Street Theatre in Pakistani Punjab: The Case of Ajoka, Lok Rehas, and the Woman Question

Abstract

The Parallel Theatre Movement, or "Street Theatre" as it is loosely called, in the province of the Punjab, Pakistan, emerged during the repressive era of General Zia-ul-Haque's Martial Law regime (1979-1989).' This form of theatre raises several questions about the nature of the relationship between the Pakistani "Islamic" state and society. The most pertinent of these for my project is the question of the state's coercive relationship with its female citizenry. Related to this is the issue of male-female relationships in the society and how these relationships are complicated by class stratifications that inevitably affect the way gendered politics (and policies) actually get played out. There is also the increasingly vexed issue of national versus ethnic identity-a conflict which is reflected through the language politics of the theatre groups; linguistic choices reveal the groups' conflicting and often self-contradictory ideological stands on this question. In choosing to focus on such an area of inquiry for a (so-called) postcolonial project, I am seeking to re-site the question "Who decolonizes?" that Gayatri Spivak insists we confront in her afterward to Imaginary Maps (1995). This question forces us to reevaluate "the task of the post-colonial," which, as Spivak sees it-and I agree-ought to involve a rigorous moving away from conflating "Eurocentric migrancy with post-coloniality" (Spivak 1995:203). In other words, let us, as postcolonial critics and scholars, turn our attention to "other sites of enunciation," as Walter Mignolo has urged (1993:120). This "turning elsewhere" is really a turning inward toward the postcolonial nationstate in order to cast a critical gaze at a decolonizing process that has simultaneously constructed a normative constitutional subject of the "new" nation (Spivak 1995:2o3): in Pakistan's case, the middle class, urban and male, or the upper class, feudal and male. Within the last decade or so, Ajoka (the major Parallel Theatre group in Pakistan) as well as its regional spin-offs, notably