I watched the first episode of Dhoop kinare, an Urdu TV drama from the 1980s. I have never really watched much in the way of Urdu television. I always knew it was supposed to be very good and quite highbrow, but I was not a TV watcher ever. Now, as the GF has stopped watching much television, I occasionally want to watch something that is shorter than a movie and decided to try this out.
It was a very good first episode. A young man’s beloved adoptive father dies and he discovers that he has inherited everything except the house, which has been bequeathed to a granddaughter of whose existence he was unaware. I gather the meat of the drama is not in this plotline, but it was a good start.
The 80s hairstyles and the odd polka dot were entertaining to see, as was the lost world of my childhood when Karachi was green and quiet, when women didn’t go to bed wearing their dupattas and people said khuda hafiz instead of Allah hafiz. The gestures and intonations of my Karachi childhood. It was a delight to listen to beautiful Urdu from actors selected for their acting abilities rather than for their beauty (though Marina Khan is certainly very beautiful). And, later (I gather) it will be another joy to watch something from Pakistan with a progressive message rather than one conveying the modern-conservative bourjeois morality that dominates media in Pakistan today.
PTV dramas of past decades were renowned amongst Urdu and Hindi speakers. They had minimal budgets, were on a state television channel, and aired through three sets of dictatorships, yet they were thoughtful, progressive and socially and politically critical works. The greatest Urdu playwrights of their generation wrote for PTV. Instead of being managed by a tightly controlled state operation as a propaganda machine, PTV (aside from its news) was a cultural messenger, there to create a transplanted Urdu-speaking national identity to supplant the indigenous Punjabi, Pathan, etc identities. Indians, I gather, were highly envious. It’s not unlike Irani cinema, I suppose.
Women have long dominated Pakistani television writing (I don’t know about directing but there are certainly great women directors). In the past they included women like Haseena Moin, the feminist writer who wrote Dhoop kinare and many of the greatest dramas of that era. Today, Pakistani dramas, are less highminded and more populist, but are dominated by Hum TV, a channel owned by a woman, and are written by women students at Karachi University.
Since the dramas were only a dozen episodes or so long, and are available online, I have made a list of old dramas to watch over the coming weeks and months.