Pashtoons and the Terrorist Film

There is a strikingly curious par adox about the relationship of the Pashtoons, otherwise Pakhtoons or Pathans, with music and the performing arts in general. In this deeply religious and conservative society, the musician is held in a certain contempt. The use of the derogatory term damm (drummer) that is often employed against singers and performing artistes is an index of this low regard and social status. And yet, Pashtoon society as a whole is very music-minded. This fondness for music is almost on a par with their other legendary passions—guns, fine food and having a good laugh. This paradoxical relationship has extracted a cultural price. For years, social stigma has deterred young Pashtoons from taking to the performing arts. Without Pashtoons being active in the cultural sphere of modern-day Pakistan, their society became susceptible to negative depictions on cultural screens dominated by other ethnic groups. Other ethnic groups, particularly those against whom the Pashtoons have fought in the course of their drawn-out freedom struggle, found it easy to depict them as uncivilised and aggressive. Thus, Pashtoon success in the military theatre was in a sense offset by their defeat in how they were represented culturally and in the media.

Perhaps the most notable instance of this contradictory process was the Pashtoons' encounter with the British. The toughest resistance the colonisers faced in their conquest of the Subcontinent was in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP), the traditional territory of the Pashtoons. So it was but natural that the British would depict their most formidable foes in rather uncharitable terms. Once the seeds of such depiction were sowed, they acquired purchase in the wider cultural plane of British India. For the vanquished elite, desperate for Anglo-Saxon recognition and approval, it was a rare moment of privilege to join the victor in poking fun at the very people who had resisted conquest. This is how the caricature of the violent and unrefined Pashtoon was added to the inventory of cultural parody, readymade for the time when cinema came along.