghanistan as a war-torn lawless terrorist haven in US-American political discourse and Western media representations (Manchanda, Rendering 394).

Sam is rescued from a Pashtun trucker festival, a fictional festival at which rowdy, truck-drivers congregate and present their talents to a crowd of leering Pashtun subjects, by his friends. Each member of the audience is indistinguishable from the other and conform to the official Pashtun ensemble of loose kurtas (‘shirts’) and cream-colored Pakols. This attire can be uniformly observed in the three films discussed in this paper: the kurta shalwar, the Pakol and the Kalashnikov are deployed as visual markers to pinpoint Pashtun bodies and highlight their innate difference from non-Pashtun ones. In a scene, which shamelessly panders to every Pashtun stereotype highlighted thus far, the Pashtun becomes an amalgam of sexual repression, closeted homosexuality, idiotic imbecility and murderous rage. The event’s compere asks the assembled Pathans: ‘Who says we like violence? Who claims that we are part of a terrorist organization? We are peace-loving people, lovers … What is the Pashtun’s true jewel?’ The crowd start aerial firing in response. ‘No, no’, he exclaims, ‘It’s ilm, ilm (‘knowledge, knowledge)’. Seemingly trying to confront and to deflate stereotypes of Pashtuns as fanatical terrorists, the film in fact re-instates these through displays of comedic buffoonery. The disorderly festival attendees expose the fallaciousness of this attempted subversion by raising their rifles to show their opinion of a Pashtun’s true asset. The lampooning of the Pashtun collective body is continued when the moderator introduces an upcoming performance by unintentionally mispronouncing, and/or adding Pathan surname modifiers (such as Khan) to the names of national and transnational musicians and celebrity icons: ‘International group, Justin Timberlane, Shakira, Mathira, Justin Bieber are nothing. Is it Michael Jackson? Is it Madonna Khan? It is User or Usher? All of it is nothing compared to the item you are about to witness’. The inability to adequately articulate the names of international musicians can be interpreted as a failure to properly engage with transnational pop culture and attests to the irreversibility and undeniability of Pashtun insularity and cultural backwardness. Despite desiring to be like their hip and young, Punjabi and Urdu-speaking counterparts, and attempting to participate in transnational modernity through an indulgence in contemporary music, the Pashtun subjects fail miserably, a deficiency which is highlighted when the trigger-happy khan sahab grows impatient and shoots the host of the event dead without warning. In other words, the essentialized Pashtun subject, unable to appropriately partake of the pleasures of transnational music and to remedy his own cultural regressiveness, sinks to the level of mindless violence yet again.

Meanwhile, Zaheem and his friends, convince Mariyam to perform an item song. The latter is ‘Bollywood parlance for a film song which features an actress in an erotically charged dance sequence … [which has] little relevance to the film narrative’ (Beaster-Jones 3). The item song is usually a ‘catchy, upbeat, often sexually provocative dance sequence’ which originated in Bollywood films (Mayur 108). Lollywood movies are heavily influenced by Bollywood films and Pakistani cinemas depend on films from India to remain sustainable since Pakistan’s own film industry only produces between 12 and 15 films each year (‘Bollywood’). Recently, it has also become embedded into contemporary Pakistani films, such controversial item numbers have become a staple in recent cinematic works of which the song ‘Tutti Fruity’ is a representative example. Mariyam transforms from the simple, girl next-door to a seductress in a sequin-covered, lehenga choli² who croons, ‘I’m a tutti fruity/I’m a cutie and a beauty’. References to Tutti fruity, a popular local ice-cream flavour, whet the appetite of the assembled Pashtuns as the urban, female subject is offered for Pathan male consumption.

This item song, in contrast to the atypical Bollywood item song, is connected to the plot of Karachi Se Lahore insofar as it creates an effective diversion, entertaining the sexually deprived Pashtun truck-drivers, who begin to hoot and wave their Kalashnikovs on cue, and allowing the protagonists to plot their escape. Pashtun homosexuality in the film is encoded as an aberrant sexual practice formed in the absence of female sexual alternatives, which once provided in the form of a young and sassy Karachi urbanite, causes the wild, suppressed, Pashtun truck-drivers, including the notorious khan sahab who had kidnapped Sam earlier to satisfy himself, to be visually and sexually satisfied. Having successfully duped the sexually repressed Pashtuns and exploited their sexual weakness, Zaheem and his band of friends are shown arriving into Lahore in the next shot, while a song describing the virtues of Lahore plays in the background, juxtaposed against scenes from Lahore’s motorway and the Badshahi Mosque: Lahore hae bhai Lahore hae/Ravi Nukkar Tay/Khabay kukkar day/jithay hular machaya … soni qurian way/shukar purian day/Aithay loki nay kamal/pandey bhangray dhamal/phulaan ugday rehnday/aithay lagday na melay dildaran day (‘Lahore is Lahore/The Ravi is close/The food is delicious chicken/Where we get into trouble/there are beautiful girls/packets of sugar/ the people here are incredible/they dance the bhangra/flowers bloom/we have festivals for the wonderful people)’. Here, Lahore emerges as a utopia of pleasurable modernity and excess and the film’s protagonists easily adopt and perform Punjabi cultural identity by dancing alongside their Lahori brethren. Having dealt with the threat of the regressive Pashtun subject and removed them from any imaginings of the national self, the friends embrace Punjabi identity as a natural and unassailable part of Pakistani identity.

In contrast to Pathans who subjected their bodies to violence, restrained them and threatened their bodily autonomy, Punjabis invite their Karachite fellow-citizens to the pleasures of road-side and rooftop bhangra. Despite the historical tensions between the two, Urdu-speaking and/or Sindhi minority identity is seamlessly folded into a cosmopolitan Punjabi identity, and this identity is portrayed as synonymous with a cohesive Pakistani identity. This is further evidenced by the song accompanying the bhangra, which is a Punjabi appropriation of a classical, Sindhi folk song. Ho Jamalo, is transformed into Hey Jamalo, a musical paean to the city of Lahore: Saada dil chay lahoriya/ho jamalo (our heart is Lahori/oh Jamalo!) Gulli danda guddi dor jay/ho jamalo (playing the game of guli danda/flying kites/oh Jamalo!) as Lahori/Punjabi identity is laid claim to through the performance of pleasurable activities, which are commonly associated with the capital of the Punjab, such as dancing the bhangra, flying kites and playing guli danda. The Punjabi/Pashtun binary is consistently evoked in Khuda Kay Liye, JPNA and Karachi Se Lahore, and the urban Punjabi subject is positioned as the embodiment of Pakistani national identity, whereas the Pashtun subject is othered as a violent terrorist, an unintegrated Islamist, a sexual deviant or a culturally regressive barbarian, who deserves to be excluded from the imagined community of the Pakistani nation-state on the basis of these failings. On the other hand, the urban Punjabi or Karachite subject is portrayed as part of a harmonious familial unit, or a vivacious group of friends, both of which function as metonymic stand-ins for the Pakistani nation-state. In both these representations, the Punjab subject is shown as moderate, open-minded and pleasure-seeking, able to participate in local and transnational pop culture and to accommodate other identities, a racialized ease which is contrasted with the Pashtun subject’s inability to modernize and to co-exist with other Pakistani subjects. Produced in the aftermath of the War on Terror, the films discussed in this paper deal with the anxiety of global politics and the pathologized figure of the pre-modern Muslim frequently depicted in Western media by locating that figure in the body of the marginalized Pashtun. Through this, the Punjabi Muslim body politic is cleansed of guilt and shame and the ground is set for the violent and militaristic disciplining of the Pashtun subject. Colonialist and Orientalist discourses are uncritically reproduced in imaginings of Pashtun bodies in Lollywood cinema and such cinematic works justify the discrimination, marginalization and policing of Pashtun subjects within Pakistan while justifying the existence of Punjabi cultural hegemony and majoritarianism.

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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.

Notes

1. The Muslim call to prayer.

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