A young woman walks out of an abusive marriage to find liberation in the big city of Karachi and on Instagram. A trained architect from an upper-class family and a Rotterdam graduate takes on the land and water mafia in her city and is shot dead by unidentified gunmen. A Karachi teenager joins a scuba diving course to find freedom underwater and, a decade later, becomes Pakistan’s first certified female scuba diving instructor.
These three are among the women whose lives have been chronicled in documentaries by women filmmakers from Pakistan. The women have one thing in common: resistance to authority. Their stories were among the highlights of the recently-concluded 15th Mumbai International Film Festival (MIFF) for Documentary, Short Fiction and Animation.
Tazeen Bari and Saad Khan’s documentary Qandeel (2017) tells the story of 18-year-old Qandeel Baloch who leaves her abusive husband and moves with her year-old son to Karachi to make a new life. Instagram gives her the agency to reclaim her individuality and the right over her body, something that life in rural Pakistan does not guarantee.
Naturally, Qandeel’s behaviour is met with both ridicule and threats. But instead of intimidating her, it only emboldens her. With rising fame, even the international media takes notice, calling her the “Kim Kardashian of Pakistan”. But the documentary argues that she was far from that in reality. Being a Kardashian would have meant upper-class privileges and protection, but Qandeel emerged out of the working class and had to give up her son’s custody, but rose above it all to become a role model for many women.
Fight for agency
In June 2016, when Qandeel filmed herself chatting with religious leader Mufti Abdul Qavi in a hotel room, there was unprecedented backlash from conservatives, followed by a sensational media investigation. It was the first time the media dug deep into her background, revealing her past and family life. A month later, on July 15, she was strangled to death by her brother for “bringing disrepute to our family’s honour”.
Tazeen and Khan depict how Qandeel’s fight for liberation and agency became greater than herself. Her boldness triggered a landslide of young Pakistani voices online — from repressed Muslim women to effeminate queer men — who felt empowered to speak up.
Three years earlier, in March 2013, architect and social activist Perween Rahman, a prominent voice in Karachi, was shot dead by four gunmen. Mahera Omar’s Perween Rahman: The Rebel Optimist (2016) tracks her nearly three-decade-long career, throughout which she empowered the city’s poor (mostly Partition refugees) and helped them develop sustainable sanitation and housing.
A still from The Mermaid of Churna Island
As Perween’s work started taking her to the impoverished pockets of Karachi — which her upper-class upbringing would not have otherwise allowed — she began voicing her anger against the powerful water and land mafia. She started receiving threats and her office was attacked once. “But Perween used to say, ‘Oh, no one knows who I am’,” recounts her sister, writer Aquila Ismail. Two days after that seemingly innocuous remark, Perween was shot dead.
“No one is safe in this city. Those who think otherwise are living in a fool’s paradise,” says Perween’s colleague, Anwar, as he takes the filmmaker through the alleyways of Karachi. Through the grim yet hopeful portrait of Perween’s life, Mahera documents the corruption in Karachi, a city divided between the rich and the poor, a conflicting reality that silently outraged the activist right till the end.
Open confines
Unlike Perween, Rosheen Khan emerged out of a middle-class, conservative Karachi family, the kind that believes educating girls is futile. Determined to establish an identity of her own, Rosheen, as a teenager, joined PADI master instructor Yousuf Ali’s scuba diving centre. More than a decade on, she became Pakistan’s first female scuba diving instructor. Nameera Ahmed’s The Mermaid of Churna Island (2014) shows how liberating the underwater world can be, where no patriarchal rules apply.
Much like Qandeel, Rosheen had to distance herself from her family to attain success and independence. After the initial scepticism from her students, she became a comforting coach for young girls and women who wanted to take up diving. Her credibility soon came to overshadow her gender, and rightly so.
Another documentary, Nausheen Dadabhoy’s The Ground Beneath Their Feet (2014), documents the lives of two survivors of the 2005 earthquake in northern Parkistan. Khalida (20) and Ruquiya (17) suffered spinal injuries and lost the ability to walk. Nausheen followed the two women for five years as they grappled in different ways with the sudden change in their lives, thus exploring also what it is like to be an unmarried, disabled woman in rural Pakistan.
Raquiya’s family is supportive and her fiancé wants to marry her even after her disability, but she turns him down. Four years later, when the filmmaker meets her, she is still housebound but making peace with her new life.
Nausheen also met Khalida after four years and found her living away from her village and working in a nursing home. She shares an apartment with other disabled women and hopes she will find a husband one day. Khalida’s mother confesses that she would never have let her daughter stay away from home and earn her own living had she not been disabled. Paradoxically, the confines of a wheelchair have liberated Khalida, something that is hard to come by for women in Pakistan.
kennith.rosario@thehindu.co.in
