Outside the imagined community: Pashtun subjects in contemporary Pakistani cinema

ABSTRACT In Pakistani cinema or Lollywood, the Pashtun subject is pejoratively represented as either the noble savage, the violent Islamist, the vengeful patriarch, the paedophile, or the simple-minded buffoon. Such representations are grounded in colonial discourse and in post-9/11 national and transnational political discourse, which is then inflected by historical legacies of Punjabi majoritarianism. Cinematic renditions play a critical role in depicting Pashtun subjectivities as excluded from the imagined community of the nation and the national body politic and re-affirm the hegemony of certain identities at the expense of other minoritarian identities. In this paper, I will focus on three popular contemporary Pakistani films – Khuda kay Liye (2007), Jawani Phir Nahi Aani (2015), and Karachi Se Lahore (2015) – in order to argue for the co-option of the national cinematic apparatus to construct a Pashtun/Punjabi binary where Punjabi identity functions as a placeholder for Pakistani national identity and the Pashtun is strategically expunged from the national imaginary as a balm to the nation’s extant anxieties relating to the presence of local and global terrorism in the region, the centre’s inability to consolidate a collective cultural and national identity and the persistence of ethnic inequality in Pakistan.