The real reason Sarmad Khoosat’s Zindagi Tamasha is banned in Pakistan
Views: 1279Published on: 28-Aug-2023
The difference between good art and bad art is that good art is subtle. Pakistan struggles to do subtle. There is certainly your everyday slapstick comedy, the tragic heroine, and the flippantly violent hero. But no, Pakistan is not at all good at subtle, which is why Sarmad Khoosat’s Zindagi Tamasha is banned.
To put it succinctly, this film is about how a non-minority becomes a minority. The protagonist is a religious devout, who gets an instant rogue status for the crime of loving to dance effeminately. Had our hero danced unnoticed, he would have survived, but he gets caught [on camera] by the ridicule-addicted world of viral social media take downs and cancel-culture. Zindagi Tamasha is old world meets new, but it’s also the worst of both worlds.
We are a country that prefers staying within social constructs. A daughter must be dutiful towards a father. The respectable must not have whims. The wives must be able-bodied. The community must have only men and women. This is the only script that the gatekeepers of morality will accept — the grossly hypocritical. The utterly unrealistic. The fashionable lie. The rest is punishable.
Art that aligns completely with power is called propaganda. Zindagi Tamasha completely aligns with the circus of life.
The film, now finally released but on YouTube, has vindicated the idea that Pakistan is not just a fertile haven for bad art, it will do anything for good art to become commercially unsuccessful. Here, the creative process is marred by the fear of rejection, which is why we are inspired by the few artists who overcome their artistic terror and still show up in the arena.
Yet, as things stand now, the fear of the film board’s license refusal is bigger than your audience throwing rotten tomatoes at you. To be an artist in this country, first, you silence your inner critic and create art, then you face the likelihood of being silenced in the cinemas, despite creating art. It is no wonder then that artists either move abroad or move on to pamphleteering.
An award-worthy movie Shakespeare and Mirza Ghalib said it before Sarmad Khoosat did — “All the world’s a stage and the men and women merely actors” and “Bazeesha-e-Afal hai dunya mere agay [The world is just a sport of children and nothing more to me]”.
Yet, no one said it as dramatically as the Punjabi theatrics, Punjabi nuances and Punjabi lyricism that Khoosat directed in Zindagi Tamasha. He said it in the film because the characters are impulsive and brutish, and then he said it again at the introduction of the YouTube release.
In both film and publishing, the fact remains that whimsical people do whimsical things, on the set and off the set, script or no script. What the former does particularly well is that it brings to life the loud, uncanny, and in-your-face discrepancies between what we believe in and what we want others to believe about us. The dialogue, short and snappy, the characters believable and cherished, and the cinematography, seared in the museums we collect in our minds.