Sterile Jinnah

Pakistan has never had any Jinnah: he was always the Quaid-e-Azam. Attempts to dig out the human being inside the Great Leader have been discouraged as being anti-Pakistan; in fact, Jinnah´s private life was never shown on TV prior to 1976 when his birth centenary was celebrated. But even the Quaid-e-Azam has never really been publicly projected, except through official photographs and some film footage kept by the government. So when the Pakistani government constituted a Golden Jubilee Celebration Committee, one of the ideas discussed was for Pakistan Television (ptv) to "do something" on Jinnah in order to "show the real man". It fell on TV producer Mohsin Ali, a member of the committee in his capacity as PTV´s Karachi Director of Programmes; to make a documentary on the Quaid. Given such a context, Ali did what every producer employed by the government would do: pass the research buck on to others. It was never taken up as an extensive research assignment and what emerged was all flesh and blood, no real man. Somebody with a lot of outside particulars but no detail. Sum up everything and you get nothing.

True to its reputation when it comes to projects initiated from the top, the ptv people thought more about how to tackle the higher-ups rather than the project. In the meantime, along came anthropologist Akbar S. Ahmed´s idea of a feature film, Jinnah, which swept everybody away. Soon Ali was telling all and sundry that his "Jinnah" would pale in comparison with the movie. This defeatism helped him convince everybody that he need not work very hard. Which, of course, goes to explain the quality of acting one sees in his seven-episode serial jinnah se Quaid tak (From Jinnah to Quaid).