Politics and Popular Culture

Pakistan Television is a partisan organ of the Pakistani state. Incoming prime ministers invariably appoint their own loyalists to senior positions within the PTV bureaucracy, and programming reflects the government’s point of view on domestic politics as well as international affairs. Shortly after the Benazir Bhutto–led Pakistan People’s party won the national election of October 1993, the state television network began screening a fourteen-part Urdu melodrama called Zard Dopehr (Yellow Afternoon). The main theme in the drama’s complex plot is the rise to political power of a balding, middle-class Lahori businessman named Malik Mehrban ‘Ali (played by Shujahat Hashmi), who was universally viewed as a thinly disguised alter ego of opposition leader and, at that time, former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.^[16] The writer and director of the series, Shahid Nadeem, is a prominent Lahori playwright, screenwriter, and television producer. He developed Yellow Afternoon during spring 1993 but was unable to get permission to produce it until Nawaz Sharif’s bitter opponent Benazir Bhutto returned to power. Because the drama presents Malik Mehrban as a corrupt, brutal, “uneducated” Old City thug who bribes and bullies his way to political power while pretending to be a pious Muslim, PTV could not have screened Yellow Afternoon while Sharif was still prime minister and thus in a position to influence hiring and transfers within the PTV bureaucracy.^[17]Yellow Afternoon played on the common upper-class Pakistani perception that the industrialist Sharif family were vulgar, “uneducated” arrivistes.

In urban Pakistan today representations of literacy and education are often conflated with class. Thus the adjective for polite or refined Urdu, nasta‘liq, also refers to the court style of Persian script in which Urdu is usually written. The metaphorical equation between literacy and social refinement parallels the equation between rationality and class. Upper-class Lahoris in particular often argue that “uneducated” (in this context, poor) people are incapable of “rational” behavior. As one young professional put it, “The poor are like animals. They know getting up, eating, and working. Nothing else.” However, it seems that poor people are naturally good (albeit irrational), as long as they stay poor. Urban Pakistanis tend to blame all social problems, including poverty, on “lack of education.” Because “education” is also a metaphor of class distinction, poor people are blamed for their poverty (they are poor because they are “uneducated”) while upwardly mobile people are blamed for escaping poverty (they are vulgar and corrupt because they are “uneducated”).

In discussions of political and bureaucratic corruption, members of the self-described “old elite” frequently argue that corruption results from upward mobility on the part of the “uneducated.” This is based on the widely shared assumption that it is impossible to succeed in the Pakistani economy without either paying bribes (rishwat) or benefiting from high-level patronage (sarparasti). Among the old elite this identification of mobility and corruption tends to dominate political discussion.

Upper-class Lahoris from old-money backgrounds often refer to themselves collectively as “Lahore Society.” The term denotes a clique defined less by rules of exclusion than by exclusion itself, whose practice is justified by reference to a fuzzy set of values supposed to have been clearer at some time in the past. Members of Society often contend, for example, that Lahore no longer has a clear class hierarchy. This can make for frustrating ethnography. Asked to comment on Lahore’s class system, they tend to reply that there is none: “There are no classes anymore. Money is all that matters in this society.” This statement expresses a clear stance on the relative merits of inherited versus achieved status, in effect drawing on the same set of class distinctions whose continued relevance it affects to deny. In other words, money is not all that matters in Society. Hence the disdain that members of Society express for nouveau riche Lahore industrialists such as the Sharif clan, who have dominated Punjab politics since the death of President Zia ul-Haq in 1988 and are reputedly the richest family in Pakistan. During my fieldwork (1992–94), Nawaz Sharif served successively as prime minister and opposition leader in the National Assembly, and his brother Shahbaz was a dominant figure in the Punjab Provincial Assembly. As one Society hostess put it, however: “It will be a thousand years before they are accepted in Lahore Society.” One of her friends added, “But you must remember that we are a powerless class, hence bitter. We sit in our drawing rooms and complain about the government, but we can’t really do anything about it.”

This was the social context that gave Yellow Afternoon its satirical bite. The drama begins in a courtroom, where a poor village caretaker named ‘Ali Mohammed is being sentenced to death for the murder of a police constable. Crusading investigative reporter Sanya ‘Ali (Samiya Mumtaz) decides that ‘Ali Mohammed has been framed to protect some shadowy higher-up. Meanwhile, we see Malik Mehrban at a family council in his crumbling Old City mansion.^[18] He announces that since the Mehrban Group is now one of the country’s leading business families, he as family leader must enter politics to safeguard the family’s interests. An elderly relative objects: “Politics isn’t our job: it’s for landlords [vadairon] and feudals [jagirdaron]. We’re businesspeople: our job is to get the politicians in our grasp so they’ll look after our interests.” Mehrban retorts: “You don’t understand. We’ve reached a point in business where we can either go up or down. We can’t stay level. If we don’t get some political power we could end up going down. Completely down.”

This scene establishes Mehrban’s class position conclusively: he is materially rich but morally middle class, in Lahore Society terms an upwardly mobile shehri (with characteristically Lahori ambivalence, the Old City, or purana shehr, is viewed simultaneously as the heart of traditional urban culture and the epitome of lower-class vulgarity). Malik Mehrban and his flashy young wife inhabit a garishly decorated bungalow in affluent Gulberg. His sister Saira Begum (Madiha Gauhar),^[19] a middle-aged school headmistress, has elected to stay in the Old City and run a girls’ school. For reasons that remain opaque for the first several episodes, she is unmarried and harbors a deep hatred for her genial, politically ambitious brother. She has two dependents: a young girl in a wheelchair who spends much of her time talking to pigeons and a dumb madwoman named Zaytoun (played by the leading dramatic actress Samina Peerzada) who speaks to nobody but seems to be in the grip of a terrible fear. In a recurring theme, Saira Begum tells her wheelchair-bound young ward installments of a dark fable in which an evil king walls up a handsome young prince alive in his palace. We eventually learn that the story is autobiographical. Saira Begum hates her brother because she believes that, years before, Malik Mehrban had her fiancé killed and buried in the basement of the family havaili (mansion) where she lives to this day, despite its distressing personal associations. (Her brother had opposed the marriage, it seems, because he was unable to bear the idea of alienating any part of the family property in dowry.)

In subsequent episodes the beautiful young journalist Sanya ‘Ali uncovers evidence that appears to link Malik Mehrban to the framing of ‘Ali Mohammed and to the mysterious madness of Zaytoun. ‘Ali Mohammed, it turns out, had been Malik Mehrban’s gatekeeper at his country house. Zaytoun had been married to ‘Ali Mohammed until he committed suicide under mysterious circumstances. Sanya and ‘Ali Mohammed’s defense lawyer (Salman Shahid) enlist the help of Tariq Hussain, the police officer who had investigated the case against ‘Ali Mohammed. Tariq helps them build a damning case against Malik Mehrban; in the process he and Sanya fall in love.

Mehrban, meanwhile, is scaling the political heights. He starts modestly, by hiring a political coach named Sadiqi, a Pygmalion figure in charge of smoothing his rough edges so that he can become a proper ruling-class politician. This means wearing Western clothes, improving his English, and learning various tricks such as a hierarchy of different handshakes with which to greet different classes of people (ordinary voters, political workers, and important political personalities), depending on how much respect, or ‘izzat, he wishes to convey.

The image makeover extends to Malik Mehrban’s entourage. He places two employees named Jaida and Shida in charge of campaign administration. “Jaida” (from Javaid) and “Shida” (from Rashid) are common working-class Punjabi nicknames. In Lahore shida is also slang for an “uneducated,” working-class city dweller; in urban contexts it corresponds to the equally condescending pindu (villager/hick). Jaida and Shida speak thick, Punjabi-accented Urdu and wear dhotti kurta (tunic and wraparound skirt), a style of local dress associated with peasants, petty shopkeepers, and other “uneducated” people. Sadiqi renames them Jerry and Sherry and dresses them in jeans, loud shirts, and sunglasses. When they break into Punjabi, he orders them to stop talking like shidas. In episode 3, Sadiqi explains that if Mehrban wants to be a successful politician, he too must differentiate himself from the mass of common people, in the first instance by wearing a Western suit:

sadiqi:

. . . The people should see that you’re different from them, stronger than them.

mehrban:

That I am, by the grace of God. [pugnaciously] Am I not?

sadiqi:

Malik Sahib, being and appearance are not the same. Look at Jerry and Sherry. Underneath they’re still Jaida and Shida, but now they look different. Now if you appear before the people in this getup [the suit], you’ll look bigger, stronger.

The subtext of this image transformation, of course, is that like his employee Sherry, Mehrban remains a vulgar shida no matter how “educated” (i.e., Westernized) he tries to appear.^[20] Mehrban’s career takes off when he is sponsored by a rich, drug-dealing film producer with close links to the Lahore chief of police.The chief is in turn taking direction from a mysterious cabal of (intelligence) “agencies” whose representatives appear mainly as disembodied telephone voices. After they rig Mehrban’s election to the city council, he sets his sights on a federal cabinet portfolio. He also drops his political coach Sadiqi, replacing him with his own son Mustapha, who has just returned from America with a college degree and speaks highly Anglicized Urdu, even calling his shehri father “Dad.” Mustapha brings in another U.S.-educated friend named Rehan to act as a public relations consultant. Muscle and money by themselves, they argue, will not propel Mehrban to national political leadership. They must manipulate the media by setting up a task force to research and plant stories about his enemies, particularly the journalist Sanya ‘Ali.

This media manipulation subplot is ironic in relation to the political agenda of the television drama in which it is embedded. For all its subtle and varied social commentary, Yellow Afternoon was most obviously a satirical attack on a recently defeated prime minister, sponsored by his successor.^[21] Lahori viewers were highly sensitive to this irony, pointing out that Shahid Nadeem, the director, was a Bhutto family loyalist with a long history of opposition to the late military dictator General Zia ul-Haq. Benazir Bhutto’s archrival Nawaz Sharif, meanwhile, started his political career in the early 1980s as a protégé of General Zia.

Leveraged by his powerful connections within Pakistan, Malik Mehrban’s slick new political strategy yields rapid dividends. He joins the federal cabinet as minister for trade and commerce, a post that offers huge scope for corruption. Soon Jerry and Sherry are installed in his outer office, charging fees for access to the great man, who is busily arranging industrial development permits and interest-free loans for all his cronies. Ultimately, however, the forces of virtue triumph. Sanya and her friends manage to prove not only that Mehrban framed ‘Ali Mohammed for the murder of the police officer but that years before he had raped his previous gatekeeper’s wife, Zaytoun. Her husband committed suicide, and she went mad, but she also bore Mehrban’s illegitimate daughter, who his sister, Saira Begum, adopted to avoid scandal. The only heinous crime in the drama of which he is not guilty, in fact, is the murder of Saira Begum’s fiancé. After she finally accuses her brother of having ordered this murder, he produces the fiancé, who is now married with children and working as a manager in Mehrban Industries. Mehrban had bribed him, it seems, to disappear from Saira Begum’s life. But the heroic, highly “educated” investigative team of journalist Sanya ‘Ali, police officer Tariq Hussain, and lawyer Nabil Khalid manage to prove that Mehrban is responsible for every other iniquity in the story. In the final episode Mehrban is exposed and ruined; in the end he flees the country for an undisclosed location in Latin America. Sanya and Tariq remain in Pakistan, morally triumphant and in love.

The character of Malik Mehrban encapsulates most of what Pakistanis tend to argue is wrong with their politicians. He is violent, corrupt, and “uneducated,” as well as hypocritical in that he pretends to religious piety, strewing his conversation with Qur’anic phrases while behaving in a brazenly immoral manner. Interestingly, his character seems to belong both to the urban middle classes and to the rural elite. His roots are in the Old City of Lahore, and although he describes himself repeatedly as a businessman who does not come from an old “feudal” political family and must therefore use his money to get ahead, he is also a rural landowner with all the trappings of “feudal” power: land, a big house, police connections, and gunmen who terrorize the local population on his behalf.

The rape that ultimately destroys Mehrban happens in a village outside Lahore. From an urban modernist point of view, rape is often projected onto the “feudal” countryside, where it stands as a metaphor of all that is bad and backward about traditional rural society.^[22] Malik Mehrban is thus not simply an alter ego of the urban industrialist politician Nawaz Sharif. He represents the corruption of the imagined “feudal” tradition as well as the “uneducated” pretensions of the urban middle class. And because Mehrban is “uneducated,” that is, morally subordinate, it is logical that the plot denies him agency by placing his political career under the control of shadowy figures said to rule Pakistan from behind the scenes.