The “New Domesticity” movement: Upper class women in Humsafar (Farheen's post)

The greatest failing of a drama like Humsafar is its narrowed even orthodox mutation of values through the lens of class. However, it quantifies the ramification on Pakistani society of the effects of greater mobility of women within class structures and outside the home space. The upper class enshrines most of the drama’s antagonists and a primarily female ensemble which is the focal point of the drama: that an upper class woman fails at domesticity. How does that fit in with the larger scheme at play?
 

Humsafar can be seen as a Pakistani social movement which Emily Matchar calls the ‘New Domesticity’ – the fascination society has with reviving “lost” domestic values- idealizing a return to traditional domestic values. Izzat and Khudari are the words used most frequently by Khirad such as with Afsheen when she speaks of how her mother had taught her ‘khuddari’ all her life. Thus, Khirad’s good breeding is legitimized in our eyes. The upper class woman loses her virtuosity in the absence of a strong upper class male. Baseerat’s death and Ashr’s inability to speak up for his wife are all used manipulatively by Fareeda to literally excommunicate Khirad from her society. Sarah is ungovernable due to a lack of a male presence in her life. Although without the upbringing in ‘khuddari’, Ashr is bequeathed Baseerat’s last, prophetic words: protect Khirad who may be manipulated since her previous life was ‘common, simple’. An implication is that women from the lower middle class are gullible and we immediately side with the weaker party.

The drama plays out certain ideas of truth telling: that it is an economic commodity for the upper class (Fareeda paying Khizr to fake an affair) but victory lies with truthful Khirad. Fareeda, the upper classwoman who isn’t capable of virtue or truth, loses her home and even her family as she is vilified by her son and spirits of dead kin. Someone like Sarah we never see as capable of flourishing in a domestic sphere.

Matcher explores how the new domestic women romanticize what was increasingly starting to be seen among upper class women as a disdainful ‘rural’ practice of cooking for the family. In Humsafar we see progress in relationships through the medium of a woman who cooks for her family. The female help voices the drama’s moralizing tone, “shauhar ka pasand napasand biwi ko pata hona chahiye”.

The upper class woman can be seen metaphorically in Humsafar: an ambitious, driven female with a centered purpose and the lower middle class representing an all-encompassing, adaptive female who should be eager to make a home. Khirad willingly leaves the workforce: the movement attempts to show this not as a failure but the right women have of placing family over work. What Hamsafar does is endorse hers as the appropriate choices when it should have attempted to find how both sorts of women (the upper and the lower) can exist in one person.