Female Friendships and Pakistan Cinema

Scholarly literature on gender in Pakistan has traditionally ignored the everyday experience of women, especially the domestic experiences of women within the household.[i] In order to explore this gap, we may have to turn to women’s voices that are present in non-formal archives such as diaries, biographies, memoirs, and even fiction—sources where we find women speaking in non-public spaces (Rouse 1996).[ii]

Following the above discussion, I elaborate on these insights by focusing on the 1960 film Saheli (Female Friend), to open up the question of domestic life and sexuality in Pakistan by turning to an underused archive: cinema. This analysis enables me to open up an argument about women’s representation in popular media in Pakistan, in order to create a different archive of women’s cultural and sexual politics and histories.

The passing of the Family Law Ordinance in 1961 was seen as major victory for women’s rights in Pakistan as it provided some legal curbs against polygyny, expanded the right for women to initiate divorce proceedings and also dealt favorably with inheritance rights for women. This move by General Ayub’s military government may not have been reflected in its cultural politics. The same year the Ordinance was passed, the film Saheli (1960) received five President of Pakistan medals for different categories. The film’s central theme was the friendship between two women and depicts one of them letting her friend marry her own husband as a second wife.

Let me offer a brief plot of the film and then share a reading that questions its more obvious interpretive reception (polygamy). The film was directed by S.M. Yusaf, a veteran of the Bombay film industry who had migrated to Pakistan and tells the story of two female friends, Jamila (Shamim Ara) and Razia (Nayyar Sultana), who grow up together in Rawalpindi with Jamila’s mother and her elder brother.

When Razia is called away to her relatives in Hyderabad, the two friends constantly miss each other and write letters to stay in touch. But these are intercepted by Jamila’s brother who has a soft spot for Razia, yet also has a mistress whom he keeps promising to marry. The friends, hence, are unable to communicate.

Pining for her friend, Jamila fakes an illness and wants the doctor to tell her mother that she should be sent to Razia to recuperate. The doctor, played by Darpan, falls in love with Jamila. She reciprocates his feeling and their marriage date is fixed. On the day of the wedding, the doctor dies in a car accident and Jamila, traumatized, enters a shock-like condition. The family takes her to Karachi to a specialist, renowned for healing psychological problems When Jamila opens her eyes in the Karachi hospital she sees Darpan again, who is now playing the character of the elder brother of the deceased doctor (but looks identical) and is married to Razia.

Jamila, of course, does not know this and she is eager to get married to the doctor. Razia persuades her husband to marry her friend as that is the only way she would recover from her condition.  Jamila gets married without knowing that Darpan is already married to Razia.

Jamila’s brother in the meantime takes the intercepted letters to Darpan and convinces him that his first wife, Razia was actually in love with him (Jamila’s brother).  The letters were of course addressed to Jamila but only through the term of endearment, habib (my love), and were signed by Razia. The doctor is convinced of his first wife’s unfaithfulness and is willing to give her up.

In the meantime, the doctor’s loyal servant tells Jamila that the person she was supposed to marry was dead and that Razia had sacrificed her marriage for Jamila’s happiness. Jamila calls Razia on the phone and hears her shriek. Jamila’s brother, who lusted after Razia, had forcefully entered her house and was threatening to rape her. Jamila arrives at the house with a gun, confronts her brother and shoots him through a broken window-pane.

The movie is actually a flashback that Jamila narrates in front of the judge hearing the murder trial. At the end, Jamila’s brother’s long-suffering mistress comes forward and says that he  was actually killed by her bullet.  She killed him, she says in her testimony, because she could not see him ruin another life. The last shot shows the two friends embracing each other and then riding back to their mutual home in a large convertible, the husband nowhere to be seen.

In her book Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (2007), Sharon Marcus reads Victorian fiction to discuss female relationships in England of that era. She shows the intensity of these relationships in terms of mother-daughter dynamics, in female friendships, in the mutual investment of women in images of femininity and the range of different ways women associated with each other.

These homo-social relationships were deeply imbibed by ideas of altruism, generosity and mutual indebtedness. The book concedes that the power of men, patriarchy and the institution of heterosexual marriage defined lives for these women, but also asserts that we need to understand the strong affective and complex bonds that women had between each other that these forces could not undermine.

Although the film can be read as a melodrama, following Marcus, we can acknowledge that the two women protagonists of this film were part of a male dominated society where they could be seen to perpetuate the institution of heterosexual marriage and even polygamy. But the viewers also witness that the bond between Jamila and Razia is far stronger than what they have with their respective male companions. At the very beginning of the film, the script allows them to address each other as habib and mahboob, both terms of endearment used for lovers in the Urdu language. In fact, when they write to each other they do not address each other by name, but rather with  terms that are normally reserved for relationships between men and women (there is clearly an eroticized message being conveyed, which the censors or the general public did not object to).

Since the strongest bond of affection in the film is among these two women, the separation created by Razia’s departure to Hyderabad results in a creative dilemma that the script needs to resolve. This is akin to the tropes of firaq (separation) and vasl (meeting), so common in Urdu literary writings. In this case, irrespective of the conventional tropes, the reunion of these women could only happen with the removal of one male love interest. Hence, Jamila’s fiancé had to be killed in order for the friends to be together again, without conforming to the demands of two husbands. We may condemn the institution of polygamy, but in this film we may want to see it as cultural metaphor (a bowing to convention or a cinematic sleight of hand) that allows the two who truly desired each other to come together within the patriarchal tradition of taking the second wife. As mentioned above, despite the twists and turns, the relationship between the two women is the one that triumphs and the last scene focuses on them, while the husband is off camera.

The film does develop a triangle of desire between the two females and their mutual husband, but the male character remains superfluous and is used like a prop. In Saheli, the affection between the two women remains paramount and the narrative arc creates an ending that shows them being together. This in itself was a radical decision by the director. He pushes this narrative by subtly bringing attention to how women work, live, care for, provide support to, and also desire other women.

My revisiting (and re-reading) Saheli  may be a small step in opening up a discussion on forms of cultural aesthetics in Pakistan and their representation of what may remain unsaid and silenced in national histories, the history of desire, of sexuality, of domestic violence, of gendered subordination.

[i] Hence the famous title of a book—nods to Lenin’s tract notwithstanding—written by two Pakistani feminists, Khawar Mumtaz and Farida Shaheed, Women of Pakistan: Two Steps Forward, One Step Back? (1987).

[ii] Autobiographies and fiction have been used effectively in the Indian context, especially in historical writings on gender by participants in the subaltern studies project. In the Pakistani context, there is some work by feminist scholars who have engaged with female voices from low-income backgrounds on their experiences during processes of urban conflict or forced migration. See Chaudhry (2004) and Khattak (2001), among others.