|
Sabiha
Sumar may look fragile, but the dimunitive filmmaker's body of work
resoundingly belies the image.
Armed
with a Bachelors in political science and filmmaking from Sarah
Lawrence and a post-graduate degree in international relations from
Cambridge University, Sumar headed back to the politically charged
atmosphere of Pakistan in the '80s. With the Hudood Ordinances hanging
over women's heads like the proverbial Damocles' Sword, Sumar went
to work. A study of women in jail conducted with a friend yielded
dramatically disturbing data - and an activist was born. Sumar and
a group of friends launched a signature campaign aimed at the repeal
of the draconian ordinances and at around the same time she embarked
on her first directorial venture. Who Will Cast the First Stone?
, a documentary about how the Hudood laws had impacted women's lives,
aired on Channel 4 and bagged the Golden Gate award in San Francisco
- but there were no takers at home. Although Benazir Bhutto was
now at the helm, the powers at PTV did not allow a Pakistan showing
of the film. Undeterred, Sumar proceeded to make a series of other
documentaries that showed on Channel 4, German and French television,
and at assorted international film festivals.
However,
it was with Sumar's first feature film Khamosh Pani, that she really
earned global recognition. The film went on to win 17 international
awards, including the prestigious Golden Leopard at the Locarno
film Festival, the 19th Mar del Plata International film award in
Buenos Aires, the Indian Star of Germany award for best film at
the Bollywood and Beyond Festival in Stuttgart, and the best screenplay
award at the Kara Film Festival in Karachi.
Ironically, while the film has been shown in theatres across the
world - including a three-month screening in India which ran to
packed houses - distributors in Pakistan have so far shied away
from it.
Saddened
by the response at home, Sumar has nonetheless moved on to her next
feature film, Rafina, the story of a young middle-class Karachi
girl looking to making a break in the fashion and beauty industry.
Will this film fare any better at home?
"I
keep trying to put Pakistani cinema on the world map, but get absolutely
no support at home. What will it take for Pakistanis to realise
the power of cinema - not just in reference to the message a film
conveys, but also in terms of the image-building good cinema can
do for a country?" says Sumar.
In this interview with Newsline, Sumar talks of her sizeable body
of work, her trials and tribulations, the validation success offers,
and her ambitions for Pakistani cinema.In this interview with Newsline,
Sumar talks of her sizeable body of work, her trials and tribulations,
the validation success offers, and her ambitions for Pakistani cinema.
Q:
Tell me about your new venture, Rafina.
A:
Rafina is a feature film about the modern face of Pakistan. It's
a contemporary story set in Karachi. It's about a young girl from
Shah Faisal Colony who wants to join the fashion and beauty industry,
which has grown so phenomenally despite Islamisation. So in this
film I want to concentrate on that face of Pakistan, but of course
the film also takes into account the social factors. Rafina is from
an Urdu-speaking background, entering an English-speaking world.
And we all know how hard that is, what that struggle is all about
given the class and language divisions in Pakistan, the contradictions
in Pakistani society.
The
film has already been commissioned by ZTF and Arte, which is a German-French
cultural channel, because the world is really interested in seeing
something other than maulvis from Pakistan. Sundance Screenwriters
Lab invited the project this year in June, and I worked there with
some of the best writers in Hollywood, like Walter Bernstein, Stuart
Stern and various other people. Rafina is the first Pakistani film
that has been invited to the cinema market in Rotterdam.
Q: Have you written the script for Rafina yourself?
A: The script is mine. It's based on a novella by
Shandana Minhas, a Karachi-based writer.
Q: What stage are you at with the film?
A: The script is done, but it will change a little
bit. Post-Sundance I have a lot of ideas about how I'm going to
improve it. The locations are done, they're all in Karachi. The
casting hasn't been done yet. If I get the right woman for the role
from Pakistan, I'll certainly cast her.
Q: Will your film crew be recruited from Pakistan?
A: We don't have a professional film crew in Pakistan,
so I'll have to use a crew from either Germany or France. I've normally
worked with a Dutch camerawoman, and I'll probably ask her to come
back again for Rafina. It has to be this way because we have no
infrastructure for professional film-making in this country. So
what we are trying to do is to also train people while filming.
We are creating an infrastructure for film-making. We are conducting
workshops. I personally did workshops with all the young actors
for three months during filming for Khamosh Pani. We did workshops
on camera, sound, light, production design, make-up, etc. We trained
over 100 people. And we'll do that again. So we hope to eventually
have a professional body of people of international calibre.
Q: And who are you looking to for the funding for Rafina?
What has the response been in Pakistan so far?
A: We have ZTF and Arte supporting it in part.
In Pakistan it's nil. Nobody has come forward. Nobody wants to support
film-making because they don't understand - even our western, liberal,
progressive minds don't understand what film-making can do. You
know, even Hindutva in India recognises film-making as a major tool
in changing people's mindsets - and they go to town with it. I've
had no support from Pakistanis at home. It's sad because I think
if Pakistani cinema is to be put on the world map, the funds should
come from here. There's been a little bit of support coming from
Pakistanis living abroad, but that too is muted. I've had a lot
of support from Indians, and interestingly from Jewish-Americans.
Q: Aren't you, in fact, already considering accepting
the India option?
A: Yes, I have been offered major funding from India.
We are now in negotiations with them. In fact, they want to put
in 100 per cent of the financing and consequently own 100 per cent
of the film. The offer has come from a very large commercial production
house. But I think it will be a real shame to have to hand it over
to India on a platter, after having struggled so hard to put Pakistan's
name on the map and achieved it, because I have always maintained
Khamosh Pani is a Pakistani film. If I have to sell Rafina to India
it will go down in Cannes as an Indian film. Do Pakistanis really
want that?
Q: You recently met President Musharraf. In what context
was that meeting?
A: Well this is for a documentary I'm doing about
Pakistan alongside my feature film. Musharraf's interview is central
to that documentary. Sundance Institute has given us a grant for
it. We are looking at the possibility of screening it in Germany.
Geo has also expressed interest in it.
Q: What is it about?
A: The documentary is really a journey, in the sense
that it's about Pakistan - where we are today, where we can go from
here, where Musharraf's vision is taking us. The reason I am doing
it is because we seem to have lost our way somehow and I want to
understand why.
Q: And what conclusions have you drawn so far?
A: I feel that if we want Musharraf to succeed with his 'enlightened
moderation,' then the liberal and progressive forces in Pakistan
have to demonstrate they support him. For example, if he attempts
to repeal the Hudood Ordinances, can we, in all honesty, bring out
a demonstration in support of this to match a demonstration by the
MMA? We can't even bring out a hundred women on the streets today,
and I think political power is decided on the streets.
So if we can't demonstrate our support for moderation, we need to
question what's happened to us. Why don't we have that street power
and strength, and how can we harness the support of the silent majority?
The fact is, there may be a sea of people opposed to fundamentalism
and extremism, but they seem to be helpless to stem the tide.
Q: Khamosh Pani in a sense captured that sense of
helplessness. What was the genesis of that, your first feature film?
A: I was trying to make my leap into feature films
from documentaries, and that's always a very hard task. I actually
started Khamosh Pani as a documentary. I was researching violence
against women during Partition and came across a Constitutional
Assembly debate which talked about the Recovery Act. This was an
act signed between India and Pakistan. A woman called Miratula Sarabai
in India had started tackling the issue of abducted women on both
sides of the border, because a lot of cases had been reported. This
act was aimed at recovering the women and restoring them to their
original families. The act came into existence in 1948, and remained
in force for a long time.
What this act didn't take into account, however, was the fact that
many of the women who had been abducted, had married and had children.
The act did not allow women to be repatriated to their original
families along with their new ones. And it was forcible repatriation.
When I met recovery team workers from the Partition era in India
they told me they were having nervous breakdowns at that time. They
had women screaming, biting them, pushing them, saying they didn't
want to go back without their new families. Some were breast-feeding
newborns.
This happened on both sides of the border, but there are no figures
for the numbers in Pakistan. And the repatriation wasn't the end
of it. Thousands of women who were returned to India found on their
return that they had nowhere to go. Their families refused to take
them back because they said they had lived with Muslim men. Many
of those women who were left homeless went mad. I think this is
one of the most horrific tragedies in history, and Khamosh Pani
was born out of it.
Q: Did you meet any of the women who had been repatriated?
A: I did meet one abducted woman. And after I met
her, I decided I didn't want to meet any more - it was such an emotionally
difficult experience. When I was in India, doing research for the
film, somebody told me to go to an area called Bhogal Pura, where
a lot of Partition families are settled. There I met Behen jee -
that's what she's called. And as we talked, she narrated the events
of Partition
There are twin villages in Punjab called Chakri and Dairi, not far
from Islamabad. Behen jee said she had a married sister living in
Dairi, while she, 16-years-old and unmarried at the time, lived
in Chakri with her family. She related how the men of the villages
had decided that if Muslims attacked, the women should jump in the
village wells and give up their lives rather than be raped. So night
after night, the women waited with their daughters, their sisters,
their mothers, for the announcement that they should jump. She told
how in Dairi, this came to pass. Muslims raided the village, and
women - including her sister - jumped in the well, and now the women
of Chakri waited their turn. But the residents of Chakri were rescued
by the army. Interestingly, Behen jee said she believes that a Sufi
shrine just outside Chakri protected them. However, as her family
fled to India, somehow she got left behind. She rejoined her family
later. She didn't say what happened in the intervening period, but
I just knew instinctively that she was one of Partition's abducted
women, I wanted to ask her so much, but I couldn't get the words
out of my mouth. I still remember her face. I have the entire transcription
of that interview, which I kept going over again and again and again.
And from it came the story of Peero, one of Khamosh Pani's chief
protagonists.
Q: A major part of the cast for Khamosh Pani was from
India. Was the film an India-Pakistan collaborative venture?
A: It was not collaborative, in the sense that there
was no financing from India. I would have taken actors from anywhere
in the world that fitted the roles. But I wanted original Sikhs
because it was absolutely essential for me to have these very intimate
scenes with them, where the men have their hair down and they're
combing their beards. And to get that really correct, you need the
real thing, or somebody very professional. But we had lots of budgetary
restrictions. So while Kirron Kher is a professional, we mostly
had to make do with new faces.
Q: Who financed the film?
A: We had 22 financiers for this film, small and big. We
had rather large sums of money coming from two different film boards
in Germany that are for the development of cinema in Germany. Then
there is ZTF which is German television. We also had some funding
from France, which wants to develop cinema in third world countries.
And other small bits and pieces came from here and there.
Q: Did you try to get funding in Pakistan?
A: I tried very hard. But there are no professional
film boards here. No television station was interested. I tried
through individuals, rich individuals, and I met with completely
bizarre responses, like 'is saal ham nay zakaat day diya hai,' (we've
paid our zakaat for the year), and 'why should I fund a film when
I can actually build a shelter for abandoned women, or orphaned
children, or distribute Quran Sharifs, or provide dowry for 16,000
women? Why should I be giving you money?'
I don't know of any country in the world today that does not have
an understanding of what it means to develop the arts or develop
the art of story-telling, of what it means to control what goes
out in the media about you, the image you project. Look at the Jews,
they're a very conservative people, a very religious people, but
they completely control the arts. Why? Because it has something
to do with changing people's mindsets, influencing the way people
look at you.
Q: That accepted, some people have criticised the film
for precisely the image factor. They say that it portrays a negative
image of Pakistan. How do you respond to criticism like that?
A: I've never heard such criticism. I even have a letter
from the President's office saying that they loved the film and
thought it was very good. I think if you look at the film, you'll
see it's really talking about [what happens] if you allow a small
minority of people to take centrestage, which is what General Zia
did. Maulvis were always part of our lives, and extreme elements
exist everywhere in the world. I mean look at the National Front
in Britain, the Neo-Nazis in Germany, the Ku Klux Klan in America,
Hindutva in India. But where do you see a situation where these
fringe elements are picked up, put in the centre of politics, and
allowed to dictate policy in a country? This is what General Zia-ul-Haq
did to us.
But what this film talks about is really a worldwide phenomenon.
I mean, if you want to get so self-conscious about it and see it
only as a story about yourself, then I think you're narrowing down
the power of cinema. When I showed the film at Locarno, to an audience
of 7000 people, they stood up and clapped because it resonated with
them. They connected with it. Women have come up to me and said,
'my son is getting into trouble, he's becoming a Neo-Nazi.' So people
across the world are seeing such terrible developments in their
own lives. What the film really shows is how a small group of people
can take over your lives, how dangerous fundamentalism is when it's
allowed to grow.
Q: Don't you think the film resonates more internationally
today because of the post-September 11 situation and the hawk-eye
focus on Pakistan which is at centrestage because of its history
and fundamentalist component?'
A: That may be one of the reasons. But the fact
is, the story-line and script were completed in 2000 and we started
shooting the film prior to 9/11 although we had to disband for a
while due to 9/11. I think when people see this film, they see world
events reflected in it, they see the growth of fundamentalism everywhere.
A film can only work over a long period, and across continents,
if it makes connections with other people. If it's simply a film
about another country and about someone else, it would not have
lasting impact.
Q: Why has the film not shown in theatres in Pakistan?
A: There's nothing stopping it from being screened.
It's just that television stations never came forward. We asked
distributors to pick up the film. They just didn't know what to
do with it. In India, meanwhile, it was picked up by a distributor
and screened for three months along with films like Veer Zara and
Mughal-e-Azam.
Q: Why do you think local distributors haven't gone for
it considering the accolades it has received internationally?
A: I was hoping that after its first screening
at Kara this would happen. Normally that is the way of business;
television stations approach you and say 'we want to show your film.'
But I think there's a certain apathy, a certain lack of understanding
of what this film is and can do for us. But essentially it's a matter
of money. If you're a distributor you have to invest a minimum of
about five to seven thousand Euros to get a print out and start
running it. And the distributors thought they'd never recover their
money.
I heard they wanted to have corporate screenings of the film, but
we were against that. We want it out in the cinema or on TV. I don't
want to encourage this Pakistani habit of private screenings for
suited men. I'm just not into that. But the good news is that we're
negotiating a deal with GEO now to screen the film.
Q: And the film has reached a segment of the public through
your travelling cinema, hasn't it?
A: Yes, we've shown it to thousands and thousands
of people, who've watched it sitting on the floor, on rooftops,
everywhere. We screened it at open-air theatres we created everywhere
we went, and that was across Pakistan - in 41 villages and towns
all over Sindh, the Punjab, NWFP and Balochistan.
Q: Were there any impediments along the way?
A: There was one instance in the interior of Sindh,
where some policemen in plainclothes came to a screening and said
'this film is not about us, its anti-Islam and anti-Pakistan.' But
the women got up, in fact, a lot of other people from the crowd
did, but the women got up first, and said, 'listen, you guys have
been lying to us all our lives and this is the first honest piece
of work we have seen. This is really about us and we should be seeing
more of this kind of cinema.' They told the policemen to shut up
and the men went away. At another location in the Punjab, near Jhang
I think, a group of maulvis said, 'we won't let you show this film
here until we see it first.' So we said, 'we don't give in to such
censorship. You don't want to see it? We'll move on to another village.'
And that's exactly what we did. In one place in Peshawar, the men
said, 'we don't want mixed screenings for men and women. We want
you to show it first to men and then to women.' We said 'we don't
believe in such segregation. You want to see it? You see it together.
If you don't want to see it, we'll pack up and leave.' The women
said, 'nahin nahin, humay to dekhni hai, hum to daykhengay.' (No,
we will see the film). So we showed it, and men and women came together.
Yes, they sat on different sides, but who cares - they came.
Q: What other responses did you receive from the public?
A: Well, it's been discussed at length by the
people who saw it. Many told us they loved the film. The kinds of
questions that arose were amazing. For example, there was the question
that came up in Wah village, which is where we had our Pakistan
premiere. That's where we had shot the film so we brought it back
to the people. And one woman got up and said, 'Saleem seems like
such a nice, ambitious boy, he played the flute so well, why couldn't
he have become a musician? Why couldn't he see a life for himself
as a famous musician?' The question opened a floodgate for me. I
saw how we have never really had any options for our children. Were
there any village music schools, was there even a school in a nearby
town, or city, or in all of Pakistan that could have provided Saleem
the option to become a musician? Could he have directed his energies
elsewhere? Could he have been an important figure in any other way?
No.
The only importance we accord our youth is when they become martyrs.
You talk to a boy in a village in India, and he'll tell you that
he wants to become Shah Rukh Khan. A girl will tell you she wants
to become Rani Mukherjee. You talk to a boy in the city of Karachi,
the little boy who comes to clean your car window, and he'll tell
you 'I want to become a martyr because that way I'll become famous.
I'll be a hero.' As for a little Karachi girl, she doesn't even
know how to dream.
Q: Were you very féted in India?
A: Well the fact is that I'm the first film-maker
in South Asia that has won the highest award in a premier film festival.
Even Satyajit Ray, who's won jury awards and smaller awards, and
of course, the national awards in India, hasn't garnered a top international
award. And I think this has kind of tickled the Indians quite a
lot, so they're keen to own me as one of theirs.
While I'm based in Pakistan, and I work out of here, I do travel
to Delhi a lot. My husband's currently working there, and my daughter
goes to school in Delhi. And when I go to India, even today, I get
dozens of calls the minute I arrive. I don't know how they keep
tabs on me. The fact is, when I was in Locarno and I won the Leopard,
I wanted to first be interviewed by the Pakistani press. I called
up people I knew in the media to say, 'Listen I won this award.'
But they hadn't a clue what I was talking about. For three days
I didn't give an interview to the Indian press, but how long could
I hold out for? Because there was Kirron Kher, talking to the Indian
press, making headlines. And the Indian press, of course, completely
ignored the fact that it was in the context of a Pakistani film
that Kirron Kher had won the award.
Q: Why is it that you did not enter Khamosh Pani at
the Oscars?
A: Well, the Oscars requires all entries to have
been shown for at least one week in a commercial cinema in the country
of origin - in the case of Khamosh Pani, that's Pakistan. If that
ever happens, I will enter it.
Q: Who Will Cast the First Stone? was your advent
in film-making. What inspired you to make it?
A:Well, I majored in film-making and political
science from Sarah Lawrence College. When I came back to Karachi
after my postgraduate degree at Cambridge, I started working on
a project on women in prison, which I sort of designed myself with
a lawyer friend, Nausheen Ahmed. At that time women's organisations
were already out and up in arms against the Islamic laws used by
General Zia-ul-Haq, but I don't think that there were any real figures
existing at that time as to what the Hudood Ordinances had actually
done, how they had implicated women and what kind of havoc they
had played in Pakistani society. So we did a small study at Karachi
Central Jail and came up with data on all aspects of the Zina Ordinance.
We found that women were primarily in jail for having had extra-marital
sex or marrying somebody of their own choice. Many women were locked
up because they had gone to the police to report they had been raped;
and then found that was used against them as an admission of having
had sex outside of marriage. So until the complaint of rape was
taken up, the women would languish in jail. There were 69 women
in jail at that time - this is the late '80s - and of these, 68
were booked for zina.
I actually used that study together with some friends to form a
committee for the repeal of the Hudood Ordinances, and we put a
campaign together which included a signature campaign through coupons
in ads in four major newspapers.
It was around this time also that I ventured to make a film on the
impact of the Hudood Ordinances on the lives of women called, Who
Will Cast the First Stone? A British company called Retake was run
by a friend, Allaudin Jamal. He was in Pakistan and read an article
of mine that had been published at the time which was based on the
research I'd done on women in prison. He contacted me and said he
wanted some material for a film he planned to make.
I said, 'Well, I'm a film-maker, I don't want you to do it, I'll
do it.' So I got a treatment ready, shot the film, took it to London,
edited it, and then it was aired on Channel 4. He produced it and
I directed it.
Q: Did the film have any impact?
A: Interestingly, prior to coming to power, Benazir
herself had signed our campaign against the Hudood Ordinances, and
after she came to power we expected her government to build on the
ground support we had mustered through our signature campaign and
the film.
But once ensconced in power, Benazir went on the defensive and refused
to allow Who Will Cast The First Stone? to be screened in Pakistan.
I took it to Aslam Azhar, who was chairman of PTV at that time,
but he refused to show it. It was this 'mullah hamaray sar pey charh
jayengay, (the mullahs will come down on us), we can't show it,
attitude. I thought that was ridiculous, because in Benazir's time,
the power of the mullahs was far less than it is today and she had
come in on popular support. As for the film, it did very well internationally.
Q: What did you do in the intervening years between
that first film and Khamosh Pani?
A: I made lots of other documentaries, which nobody
in Pakistan was ever interested in watching or screening. I did
a film called Where Peacocks Dance, which talks about cultural nationalism
in Sindh. It uses Moenjodaro as a window. In Pakistan we've been
in great denial of our heritage. It's been said Moenjodaro doesn't
really belong to us because it's pre-Islamic, our history only begins
in 711 AD, with the advent of Islam. This film pointed out the dangers
of denying our own heritage. When the people in Sindh talk of Moenjodaro
as their cultural heritage, will you deny them their Pakistani identity?
Peacocks was a documentary. It was shown at the Rotterdam International
Film festival in 1993, aired on Channel 4 the same year, and we
showed it very widely in Pakistan through our travelling cinema.
Q: What came next?
A: Next I did a short current affairs piece for
Channel 4 again, called Karachi in Crisis, which was about mohajir-Sindhi
strife. That was followed by a documentary called Suicide Warriors
which was about the women suicide brigade with the LTTE. I lived
with them for a week in the Tamil, war-torn areas around the jungles
of Batticaloa in eastern Sri Lanka.
Q: What inspired the film?
A: I was just really curious about this image of women
at war. The images that had come across from this conflict was of
very dehumanised women, as if they were monsters of some kind. I
was dying to get behind this story, see for myself what it was about.
So I met these lovely women who actually became great friends. But
it was surreal. They were suicide warriors - I knew they were going
to die. Charlie, one of the women I interviewed at that time, is
already dead. It was very sad when we left. My whole crew and I
were crying because we knew that we may never see them again. But
having lived with them we understood their motivation, we understood
why women of 16 and 18 and 20 would be willing to give their lives.
It's ironic, but it's about survival. They said they wanted to become
suicide warriors because if they joined the LTTE, maybe they would
live a day longer, a week longer. If they didn't, they believed
the Sri Lankan army would rape and kill them much earlier. So the
idea that they might live a little bit longer and die in dignity
was their motivation for joining the LTTE.
Q: Where was the film shown?
A: It was a Channel 4 film. The government of Sri
Lanka of course, banned it, because they didn't like the fact that
suddenly these monstrous women were not monsters at all. They were
just like any 16, 18-year-olds, singing and dancing. We actually
had a candle-lit kind of girls' night, where the girls were eating
the little snacks they had collected over the day for a midnight
feast, and they were singing songs, talking about Indian films and
action movies.
Q: Where did you go from there?
A: I did a couple of current affairs documentaries
in Sri Lanka. Then came a film called Don't Ask Why, which is based
on the diary of a 17-year-old Karachi girl. She comes from an upper-middle
class background with a western education and finds herself in conflict
with the atmosphere in a country that's becoming increasingly fundamentalist.
So, while it is very much a story about a regular 17-year-old, saying,
'why can't I go out?' and 'why can't I party?' at some level there
is also the need to explore and understand what the growing trends
towards religious conservatism are all about.
Q: How much of Don't Ask Why is factual?
A: It's not fiction. It is a documentary based
on this young girl's real diary and she plays herself in the film
and actually reads aloud from it.
Q: Given the social constraints, how did you manage to
get this girl to agree to come on film?
A: Well, she was very proud of it. You know how 17-year-olds
are - they're quite blasé, sometimes even over-confident
about who they are and what they believe. She certainly didn't think
she was confused. But actually, she was trying to find her place
in society. In the course of that she started examining whether
religion was going to give her the space she wanted. And that was
a very interesting experiment for us to watch. We shot the film
in two spells. There was a gap of about six months between the two.
At that age you are passionate about something one day, against
it the next. So having given that gap we actually saw a certain
kind of change in her. In the last scene, after her experiment with
religion, you see her packing her bag, saying 'I'm getting out of
here for a bit because I just can't take it.'
Q: Where was this film screened?
A: This was done for Arte, a German-French cultural
channel. It was shown on a satellite channel linked to television.
So it was aired all over Europe. It's also done a lot of festivals,
and it has been sold very widely. It's got a very good distributor
in America called Women Make Movies.
Q: What followed this venture?
A: Then came For A Place Under The Heavens which
is my last documentary to date. That's a very personal journey through
the Islamisation process that we've been through. It starts way
back, before I was born. It starts with what my father and mother
told me about Pakistan - the '50s and '60s, the freedom, the ballroom
dancing, the cabarets
that era which we only heard about.
But I had my father's personal footage of that time, so the film
begins with that and then it shows how things began to change. It
actually examines where the beginning of this change lies - and
that really is in our constitution itself. Because the constitution
says that sovereignty rests with Allah, and it is through Allah
that it is manifested in the people of Pakistan. Now if sovereignty
rests with Allah, then where is the will of the people? And I think
that is the crux of the matter, the heart of our problem. We battle
with it all the time in this country; every political party battles
with it, every military regime battles with it, we as individuals,
as groups, as women's organisations, battle with it.
Q: Your entire body of work, beginning with the campaign
for the repeal of the Hudood Ordinances to the films you have made,
has a very strong social context. Where does the social conscience
come from?
A: Some of it comes from my father. I grew up
listening to qawallis, Sufi stories, and Persian poetry which he
recited all the time and which it was almost mandatory for all of
us children to sit and listen to. There were also a lot of political
discussions in our house. There were eight of us siblings and we
had a huge age gap between us, so there were also a lot of disagreements.
But I think at some level we all agreed with our father on the need
for a change in our value system and for the feudal mindset that
exists to give way to something new.
My father was also a very generous man - both my parents were. They
had been through very rough times when they lived in Bombay, so
my parents really realised the value of having money and being in
a position to give. And they gave all the time. Those were the values
we were raised with.
|