Last year, I took a course called
Gender, Music, and Sexuality. One of my motives for taking the course was so
that I can better understand the Pashto music and film industries (and the
focus of the class was not just one race or ethnic group: it was an in-depth
analysis of the roles that our notions of sexuality and gender play in
music/film all across the world, with examples from various countries of all
the continents). When the time came for us students to discuss our ideas for
potential term papers with our professor, I went to her office and told her
that the idea I had in mind was a bit embarrassing and that the examples I will
give her and in my paper when writing about are going to be utterly mortifying.
I told her how tired and sick I was of the way women (and, sometimes, men)
perform in Pashto musics, often to beautiful and meaningful lyrics, and that I
want to understand exactly what is going on in the minds of the performers, the
directors, and everyone else involved in the production of our (Pashtuns’) music.
My professor was (is) a prominent scholar in her field (Ethnomusicology) as
well as in some others (Gender Studies, Middle Eastern Studies) and a beautiful
human who taught me to think positively, to never assume the worst or negative of
anyone or anything until I have fully understood them, to always try to look at
things from multiple perspectives no matter how offending they might be, to
never come to a conclusion until I had considered various possibilities. And so
I knew that she wouldn’t let me down in instilling in me a different, new,
another understanding of the one thing that bothered me most about Pashtuns.
And she did—and I’m so grateful to her.
The paper is over 15 pages long so cannot be shared here in its completion, but
here’s a link to the outline of the paper, and below, I will share some excerpts
from it. My purpose is not so that we will laud the performers of our music;
such thinking is beyond my interest. But I want us to at least acknowledge that
there’s something deeper, more complex going on here than most of us imagine. I
also hope that it will encourage others, particularly those with Music and/or
Gender Studies interests, to contribute to studies on Pashto music, the tension
between practice and ideals in the Pashtun society, and the roles of the
performers. It is precisely because of the extreme lack of studies on this
issue that I opted to write on our music videos rather than on music in
general, for Pashto music, its performances, and its lyrics are another
excellent research opportunity for those interested.
Introduction
Two years ago
in an online Pashtun discussion forum, some members suggested that we have a Pashtun
version of American Idol, only that we would be reciting the Qur’an, not
signing. I liked the idea and expressed a desire to participate in it. The male
member who had initiated the request said that, no, that would be unacceptable
because I am a woman and Islam forbids women from allowing their voice to be
heard by non-related men, and the forum is public, which meant that everyone
would be able to hear my voice; hence, the competition was open only to males. Virtually
all of the other participants in the discussion agreed with the male member
because he used Islamic sources to support his argument, which was that the
woman’s voice is considered aurah, or something private that has the
power to attract a man’s attention and therefore lead to fitna, or
social chaos. After weeks of debate, the competition did not take place because
I insisted on participating, and the male member along with others did not wish
to be associated with an un-Islamic event on a community that claims to be
Pashtun and hence Muslim.
I narrate this anecdote here for two important
reasons. The first is that it shows the importance of religion in the Pashtun
society, particularly when it comes to women’s conduct and gender relations,
and the second is that it explicitly sexualizes the woman’s voice, presenting
it—and indeed the woman’s quintessence—as something private that must not be
made available to the public. Yet, men’s voice is not sexualized because it is
not considered an object of attraction. It is therefore fascinating that Pashto
music videos, the subject of this study, do not seem to perceive gender and
sexuality the same way.
The Roles of Music
Music has been
used throughout history for various purposes, among which are for the music
producers and musicians and others involved to express political, religious, social
views; to assert a people’s identity; to depict certain situations of a people
or culture, such as national tragedies; and to raise awareness of a certain
cultural quality. Hence, music has no one role or objective but a variety of
them. Particularly in Pashto music, the social and political predicament of the
Pashtuns are strongly depicted in songs like “Zamung pa kale ke shar ma
jorawai” (Don’t bring violence to this global village of ours), sung by Irfan
Khan, or “Nan Pekhawar Jareegi” (Peshawar is in tears today); powerful calls
for unity are often made through music in songs that endeavor to eliminate
tribal affiliations by gathering all Pashtuns under the flag of ethnicity, such
as a popular song by Musharraf Bangash in which he names all of the different
Pashtun tribes and makes a claim to fame of the Pashtuns as one nation, rather
than as individual tribes; the role and position of women in the Pashtun
society is well portrayed in many songs, among the most popular being “Bibi
Sheriney” (Sweet Lady), sung by Gulzar Alam; a feeling of patriotism and an
appreciation for identity is instilled in the minds and hearts of Pashtun
audiences through music, as in the song “Ey Zama Watana” (O’ my beloved land!);
ideas of gender roles as perceived by the society are expressed in other songs,
such as in “Peghley hayadaare har zalmay ye dak da nang” (The female youth of
our nation is full of modesty, the male youth full of honor), although the main
theme of this song is not of gender/sexuality but instead on Pashtuns’ pride
for their nation. It is this last group of Pashto music, particularly that of
gender appropriation through music, in addition to the performers’ expression
of sexuality, that I aim to discuss here.
As the title of the last mentioned song suggests, the two sexes are identified
as females and males, and a certain sense of recognition is attached to them:
the Pashtun women are expected to be modest, while the Pashtun men are expected
to be honorable. Women are thus associated with modesty, which mainly points to
clothing as well as public and private behavior, and the men with nang,
or honor, and they work together such that the women maintain their haya,
or modesty, so as not to offend the men’s nang. Arguably, this places all the responsibility
of honor on the hayadaara, or modest, female, which is true for the
understanding of gender roles in the Pashtun society. [...]
Gender
Construction through Music
Popular Pashto
music videos do not support this idea of the hayadaara Pashtun woman and
the honorable Pashtun man, although the latter cannot be as easily discerned as
the former because it is not the man’s decorum that is scrutinized, and the man
is not identified by his behavior—the woman is. [Below, it by performer and dancer, I am often referring to the dancers to Pashto music, not the singers.] Yet, the women in
Pashto music videos actively contest these gender norms and expectations in the
society. They defy normative moral standards by flaunting their feminine sexuality
and appearing to be sexually loose, unlike the ordinary Pashtun woman, who is
to suppress her sexuality in public and express it only in front of her
husband. Yet, like performers of many other regions, including early Western
Europe, these women resist culturally established norms to create space for
themselves in music and dance; they are fully aware of the consequences of
their performances, but they continue to assert themselves as performers in
musical spaces. Because the space belongs to them and is created by them, they
also have the opportunity and the freedom to express their sexuality in a way
that they are not permitted to do so outside of this space. The female
entertainer in these videos is called dama (plural, damaaney),
the male dam (plural, damaan). However, because this term is
derogatory and reduces these performers, especially the women, to merely sex
objects used for pleasure alone, I will avoid referring to them as such
throughout this study because I propose that there performance, no matter how
sexual, be interpreted in multiple ways, not just in terms of pleasure.
The Pashtun women in Pashto music videos
are socially referred to as damaaney, as mentioned above, and may be
compared to the Indian nachni (discussed by Carol Babiracki in “What’s the difference?” In Shadows in the field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology, 1997); the Indonesian ronggeng
(Henry Speller, “Negotiating
masculinity in an Indonesian pop song: Doel Sumbeng’s ‘Ronggeng.’” In Oh boy!
Masculinities and Pop Music, 2007); and the
dancing girls of Hira Mandi (Louise Brown, The Dancing Girls of Lahore: Selling
Love and Hoarding Dreams in Pakistan's Ancient Pleasure District, 2005).
For example, like the nachni, the female Pashtun performer
is an important part of Pashtun weddings: she is invited to entertain men in
their hujra, which is a traditional male-only space, even though she is
degraded and looked down upon for her act by both these men as well as everyone
else in the society. The Indonesian ronggeng is not just a performer of
music and dance, but she also engages in sexual acts with her male
clients/audiences; the Pashtun performer, too, often extends her services to
sexual acts with her male hosts, including when she is invited to their homes
to dance at weddings (Charles Lindholm, Generosity and Jealousy: The Swat
Pukhtuns of Northern Pakistan, 1982). And, like the dancing girl of a
Lahore brothel who manages what she calls her shame very carefully, shame being
associated with sexual activities, contacts with men, and failure to control
and discipline the body, the Pashtun performer dresses inappropriately
according to the social expectations (usually, this means skin-tight clothing,
and rarely do her clothes expose her skin), she is too friendly with men, and
she moves her body in a very lax manner; she therefore brings shame to her
family and society, reducing her chances of marriage with a “decent,
respectable” man.
[…]
Identity Formation through Music: Understanding the Performers’ Role
The public behavior and the performance of these Pashtun women performers play
a pivotal role in identity formation among Pashtun women in the society. The
identities of these two groups of women—one being the entertainers and the
other being the ordinary women—are contrasted against each other such that
Pashtun men who enjoy the performers warn their own female family members
against becoming like them: these performers are not to be seen as role models
for the female youth, and the young daughters will not grow up to be like the
women on TV. Hence, the ideal Pashtun woman is virtually everything that the performer
is not.
But perhaps the most likely way to understand the
performer’s role is to see it as a response to the suppression of sexuality in their
society, which also points to the responses of their male audiences. [...]
While the women’s performance may be understood as providing a window into Pashtun
notions of gender, this is not entirely so, as it assumes
that the role of music should be or is limited to portraying certain cultural
behaviors and norms. However, as previously noted, music can be interpreted in
various possible ways, which include shaping people’s identities and
transcending the society’s limitations. The former reading of music, that of
shaping people’s identities, can be viewed in the context of this study’s
performers as: they reassert traditional notions of Pashtunness, of what it
means to be Pashtun, by reminding their viewers that what is being shown is
un-Pashtun, thereby defining what it means to be Pashtun and how to avoid being
un-Pashtun. The latter reading of the role of music also offers a different
viewpoint: these women are in fact empowering themselves by transcending the
limitations that the society has established for each gender. They willingly cross
the boundaries that the society has set for them because, perhaps, they realize
that women's bodies, and hence their sexualities, have been under social
control for a long time. They are aware of the consequences of a woman’s choice
to enter the public music world where her body is viewed as the embodiment of
seductive power and the entertainment field as "extremely sensitive"
for women to work in due to religious ideas about female sexuality, and, yet
these women offer their bodies for pleasure to the public anyway. [...]
The Audience
As pointed out earlier, the female performer
who acts in these music videos also serves as an entertainer in Pashto
weddings, tending only to men’s desires while the women, who are outside of the
hujra in the larger home space, tend to have “ordinary” girls and women
dancing to them. As this suggests, their audience is primarily men, which can
be seen in almost all Pashto music videos, particularly live performances.
In fact, it is not just the audience of the dancers who is almost all male but so is the audience of the singers. A few examples of both are presented below.
“Che masti wey ao zwani” (If only youth and enjoyment were eternal), where the performer dances to a group of four men, one of whom is
sitting in the center and is depicted as
her main audience—and there are no women.
“Marhaba, Marhaba” (Welcome, welcome), an example of a music video that not only
illustrates the point of the dancer’s audience but also of her sexual,
seductive role contrasted against that of her male partner’s.
“Maa la chal na razi” (I don’t know how)—few
women, the rest all men.
“Zama charsi janana” (O’ my addicted
beloved), perhaps the best example of an almost entirely male audience; the
audience can be seen from 01:59-02:10 as all men.
The issue of
audience raises important questions of class: for live performances, including
those in weddings, the audience must be able to afford to attend or host the
performance. The women who do attend these performances tend to be upper-class,
as can be told from the way they wear their dupattas, or veils around
their shoulders or necks. Few have their faces covered, and most have their
hair showing. Generally, the showing of the hair is associated with liberalness
and face-covering with conservatism or traditionalness. In many cases also, the
audience includes a large number of other singer and performers. Hence,
it seems that particularly lower-class women are excluded from the audience. [...]
Displayed Gender
Differences in Musical Performances
Gender differences
are created when different qualities and roles are attributed to individuals
based on their sex. For instance, in terms of looks, the male performer in most
musics, including Pashto music, does not
bear the pressure of being aesthetically appealing to his audience, but the
woman does. In fact, because the society prefers light-skinned women to
dark-skinned ones, she must look white in order to appeal to her audience. Moreover,
the woman tends to have a more sexual role, such as that of a seductress, and
does most of the dancing and performing, whereas the man does not; he merely
seems to be watching the woman perform and every once in a while, dance with
her. Additionally, the only role assigned to the woman is singing or dancing
(she seldom does both): she does not tend to play any instrument [this does not
take into consideration folk musicians, who are an important and separate category
of their own], while there are many male Pashtun musicians who both sing and
play an instrument, among them Sardar Ali Takkar and Gulzar Alam. […]
Conclusions
There appears
to be tension between reality and the ideals of the Pashtun society. Somehow,
it seems to be an accepted idea that performers are “expected” to transgress,
as though it is their job to transcend social boundaries; they do it, and their
audiences enjoy it. The stage is their space and opportunity to do something
they are not socially permitted to do otherwise. Since they are the instigators
of what is deemed inappropriate behavior, they do not represent the ordinary
Pashtun girl; they instead represent the girls who do not “exist” in the
society, the girl who must not be. The challenge to the assumption that
Pashto music videos must represent authentic Pashtun culture remains: if that
must be so, then what and who encourages the produces to continue making the
sort of music videos that they do? Why are these very popular among Pashtuns if
they are not an accurate portrayal of the society? On the contrary, the facts
that they are popular and continue being produced suggests that there is an
eager audience waiting to rely on them for entertainment.
[…]
Qrratugai is an Islamic Studies student with emphasis on gender relations in Islamic law. She tweets at twitter.com/qrratugai and blogs at http://orbala.blogspot.com.
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