By Saima Salman
We are being conditioned to believe that women have been empowered. Movies, television plays and theatres from across the high seas are all infused with kickboxing, body piercing, slick talking, money-making, crime-fighting blondes, brunettes and redheads. To some extent our local themes are also tinted with shades of girl power or at least revolve around women who ultimately make it bigger than in real life.
There are some sensitive writers who are trying to realistically portray the plight of most women. By most women one means the ones that still work from dawn to dusk in fields owned by their men and simultaneously tend to their sons’, husbands’ and fathers’ needs. ‘Karo kari is an age old tradition in the rural areas,’ says an NGO worker. ‘It has only recently gained media attention. The idea should not be to turn such issues into interesting stories but to bring an awareness among the village people and the general public of the details of this heinous practice still widely performed in the rural areas,’ Aftab Iqbal of the NGO Resource Centre states.
Several television plays are written for this purpose and very powerfully portray the theme of karo kari such as the ongoing serial Ghuttan shown on PTV and the recently concluded Taaqub that ran on Prime Entertainment.
Ghuttan has a stellar cast that ensures that the message is sent across. Qazi Wajid, Qaiser Khan, Farhan Ali Agha and Manzoor Murad were supported in their roles by Sanam Iqbal, Mumtaz Kanwal and others. Agha Rafeeq has written the script involving two women. One belonging to a village and the other from the city, but both facing the wrath of the male members of the society, either in the name of revenge or honour. Manzoor Magsi has directed this 13-episode serial.
Taaqub again is a story of a girl wrongly accused and the brother decides to kill the woman without bothering about the evidence. She luckily survives, the Ghuttan sister unfortunately does not.
Ghuttan and Taaqub are not the first tele-ventures with the honour-killing theme. There have been several plays that made the public aware of such a tradition and showed us how women can be brutally murdered in the name of honour even if a mere outsider claimed to have seen them in a compromising situation with a stranger. No proof is needed. Hence a number of killings are carried out on false pretexts just to get revenge on one or the other of the victim’s family’s.
“The woman who is considered kari is buried quietly in a grave out of the precincts of the village in a hole that is covered up and forgotten. The family members of such a female never discuss the subject even among themselves and no Namaz-i-janaza is performed for the deceased,” explained an NGO worker.
When asked whether television had played a substantial role in highlighting this horrendous act, most of those concerned with the issue said that it was not enough. The idea should be to influence the local or regional scriptwriters, directors and producers to make more of these plays in the regional language so that the people who suffer at the hands of this tradition can be reached more effectively. There are legal intricacies and loopholes that the country-folk need to be aware of. There is a need for a means by which the silence of the family members can be broken.
On the other hand, city audiences should react strongly and get the authorities to clamp down on such atrocious incidents. The government should bring awareness among the village people that karo kari is a crime and against their religion as well.