The Indo-Pak war we’re losing

Remember the good old days of Doordarshan when we were treated to serials such as Hum Log and Buniyaad , before being swept off our feet by the telecast of Ramayan and Mahabharat ? We watched the last two in rapt attention and reverence, even though they dragged on and on, really trying our patience. But they did grip the imagination of a generation gone by and anyway, what other choice did we have?

The weekly or bi-weekly telecasting of a bouquet of films, songs and programmes such as NDTV’s The World this Week , was also awaited eagerly and lapped up. Slowly, painfully slowly, our television programming improved and gave us a wider choice.

Then sometime in the late 80s and early 90s, when some friends and relatives returned from Pakistan and raved about the serials telecast there, I found video cassettes of a couple of the popular ones — Tanhaiyaan and Dhoop Kinare — in the neighbourhood lending library and watched them. The quality and content were surprisingly good.

These were being aired on PTV in Pakistan and the high quality of the script, characterisation, and subdued, understated acting was really impressive. I got hooked to Dhoop Kinare based on the lives of doctors and loved the portrayal of Dr Ahmer Ansari (Rahat Kazmi) and Dr Zoya Ali Khan (Marina Khan) so much that on a trip to Pakistan to cover the 1993 election, I brought home all the four bulky video cassettes.

Over the years so many video and audio cassettes have been thrown out during spring cleaning, but these cassettes have remained, awaiting conversion to digital format.

But I didn’t move beyond these two , and revisiting Indian Hindi soaps after a decade found them crass and melodramatic and far, far removed from reality. On a visit to Pakistan about five years ago, I was totally surprised to find housewives and older women hooked to Indian soaps of the saas-bahu variety. I even know an elderly lady who lived alone in a huge house in Lahore who’d watch the repeat telecasts of Indian soaps , with strict instructions to her domestic help not to disturb her!

But recently a Pakistani friend bitterly complained about our Hindi soaps. “Your advertisements during breaks are much better!” she said. One could only blame Ekta Kapoor for painting such a horrendous portrait of the Indian woman — a sati Savitri or a total demon, always decked up in layers of gold and thick pancake make-up, both of which never came off even in bed!

Having stayed away from Indian or Pakistani soaps for a decade, recent rave reviews of Pakistani serials now being telecast on Zee TV’s Zindagi channel, triggered a revisit.

Though some were passable and some rather superficial in their treatment of both plot and layering of characters, they had remarkable and refreshingly different features vis-à-vis Hindi serials. The most refreshing difference is that women in Pakistani serials dress like ordinary middle- and upper middle-class women, even though the serials tend to concentrate on stories woven around rich families.

The young women mostly wear salwar-kameez and jeans and tops and use light make-up; chunky gold and flashy diamond jewellery are missing, unless wedding scenes are involved.

More important, the serials show educated girls from both rich and poor families focusing on a career and there is great emphasis on girls’ education.

The acting may not be brilliant but melodrama and yelling, hysterical women are kept to a minimum, as are lectures/homilies on the perfect woman. The sets are simple and elegant, not flashy or garish. While the first two serials I watched — Maat and Mere Qatil Mere Dildaar — were a tad disappointing, even though good enough to merit recording and watching, the two that followed last month, Zindagi Gulzar Hai and Kahi Unkahi , were surprisingly good.

The half-a-dozen serials I’ve watched till now focus on the class struggle and the huge rich-poor divide. But the underlying current, and surprisingly so in a country like Pakistan that is battling with its own Taliban, is invariably gender justice.

Zindagi is a lovely story of how a man abandons his wife because all their three children are girls and marries another woman, leaving his first wife, a teacher, to fend for herself and the girls.

The eldest, Kashyap, a brilliant student of management, grows up hating not only men but the institution of marriage itself. She is wooed by Zaroon from a rich family and even though she finally marries him, her very strong instinct to retain her independence, both financial and otherwise, lands the marriage in trouble.

The mother’s role is brilliantly written and executed, the script/language, centred around how daughters should be greatly valued, brought up and educated just like sons, is not hyperbolic or bombastic. The acting has no melodrama. Kashyap looks like the girl next door, dresses simply, wears hardly any make-up, and the evolution of her character, from a headstrong but deeply caring woman to one who slowly accepts that not all men are selfish and stupid like her father, is laudable.

Kahi Unkahi doesn’t have the same class, but the central character Zoya, a driver’s daughter, proves she is far superior in heart, thought and intellect to Anam, the totally spoilt rich woman, who cannot accept defeat from Zoya either in school or in winning the affections of their common heartthrob.

Apart from the strong gender themes, the depiction of class prejudices, the contempt of the rich for the poor, the poetry-like cadence of the Urdu language, which is mercifully simple (the channel sensibly runs a translation of difficult Urdu words), another winner is the short life-span. Most of the serials are around 20-25 episodes.

Those who watch Indian Hindi serials tell me that even in these the gender theme is now gaining importance but the handling is all wrong. The result is characters being reduced to caricatures.

The worst part, one hears, is that the characters wear designer clothes — including sarees — and jewellery because there is a whole army of women out there who are waiting to copy these designs. If this is true, nothing can be more pathetic.

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