 Okay, so I think we can start because, yeah, it's people will keep coming in. So my name is Amina Yakin, I'm Chair of the Center for the Study of Pakistan. And it's my great pleasure to welcome you to this afternoon's webinar. And I'm literally just going to be handing over the reins to the host who will be chairing you through this session. This I'm very, very grateful to the speakers and to the who came together and agreed to do this panel and are joining us from different time zones at in different locations in the world. So thank you all for being here with us today. For me, it's really important to have a conversation about television Pakistan in the seminar series for the Center for Pakistan. We cover a range of topics and contexts and my own interest is also very much connected to how we think about the politics of culture in Pakistan. So to me, this seems an important landmark special issue on on Pakistan that we will all be eager to hear about and learn about. So without further ado, I'm going to introduce Professor Rosie Thomas, who is a professor of film at the Center for Research and Education, Arts and Media at the University of Westminster. Her early research as a social anthropologist was in the Bombay film industry and since 1985 she has published widely on Indian cinema. She's co-founder and co-editor of Bioscope South Asian Screen Studies and Monograph Bombay before Bollywood film City Vantices was published in 2013. Rosie, Professor Thomas is co-editor of this special issue with Dr. Salma Siddique, who I had the pleasure to meet at a conference in Lahore. And here we are many years later reconnecting again. So this is to welcome all of you and also to welcome all our participants who are joining today and some who will be listening later to the recorded version. And before I hand over to Rosie, I'd also just like to thank Sunil in the background, who is doing all the technical facilitation for the session and has been putting in a lot of work to get this thing organised and up and running. So thank you, Sunil, and welcome, Professor Thomas. OK, thank you, Amina, for that introduction. And thank you for hosting us and organising this event, which I think we're all looking forward to very much. And thank you, Sunil, for doing all the hard work behind the scenes. So it's actually wonderful to have a chance for the participants. Several of most of us have never actually met even virtually before and to have a bit of a discussion about this special issue, which took up quite a bit of our lives a couple of years ago. It was actually finally published in January 2020, was it? December 2019. But it had actually been in process for a few years before that. So as I'll explain in a moment. So it's an important moment for us to come together and actually have a chance to speak about it. The way that the webinar will work, we've asked each of the four speakers to speak for about 10 minutes each. And then Amina will be a respondent. And so that will take up the first 50 minutes or so. And the final 40 minutes will be for Q&A. And I'd like to invite your audience to put their questions in the Q&A box, not in the chat box. And that means I can monitor the Q&A box and hopefully get through as many questions, depending on how many questions you get through as much as possible. So we're looking forward to feedback. We're looking forward to a discussion. And I hope this is something that is useful and interesting for everyone. The journal special issue came to pass. The idea was brought to us about three or four years ago following one of my co-editors who had seen a panel of early career researchers at the Madison Conference and fed back that there's an exciting new group of early career PhD students working on India on Pakistani television. And that it might make a good theme and a topic for one of our upcoming issues. It was something that for me was personally very exciting. I've been running the Achievement in South Asia Journalism Program at Westminster for the past eight or nine years. So we've had a small cohort of mid-career journalists from across South Asia in London for eight weeks each year. So I've been hearing firsthand about what was happening on the ground for print and television and web journalists in Pakistan. I've been visiting Pakistan each winter and seen the extraordinary changes that were happening from 2012 through to 2020 when I was last there, but through to 2018-19 when this this journal took off. And I think I and my co-editors felt that a bioscope special issue would be a useful place to explore and contextualize all this. Moreover, it was it was the television space in Pakistan was more or less absent with within academic work at that time with notable exceptions, including Amina. But while bioscope had hosted an issue on cinema from Pakistan a few years ago, this seemed like something new and fresh. And we felt that exploring this vibrant and very unique media space would allow us to make some sort of a significant intervention, both empirically and theoretically, in particular, what the case study of Pakistan reveals about the mass media and its very various entanglements today. It does seem a very unique space, obviously, with parallels elsewhere in the world, but it was worth exploring. And we agreed to work with the people from that panel who wanted to a couple dropped out and then we did a call for papers and got quite a healthy response and interestingly the majority from early career researchers. It was clearly all PhD students. It's clearly a field that was was attracting a new a new set of researchers. And from these, we selected a group that spanned the field and we thought complemented each other to make what we hoped would be a balanced issue. So what we have in the issue for those who haven't been able to look at it properly, we have two articles and a field work piece on drama broadly, two articles and a field work piece on news broadly and two articles that are more left field and much more about cross border flows and different entanglements of entertainment. So, of course, there could have been much more. We could have included something on talk shows, but actually, this was the one area where some significant work had already been done. And sadly, we lost a couple of contributors through time pressures, including one with great potential on the popularity of Turkish TV dramas in Pakistan. So they didn't make it to the special issue, but they're still in play and are being revised for a future non-specialist issue of bioscope. So in a sense, we haven't lost anything and it's in the nature of journals that we have a time pressure. We come out when we have to and what's ready is ready and what isn't isn't. So, of the two articles on drama, one by Aisha, who is here today and will speak shortly. One by Elliot Montpellier on Mirata La Rousse and Pius Publix. And a rather wonderful fieldwork piece that Shruti Kottari gave us based on 1990s interviews with the drama serial writer Hasina Moyne. On news, we have Aisha, who's here today and will speak for herself. And we have Asif Akhtar, who had a fascinating piece on broadcast media censorship in colonial times and now and does a comparison between the two regimes and finds some striking parallels, including a sort of delirium mechanism in play in that. And we also have a fieldwork piece which we felt was particularly important by Bada Alam, who's a journalist who we'd come across through the Chevening programme who was the editor of the garachi based Herald until he lost his job just a few months before we were going to go to press. And I think what's very striking, we felt we had a lot of material and the nature of academic work is that by the time it's published, it's often out of date. Things were changing so quickly in Pakistan over those years. That we felt it was really important to have something, especially since 2018. And Bada Alam's very personal stories about censorship in media newsrooms since 2018 and a very reflective piece on the background history actually gave us that up-to-date currency which I think helps. The other two, which I refer to as more sort of left-field articles, neither strictly drama nor news, one was by Rafay Mahmood and Richard Williams. And Rafay is going to be talking about to this today on Coke Studio. And the other was by Ritika Punt on Pakistani television serials in India and the cross-border flows, which is obviously very much a theme that interests us. And I think it's something in the way that media studies has to go in the modern world. And before we move into this, I'd like to say what a pleasure it was working very closely with my co-editor on this, Salma Siddique who will be speaking today as well. It was very much a joint venture and I think we both enjoyed the process of getting to grips with this field. So we'll move straight on to the first of our contributors. And I'd like to invite Ayesha Mullah, who's a PhD candidate in Anthropology at the University of Chicago and currently a lecturer in critical media studies at the University of Texas at Dallas. And she's going to talk to her paper called Mazanahi Aya, Negotiating Sensationalism in Pakistani Television News Practices. Ayesha, over to you. Thanks so much, Rosie. It's great to be here with all of you. And yes, as you mentioned, so much has certainly changed in the news media industry since the time of my field work. And even since the time that this issue has been published last year. But I have to say, I think, unfortunately, some things have also stayed the same when it comes to sensationalist television news in Pakistan. So what I'd like to do with my allotted time is just quickly recap some of the key points of my article. And I hope we can continue the conversation, maybe with more recent examples in the Q&A session. So at the time of my research in 2015, I was primarily interested in exploring the ways in which a particular class of Pakistani broadcast journalists negotiated sensationalist practices in television news, specifically those who had transitioned to the production of Urdu television news after working with English language newspapers. My initial focus on this exclusive professional cohort did not aim to privilege elite liberal anxieties, but rather to understand the context from which their critiques arise and the implications of their relationship to power. The sociopolitical ramifications of a privatized media landscape in Pakistan led to the rapid growth of an industry that continues to rely on an available labor pool of largely lower middle-class applicants with television news organizations having to train their entry-level employees on the job. In 2013, the Pakistan Federal Union of Journalists surmised that at least 18,000 new journalists had entered the workforce, of whom almost 70% had no formal training in journalism and less than 5% were women. The hiring of untrained media personnel is an indication of the ways in which young broadcast journalists in Pakistan are not only tasked with producing affective news, but are also expected to act as authentic cultural mediators between corporate news channels and mass audiences. Stereotypical examples in liberal elite commentary on recently recruited untrained reporters being sent off to cover breaking news events invariably frames them as scrambling through police-credoned areas after bomb explosions contaminating crime scenes or entering into the houses of the victims of such attacks, shoving cameras and microphones into grieving family members' faces and asking them in-aim questions in between their whales. Caught between the ratings raised to deliver breaking news footage to their respective newsrooms and being simultaneously scapegoated by their corporate management when they step out of bounds, the rawness of the untrained journalist has come to conveniently stand in for the media industry on its worst days. While we cannot deny the reality of such instances, my main argument in the article is to analyze the prevailing discourse on the ethics of journalism in Pakistan as a productive site through which the differences between privileged and vulnerable media labor emerges as most apparent. The dilemma facing English-language print journalists now employed in Urdu news media meant turning away from a trained BBC model of serious sober journalism and tuning their craft to a localized set of dramatic news practices. One of my interlocutors was quite forthcoming in recalling one of his first assignments of putting together a news package. His news bureau chief sent him to Fezlaba to start producing local news stories for the primary reason that people rating meters and devices used for measuring television ratings had recently been installed in the city's households, and these are now his words. Once there was continuous load shedding and a group of people had gathered to protest outside one of the power companies. We shot a few scenes of footage, sent it back to the chief in Lahore, and he replied with a text message, mazanaya, that wasn't entertaining. And he told us to gather more people, burn a few tires, raise louder slogans. So we did. Suddenly we had a sizable protest with flames and an agitated crowd. All the news channel vans started reaching our Fezlaba protest site, and the event received considerable coverage. All the while, those damn people meters ticked away. This encounter with that ubiquitous catchphrase of the editing room, mazanaya, resulted in my interlocutor crafting the quintessentially angry South Asian crowd, conveniently packaged for the 9 p.m. news bulletin complete with flaming tires. The phrase mazanaya is not only an assessment, so this wasn't fun, but it has acquired from many of the media professionals I spoke with the salience of an unspoken truth. The news can be made entertaining, and you'll know it when you see it. In order to engage with this proposition seriously, I started noting the distinctions between what my interlocutors considered to be sensational news and unethical news practices, and found that the boundary lines drawn between the two were sketched along the use value of that particular news story. Boxing news channels are notorious for airing news without verifying sources and are not unique in blurring facts in exchange for sensational headlines. In cases where the discussion involved celebrity news anchors, criticism of their sensational content was delivered swiftly and unanimously. The understanding being that when highly-paid media personalities pull in large numbers of viewers, they have a higher responsibility to deliver accurate news content without twisting facts to stir up controversy. An episode from late 2010 was often referenced in my conversations in which popular news anchor, Mehar Bukhari, deliberately misconstrued then Governor Salman Tassir's efforts to advocate for a victim of a blasphemy case, and the anchor accused him of being a blasphemer himself during a live interview. He was shockingly assassinated a month later, and his death was largely seen by liberal elites as a senseless consequence of his portrayal in the media. Not surprisingly, a media executive in charge of Bukhari's show did not share this view when I asked about the particular episode as a glaring example of sensationalizing a sensitive issue. And these are his words. Yes, it was my program, but Mehar Bukhari cannot be held responsible. I cannot be held responsible. The channel, some cannot be held responsible. Because look, I can ask you questions during an interview, however controversial they may be, but the answers that you give, only you can be held responsible for that. While it was tempting to dismiss this poorly aimed attempt to shift the burden of accountability, the executive's response does expose the chain of command that broadcast journalists must navigate in weighing decisions on crafting sensational news. Barring a few rare exceptions, the editors and chief of most Pakistani news channels are de facto also the owners of their individual private media groups. The political agendas of each news channel are thus identifiable by the content that they produce, whether anti-government or pro-establishment, depending, and especially in 2014-2016, on the particular history of the channel's CEO with the current ruling political party. The irony of young untrained and middle-to-lower-class journalists reporting upwards to a chain of media professionals that ultimately ends with an elite, politically-motivated, untrained editor-in-chief was not lost on Manjula Hooters and was simply a sobering reality for the business model of much of the Pakistani media landscape. Dramatic and emotional news coverage was understood as an industry standard, along with the established use of popular music in news headlines and exaggerated speculations in an effort to break a particular news story first. For many, the boundary line between sensational and unethical lay in the greater purpose of the news story itself, as explained in the words of this senior producer. And these are her words. For me, the ends justify the means. If you're shining a light on an important issue, you need it to be the ha-mak-idar, explosive. And that's fine. But putting music to footage of a supermodel walking up to a court hearing or, I don't know, looping footage of a policeman getting slapped, that has no real value. By value, I mean it has no impact on society. If you're not contributing to any substantial discourse of the society, it may not be unethical, but you're doing news wrong. Upper class journalists who expressed ridicule towards the state of current broadcasting practices in Urdu news nonetheless acknowledged that it was through such practices that channels were able to attract mass audiences and thus secure the advertising needed to keep them in business. The need to stay in business was, of course, often rephrased as the responsibility to deliver the news to impressionable people who made up the majority of the voting electorate and who, despite their pitied illiteracy, were now fluent consumers of the liberal free market. The professional vulnerability of lower middle class journalists is thrown into sharp relief when the work they're expected to produce, be it visually compelling spectacles or reporting at the cost of false flying facts, is both peddled by elite news professionals as the only way to attract mass audiences and is also critically rejected as crass sensationalism. So I'm just going to stop reading from my article now and hope that elicits some kind of reaction to maybe more recent examples in Q&A. So thank you. Thank you very much, Aisha, and thank you for keeping to time. That's beautiful. Okay. The next speaker is Rafé Mémoud. Rafé completed his MA in creative and cultural industries at SOAS to focus on ethnomusicology and screen studies. And he's currently an adjunct faculty at Habib University and the culture editor of the Express Tribune. And his article written in collaboration with Richard Williams, also from SOAS, is a soundtrack for reimagining Pakistan, Coke Studio, Memory and the Music Video. Rafé, great pleasure to have you here. Over to you. Thank you so much, Rosie, and thank you Aisha for such an engaging talk. As a journalist, I learned quite a lot about the realities of the business. So coming back to the paper we, I and Richard wrote together. So it was interesting because I as a journalist had investigated a lot into Coke Studio, been a part of the live recording, seen the process up close and personal to see how sort of an engineered kind of image is being put out there. So the thought behind the paper was to essentially come up with an argument and look at the impact of something as significant as Coke Studio, which has been termed by a lot of cultural critics, Pakistan's most significant cultural export in the past two decades. Some even say claim that it's bigger, but the most significant since Nusrat went to the rest of the world. So, and it's interesting because if you look at the show, the show very much takes foundation in a very clinical sense from Peter Gabriel's idea of world music and which the founder of the show, Rohail Hayat was also the founder of the band called Vital Science. One of the first Pakistani pop bands to come to the mainstream media was also inspired by and hence the name Vital Science. Also inspired by Pink Floyd. So someone like him comes to the mainstream and launches a show which was essentially designed for television. So what we may know of Coke Studio as a YouTube product, but it was never designed for YouTube. It was possibly the first successful interventions of shooting a television show for a music audience. And the reason why I say it successfully is because it managed together one of the leading names of the industry put together who had appealed not just in Pakistan but also in India in Bangladesh and rest of the region to come together and make something. But if you look at Coke Studio today which is 13 seasons down, it was the 12th season that was going on when we completed our field work, our research and submitted it to Bioscope. It was interesting that Coke Studio's first season was coming out that did not start with a patriotic anthem. So the previous five seasons all had started with a patriotic anthem and Coke Studio had a very strong tagline that they were going for which was either the sound of the nation or it was a one nation, one spirit and one sound. So it was very much the idea behind the paper was to bring together the ideas of nation building and nationhood and look at Coke Studio as a vessel of nation building something that we thought we were approaching from a very unique perspective but if you look at Coke Studio's last publication the official Coke Studio table book that came out in 2011 the second edition it compared itself to the glorious times of the radio Pakistan when the soldiers would go on the war with India such as Shaukat Ali's classics and Jaag Uthaa Hai Saira Vatan and Noor Jahan's classics would blare on the speakers. So it wasn't the attempt that we were trying to that we were making and bringing the ideas about nationhood together became so overt in the end of it that it was almost quite clear that Coke Studio may have started as a music show but it's very much now a corporate entity that is very much reinforcing a corporized version of the modern Pakistani state wherever that stands and however it stands whether it's in terms of religious inclusion whether it is in terms of bringing people from different ethnicities it is to sum it up in a better way it is something that people want to see Pakistan to be known for more like a vehicle for soft image and something that they don't see otherwise in mainstream media which is why there's a lot of emphasis on devotional poetry or Sufi poetry per se that you know because it's giving a very strong sense of pluralistic version of Islam which also goes back to the pre-partition senses of Muslim nationhood and Muslim brotherhood so what was interesting for us to know was we looked at a couple of videos we looked at the prosthetic memories attached to them which were more like an extension of it because when it's now on YouTube people are forwarding songs on WhatsApp, sharing on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, everywhere so it was interesting to see the kind of conversations that were developing under the comment section so two really important things came out that Coke Studio has become such a huge vessel for cultural change that even in terms of cultural issues related to cultural authorship get impacted if Coke Studio takes a certain stance on them then the next thing that really came up was that within the comment section of Coke Studio there's a very interesting transnational debate going on in which a Bangladeshi Canadian who now lives in Toronto is listening to a song by a Pakistani born in East Pakistan and remembering his Bangladeshi national hood through that song and at the same time we had people saying Jai Hind Jai Bangla we will never forget 1971 under the same song and the song is sung by Alamgi Pakistan very much considered the Elvis of Pakistan a person who migrated to West Pakistan after Bangladesh was formed and then very much became the torch bearer of pop music in Pakistan so he sung a folk tune Amma Bhashai Lee Ray by Jassi Muddin which was complimented and juxtaposed by some more lyrics that were written to go with the melody so two things that came up with the two findings the first case study that we looked at in terms of understanding the problems of authorship was the Qawali Taj Dar-e-Haram originally sung and released by EMI Pakistan sung by the Sabri brothers Ghulam Faitz Sabri and Maghul Sabri in 1975 and it was interesting that Koch Studios version of Taj Dar-e-Haram led to a debate about the authorship of that Qawali and the questions that arose about that authorship was that the Qawali has been written by Amma Ghul Prince and when we go back to that we see that Koch Studios has attributed it to Hakim Mirza Madni and all the resources on internet who had previously attributed it to Muzaffar Varsi or Purnam Alabadi had changed it to Hakim Mirza Madni so it was interesting to look at where that was coming from which was coming from the 1975 leaflet of EMI Pakistan that said Hakim Mirza Madni and when we went to other places other platforms on the internet we realized there were people who were pointing out how this Qawali has been written over the years by different people and Koch Studios sort of came and put a stamp on it and somehow got associated with the Muslim Prince which was necessarily never the case and same goes for Amma Bhashai Lee Ray that song within the Koch Studio comments instilled new kinds of nationalism a lot of time very transnational attitudes within people living across the globe and somehow even Indians coming up and saying that we just want this song you can take Kashmir so this is the kind of debate that started happening within the song and then the people from Bangladesh coming in and said that only if we could give a tribute like this to the Bangladeshi culture so it was interesting that decades of enmity of political resistance was being resolved within that comment section and yet it seems to carry on in some way or the other there seems to be a dialogue there and to bring it to a close it's one thing that came really important where Koch Studio literally became very overt with its political presence was just a day before the polling was to take place for Imran Khan's election Koch Studio released an anthem earlier than expected which was a take on Faiz Ahmad Faiz which was very much an anti-establishment anti-throne poem which was treated like a devotional piece of poetry in the beginning and one criticism that came back to back was that the original Baal Banu version which was written in resistance to Zeyaul Haq had a lot of anti-establishment and pro-protest verses in it but this one treated the poem like a devotional take about change which essentially implied that if you and God are one then everything is going to change for the better so this is basically the summary of the kind of politics the kind of nation building a corporate sponsored beverage show has turned into in the past 13 years since it's began thank you Thanks very much Rafay and now we move on to Aisha Aisha Malik is a research affiliate at the University of Sydney in the Gender and Cultural Studies Department where she teaches on media and gender and her paper in this in this article is in this issue is Transnational Feminist Edutainment Television in Pakistan Udari as Case Study okay over to Aisha Aisha I think Aisha Thanks I got cut off my internet wasn't working have we done the introductions okay hi everyone I'm Aisha in my work largely I raised the production and reception of the Urdu Seal drama post deregulation of the Pakistani television industry but in this article in the special issue of Bioscope I look at one drama seal in particular which is Udari but before I go into Udari as a case study I wanted to briefly introduce the Urdu Seal drama and its history Is it stuck just for me? Yeah I think Aisha's frozen Yeah I think we need to get a message for everyone okay maybe Sunil unless you can find a way through this maybe we should go on to Salma and see whether Aisha's internet access improves okay is that alright Salma? Yeah okay so let me introduce Salma Siddique who is the principal investigator of the Urdu Seal drama investigator of a DFG funded film spectatorship project called Nitrate Cities at Humboldt University to Berlin Salma was absolutely as I've already said wonderful support and colleague collaborator on this special issue and indeed a lot of its intellectual excitement comes from Salma so over to you Salma to talk about the issue Thank you Rosie and thank you Amina for inviting us today and it's I'm actually sorry that Aisha's presentation got disrupted because I was building on it but I'm sure she can come back and we can talk together so I was going to I'm going to focus on three contributions to the special issue and each of these allow us to think outside of national zones so my own work focuses on you know this kind of cross-border film histories and I'm always interested in these kind of cross-border media flows but also the crossing of time zones and so I'm going to talk about these three contributions which kind of move away from a conventional understanding of how television broadcasts unite geographically or territorially yeah and the title I mean we called our special issue television Pakistan but for us the idea was it was a post network television so it is about you know intermediality it is about the fact that there is a longer history of different media but also that the social media platforms are now playing a very important role in making what television is what it is in Pakistan so we were trying to think through TV audiences in different time zones researchers in different time zones and most importantly passed as a different temporal zone so the first in that order is Eliot Maupuler's article on the enduring popularity of 19th century colonial novel Miratul Ursin contemporary Pakistan and his ethnographic fieldwork conducted with writers and producers of the drama industry sees the past Pakistani family unit as both Sinek Dekhi for the nation and an important viewing unit used to interpolate audiences here he argues that family duty is the religious adjacent that dominates the drama form and what Eliot is interested in is understanding how piety is made public and how this particular narrative this 19th century narrative has been regularly adopted in religiously inflected discussions about respectable behaviors and what Maupuler's article reminds us of course of Pemra's red lines which compelled writers and producers to avoid sectarian and religiously divisive issues but it hasn't, I mean we also have to remember it hasn't entirely eliminated religious themes from television dramas his argument is nuanced and subtle he recognizes that the dramas formulate religious messages in unmarked and oblique frames such as duty family emotions and class more importantly the article problematizes the India dominant understanding of the literary scope of Mirath of Urs and the fact that assists in Pakistan today in television forms points towards the complex genealogy and inheritance of piety in South Asia so I think that's really very key to Eliot's work here a tale can have two endings depending on the vantage point of the researcher but if Pakistani family is indeed a key for the nation and an important viewing unit as Mahpira's argues used to interpolate audiences of the dramas how do we understand or explain the popularity of Pakistani serials in India Ritika Pan's article on the syndicated television content from Pakistan on the Indian channel Zindagi argues that Pakistani dramas offered a mediating space to Indian audiences by maintaining a balance between Indian tradition and Pakistani modernity I think what Ritika does is she draws on this longer history of you know the popularity of Pakistani dramas in India you know they were making their way in from the 1980s in the 1990s through VHS and CDs and bootleg economies and of course she also talks about how the cities in the other areas would receive television signals from Pakistan so if you were living in Punjab or Himachal Pradesh or you know one of those border cities families were receiving these signals and watching these dramas but the syndicated content on television channels had a kind of a circuitous journey so she draws attention to the complex global media flows through which Indian channels began from Pakistani channels to cater to transnational audiences residing in the UK the popularity of Pakistani TV soaps in the diasporic audiences then paved the way for media flow from one media periphery to another so it's no longer the north south flow but a south south flow was happening here and Panth, Ritika Panth emphasises that the broadcast of Pakistani series on Zindagi channel not only challenged the propagandist representation of Pakistani people that the Indian media had been circulating but it also disrupted the equivalence of foreign as necessarily western in Indian TV programming so and she writes the pleasures of watching foreign TV programming were altered with Pakistani TV series as Indian audiences for the first time watched foreign content that did not require the cultural capital to comprehend a new language or read subtitles in fact she writes how some of the series actually provided viewers with the glossary of Urdu words and so kind of upgraded the vocabulary of Indian audiences as well finally and we were very delighted to feature this field work piece Shukri Kothari's interview with one of the highest paid and widely respected writers of her time, Hasina Muin from the early 1990s Kothari herself was a pioneer of sorts in the sense that she was working in the early 90s on as an Indian researcher examining the discourse of Zinnana on the production and reception of Urdu drama in Pakistan when Kothari could not get a visa for another field trip to Karachi as an Indian citizen she and Hasina decided to meet somewhere else Kothari writes the airwaves became that place where we could talk and discuss this project without governmental approval or censor and Kothari of course traces Hasina Muin's rebellion so to speak but then she also captures the contradictions of this writer so Hasina at one point says Zia Saab love my place so it's no longer Zia Saab is not a problem for Hasina Muin but what she recounts is the fact that Nawaz Sharif's regime came up with this dictate for PTV where all women in television had to cover their heads so this is what Muin said then the policy came about and I asked him which sensible mother has a dupatta on her head first thing in the morning in the privacy of their bedroom Muin also recounts that a serial made during that time had a drowning woman holding on to her dupatta so I mean there were these series of very incongruous representations that finally led to a kind of reversal of this policy of the pata during Nawaz Sharif's regime Kothari is however unsettled by Muin's dismissal of class as an issue which I'm very grateful to Aisha's work as well but the newer work around television cultures in Pakistan is drawing attention to that Kothari says that Muin's women who have agency belong to upper upper middle class families so she reminds us of this fact and this is also something that Amina has pointed out in her work on the new series including Hamsaf which are critiquing the notions of liberal modernity or liberal notions of womanhood so I think my time is running out Rosie right so I can just maybe take a minute so for a long time TV has been considered the medium of respectability in Pakistan that's my reading associated with literary and educated sensibilities this is something that has eluded cinema for good part of its existence and also as I've recently read this book by Kiran Emad and a lot of writers now from digest fictions are making their way into the television industry also sort of provoking these anxieties around respectability and what sort of womanhood are we sort of are they representing Pakistan's screen so I think in terms of how to think about future research of what could be productive areas I think the idea of these different notions of respectability morality and creative tastes definitely needs more critical engagement I would also reiterate if the Qadadi's call for the need for a more comprehensive study that will trace the role of social realism from the 1930s well into the Pakistani TV series of the 1990s so we become medium agnostic but look at the larger tragic tree and finally of course we are very interested in post-network television and OTT platforms so I guess maybe in the discussion we can talk about the feminist detective series Turel that sort of created quite a few roles in Pakistan recently that's it yeah thank you. Okay thanks very much Salma that's great now before I go back to Aisha I'd just like to a word to our audience there are not any questions in the Q&A box yet and please do think about putting them in now so that we don't have a right at the end a whole sort of flood of them and they they get lost so please let's have some questions coming in and we'll go back to Aisha who I think is probably going to experiment with keeping her video off to make sure that she gets at least her voice out there so Aisha back to you thank you so much Rosie and I'm sorry about the disruption and I'm going to keep my video off I'm glad actually I'm following Salma because she talks a little bit about Shruti Qatari and my work also builds upon Shruti Qatari's work and her idea of the Zanana however in the time that Shruti Qatari was doing her work she was working in a in the context of her state controlled broadcast television in Pakistan when the drama serial format had a very distinct but had a very different sort of content the content that they were tackling the serial dramas was very different from the content that serial dramas are tackling right now in a deregulated Pakistani television industry so I wanted to talk a little bit about a little briefly about the sort of content that was being discussed by the Pakistani drama serials in the context that Qatari was talking about in my article as I discussed there was an educational motive embedded in the serial drama format and while the serial drama format in its initial broadcast on PTV was targeted at family viewing we have seen that during various regimes during the Raziya regime and during even the Nawashree regime in 1997 there was a specific target towards women of these serial dramas where they were trying to embed certain type of values in especially in the Sharif regime certain sort of conservative values were embedded in the serial drama so according to the regime change the content of the serial dramas did change however post 2000 deregulated Pakistani television industry we saw a complex set of coordinates emerge that over determined what I saw as the serial drama agenda setting rule so there was an eclipse of the progressive social education imperative that was embedded in the format and new commercial motivations towards popular appeal began to emerge and there was an ongoing censorship and pressure from religious groups on the content of the drama serial in this somewhat complex and contradictory climate I examined the case study of the serial drama Udari which is aid funded in coordination with the locally based non-governmental organization called Qash so before I go into the case of Udari the use of Udu Serial drama in this context is actually not new when Salam was talking about Hasina Muin actually Hasina Muin was one of the first Udu Serial drama writers to work on what might be called what was called at that time education entertainment a serial drama that was made in conjunction with John Hopkins center of disease control in the United States it was foreign funded it was called Ahat and it was talking it was speaking to notions of family planning maternal health maternal newborn health so entertainment education has been used in the past as well in Pakistan so this drama serial in 1991 was made in 1991 and it was talking about like I said sort of ideas around maternal health however the new sort of educational entertainment what you might call that is coming out in in a post deregulated television industry is what I'm calling in my article feminist edutainment and the reason I call it feminist edutainment is that it focuses more on gender norms rather than as opposed to E.E. focusing more on these sort of underlying health concerns so the first example of the example that I want to briefly talk about of feminist edutainment is Odaari which was conceived as in response to the Kasur incident in which which is the largest sort of pornography scandal in Pakistan and so the just briefly talking about a little bit about the sort of overview giving you an overview of how these drama series are produced is that under a broad umbrella of female empowerment the Canadian government gave funds to this local NGO called KUSH which was set up in 1996 KUSH is the first specialized microfinance institution of Pakistan and works with low income households to create more enabling environment for women to run and build and run businesses it seems on the first it seems to have little to do with television but making television is part of developing and commissioning television serial drama as part of KUSH's social advocacy program so like I said funding was received under the broad umbrella of female empowerment and then allocated to different project and the first project that KUSH made with this aid funding was called Rehi and there is a bit of difference between Rehi and Odaari which I think that speaks to the sort of rapidly changing nature and commercialization of the Pakistani television industry so in my research I spoke to the writer of Rehi and Odaari and I also spoke to the producer and they told me that because of the rapidly changing nature of the Pakistani television industry they also felt some pressure to make the content more commercially I suppose viable by adding in more entertainment entertaining elements to the story so while the focus was on sexual abuse there are sort of interweaving story lines that have to do with music and art in the in Odaari as well to keep the audiences you know and in terms of things because there is a lot of focus on ratings in Pakistani television industry even the sort of when they measure impact of the two serial dramas one of the things that really highlighted in the impact assessment report of Odaari is that Odaari did better than any other serial drama that was playing in the in the 8pm time slot even better than Rehi and perhaps that is because of the commercialization of the content increase commercialization of that content and added element of entertainment sorry Rosie how am I doing on time sorry I can't hear you if you could wind up right now then we'll be able to have a bit of time for the questions which are coming in so just yeah I just wanted to briefly talk about this case study of Odaari which I think is a very interesting sort of way of presenting issues like sexual abuse on television which is perhaps a much needed discussion that needs to be had in Pakistani society but that's about it great okay thank you very much Rosie thank you to all the speakers so we've got just half an hour or a little bit less than that for the questions and I'll begin with a question from Eva Loring just a brief question can Coke Studio Pakistan and Pakistani dramas be considered as a source of Pakistani soft power who'd like to take that would Selma take it? okay well of course I think more than Pakistan it's evidence of Coca-Cola soft power in Pakistan they're opening new and new bottling plants in Pakistan and Coke Studio is a part of their 15-year marketing strategy their marketing share has increased by 15% they were no way in certain markets and now they're in certain markets so I think Coca-Cola has succeeded the stuff they were doing back in the World War uplifting the troops by providing Coca-Cola and now they're making people feel more attached to it so in my personal opinion yes definitely it has but you have to understand that be it cricket or music it's usually the fizzy drinks supporting them in Pakistan and it's always not just the country that's manufacturing soft power it is also the beverage company or the MNC associated with it it is also benefiting from it someone else can talk about dramas sorry I've just remembered I've made a terrible mistake I've completely forgotten that Aminah is going to be a respondent and we're dying to hear what Aminah has to say so please Aminah can you come in and give your response and then we'll get to the rest of the questions I'm really really sorry I think we've lost track of time with all the disruption so please Aminah needs no introduction I'm sure to our audience thank you Rosie not at all I was thinking I'll be let off the hook here so I'm looking forward to Rafi and the Q&A thank you all of you for such rich and exciting and important interventions a lot of debate on television Pakistan which touches on the ethics of journalism in Pakistan of the ownership of media of funding of the kind of connections the transnational connections that you're talking about that militate against the very nationalistic content that is being produced and what are the tensions I think that's been really nicely sort of spoken about and illustrated in the discussions about various contexts and the feminist edutainment you know women have always been at the heart of of sort of nationalist mission nationalist projects shall we say global certainly in postcolonial societies they've been at the heart of projects and this kind of engagement with the NGOs and interests with regards to how fertility and health are managed within Pakistan through the television media is is a very powerful way of kind of thinking through who where you know who's the storytelling working for and where does the storytelling how far does it go in terms of actually what kind of publics I suppose that's the question I think of what kind of publics are watching this and absorbing this transformative kind of idea that is being put forward by the people who wish development I suppose development-led concerns that are coming in via that funding to what extent is that empowering for those women and to what extent does it actually you know change those relationships of class that were brought up quite a lot you know what are the kind of things that happen there with regards to the commercialization and all the sort of and I suppose one of the things that I thought about there was I mean I sure was talking about the show and I was also thinking about another show and I think it's a persona and a personality and a context that really connects with all of these issues with regards to the representation of transnationalism gender and media cultures in Pakistan and I'm thinking of the context of Kandil Baloch here as somebody perhaps that we could bring into the conversation who was very much a part of this whole narrative you know there was an adaptation as well wasn't there on as a television drama serial that was played out in which certain parts of the story was shared and other parts were not shared you know what's permissible in television who again I think as some of you were talking about the sort of ownership with regards to the accountability you know where is the accountability who has the accountability and who can be brought to accountability and then the kind of because with the Kandil Baloch case it was really interesting where the media industry that has participated in the kind of show and tell around her whole story sort of then took a back seat in relation to when Kandil Baloch happened after her murder and wanted to be more participatory in the reclaiming of Kandil Baloch you know what were the ethics that were involved in that story and recently I mean I don't need to I suppose remind you of this but then we've had the controversy with Khalil Rehman Qamar who was in the news for his drama which broke all sorts of records and he asked them who I have you and it's misogynistic representation of women etc you know it sort of ties in with things like the women's march and and the transnational activism of Marvi Sermad and the fact that it was okay to to say something that was quite objectionable and hurtful to a woman to swear at a woman on live television to have no intervention from the kind of from the TV channel I think it was Neo News who were running that panel debate and these are the sorts of and the fact that a lot of our media industry celebrities still kind of caught Khalil Rehman Qamar and there are women involved in that and men involved in that and that's where I'm really interested to hear about the questions of the middle classes that populate this this culture and how are they you know they complain about the stories that they want in which they would like to participate in that are not available to them but at the same time you know the ownership and the networks of power seem to be very challenging and also authoritarian in some ways I mean and we know that I mean this so all of this is really interesting for me and I also thought with just to kind of wrap up that I thought of here because agenda setting was brought up I think by Aisha in her paper and that's something that I've connected with in my core third book framing Muslims stereotyping representation after 9 11 now that doesn't look at Muslims sort of what a Muslim is or who a Muslim is but just looks at the kind of idea of representation and one of the things that we one of the people we engaged with was Maxwell McCombs and his work in setting the agenda in relation to news media and the idea of the frame which in which if I can quote the central organizing idea for news content that supplies a context and suggests what the issue is through the use of selection emphases exclusion and elaboration frames call our attention to the dominant perspectives in these pictures that not only suggest what is relevant and irrelevant but that actively promote a particular problem definition causal interpretation moral evaluation on and or treatment recommendation for the item described and we were talking about the twin concepts of stereotyping and framing being applicable beyond the boundaries of individual disciplines and cultural practices taking forms in different media and we were just sort of talking about it around the context of how Muslim this is constructed in a non Muslim context but I think you can also reverse that that sort of frame and look at it within a Muslim nation to see how that sort of self constructs Muslim nests and sets the agenda and also how global media networks you know what are the relations of those with the transnational concerns and contexts so anyway I mean there's a lot more I can say and think about but I think this is a really rich special issue I would like to congratulate all of you you know there's incredible hard work that has gone into it it's really exciting to hear that early career researchers you know are kind of leading the path in the field in terms of how we can think you know about the new ways of imagining culture within Pakistan and where the tensions lie and I think you've also opened up that kind of discussion of modernity that we always kind of debate and throw around and challenge be it in cultural studies or modern anthropology so I'll just stop there and thank you all for your contributions and for being here today. Thank you Amina, thanks. Would any of the panelists like to respond to any of the points that Amina raised or should we go back to the questions I have one thing to say because we talked a little bit about Gandil Baloch and you know her life and the sort of serial drama that was made about that as well and I think that to me while in my larger work I had I did have a look at it because the serials like Odari which are made on social issues that garner really high ratings they lead other commercial producers to make content that is similar which is you know could be called about social issues as well and you know is leads producers to make this kind of content but that sort of perhaps research or responsibility that might go behind creating content and you know representing somehow Gandil Baloch or any other person who is the subject of such a serial responsibly that is perhaps missing in a lot of the content that is produced about this and so I in my work I do look a lot at you know content that is produced about current issues but perhaps I myself am a little perplexed by how one can sort of have that balance between sensationalism and being with content responsibly and I think that those are sort of the contradictions that are worth exploring. Thanks. Any other panellists want to come into that? Okay I'm going to go back to the questions this is quite a few and we don't have long there's a question for a couple of questions for Ayesha and first one from Monira Chima I'm interested in knowing more about the theoretical framework used in Ayesha Mulder's work Ayesha can you briefly respond to that? Sure Rosie and I was looking at the questions I think we have access to them too and so I was thinking do you want me to just throw some of the questions together so yeah I think there was a question on sort of the ethics and how I actually was able to answer obviously those who weren't able to read the article yet my fieldwork was actually placed in a journalism training center and the timing of it was just really lucky it was in Pakistan and this like first center for training journalists shows up in Karachi funded by the US government very generous grant and so it was this sort of cleaning center where we had these new journalists sort of coming in every week for these sessions very striking is that they were entry-level journalists, they were hired as journalists but then they were also being trained to be journalists and so that figure of the untrained journalists really features in my work and so the framework that I'm really looking at when I'm looking at these as my primary interlocutors is a framework of aspiration and I think it's interesting how the news media industry becomes an aspirational site as an aspirational profession or lower to middle class entry sort of job entry entrance into the job market and it ties into sort of politics of desirability politics of respectability that we're seeing in sort of you know parallel realms of media in drama and cinema and television news provides somewhat of a stable aspirational income bracket for these groups and so the ethics of journalism then plays out within the sort of entry-level new journalists who are both sent out to cover you know reports or cover stories in unscrupulous ways and then are scapegoated by their management as well so it's sort of you know a hire and fire at will and so they're using that rawness of that untrained journalists to go ask those questions that will you know elicit these responses live on camera and then these journalists come to these training centers complaining of the treatment they receive in their news rooms you know where they're sent out to go make up the news so for example you know whatever the political agenda of the day was to say you know there's no petrol like you know go find me some vox pops of people on the street complaining that you know there's no petrol today and so then they'd go out with their report with their camera crew and they wouldn't find they wouldn't that wouldn't be the case there's petrol available but they have to come back to that report and so they ask people to lie on camera and you know they're they're narrating these stories to senior boxing journalists in the training institute and you know there is sort of like a gas shock and sort of like how could you do that like how could you ask someone to lie on camera that's not news that's unethical and then these you know entry level journalists are sort of like well that was my job description like I was asked to go do that and so the directive from the level sort of privileged journalists is you have to flat out refuse that you have to you know you know just quit your job and that's not an option for entry level journalists you know sort of there was a there was a very sort of tangible disconnect between privileged labor and in those that are coming into the industry and I think that kind of tension doesn't really translate onto screens and so we don't see it as much as we will hear about untrained journalists being critiqued by their seniors in you know newspaper editorials and there's so many instances of you know journalists in the news and the complaint is you know journalists don't know how to not involve themselves in the story so oftentimes we'll see like this untrained journalists become the story right like she like slapped a guard outside of you know a building this became the story and so we have to fix this problem of untrained journalists and so the center that I was at was a fascinating space where you know they're addressing this problem of untrained journalists but it's also sort of masking over larger issues of class disparities, educational disparities in Pakistan and then obviously the main question is also like this is an Urdu mass medium and so it's very relevant that the caliber of sort of journalism that they're looking for is not necessarily being translated in educational institutes and so there's a much larger problem of sort of you know training the labor that needs to fill these newsrooms and so yeah I'd say in a sort of convoluted way to talk about it, it is my work really looks at this industry as an aspirational industry for entry level journalists. Okay there's a few questions for Rafay Rafay Should I take them together or? Yeah why don't you rather than me shall I read out or do you want to just weave something that I mean we've got one Yeah go ahead go ahead We've got one about the patriotic intros to Koch studio where a thing during the time Raheel Hyatt was not producing the show and do you think that Hyatt doesn't necessarily approach Koch studio as a Pakistani nation building project but rather as a more trans national South Asian harmonising project if it can be called that as from Uzair Ibrahim Alright I'll start from here Okay so to sum it up for you Uzair this was a very interesting conversation I had with Raheel Hyatt in December and I did ask him that why did this season not kick off with that sound of the nation and as much as covertly and subtly he was of the opinion that he doesn't appreciate sound being associated with any sense of nationhood because sound itself being so trans national in its nature so but his take was that you know they allow me to take the creative freedom as far as the musicality is concerned so I let them take the freedom of marketing and putting controversial and sometimes questionable taglines to sell the show but as far as the notion of harmony is concerned this was very much the idea behind Koch studio when it started because that is how a brand like Coca Cola company came on board because the whole nation of harmony or cross culture inclusion was very much in sync with their brand identity so you have to understand that how he conceived it is very smart on Rohail Hayats and that he conceived it in a way that there was enough for the brand to take away from that to sum that question up I think Hayats version of Koch studio is very much this but but the four or five episodes that we see from strings I think have a lot to do with strings belonging to the Andhra Maksud family which is this family from North India and embraces the whole creation of Pakistan in a very spiritual sense something reflective reflected in Fatma Surya Bajia's novels and Zaira Negar's poetry and even Andhra Maksud's writing so I take Bilal Maksud's Koch studio as an extension of that mentality which is why you do see a lot of Urdu classics coming in the season and a lot of you know other national languages as complied by a lot of people being ignored on those seasons the other question by Bidu is are divisive or inclusive from a transnational perspective the studio produces programs reach the audience crossing the border at the same time for the nationalist Pakistanis you know the thing with Koch studio is that the essence of Koch studio is giving a cosmopolitan representation to traditional music it's very simple so traditional music is the same as it goes from Nangarhar in Afghanistan to all the way to Nepal you have the same notes, you have the same renditions you have the same folk swings working around it so I think in terms of its musicality yes they've included a Rajasthani singer even in Koch studio season 10 they included a female singer from Ummerkot who used to sing Krishna's Bhajans who used to render Bhakti which was covered in the BTS of the song but what she sang in the studio was essentially Sufi poetry so that brings that sort of leads to the question that is Koch studio sort of quite subtly trying to push the boundaries or is it trying to sort of tick all the boxes and yet stay in the safe hands of very much the state focused notion of nationhood because one question that bothers me as a culture writer and a commentator is that one thing that Koch studio hasn't overcome is the marginalised culture such as the Balots and the Pukhtuns being shown, treated and choreographed like museum pieces and not as such cosmopolitan citizens of the music world I hope that answered that Great, thanks very much we've got a question from Richard Patterson please explain in more detail the trade in programs and signal audience viewing overlap between Pakistan and India India and Bangladesh, Bangladesh and Pakistan I don't know whether anyone here has any overview of that Salma do you have anything to say on that or I would not risk talking about India and Bangladesh I'm sure like I mean as Ritika Latika mentions that this is something that my respondents in Pakistan also told me is that people who live close to the borders receive signals right so it's very easy for them at any point in time to catch those signals watch the programs that are being telecast in the language that they understand so this was the case of people living in Pakistan the border areas in the 70s and 80s especially where we would often tune into and this is not trade by the way this is just people catching signals and watching it it's not official so this is what one of my respondents said that we would tune into Chitra Har which was the Indian program for music and they said we had heard these songs for a long time on radio and then suddenly we saw them and we didn't like what we saw so I mean this is also what you hear for a long time and suddenly you see them on television we said we saw Rajesh Khan and we were like what's this but at the same time Zindagi what Ritika writes about Zindagi channel was actually in some ways something unprecedented in India because they actually had a channel just dedicated to content from Pakistan and it was short lived in the sense that it lasted for I think less than two years and it was banned and this sort of brings me to the question around soft power so if one were to think in those terms I would say that people who are alert to the idea of soft power do recognize the presence of these studios and the actors as soft power which is why they are the first to go away which is why you know Fawad Khan will be expelled or you know stop from working in India it's not they are worried about him making money in India but they are worried about the fact that he makes Pakistan more sexy and more desirable and so this is how you know if so I think in that sense soft power of these dramas do work to a certain extent in India of Pakistan through these dramas so and yeah I think as far as I know there is an official ban in Pakistan and Indian television but of course satellite providers or you know your local cable will sometimes offer that fare locally and you know people do watch it so there is enough familiarity with the genres of the Saaz Bahu series people have watched it in the past and you can also see it in the dramas that are coming from Pakistan where they mention you know there is a lot of intertextuality you know you are watching too many Indian TV series or like that so there is familiarity there is and of course with the YouTube and all I mean all these everybody is now watching whatever they want to watch and it's available so to the extent it's available in their regions yeah if I may add quickly just add something that's something that I've also always encountered in terms of cultural exchanges one thing that Pakistani producers are really anointed the anointed at is when Indian films were being imported to Pakistan Pakistani films were not being played in India and this has remained a point of contention for the artists for the stakeholders whether they are exhibitors or producers if you are looking at the transnational flow of content in a legal way so that always remains a point of contention that yes you are getting Indian films and the local cinema is benefiting a lot from that economy of the distributor exhibitor system but what about Pakistani films let's say because the total Pakistani cinema market is smaller than the market of Delhi as a whole in terms of screens so expanding that to a bigger country with the similar nuances in terms of culture that remains a point of contention and debate regardless of whether there was a ban or not Okay, thank you very much and I see that we're now at 3.30 exactly and I've been warned that we need to get off air as soon as possible so I would like to say a very big thank you to all our participants and to Amina and to Soaz and to all the people in the audience who've stayed with us to this point and I hope that you all managed to get hold of or get access to the special issue and do just get in touch with Salma or me if you want to actually follow up anything else by email afterwards. Okay, so that's all from me Amina, I don't know if you want to wind up to your event Okay, thank you everyone, I think we don't have time to discuss things like Imam online and many other kind of communalist programming that sets the airwaves on fire across India and Pakistan, Pakistan and India so it's something perhaps to say for another time and for another special issue so thank you to all of you for being here today and for kind of really raising some compelling contexts and ideas and I really actually one of the things from the articles I think the neo-global flows is something that stays with me from I think it was from Pants article and from all your pieces Soft Power and Cook Studio and yeah, and the power of poetry that is the King and how that becomes commercialized and sort of softened in different ways, lots of things you've given us to take away from today's session and yeah, once the recording is available we will share it, it will go out on the media pages for the South Asia Institute on the SOAS YouTube channel and we do look forward to seeing everyone next week if you can join us but we have Ali Asghar Asha with us doing interview that this is going to kick off the centre for Pakistan studies student-led seminar series contributions so it's starting with an in-conversation with Hazara artist from Pakistan so please do join us next week. So now I think is it the 25th? I'm just trying to remember I don't know 25th, I'll put the link in the chat box. Okay, brilliant, yeah so thank you, thank you everyone thank you bye bye