SZABIST colloquium: Musharraf was bad for TV, Zia was good

It is during repression that the burts of creativity emerge.

KARACHI:

One day, dictator Ziaul Haq’s information secretary General Mujibur Rehman called up director Shehzad Khalil demanding an explanation: In his drama, why did the hero choose a church and not a mosque while seeking refuge from a mob out to lynch him?

Such was the oppressive atmosphere in which Pakistani television worked during the 1980s and the decades before. But, this period of repression produced bursts of creativity the likes of which the country has not seen since, argued some experts. They met for a colloquium on television in Pakistan that was organised at the media sciences department of the Shaheed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Institute of Science and Technology on Saturday.

“They found ways to produce the best work amid the worst censorship,” said Agha Peer Muhammad, who worked at PTV and then at ARY One World as a reporter, editor and producer for more than 30 years. This was the time when Pakistani dramas were at their pinnacle.

This was backed by Geo TV editorial director Ghazi Salahuddin, who dwelt on the emergence of television in Pakistan during the early 1960s. He also felt that while censorship limits narrative possibilities, brilliant creative work often emerges at times of the greatest repression. It was the directors produced during the conditions of Zia’s era, who went on to give Pakistani TV its best work well into the 1980s. Some of the best examples are Dhoop Kinaray (1987), Tanhaniyan (1985), Deewarain (1983) and Uncle Urfi (1972), discussed the speakers.

By the time Musharraf rolled around, the landscape was quite different as was PTV. Here Agha Peer Muhammad presented interesting insight on why this military dictator decided to free up TV channels.

“The officers of the Pakistan Army who used to monitor a number of Indian TV channels that eulogized the sacrifices of the Indian army, appeared extremely frustrated by the [work] on PTV,” he recalled from his deployment as a reporter for the state-run TV channel during the Kargil episode. “An officer of the Brigadier rank approached me and vented his frustration by calling me useless and uneducated, someone who could not explain the situation and sacrifices of our army personnel.”

Peer Muhammad said that the state adopted a policy to report Kargil as an adventure of the ‘Kashmiri mujahedeen’ and not focus on the Pakistan Army. PTV had failed to make the right impression. “Later, the establishment decided to open up a number of TV channels so that they could unanimously disseminate information on issues of such national interest,” he maintained.

Later, Mahtab Rashidi, a member of the Hum TV’s board of directors, shared her experiences during Zia’s era and how she was barred from hosting two shows ‘Farozan’ and ‘Apni Baat’ just because she refused to cover her head. “Through the media, Zia wanted to portray his personally idealised image of Pakistani women and how they should look,” she said. She did not appear on TV for the next eight years of Zia’s rule.

Film

Shireen Pasha, who heads the department of film and television at the National College of Arts, presented a short history of Pakistani film, leading up to the inception of television. At the time of independence, such was the mindset that the first minister for communication, Abdur Rab Nishtar, stated: “We should watch movies, though there is no need to make them in our country”. According to Pasha, who told the mosque-church anecdote, as a result, filmmakers here worked independently while focusing on indigenous ideas which ultimately resulted in the production of socially relevant films.

“By 1971, Pakistan had become the fifth largest film-producing country in the world with around 138 titles released in a year,” she said. But then, a sheer neglect to invest in new technology prevented expansion. “This led to collapse of our film industry, while Iran, during the same era, managed to create its identity after heavily spending on cinematic technology.”

Current state

The keynote speaker, renowned actor and media personality Rahat Kazmi, lamented the current state of media programming. “Our media perpetuates obscurantism by reinforcing pseudoscientific ideologies and beliefs,” he said. Apart from reinforcing habits, Kazmi was of the view that the media, against popular perception, cannot bring about any significant change in our attitudes.

According to Ghazi Salahuddin, today the problem is that programming fails to reflect society. In the earlier decades, there was an intellectual class that managed to make such content available for the lowest common denominator in society.

“For this reason, we are unable to deliver the expression that was the hallmark of the 1960s and 1970s,” he said, giving the example of slavishly following an ‘English culture’ in a country which is not able to run a single English language TV channel.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 4^th, 2012.