Right at the onset, let me make it clear that I had a lot of issues with Kankar, the narrative about domestic violence that is about to conclude on Zee Zindagi. All the women in the serial with the exception of Kiran (Sanam Baloch), spend their lives sharpening invisible knives, wishing each other ill, pretending that all is well with the facades of their lives while their dimly lit, dense and toxic minds stew in bitter juices.Their only preoccupation is with marriage and announcing the “khush khabri” of a speedy pregnancy so that they can consolidate their positions as mothers, mothers-in-law, daughters-in-law and women who are nothing without their men and their fertile wombs.The refrain of, “Tum fresh ho jao main khaana lagati hoon,” echoes through the narrative and none of the women have any ambitions. Not even Kiran who is supposedly a smart and committed student. Aarzoo (Maha Warsi ), though also an educated girl has no aspirations other than marrying her cousin.
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“Naukri” is a bad word in the milieu as it signifies that the working woman has no man to take care of her and even Kiran who has left a rich husband to find her own way through life, meekly gives up her job when her second husband demands it. The only consistently working woman Rukhsana is the most bitter of the lot as she believes that a career only makes a woman vulnerable to more responsibilities and is proven right when her uncouth in-laws want her to keep working “even” after marriage so that they can get some “faida” from her naukri. None of the women have any desire to explore the world outside domesticity. And even though rampant inbreeding is going on to avoid unfamiliar surprises that come when you marry a stranger, domestic joy is hard to come by in this marital dystopia. Everyone is suffering through an unhappy marriage.
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Sikandar’s (Fahad Mustafa) parents have had an abusive, violent marriage. Kiran’s father, though a good man now, has hit his wife as well in his youth. Arzoo’s parents are always bickering about his rishtedaars and her rishtedaars and there is Rukhsana who is neither single, nor married and growing more and more rancid by the day. Even after her marriage is solemnised, she makes life miserable for her new sister-in-law for no reason except that she is so bitter about her Kuwaiti papers not being processed fast enough that she must make everyone else suffer too. Her mother is a naive, easily manipulated woman who attacks her perfectly decent daughter-in-law but cannot fight back when rich relatives like the insufferable Faiqa humiliate her routinely.
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Sikander’s mother has seen and suffered abuse but insults her own daughter-in-law for standing up to violence, even making her take off her jewellery when she leaves the home for good. Kiran’s mother and sister cannot understand why she wants to leave a man whose only fault is that he hits her sometimes! Does he not buy her jewellery, foreign holidays, a car for her own use? Men do all these things. Women have to adjust. “Auratein toh mitti ho jaati hain ghar basane ke liye, ” is the oft repeated argument. Faiqa’s obsession with getting her daughter married to her sister’s abusive son is so pervasive that she hurtfully dehumanises Kiran to make him look better till ofcourse her own daughter gets hit by him.
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Some of the things that are done and said to Kiran by the women in the family are so inhuman that they give domestic violence an entirely new meaning. No less vicious than the public stoning of an inconvenient woman. Possibly, director Aabis Raza and Umera Ahmed, the writer of narratives like Maat and Zindagi Gulzar Hai wanted to show that words wound as much as physical violence. And that women are perhaps both victims and perpetrators of patriarchy. That said, what the series managed to do and powerfully too, was to show how women in acute pain are gaslighted or made to doubt the extent of their own damage and hurts by people closest to them in almost all societies. When Kiran is hit by her flamboyantly romantic husband, her mother wants her to tame her responses instead of reacting. Her eventual divorce is blamed on her inability to manage a “gem” of a boy and on high-handedness. Not an unfamiliar scenario in the subcontinent where women are routinely blamed for failed marriages and vilified in public and in private by sometimes their own relatives.
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Kiran’s second marriage is based on the promise that she will be respected but right from the onset, she is asked to take the hurtful behaviour of her sister-in-law in her stride by the very man who knows what kind of scars Kiran herself is carrying from her past. Not just that, he begins to systematically undermine her anger and pain and starts becoming a paler version of her first husband.
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The series in the end was not just about how marital violence undermines women but how patriarchy reduces women to roles they must play at great personal cost if society supposedly has to function. A woman’s only function is to marry, reproduce and put up with whatever life throws at her. If a man is rich, she must feel obligated because he has rescued her from poverty. If a man has married her despite her past, she must be obligated because he has rescued her from infamy. She cannot ever scream aloud to say, “this hurts. I am in pain.” Especially if she is poor and has no options. Watch how in Sikander’s home, Kiran is always taunted about her humble upbringing. And in Adnan’s home, about her past. Even Aarzoo who has the emotional and financial backing of her parents, chooses to go back to her violent husband because unlike Kiran, she cannot face the society with unwavering izzat-e-nafs (self respect).
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For me, the punchlines Kiran delivers twice in the series were worth the time I invested in the story.
The first one comes when her soon to be former mother-in-law taunts her, “I have also been beaten. I still kept my family together. Kya hamari izzat nahin thi?“
And Kiran says, “Thi..aapki bhi izzat thi par aapne karwai nahin.”
And the second is when she slaps Sikander and says, “dard hua? Aurat ko bhi hota hai!”
I guess this line summed up the collective pain of all women who are never validated no matter what they go through. And for an instant showed us just what the world would be like, if patriarchy received an occasional, stinging blow too. And if it was a woman who delivered it. Without apology.
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Reema Moudgil is the editor and co-founder of Unboxed Writers, the author of Perfect Eight, the editor of Chicken Soup for the Soul-Indian Women, a translator who recently interpreted Dominican poet Josefina Baez’s book Comrade Bliss Ain’t Playing in Hindi, an RJ and an artist who has exhibited her work in India and the US and is now retailing some of her art at http://paintcollar.com/reema. She won an award for her writing/book from the Public Relations Council of India in association with Bangalore University, has written for a host of national and international magazines since 1994 on cinema, theatre, music, art, architecture and more. She hopes to travel more and to grow more dimensions as a person. And to be restful, and alive in equal measure.