Mirāt ul-‘Urūs on the Small Screen: Family TV Dramas and the Making of Pious Publics in Pakistan

Introduction

This article examines how the drama genre in Pakistan participates in a discursive tradition shaping Islamic authority and mediating collective notions of piety. My ethnographic fieldwork in the industry locates dramas as a prominent, yet overlooked feature of religious publics in the Pakistan mediascape. Speaking with figures in the TV industry, there was shared sentiment that productions are driven by corporate interests, conservative in their subject matter, and unlikely to take risks that might jeopardise their advertising revenues. Due to regulatory red lines from the Pakistan Electronic Media Regulatory Authority (PEMRA), ¹ sectarian and other religiously divisive issues are avoided. These regulations, however, have not entirely eliminated religious themes from television dramas, and perhaps more significantly, audiences continue to discuss dramas in religiously informed ways.

The owner and president of a leading television station was quite explicit in illustrating how these stations negotiate constraints on discussing overtly ‘religious issues’. When I interviewed her in Karachi a few weeks before the 2018 national elections, she described how her channel blends entertainment with moral education. She talked about how, with the world opening up, she seeks to address the many issues facing Pakistani society, (‘Dunyā itnī khol gayī hai, ke hamen har subject discuss karnā chāhiye’). She added that you could not discuss religion, as this might stir up social tension (‘Hān kabhī kabhī āpkā religion, yeh aisī chīzen jo āpkā society ko garbar karen, woh beshak nah touch karen’). Most importantly, she added the caveat that for ‘side-chizen’, the things ‘adjacent to religion’, there is a way to portray and discuss those things (‘Leikin unkī ko’ī aise side-chīzen hūn, jo tarīqe se āp batā sakte hain’).

The idea of religious ‘side-chizen’, which I translate and elaborate as ‘religious-adjacent’ issues, highlights the necessarily ambiguous and indirect approaches to discussing religion that define drama production practices. My interviewee’s use of the English term ‘religion’ is a mark of the real risks of committing blasphemy, as a result of which one cannot be specific about Islam. Instead, the dramas formulate religious messages in unmarked and oblique, almost universalist, frames such as duty, family, emotions and class. Her explanation of these as ‘religious-adjacent’ issues, despite her obliqueness, also illustrates how such representations of the pious life are available for uptake by religiously polarised audiences and can facilitate debates on proper and improper depictions of religious content.

This television executive referred to familial tensions as the motivating dramatic force for the narratives, a consistently entertaining element of drama across Pakistani television’s history. The melodramatic narrative of clever plot twists, which weave the saas–bahu (mother-in-law/daughter-in-law) relationship, the trope of the mazlum aurat (downtrodden woman), and tense conjugal relations are what entertains and what sells. For her, social and religious issues must be woven into these storylines. Careful attention is paid to the way a drama might capture what she described as ‘realistic’ depictions of religious concerns that are constrained by social and state pressures. There are myriad disjunctures between, on the one hand, the privileging of Pakistani dramas’ realist aesthetic and, on the other, a reluctance to address religious topics head-on in dramas. Shuchi Kothari (2005) found a similar dynamic in her study of PTV dramas from the 1980s and 1990s, where producers and writers carefully negotiated and, at times, subverted state censors.

This article uses three television adaptations of the narrative of Mirāt ul-‘Urūs to argue that the depictions of piety in Pakistani television dramas are an overlooked part of how religious publics come into being and are maintained. While sectarian movements, practices of personal piety, and state-led Islamisation efforts have all received scholarly attention, this article addresses how entertainment media, including the emergence of privatised corporate channels, are potent vectors for making piety public. In dramas, piety emerges as a dominant and collectively shared aspirational value. The mediatisation of piety is an important element for advancing our understanding of public religiosity in Pakistan.

The original story Mirāt ul-‘Urūs, written in 1869 by Deputy Nazir Ahmad, has received sustained attention in the study of Urdu literature and more recent interest from scholars of gender, education and childhood. These scholarly interests have begun to consider the role of television adaptations in the context of reading and viewing publics, as well as in reconfiguring the transmission of particular aspirations for girls’ education. Shenila Khoja-Moolji’s work (Khoja-Moolji, 2018) has provided an extensive analysis of the narrative elements of Akbari Asghari (2011) and Miraat-ul-Uroos (2012), focussing on the role of these dramas in shaping specific kinds of femininity and the ethical formation of young women. I build on this work, examining the recent versions of Mirāt ul-‘Urūs alongside the earlier PTV adaptation to offer a more expansive view that finds ‘religious-adjacent’ issues are producing new kinds of authoritative discourses for consumption in the wider Pakistani public. I draw upon the variety of familial relations in Pakistani dramas as an alternative mode for thinking about ethical formation, one that extends beyond young women and is actively contested, negotiated and upheld by audiences.

Adaptations of Mirāt ul-‘Urūs across different media forms and over three centuries help us to better understand the dialogical roles played by audiences and the culture industry in shaping religious discourse in the public sphere. Using a media history approach for studying these three televisual adaptations in the context of Nazir Ahmad’s original work, ² I discuss family tensions and duty as central concerns in the drama genre and relate these to ‘religious-adjacent’ issues. Finally, I elaborate upon the importance of television adaptations of Mirāt ul-‘Urūs, and dramas more generally, examining the discourses that emerge within intermedial contexts and how the current digital moment reshapes audience engagement with the televisual form. The article examines these televisual adaptations to describe the changing place of dramas in literary, socio-religious and digital spheres. Mirāt ul-‘Urūs has been both foundational for and emblematic of how narrative in the Urdu drama genre makes use of family – particularly tensions between kin relations – as the locus for attempting to resolve systemic social and political concerns. In the online responses to these dramas, I observe a keen recognition on the part of audiences (both male and female) of the ethical discourse that undergirds today’s dramas. Audiences comment on representations of piety – and depictions of what it means to be a good Muslim – in blog reviews, in YouTube comment sections, on Facebook and on many other online platforms. The serialised form of Pakistani dramas allows for rich engagement with content on digital forums such as fan sites and social media. The interplay between audience engagements and the industry’s deliberate attempts to leave ‘religion’ mostly unmarked yields a hegemonic Sunni discourse and mediatises a particular kind of piety. ¹

Approaches to a Media History of Mirāt ul-‘Urūs

To approach the complexities of the dramas’ genealogies, I consider the ongoing social impact of Mirāt ul-‘Urūs from its publication in 1869 to the present. Tracing the numerous ways that the nineteenth-century text Mirāt ul-‘Urūs (the bride’s mirror) is important in understanding the genealogy of writing, speaking and representing piety in television dramas, I seek to comprehend the industry’s present successes by following one narrative across three distinct time periods. The article makes no attempt to catalogue the intricacies of each narrative, nor to scrutinise distinctions between them. Khoja-Moolji (2018) has provided an excellent summary of the two most recent adaptations (Figure 1), and the 1989 PTV version strives to remain faithful to Nazir Ahmad’s plot. Rather, I focus on the recurrent incorporation of tensions over familial duties as a key ‘religious-adjacent’ theme.

In the decades immediately following the novel’s publication, most authors (nearly all male) drew inspiration from Nazir Ahmad in writing literature for women. In the period that followed, especially the mid-twentieth century, the influence of the Akbari Asghari narrative remained socially relevant but its literary impact was increasingly obscured by other writers (namely, ‘the progressives’). I have not attempted a comprehensive account of the story’s influence, but it is clear that the tropic elements of characters and the values that Nazir Ahmad imbued in the sharif Muslim family were readily incorporated into a lexicon for articulating ideals of femininity, piety, middle-class values and education in this period. ²

The second period, the 1980s, was an important decade in Pakistani television’s history. In my fieldwork, when interlocutors express nostalgia for ‘the old dramas’, they frequently reference the works of Haseena Moin, Nurul Huda Shah and their contemporaries. PTV’s version of Mirāt ul-‘Urūs is not usually among the dramas first invoked, though comments in the YouTube comment section of the drama demonstrate audiences’ appreciation of its realistic depiction of the morality and respectability of bygone years, when the social shifts resulting from Zia ul-Haq’s control over aspects of the state apparatus were apparent. Growing sectarian Islamisation signalled a well-documented reversal of women’s rights. It is perhaps not surprising that, in the later years of Zia’s rule, PTV shifted to this canonical narrative, one which is densely infused with the ethics and etiquette of a period before ‘corrupting’ influences arose. Perhaps the heteroglossic narrative of Mirāt ul-‘Urūs offered a careful circumvention of the repressiveness of state-led Islamisation and called for a harkening back to alternative representations of piety and respectability, as Shuchi Kothari (2005) highlights in her work.

In the third moment, the 2010s decade, the sustained success of several major entertainment channels has paved the way for many smaller channels. Production houses, editing teams, set rentals, sound technicians, audience metering companies measuring target rating point (TRP) of dramas and innumerable other media-making services, particularly in Karachi, extend well beyond the recognisable names of major broadcasting companies. Increased educational and career opportunities have helped the industry to professionalise and expand. The influx of creative talent, accessible technologies and digital platforms has led to a surge in web series content and the proliferation of blogsites, YouTube channels, Facebook fan pages and innumerable other local or unofficial viewing and interactive platforms. ⁵

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Figure 1.

Source: The author.

The impact of Mirāt ul-‘Urūs in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has received considerable interest from scholars of Urdu literature and historians of reformist Islam in colonial North India. These scholars have trained their focus on ideas of sharif respectability (Naim, 1984), idealised notions of femininity (Lal, 2008), women’s education (Khoja-Moolji, 2018), girlhood (Lal, 2013) and morally inflected emotions (Pernau, 2014). Much less attention has been paid to the television dramas of the 1980s (though cf. Kothari, 2005; Suleman, 1990), despite sustained attention to women’s issues and Islamisation taking place during that period. I extend Khoja-Moolji’s work on the two recent adaptations and Kothari’s work on PTV dramas, in particular, to think more centrally about the religious address of dramas and to reconsider the place of piety today as the narrative is further mediatised and participates in making pious publics that extend beyond the private sphere of women.

My own approach strongly emphasises form and the shifting intermedial relations that emerge around television dramas. The serialisation of today’s dramas is intimately linked to the serialised print digest; ⁶ many of today’s dramas, including the HumTV remake Akbari Asghari (2012), were originally published in the digest form. The digests have their own roots in the serialisation of early Urdu prose and women’s journals published by figures like Nazir Ahmad’s son Bashiruddin and nephew Rashid ul-Khairi. Serialisation in both literary and televisual forms allows for iterative engagements of reading and viewing publics. Today, digital mediations of the dramas – blogs, fan websites, Facebook groups, Youtube channels, etc. – contextualise the shows, often in sync with weekly broadcasts. This is an exciting realm for future work that might examine how these responses actively contribute to shaping future episodes, new dramas, fan fiction, web content and other digital visual media.

Nazir Ahmad’s Groundbreaking Work

Mirāt ul-‘Urūs, was originally written as a latīf qissah, or pleasing story, in Urdu by Nazir Ahmad (1830–1912) in 1869. It has been extensively discussed as the first Urdu novel (Asaduddin, 2001; Dubrow, 2018; Naim, 1984; Oesterheld, 2001; Suhrawardy, 1945). When it was published, Mirāt ul-‘Urūs addressed the lack of educational opportunities for Muslim women and expanded on the reformist aims of the Aligarh Movement. The story conveyed these aims through a fictitious narrative about two sisters, one of whom has benefited from education in her home and the other who has eschewed it. Nazir Ahmad wrote this in response to the colonial government’s announced competition for the ‘production of useful works in the vernacular’, ⁷ and it was included in colonial school syllabi. To this day the book remains part of the Urdu literature curriculum in Pakistan. The themes and title, which translates as ‘Mirror for Brides,’ draw from the akhlaq (ethics) genre known as the Persianate Mirror for Princes. Nazir Ahmad offered this mirat to his daughters instead and his female protagonists signalled a partial rupture within the existing tradition.

The story itself revolves around the married lives of two sisters, Akbari and Asghari, both recently married. Asghari, the younger, is well-equipped to help run her new household; Akbari is, conversely, totally unprepared for her new life. She makes grave mistakes, at immense cost to herself and her new family, both financially and in terms of the norms of ‘respectability’. She forces her husband away from the joint family, only to face financial ruin. She is disrespectful to elders of her own family and to her in-laws. With no attempt to hide his didactic intent, Nazir Ahmad crafts Asghari as a bearer of virtue, piety and devotion, and of great help to her own family and her husband’s. In depicting her successes, the author suggests that, with humility, deference toward elders and a good education, a young sharif woman will succeed in life.

Asghari initiates substantial economic and structural change within her family. On the basis of the merits of a younger protégé’s adab, or moral comportment, she secures the young girl’s marriage into a respected family of better class standing. Asghari leaves home to join her husband on appointment in the colonial government in Lahore, only to find that he has fallen into bad habits with both his piety and his financial affairs. Asghari, in many ways, controls the family estate and guides it morally, towering above her male peers. While she does so in a respectable fashion, she transcends the traditional role of women in her milieu. Her character both defines and defies the trope of the sharif woman of her day. This towering position can be read in opposing ways (as I suggest below with regard to the 1980s adaptation during Zia’s rule). On one hand, the transgressions enacted by Asghari – leaving home alone to go to Lahore to set her husband onto a straight path, educating young women in her community, and earning money (and cultural capital) that restores her immediate and affinal family’s position – are agentive and transform her position in the family. On the other hand, her actions can be (and mostly have been) interpreted as reinscribing the patriarchal values of her time.

By the 1930s, there was a robust women’s literary culture with widely circulating women’s magazines, educational institutions and growing literacy. Shaista Ikramullah Suhrawardy, in her Critical Survey of the Development of the Urdu Novel and Short Story, notes that during her lifetime Mirāt ul-‘Urūs’ ‘popularity remains unabated with each succeeding generation’ (Suhrawardy, 1945, p. 41). She writes:

So real and lifelike he succeeded in making them that Akbari and Asghari are not regarded by the Urdu reading public as ‘characters’ in a book, but as personal acquaintances whom they have met, and know. How often are the various situations and phrases from Mirāt ul-‘Urūs and Banāt un-Nash quoted! How many mothers have smiled indulgently at their daughters’ boastfulness and told them not to be a Husn Ara and how often their petulant boasts and naughtiness been likened to Akbari’s! (Suhrawardy, 1945, p. 48)

Suhrawardy’s appraisal also demonstrates the extent to which opinions about the position of women had changed. She notes that, ‘Akbari’s “character” can take on a new aspect and be doubly interesting when looked upon from the modern point of view. When the book was written, her type of girl was not popular’ (Suhrawardy, 1945, p. 48). By the 1940s, however, Akbari, ‘is a more lovable person and has a warmer heart than Asg[h]ari’ (Suhrawardy, 1945, p. 49). Recent comments on the YouTube version of 1989 PTV adaptation offer similar sentiments, albeit in an admonishing tone, claiming that ‘women of today’ are all like Akbari. ⁸ Suhrawardy and the online commentary on the current drama adaptations demonstrate how this particular narrative has been regularly adopted in religiously inflected discussions about respectable behaviours.

Reproducing Mirāt ul-‘Urūs

The three televisual adaptations of Ahmad’s classic offer an insightful case for considering how religious publics emerge from circulating television dramas. The narrative of Mirāt ul-‘Urūs had an extensive social life across the early 20th century and it has gained new energy going into the 21st century via the success of these television dramas. C.M. Naim notes that, even before the first television adaptation, ‘the main motif of two sisters, one good and the other bad, has been used in innumerable novels and stories aimed at the female audience’ (Naim, 1984, p. 301). With the arrival of television, a new visual media further adapted the novel’s tropes, of which the 1989 PTV serial was the first. Mirāt ul-‘Urūs was remade in 2011 on HumTV, and on GeoTV in 2012. The three versions differ considerably. The PTV adaptation is the most faithful to the original text. However, it ran for only five episodes, far fewer than many other dramas of that period. Although 1980s dramas have seen a resurgence in the last decade, the PTV Mirat ul Uroos has attracted little renewed interest in comparison with others such as Tanhaiyaan (1985) or Dhoop Kinare (1987). The PTV Mirat ul Uroos (Figure 2) has also been overlooked in online musings that reintroduce old dramas (for example, Ahmed, 2015). Yet its YouTube views are still considerable; Episode 1, uploaded two years ago by Shalimar Recording, has had nearly 400,000 views and 175 comments at the time of writing.

The PTV version opens with the narrator describing Nazir Ahmad’s religious education, his familiarity with how women speak, and his ability to capture the mood of sharif families in North India in the wake of the Indian Rebellion of 1857. The short opening narration stresses Ahmad’s formal training at the Aurangabadi Mosque in Delhi, his erudition, and his eventual marriage to his Maulvi’s granddaughter. It also emphasises his realistic capturing of begamati zuban, or women’s language, which the narrator suggests resulted from Ahmad’s encounter with women when he used to run errands to and from the mosque. The drama is a period piece featuring life in 1869 as imagined by the PTV producers more than a century later. The dialogue and narration frequently draw directly from Ahmad’s text.

In contrast, the 2011 HumTV production Akbari Asghari is a romantic comedy. The central premise is that sisters Becky (Akbari) and Sara (Asghari) return to Pakistan from abroad to marry their cousins Akbar and Asghar. A central element of the plot involves Akbar’s religiosity and blind faith in a local pir, who is eventually exposed as a fraud. Though Sara’s initial warnings about the pir go unheeded, eventually the couple finds common ground in their religious outlook. Finally, the 2012 GeoTV remake returns to the original name, Miraat-ul-Uroos, but carries a twist of its own. Akbari and Asghari are grandmothers, and the story centres around their grandchildren. Akbari has spoiled her granddaughter, who marries Asghari’s grandson, the primary source of financial stability for his family. She takes him away from the family to live on their own outside of the joint family, causing distress and financial hardship for the young man’s family. Akbari’s other granddaughter is married to Asghari’s second grandson whose struggle to keep his job becomes another major plot device.

Shenila Khoja-Moolji’s study on young women’s education attends to how these adaptations help reproduce middle classness and a private form of piety. Khoja-Moolji argues that the underlying didactic narrative is well-adapted to this task, ‘Both Miraat-ul-Uroos (2012) and Akbari Asghari (2011) outline the performances–consumption habits, relations with members of the opposite sex as well as other social classes, orientation to waged work, and engagement with the patriarchal family – that can help secure the economic and cultural reproduction of middle classness’ (Khoja-Moolji, 2018, p. 144). Her emphasis on middle classness, religion and family in these narratives is a recurring theme in recent ethnographic work on Pakistan more generally, which includes participation in religious movements (Ahmad, 2009; Iqtidar, 2011), contestations over sacred space (Hull, 2012, Khan, 2012), and consumption and other everyday practices of religiously minded families (Maqsood, 2017). Linking the themes of Mirāt ul-‘Urūs to the changing ways that the narrative circulates (as Khoja-Moolji does for the two recent adaptations) helps us understand how piety is mediatised and rendered a public form of religion. The focus on this mediatisation of the text through television dramas contributes new insights on the spread of shared repertoires of middle-class ethics, beyond normatively public forms of religious life, like politics or education.

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Figure 2.

Source: Penn Libraries.

Family Dramas, Kin Relations and Islamic Authority

While the saas–bahu relationship is usually described as being the central element of Pakistani dramas’ melodramatic realism, writers and producers motivate the story worlds of Pakistani dramas through a much greater variety of relationships in conjugal and affinal families. I argue that duty – and especially familial duty – is the ‘religious-adjacent’ category that dominates the drama form. Duty also possesses its own rich literature in the Islamic tradition evident in the many manuals around how to live an ethical life (e.g., Thanvi’s Bihishti Zevar discussed below, see Metcalf & Thanvi, 1990). The centrality of duty in Pakistani dramas draws attention to the potential challenges to religious authority afforded by fictive narratives. I shift my attention to the wider category of family – and duties between kin – because the engagement with the category of familial duty in the dramas felicitously mirrors central preoccupations of Islamic jurists (the ‘ulama). In particular, I highlight examples of financial duties within the family, duties around marriage customs, and shared responsibilities around modesty, all of which emerge from these dramas and audience engagement with these adaptations.

Following scholars such as Laura Mulvey (1977) and, in the South Asian context, Rosie Thomas (1989), Patricia White has argued, writing of Lebanese cinema, that, ‘In the time-honoured traditions of film melodrama, political and social conflicts are displaced onto such personal concerns and resolved (or not) emotionally rather than systemically’ (White, 2015, p. 104). In Pakistani dramas, depictions of family strife help reveal the growing collective valorisations of piety and the religious challenges shaping national identities since the 1980s. What kind of readings of drama narratives are possible if we consider ways that the social outcomes of state-led Islamisation are depicted, grappled with, and sometimes subverted, through the tropes of familial discord in drama narratives? Drawing from interviews across the drama industry and building on Purnima Mankekar’s work on Indian television (Mankekar, 1999, p. 74), my research sees the Pakistani family still as both synecdoche for the nation and an important ‘viewing unit’ used to interpolate audiences.

Women have been the central focus for nearly all scholarly attention afforded to Mirāt ul-‘Urūs and to Urdu dramas. Dramas, however, appeal to wider audiences than just women. While Shuchi Kothari (2005) detailed the zenana as the domestic reception space of 1980s and 1990s dramas, as she notes, watching them was also a family event. In my interviews, older drama lovers described to me how the streets of Karachi would empty when new episodes were shown. Today too, women are perhaps the core target audience for dramas’ advertising revenue, but dramas appeal to and engage men too. A growing variety of subjects is being discussed through today’s dramas. This diversifying audience is evidenced in my discussions with both men and women in Karachi and in commentary on online streaming platforms.

The dramas lay a heavy emphasis on the problems women face in everyday life, yet these are often contextualised within wider familial tensions. Take, for example, the ‘good’ wife in Miraat-ul-Uroos (2012), who finds it necessary to give tuitions to make extra money for her joint family. At the end of Episode 23, her husband comes home, weary from a day at work with a mediocre wage, mentioning that he wants to quit. Aima snaps back, ‘I’m prepared to work beside you, but not to take on your duties (zimadari)’. While Khoja-Moolji reads this as maintaining middle-class patriarchal family structures, I read the repeated focus on zimadari in family life as an exemplary kind of ‘religious-adjacent’ issue, where social structures, including patriarchy, are negotiated and contested. In another example, in the YouTube comments of Episode 5 of Mirat ul Uroos (PTV), two users, ‘Chocolate Cake’ and ‘Wajid Khan’, exchange their thoughts on representations of duties between the daughter-in-law and father-in-law. Chocolate Cake writes, ‘Why is she doing parda from her father in law… so many cultural differences that clash with Islam…’ Wajid Khan links to a talk (also on YouTube) given by a prominent religious leader, Tariq Masood. ⁹ Chocolate Cake responds stating, ‘the Mufti says that if the father-in-law is young, then it’s advised (ihtiat) to observe pardah, though not obligatory (wajib). In this drama, the father-in-law is old… the Mufti says that he can look upon his daughter-in-law, but it must be as viewing his daughter’. ¹⁰ Here, duty is incumbent on both participants in the affinal family.

As with the 1869 novel, which Nazir Ahmad often said was equally important reading for men, today’s dramas are full of stories that revolve around how duties are negotiated within families. Grappling with a variety of tensions that can emerge between kin relations, drama serials emphasise the correct ways to reproduce the family structure through resolving conflicts that mirror the pressing challenges facing the wider social body. When drama narratives stray from the audiences’ own beliefs, then debates over and references to more canonical versions of authority are introduced. In Pakistan today, this of course encompasses a vibrant debate about Islam and the place of religion in society. When we recognise the preservation of middle-class values enacted through familial duties as the central element of Pakistani dramas, we can unambiguously link the entertainment media’s role in shaping public religiosity to the changing facets of Islam in Pakistan. Attention to the way piety is performed and the circulation of tokens of piety in dramas sheds new light on how a growing Pakistani middle class reflexively understands collective ideas about Islam and religious subjectivity.

Episode 21 of Miraat-ul-Uroos (2012) sees the brothers’ younger sister’s wedding arrangements falling apart over their family’s failure to provide a car for the couple following the religiously sanctioned marriage, the nikkah having already been completed. Their grandmother Asghari intervenes with an admonishment, stating ‘the worst thing in God’s eyes is divorce’. It is a small remark, but one of dozens similar that pepper the narrative’s dialogues. The threat of divorce dominates the following episodes, straining the family until the young woman’s marriage is broken up and she is eventually brought together with Akbari’s grandson. This resolution helps rectify another structuring tension in the later episodes. Akbari’s grandson is to be engaged to his cousin living in the US. Though he studies in the US, he wants to return to Pakistan out of a sense of duty (zimadari) to look after his parents. Across the two narrative arcs, which intersect in their resolution, we see education, marriage etiquette, duties to affinal kin, patriotism, religion and duty to one’s parents converging. Questions around dowry, engagement, marriage, marital obligations, divorce and obligations between parents and children are present across each of the adaptations; all are subjects governed by Islamic norms and law.

The majority of my interviews with writers and producers highlight how, steering clear of PEMRA infractions, they couch tension between couples as a function of class and consumption, evident in these relationships, instead of choosing to focus on issues like sectarian difference or Muslim and non-Muslim relationships. Producers of dramas thus consciously do not shape the subject of their works around subjects of interest to the ‘ulama. In fact, they often eschew the category ‘religion’ as a theme entirely, for particular forms of religiosity (politics, religious education, sectarianism, etc.) that they associate with the term are too contentious for consumption. Family duty emerges as an acceptable site for exploring social conditions that do animate tensions for a pious middle class.

While religion is a consistent category at work in scholarship on Mirāt ul-‘Urūs, from Naim on adab (1984) to Khoja-Moolji on women’s education, Islamic authority is largely a peripheral part of this. Part of what shapes the nature of these engagements is that Ahmad himself understood the need to meld education, religion and entertainment. In the introduction to Mirāt ul-‘Urūs, he writes, ‘I became convinced that purely religious subjects of study are not suited to the capacities of children, and that the literature to which my children’s attention was restricted had the effect of depressing their spirits, of checking their natural instincts, and of blunting their intelligence’ (Ahmad, Ward & Pritchett, 2001, p. 2). ‘Religious-adjacent’ articulates the nearly identical approach of television dramas to bringing about education through forms of entertainment. Khoja-Moolji (2018, p. 124) calls these features of the Mirāt ul-‘Urūs narrative and its extension into television, ‘public pedagogies’. Mirāt ul-‘Urūs and its adaptations can be viewed as a kind of piety manual, one that situates moral life in relatable scenes that convey their own religious authority. Religion is rendered less didactic and more embodied, yet these religious ‘side-chizen’ are efficacious in shaping ideas about piety and ethical life.

Ali Ashraf Thanvi’s banning of Mirāt ul-‘Urūs in his 1905 Bihishti Zevar seems to have foreclosed the possibility that scholars might read Mirāt ul-‘Urūs as an authoritative religious text. As Barbara Metcalf argues, the women of Mirāt ul-‘Urūs ‘go beyond the bounds of being competent and responsible to become more independent than their received domestic role comfortably allows’; for Thanvi, Nazir Aḥmad’s story ‘went too far in the direction of the cosmopolitan, at the risk of what was seen as the normative cultural core’ (Metcalf & Thanvi, 1990, p. 326). Thus, despite its popularity and Asghari’s fictional embodiment of Thanvi’s characterization of ideal feminine piety, he listed it among books not permissible to read. C.M. Naim offers several reasons why this may be: that Thanvi was against zenana education and women’s literature; that the women in Ahmad’s narratives, ‘tower above the men around them’; and that Ahmad often poked fun at Maulvis in his works (Naim, 1984, p. 308). Naim’s essay on moral authority for nineteenth-century Urdu-reading publics argues that Mirāt ul-‘Urūs put forward an ‘Islamic version of the Protestant ethic of success’ that both colonial rulers and local elites sought in the 19th century (Naim, 1984, p. 314).

For Ahmad, the importance of religious practices is of primary importance in the development of Asghari’s adab, or etiquette. Akbari’s lack of practical skills is as much a product of her shirking religious duties as they are of her grandmother’s coddling. In an interview posted on the website dramapakistani.net, the writer of Akbari Asghari (2011) (Figure 3), Faiza Iftikhar, expresses her disdain for the mazlum aurat trope in dramas by pushing back against this trope, ‘did she [Akbari] do something against religion or morality? No, she was just a little careless and lazy’ (Sheeba, 2014). Iftikhar is clearly trying to recover the good in Akbari and trouble perceptions that Asghari is a unidimensional, good middle-class Muslim girl. Iftikhar relegates Becky’s (i.e., Akbari) shortcomings to the secular domain, without imposing any ‘antireligious’ actions on her character.

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Figure 3.

Source: IMDB.

As Khoja-Moolji notes in her chapter on the contemporary Mirāt ul-‘Urūs dramas, there is ‘a simultaneous mocking of some categories of ‘religious’ – those who are extremists, Taliban, fundamentalist, or charlatans – and an effort to reclaim religion from dominant meanings that reduce it to a political ideology by signalling it to be a site of faith’ (Khoja-Moolji, 2018, p. 143). Gesturing to Sara’s (i.e., Asghari’s) piety, Khoja-Moolji writes, ‘Ideal performances of religion, according to Akbari Asghari (2011), entail keeping religion private; religion is to inform ethical formation and not public performances’ (Khoja-Moolji, 2018, p. 142). The drama contrasts this private religion with Akbar, who is strongly marked as outwardly religious due to his linguistic register, his wardrobe and behaviours. These differences are remarked upon by a drama blogger who writes:

I loved this drama mainly for the reason because Akbar and Asghari’s characters went to show that how exactly religious matters can be handled. Akbar thought he was just doing things right – which he undoubtedly was, but just the little input from Asghari made him tackle his religious side logically as well. There were some amazing dialogues that targeted the mindset and notions of people, which they might have towards someone who is trying hard to adapt the religious way of life. No one could’ve ever thought that a broad minded girl like Asghari could actually have a religious side to her as well… (Mirza, ‘Drama of The Week – Akbari Asghari!’, 2014)

Thus, how religious matters are represented is an important source of pleasure and popularity for audiences. Khoja-Moolji’s reading of ‘muted religiosity’ (Khoja-Moolji, 2018, p. 140) to explain the private cultivation of piety encouraged in these narratives falls short of capturing the ways in which representations of Islam circulate in television dramas and how audiences engage with these narratives, especially through digital platforms. Dramas that sidestep ‘religion’ for ‘religious-adjacent’ themes mediatise an impactful discourse of personal piety for an increasingly pious and technologised public. Mirāt ul-‘Urūs adaptations exist among hundreds of other serialised narratives. Yet, given the three adaptations and the historical dimension of the narrative’s nineteenth-century emergence in print media, these offer a convincing case study for tracking shifting ways that fictive narratives enact religious authority.

Margrit Pernau, in her discussion of piety as emotion (Pernau, 2014), writes, ‘If the story of Asghari, The Bride’s Mirror, is still read by some, it no longer holds the power to shape a community’s notions of piety and pious emotions. Texts emphasising religious and patriotic piety are certainly still written, but they are no longer mainstream. They neither become bestsellers, nor are awarded book prizes’ (Pernau, 2014, p. 71). This may be accurate for the Indian literary field; however, the persistence of Mirāt ul-‘Urūs and its popularity in remediated televisual form points towards a more complex genealogy for piety in contemporary Pakistan that differs from Pernau’s account. ¹¹ Specifically, these dramas’ focus on familial and everyday ‘religious-adjacent’ negotiations advance a normatively Sunni notion of piety that increasingly dominates public discourse. In Pakistan, with television dramas and associated print and digital media in mind, we can push back against Pernau’s claim that ‘texts emphasising religious piety are no longer mainstream,’ since they appear at the very heart of the drama discourse and drive their intense popularity.

My aim has been to show how religiosity in Mirāt ul-‘Urūs is anything but muted if we consider dramas as an important space for producing Islamic authority through unmarked ‘religious-adjacent’ attention to duty, family and domestic issues. Drama narratives address these subjects through portrayals of families’ attempts to resolve wider social issues, which are embedded in the broad and shifting tradition of public contestations of Islamic authority. While Naim’s (1984) description of the ‘protestant ethic’ may remain constitutive of the internal discourse of these dramas, the circulation and contested uptake of this discourse point to how publics are animated by ‘religious-adjacent’ themes. The work of the active audience, which transcends the diegetic space, unmutes the piety contained within these dramas.

Televisual Form

Scholarly debates about the formation of religious publics in the areas of what is today North India and Pakistan have mostly focused on the development of print media practices in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The impact of emergent print technologies on the transmission of Islamic knowledge has been characterised as either an attack on traditional forms of transmission or a democratisation of Islamic authority, as the ‘ulama dealt with the introduction of these new technologies to refigure their place alongside changing modes of knowledge transmission (Ingram, 2014; Zaman, 1999). In conceiving of religious publics in these ways, such studies have understandably privileged the place of the ‘ulama in shaping religious knowledge. This attention to discourse as enacted through print culture has emphasised the relationships between elite producers of discourse, new media forms and their readerships. Yet this attention to print has been encumbered, methodologically, with how to address processes through which individuals participate in the production of publics and how they continually ratify these broad social domains by participating in hegemonic discourses. As part of popular culture, drama narratives are articulated in a public sphere with a rich and contested history of traditional authority coming into contact with new, popular and mediated forms of knowledge transmission. In treating the themes in Mirāt ul-‘Urūs adaptations as emblematic of the industry, we see a convergence between the dramas’ ‘religious-adjacent’ elements and some of the ‘ulama’s jurisprudential preoccupations.

Each of the three televised versions were themselves published in print form, demonstrating the continued importance and intermingling of media formats in the world of Pakistani dramas. The PTV screenplay for Mirāt ul-‘Urūs (1989) was published by Professor Haq Nawaz in the same year as his short novella. Umera Ahmed published her 800-page screenplay for the 30-episode production. For Akbari Asghari, Faiza Iftikhar readapted her 30-page story previously published in the Urdu digest Shu‘a. While pulp fiction digests in Pakistan have long offered an intimate view of everyday life for middle- and lower middle-class women (Ali, 2004), drama viewers build on existing reading practices that help negotiate shifting cultural politics and social realities. These mutually imbricated media offer close representations of actual lived experiences, coping strategies and imaginative realities that help negotiate complex social changes.

Jennifer Dubrow (2018) also notes these continued links across the print and televisual serial form. In her study of nineteenth-century Urdu cosmopolitanism, she links the erstwhile author–reader relationship to the affordances of today’s digital world:

The Pakistani serials perpetuate certain features of the late nineteenth-century Urdu cosmopolis. The newness of the digital technology produces a moment that in one way mimics the experimentation, interaction and cosmopolitanism of the late nineteenth century Urdu cosmopolis… there is vibrant discussion on online forums dedicated to Pakistani television dramas. (Dubrow, 2018 p. 114)

My ethnographic work also reveals something similar to what Dubrow observed for the nineteenth century, notably that, ‘authors used serialised formats to try out new material with readers before committing to an entire work’ (Dubrow, 2017, p. 405). As my interviews and observations in the industry demonstrate, producers of dramas in the televisual form are increasingly in conversation with their audience in the digital spaces for sharing and engaging with content, and seek feedback (sometime as rudimentary as Facebook ‘likes’) as they move forward with productions. The successive adaptations of Mirāt ul-‘Urūs across different media forms offer a glimpse at how new media reinterpret the media that came before (Bolter & Grusin, 2000) and are situated in fields of media technological networks and media histories, offering genealogies not only of the discourse contained within the drama, but also of genre and the ways people engage religion and technology in intersecting ways.

Conclusion

There is a general consensus that ‘realism’ is at the heart of the Pakistani television industry’s aesthetic in its serial drama production. Iftikhar Dadi, writing recently on Pakistani film, has noted that the melodramatic realism of 1960s’ postcolonial modernist social cinema ‘“migrated” to popular TV serial format’ in the early 1970s (Dadi, 2016, p. 90). The realist aesthetic, shaped by tropes of family tensions that dominate the industry’s narratives, is a purposeful attempt to address questions of religion in everyday, often indirect ways. The small body of Mirāt ul-‘Urūs television adaptations discussed here is emblematic of a complex field of discourse about the family as one dominant site of ‘religious-adjacent’ debates in the Pakistani mediascape. This concept, which emerges from my fieldwork, is generative for thinking about the industry’s creative approach to regulatory red lines and realistic portrayals of the everyday, including religious life. The diversity of how themes across dramas, periods and broadcasters link to this concept needs a more comprehensive study. The trend within the industry over the last five years has been to focus on a widening range of social issues, including marital rape, sexual assault, child sex trafficking, class conflict, prostitution, inheritance, feudal politics, political corruption and honour killings (see Malik in this issue). Many of these new topics also converge with issues that might fall within the purview of religious scholars. Writers I have spoken with hinted that their work is animated by the perception that traditional religious authorities are not addressing these complex social issues. Dramas are setting out to tackle these and by doing so create further contestations over religious authority.

Through a history of intermedial engagements, the preservation of the serialised form, and the thematic of the ‘religious-adjacent’, this article traces the persistence of one narrative as emblematic of dramas in general. Interactions between print and broadcast media are now enhanced and altered by online fan pages, social-media platforms and data-collecting audience metering devices. I point to these links because the interactions facilitated by media and their intermedial genealogies are central to understanding the role of dramas in the making of pious publics in the last decade. The effects of drama watching are no longer imagined by television producers across a diffuse public, but actively engaged with, commented upon and interpreted by connected networks of viewers and fans in ways that are discernable in the digital archive. With these, the agency of the audience is increasingly made visible, and it can be argued that the pious discourse of dramas is a significant factor in shaping pious publics.