Anti-intellectual trends on television decried
KARACHI: The anti-intellectual and regressive trend in current television dramas and talk shows was decried by media experts on Saturday in a day-long colloquium on ‘Television in Pakistan’.
Organised by the Department of Media Sciences, Shaheed Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Institute of Science and Technology (Szabist), the event took a critical look at the past, present and future of the medium in Pakistan.
At the outset, Dr Framji Minwalla, head of the department, described the discussion as an exploration of how the media shaped and was in turn shaped by practitioners and viewers.
Actor and media personality Rahat Kazmi, who was the keynote speaker, contended that while the media rarely created social change, it did reinforce pseudo-scientific ideologies and beliefs that had served to undermine civil society in Pakistan.
In this context, he criticised the anti-intellectual and regressive direction of current television dramas and talk shows.
Several speakers recalled the formative phase of television in Pakistan and described how those involved in the new medium had to navigate stringent bureaucratic controls to communicate with their audience.
A recorded video clip of Aslam Azhar, considered the father of television in Pakistan, was shown in the third session. According to him, while news and current affairs programmes were censored during the Zia years, dramas, which he described as “tamashas”, were not pressured in the same way.
Mr Azhar described how TV evolved into a potent force within a short span of time despite efforts to control it. He added that during his days there existed a thriving intellectual culture that valued artistic pursuits in a way that Pakistani society was no longer doing, and exhorted the youth of this country to consider the creation of art as work rather than pure entertainment. It was during Mr Azhar’s time that PTV began to air the campaign speeches of politicians in the run-up to elections.
However, the state-controlled media was unable to develop an unbiased narrative that examined the developments leading to the secession of East Pakistan and the emergence of Bangladesh. In the years following this cataclysmic event, PTV acquired enormous technical capacity which was evident not only during the marathon coverage of the Islamic Summit in Lahore but also in several long-running drama serials that earned international acclaim and emptied the streets of traffic while they were on air.
However, Ghazi Salahuddin cautioned that recasting the 1960s and 1970s as the golden years of Pakistani television ignored the fact that state-mandated censorship limited narrative possibilities. He also suggested – using the poet Ghalib as an example – that the most brilliant creative work often emerged at times of greatest repression.
The session on the Zia Years 1980-1990 brought back memories of the ruthless attempts to gag the media though imprisonment and lashing of media personnel. Renowned television personality and former information secretary Mehtab Rashdi and Agha Peer Muhammad recalled their experiences from those times.
Earlier, the Khoosat family (Irfan, Sarmad, and Kanwal) shared their family history of working for television which goes back to the 1960s and spoke about the different challenges they faced over the course of many years in writing, directing, and producing TV dramas. Sarmad and Kanwal Khoosat discussed how the issues depicted in their work reflect contemporary social concerns.
Shireen Pasha presented a brief history of Pakistani film leading up to the inception of television, and described both the technological and political limitations confronted by television writers and directors. Other participants included Ayesha Tammy Haq, Dr Seemi Naghmana Tahir and Haider Waheed.
The four consecutive sessions were ‘Khoosats in conversation’, ‘From inception to censorship: 1964-1980’, ‘The Zia Years: 1980-1991’, and ‘Seeing Ourselves: Television since Privatisation’. Each session was followed by a question-answer interval in which audience members could interact with panelists.
Those who attended the event included corporate delegates, civil society representatives, students from various universities, and SZABIST staff and faculty.
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