Productively ‘perverse’

The Urdu word 'fahashi', meaning 'vulgarity' or 'perverse', carries a heavy weight across Southasian societies, sometimes leaving serious imprints on how certain groups of people are perceived, labelled and stereotyped. In 2020, filmmaker Saad Khan and creative director Joey Chriqui made a documentary called Showgirls of Pakistan which exposed the cultural complexity of fahashi. The film documents the practice of 'mujra' in Pakistan: a traditional form of Kathak dance that began in the Mughal Empire during the 16th century. It was performed by women on folk music in pre-colonial Indian courts for royalty, and later for local rulers during the British Raj. Perceived as high culture in pre-colonial India, the British labelled it immoral, and criminalised and demoted it to working-class culture towards the period of Mughal decline. This change pushed mujra dancers, also known as 'Naachch girls' in pre-colonial times, to the fringes of Indian, and part of what is now Pakistani, society, and still continues to do so today as seen in the lives of three mujra dancers in Showgirls – Afreen Khan, Uzma Khan and Reema Jaan.

While the film captures the mujra dancers' conflicted yet powerful humanity, it also reminds us to unearth the grander pop culture of Pakistan's working class, in particular one of the pop culture variants: the Punjabi subculture. It is loud, colourful and intense – everything that isn't 'decent' or 'proper'. And Showgirls proudly adopts this noisy aesthetic to represent the dancers' lifestyles. This aesthetic comes from the cinema of 1970s-80s Lollywood, the film industry based in Lahore, representing an era that was part of the country's Golden Age of cinema. It is a specific film style widely known for its vibrant energy, but what most do not know is how it was a powerful form of resistance during Pakistan's most oppressive dictatorship, that of Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq's, from 1978 to 1988. The films adopted Punjabi culture's 'perverse' stereotypes and unapologetically played with these to express the working classes' social and political struggles of the time. In doing so, the films transformed the loudness from just perverse to productively perverse.