Every now and then while changing channels on your TVs you guys might notice a lot of similarities in Pakistani drama serials. Every story of Pakistani drama serials give the impression that Pakistani women do little beyond crying. Women are always shown to be hopeless and helpless.
If these stories had cropped up occasionally, they could still have been acceptable but when 100% of these stories revolve around only these tropes then this is a problem. The very first issue with our drama serials is the Askghari abkari binary. Both these characters originated from the novel “Miraat ul Uroos”. Abkari and askghari were sisters, Akbari is the older sister, who is given every possible vice under the sun. she is rude, ill-mannered and fights with everyone, basically she makes her way through the story being a caricature of the shrew. While the younger sister, Askghari, is sweet, kind-hearted, good-natured and talented young girl. This drama was written in the 19th century and it seems that the plays of today haven’t made any progress as they follow the same prototype. In other words, we are still standing at the same ideological point we were nearly two centuries ago. The plays that we are watching now adays still provide only two options to women: helplessness and self-sacrifice or evil and selfishness. This gives the women of our society the impression that if they become the goddess of sacrifice then everything they hope and wish in life will fall into place. The second problem with our dramas is that most of the time woman are always portrayed as woman`s worst enemy. Two women are never portrayed as friends and even if they are their friendship is usually meaningless. Furthermore, women are always portrayed as stupid who can`t handle a meaningful conversation. Its portrayed as if the only thing women can talk about is their household, husbands, kids and fashion. All these issues reflect the poor, lazy and uninspired writing which is very harmful in stereotyping the women of our society and it also reinforces toxic societal values.
Agreed!! Thankyou for speaking about this. The more that media is decentralized, I believe the more perspectives we'll be able to see
Yes sunaina i totally agree with the very problematic portrayal of mental health issues. But as miraal and anaya's rivalry is concerned so how i perceive it is that they tried to depict two different kinds of independent and empowered women and miraals character was there to show that using your power in a wrong way is not strength (as many people nowadays believe so) which was a good message imo
@23100192 I agree that Sabaat was a breathe of fresh air in terms of showing strong women. However, even then, these women were pitted against each other (Anaaya and Miraal), seen to be competing for Hassan's attention. Moreover, the drama was extremely problematic in its false and romanticized portrayal of mental illnesses.
Agreed! Another stereotype that's being increasingly portrayed is how there's always two women fighting over the same man or one women being chased by two men. In such cases, aspects of friendship and family are seen to be thrown out the window- with the only thing being on the character's mind to chase the person they desired.
Also, there's a lot of focus on marriages within our media industry. I have barely come across a drama serial that portrayed a strong lead female character that was fighting for her ambition. Not only TV shows, but even our advertisements reflect the shortcomings of our society and often tend to downplay women. For example, if you were to look at molly foam ads, they solely revolve around marriage and I have always thought that they subtly promote the culture of dowry. We, as a society, genuinely require a TV show which shows a strong female character who's striving to achieve her ambitions (recently saw bhaag beanie bhaag and it was refreshing to analyze the character of Beanie).