BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies

Since 2007, Coke Studio has rapidly become one of the most influential platforms in televisual, digital and musical media, and has assumed a significant role in generating new narratives about Pakistani modernity. The musical pieces in Coke Studio’s videos re-work a range of genres and performing arts, encompassing popular and familiar songs, as well as resuscitating classical poetry and the musical traditions of marginalised communities. This re-working of the creative arts of South Asia represents an innovative approach to sound, language, and form, but also poses larger questions about how cultural memory and national narratives can be reimagined through musical media, and then further reworked by media consumers and digital audiences.

This article considers how Coke Studio’s music videos have been both celebrated and criticised, and explores the online conversations that compared new covers to the originals, be they much loved or long forgotten. The ways in which the videos are viewed, shared, and dissected online sheds light on new modes of media consumption and self-reflection. Following specific examples, we examine the larger implications of the hybrid text–video–audio object in the digital age, and how the consumers of Coke Studio actively participate in developing new narratives about South Asian history and Pakistani modernity.

First created in the context of state-controlled broadcast television of the 1960s, the Urdu serial drama form has proven enduringly popular in Pakistan. This article examines how institutional changes, including the appearance of nongovernmental organisations in this space, have altered the production and reception of these serial dramas and their thematic content, which has recently included such highly charged topics as sexual abuse, harassment and rape. First, I look at how transnationally funded content has impacted modes of production in a liberalised and deregulated Pakistani television industry. Second, I give a case study of the internationally funded drama serial Udaari as an example of agenda setting television intended to create public dialogue and galvanise change, to which I give the name feminist edutainment (FE) that intentionally recalls the form of entertainment education (EE) associated with the work of Miguel Sabido. Finally, I draw on my ethnographic research to argue that contemporary serial dramas, while engaging a domestic reception space primarily occupied by women, have expanded into the online space through the social media activism of feminist influencers.

This article analyses three Pakistani television adaptations of Nazir Ahmad’s novel Mirāt ul-‘Urūs to better understand the role of television dramas, an entertainment genre, in shaping pious publics. Scholarly attention to the novel, notably Shenila Khoja-Moolji’s work (2018) on the two most recent adaptations, primarily discuss feminine piety, women’s education and modes of instilling middle class values for women in these narratives. This article shifts focus to examine more broadly how dramas contend with family tensions, how they conceptualise familial duty, and how this widened focus on family provides new insights on religion in these adaptations. The article explores the concept of ‘religious-adjacent’ issues (‘side-chizen’), a category that emerges from ethnographic fieldwork in the Pakistani television industry. This framing helps us understand not only the ways in which narratives are structured around private piety and tensions arising from familial duty, but also the changing forms of circulation and online audience engagement of these dramas, all of which play an important role in shaping religious publics in contemporary Pakistan.

Foreign programming on Indian television was largely dominated by American and British TV programmes until 2014, when a Hindi entertainment channel Zindagi, owned by Zee Entertainment Enterprises, began broadcasting syndicated television content from Pakistan. The channel’s tagline Jodey Dilon Ko (uniting hearts) shaped the possibility for peaceful reconciliation between the two political rivals, India and Pakistan, by offering ‘sarhad paar ki kahaaniyaan’ (stories from across the border) to Indian audiences. The popularity of Pakistani serials in India may be observed against the backdrop of a television industry inundated with formulaic saas–bahu (mother-in-law/daughter-in-law) plotlines over the last decade. While Indian television and films have been a part of Pakistani popular culture for years, Pakistani serials like Humsafar (life partner, 2011) and Zindgai Gulzar Hai (life is a bed of roses, 2012) broadcast on Zindagi gave Indian audiences a peek into their neighbours’ socio-cultural environment. These serials dismantled the conventional mediatised image of the distanced ‘other’ and redefined the former perception of ‘foreign’ as essentially ‘Western’ in Indian television programming. Through an analysis of new trajectories of flows between media peripheries that I term ‘neo-global’ flows, this article argues that Pakistani dramas broadcast on Zindagi between 2014 and 2016 offered a ‘mediating space’ to Indian audiences by maintaining a balance between Indian tradition and Pakistani modernity.

This article traces a genealogy of regulatory and other tactics through which the Pakistani broadcast media is controlled, comparing the colonial context of the development of these tactics with the postcolonial circumstances of their re-deployment. Archival research into the East India Company’s documents from the turn of the nineteenth century uncovers the development of regulatory regimes referred to as Censorship, Self-Regulation, and Licensing, in addition to extra-legal techniques. The article argues that colonial tactics still form key components of Pakistan’s postcolonial broadcast regulations. However, in the past, one regime was replaced by another in a linear progression; today these regulatory techniques appear concomitantly stacked, selectively deployable and enfolded within an expanding array of extralegal techniques. The article seeks to move beyond conceptions of ‘regulatory capture’ or ‘media capture’ by applying the Deleuzian concept of ‘double capture’: in the case of the Pakistani broadcast media, the government regulator (and to some extent the government itself) is captured by ‘media power’ in the same instance that the media assemblage itself becomes subject to ‘state capture’ through extralegal means. Part one focuses on the decades when the colonial state first regulated newsprint (1780–1823), tracing the development from extralegal controls to a succession of legal regulations through which Company administrators could regulate – rather than be regulated by – colonial newsprint. Part two considers the paradoxical situation in Pakistan’s contemporary broadcast regulations (2002–2018), where PEMRA seems powerless to regulate the media, yet the media is subject to a ‘double capture’ through a combination of legal and extralegal modes of control.

Over the course of the last 18 years, privatised television news channels have transformed the nature of the national news culture in Pakistan. In addition to sensational news packaging, leading current affairs talk-show hosts routinely capitalise on aggressive interrogative tactics to antagonise politicians on air, producing a dramatised performance that feeds a politics of publicity. Within this context, the emancipatory potential of television once celebrated through media deregulation in the early 2000s has since been replaced with a disdainful liberal discourse on the lack of critical-rational debate. Based on in-depth interviews with a range of television news professionals in Karachi, I explore how Pakistani news media professionals negotiate the tension between a principled commitment to protecting the ‘independence’ of mass media and a cynical disavowal of its existing forms. Sensationalist media programming is certainly not unique to Pakistani television, and an increasing interest in postcolonial news publics continues to provide much needed perspectives from non-Western models of journalism, yet I believe a scholarly focus on media sensationalism remains impoverished without an understanding of the contextual constraints within which television news producers mediate their livelihood. In this article, I argue that the prevailing discourse on the ethics of journalism in Pakistan becomes a productive site through which the differences between privileged and vulnerable media labour emerge as most apparent.

The essay describes how and why various parts of the state in Pakistan, especially its security and intelligence agencies, have embarked on a campaign to censor and silence news media through mostly quasi-legal and extra-legal measures. It does so by offering a personal account as well as narrating many other impersonal examples collected from across the Pakistani news media. It also provides a historical and commercial context to the ongoing censorship and self-censorship in the country’s newsrooms to show how the present is both similar to and different from the past.