Team Memoona/Batool vs Team Fareeda/Zareena (in 550 words!)

As a drama with widespread national appeal, ‘Humsafar’ shapes a carefully laid out, ‘appropriate’ public imagination, and an example of this is its nuanced stylization of women, not only in terms of the ideology each female character is supposed to endorse, but also through variations in her dialogue, apparel and social context.

When recounting his father’s imposition of Khirad’s being into his life, Asher tells his mother in his deliberately Anglicized rhetoric, “We’re poles apart; we’re very different people”. This theme is reinforced through the absolute binaries set up between the NGO-running, café-coffee-drinking elite ladies versus the “choti soch” waali “jaahil” lower middle class auratain in ‘Humsafar’ – more explicitly through the different worlds the lush green lawns of Karachi and the cluttered muhallahs of Hyderabad are supposed to represent.

Since Khirad and Sara will probably be this week’s hottest topics, I’ll analyze the spheres ‘Humsafar’s ‘senior’ female generation operate in to be a little unique.

Whether we talk about something as simple as Batool’s gesture of bringing Khirad homecooked haleem because young girls like “chatpatta khaana”, or Memoona’s readiness to put her daughter before her even when she’s dying, Hyderabadi women possess moral considerations that are barren in Karachi (for instance, Fareeda HAS to see Memoona’s good-natured phone call to her brother as a strategically calculated move, meant to further some secret agenda). Taking this forward, ‘Humsafar’ ingeniously links morality to religion; the viewer notes Batool and Memoona’s numerous supplications to a higher power (“Allah behtari karay ga”) as well as their dutiful parda when they’re out teaching, whereas Fareeda and Zareena have everything they need, which is why Karachi seems detached from any kind of determined association with religion until Khirad moves in (which is the first time someone in the big mansion is shown praying).Women in Hyderabad have a more grounded sense of reality (literally grounded, they sit on the floor): they cannot afford the luxury of being taken care of. This is emphasized through their perpetually disheveled hair, lack of make-up and demure clothing in comparison to the absolute plasticity of the appearances of Fareeda and Zareena.

For the Hyderabadi characters, the barriers between public and the private realms of existence are blurred – they are working women, and the pressure of breadearning reflects itself in their actions and concerns (most explicitly shown when Batool visits Memoona and the duo discuss monetary stress). In Karachi however, the private sphere is a completely segregated, exclusive universe (which is why the balance is upset as soon as the Hyderabadi world penetrates through this realm, even through a mere phone call), and women are seen venturing out into the public not because they have to, but because it’s a nice way to pass their time. If a woman as cold-blooded as Fareeda participates in humanitarian causes, it’s got to be because a) she has too much money, b) social work is probably what’s popular amongst the high class elite at the moment or c) her perfect, monotonous, problem-less life needs a little spark.

Basically, ‘Humsafar’ uses the disparate social contexts of Memoona/Batool and Fareeda/Zareena to propagate two completely different sets of ideologies. Big forces such as wealth, religion, class and family influence the representation of women in the drama, and it’s made plain to the viewer what norms and values deserve to be followed.