All the shor about Chor

Why does co-Ven’s Chor bring all the trolls to the yard?


Ahmer Naqvi March 03, 2013
Why does co-Ven’s Chor bring all the trolls to the yard?.

Chances are you haven’t seen the new video called Chor of the Pakistani rock band co-Ven. Chances are that the channels you get on your local cable will not be showing, under any circumstances, any of the versions of this video. Chances are you haven’t been using the internet proxy sites needed to access Youtube where the three different cuts of the video reside. Well, allow me to begin by describing it.
The song’s lyrics condemn society’s chors, decrying their greed and depravity. The condemnation is at the heart of the song, which is why its video initially appears to be contradictory, as all three versions are essentially images of the band performing at a mujra, which is being attended by a gaggle of unsavoury, unkempt and unabashed men. While the video doesn’t really compare in terms of scandal levels to an average Bollywood item number, social media doyens have been calling it the ‘most shocking Pakistani pop video’ ever.

Of course, there is no objective metric available for gauging that claim, but I would venture that it doesn’t really come close. Plenty of pop songs have women in more revealing clothes and dance moves (Nirma in Jab Larki Jawan Ho Jati Hai, Mathira’s ‘songs’) and there have been more subversive themes in other videos as well, including one Najam video from the 90s which seemed to show Iraj castrating her rapist.



But I think the Chor video is very important for another reason — it fits into a vein of Pakistani visual culture which for varying reasons is rarely seen anymore. In order to understand this context, let’s zoom out a bit, and start with films.

South Asian films are often referred to as ‘masala’ films, owing to the fact that they involve a mixture of several genres and themes in the same story. The masala film’s central discussion is on right and wrong, and characters are often very simple and easy to identify in terms of whether they are good or bad. In all these features, the South Asian masala film carries on the traditions of the oral narrative — religious epics and folk tales that used to be the primary means of social entertainment and guidance.

The narrative in a masala film inevitably begins with a disruption in the moral universe of the film — someone gets killed/wronged/falls in love with the wrong person etc and the film comes to a conclusion when said disruption is resolved and a new equilibrium is reached. But during this process of moral disruption, something very interesting happens.

As the academic R Vasudevan (1989) writes, “within the apparently clear moral universe of the [South Asian] melodrama there is an ambivalence which addresses the forbidden fears, anxieties and pleasures afforded by the narrative.” In other words, while the disruption in the moral universe occurs, the film/narrative is allowed to show things which would normally be forbidden by the morality the film itself upholds. To give some basic examples, risque songs and forbidden romances are allowed during these disruptions.



Let’s take the 1976 film Society Girl directed by, and starring, Sangeeta. The film shows the ‘Society Girl’ as someone who is deplorable and condemnable, yet in order to make that statement, it also has many scenes showing her dancing in skimpy dresses and delivering salacious lines to her one-night stands.

At first, this strategy seemed curious and hypocritical. Why would a film condemn something that it is showing itself? If what is being shown is condemnable, then surely it would make sense to not show anything like it, rather than going through the effort of finding an actress, dressing her in such clothes, giving her raunchy lines and seductive gazes, and eventually condemning all of it.

However, if we reconsider Vasudevan’s words here, we realise that such contradictory ideas are shown so that they are rejected eventually. In essence, the formula seems to be that you show the contradictory, condemn it and preach conformity.

The best way to understand this formula is through romances in masala films. Almost inevitably, the romance falls foul of the morality inherent in the film. Either the guy-girl are from different socio-economic classes, or their parents/families/clans are at war, or simply, they are conducting pre-marital friendships, which is ‘wrong’ in and of itself. Yet, by the end of the film, with the villains defeated and good triumphant, the couple’s romance is given the blessings of the elders, their union sanctified through the institution of marriage, and hence their relationship goes from being condemnable to an idea of conformity.

This strategy suffered from an intriguing dilemma in the 80s. The financial and moral policing of the film industry, coupled with the runaway success of the gandasa-action-hero genre, led to a change in films. Despite the censors, and the state, becoming more sanctimonious a cursory overview of film songs from the 80s as compared to earlier decades would show that these were becoming far more risque.

Yet at the same time, this increasing raunchiness largely became the sole purview of the heroine/female characters. They were the ones shown to be gyrating in suggestive, and often soaking wet, outfits while the heroes would scowl while stoically standing and resisting the seductions of their lady. While the early 90s saw a brief resurgence of the dancing hero, these soon returned to scowling mode. In essence, a more conservative society seemed to be producing, or demanding, greater contradictions.

During this era, we also saw the ‘golden age’ of television dramas on PTV, and later, NTM/STN. Inevitably, these also displayed morality as a prime motivator for the narrative, employing a strategy which the blogger/critic Umair Javed describes as ‘reflection and reform through awareness.’ As you can tell, this is a variant on the strategy being employed in films, but the subversive, risque elements were toned down, if not removed altogether in favour of more family-friendly depictions and nudge-wink insinuations. Consequently, films started losing a lot of their credibility, and were increasingly seen as vacuous and corrupt, particularly in comparison to TV dramas. Crucially, the nuance required to appreciate the condemn-conform strategy was also being lost, as both filmmakers and their audiences reacted to the prevailing social situation in contrasting ways.

Let’s pause here and return to the co-Ven video once more. Seen in the light of the discussion above, the video can no longer be seen merely as a scandalous mujra. Instead, it can be argued that the dancing women serve to condemn the ‘chors’ shown in the video. While the women are in complete, and stunning, control of their bodies — as well as their audience — the men are totally out of control, barely being able to contain themselves, before descending into outright violence by the end.

So why is this video seen as a desi strip-tease, instead of a commentary condemning chors?

The answer lies in our innate ability to criticise any local art form if it doesn’t subscribe to our perceived cultural values. A Pakistani art form must carry all the imagined morality of the entire nation, thus Pakistani songs can’t be subversive, Pakistani heroines can’t be sexy, a Pakistani stage show can’t be vulgar and Pakistani dramas cannot show Western or Indian values. By lumping our cultural products with these expectations, we break their ability to follow the condemn/conform strategy. Now, they are not allowed to show anything contradictory to perceived cultural values, even if the purpose of showing such things is to condemn them.
This doesn’t mean that our society no longer wants these “forbidden fears, anxieties and pleasures” to be articulated. Instead, we get our fix by turning to Indian films and Turkish dramas, which are desi enough in the fact that they have morality as a central drive for their narratives, and yet are foreign enough not to be laden with the burden of showcasing our moral values.

And therein lies the tragedy of the reception that “Chor” has gotten. Instead of being understood as a clever and traditional (yes, traditional) way of condemning society’s vices, it is seen — by both its supporters and detractors — as a daring attempt to show skin in Talibanistan. In essence, it shows our decreasing intellectual capacity as an audience, where we are no longer able to understand art beyond its most literal interpretations. We’re left hanging between either this “Nangi aurat? Haw haye” or this “Nangi aurat? Hooray, we’re defeating the Taliban!”

Well, here is my humble yet clearly condescending opinion. Those of us obsessed with being titillated or shocked by the video, and those of us seeking to enjoy it as an example of liberal values translating into empty materialism, and those of us who hate/love it as something that pushes our outrage button, are in effect the chors the video refers to.

Published in The Express Tribune, Sunday Magazine, March 3rd, 2013.

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COMMENTS (6)

Omar Yousaf | 11 years ago | Reply

i thoroughly enjoyed the song and the thought behind it...i see it as a highly political satire highlighting moral corruption, deception, greed, lust.... a fairly accurate picture of a certain segment of our society...brilliant job...!

Akshay | 11 years ago | Reply It's a little tame by Indian standards, the average Bollywood movie shows far more skin. However, the song's and video's sentiments are spot on. The expression on the women's faces is serene confidence, rather than the fake faces made in Indian remix videos. Great song too.
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