Something more than a dictator

Here in Toronto, Canada, I am flipping through the pages of the 2021 Reel Asian Film Festival anthology and find a still of Nazia Hasan looking at me from the pages. I am taken aback and look back at this picture until Nazia and I are in a lifeworlds-apart staring contest. The still is from 2018 short film Video Home System, screened at the Reel Asian Film Festival in 2019. I think about how the 1981 hiss of “disco, disco, disco….” at the beginning of a beloved pop anthem, Disco Deewanay, Nazia and Zohaib Hasan’s hit single, had sounded through a screening hall somewhere in the city in 2019. In Video Home System, television footage of Disco Deewanay is followed by a cropped, headless video of Zia-ul-Haq, the military president, under whom Pakistan remained under martial law from 1977 to 1988. The short film references a ban that Zia-ul-Haq put into effect on Nazia and Zohaib’s music some time in the 1980s. Video Home System then explores a fictional meeting between Nazia, Zohaib and Zia-ul-Haq, where a ban on the sibling duo’s music is negotiated and ultimately lifted.


The short film makes an interesting move in fictionalizing the encounter between Zia and Nazia/Zohaib, because truthfully there is more fiction than fact about how exactly censorship happened (see also, Sabahat Zakariya’s video essay titled “A Cultural History of Pakistan: Rethinking Zia”. Over breakfast, I tell my friend, well, it’s not like Zia came and suddenly everything was different, everything went into darkness! My friend argues, well isn’t that true? She is asking me to think about the violent gendered laws encoded as part of Pakistan’s constitution under this military regime. I pause to reflect and make sure to acknowledge to myself the weight of that particular constitutional movement, and the rise of a women’s movement in the 1980s against constitutional discrimination against women – and I also say that a nuanced cultural account, especially for entertainment, is attentive to a complex cultural fabric that certainly thickened under military dictatorship, but also existed in relation to a range of other historical and cultural actors.

Even after having researched television in Pakistan for ten years now, I actually am not sure how to trace this ban on Nazia and Zohaib Hasan’s music - what it looked like, who put it into effect, how long it lasted, as my research has shown me the web of censorship under the Zia years (and the years before and after under different dictators and the years to come for future dictators and the years after….) was quite unstable, especially within the entertainment industry which paradoxically produced a host of drama, music, and entertainment programming within a state institution that did not always have a linear relationship with state/nation/Islam. In the absence of concrete pieces of information, the interwebs provide sweeping narratives of censorship, but having closely looked at these television archives, censorship, like it tends to be, throughout the history of Pakistani television as a state-owned enterprise, has been unpredictable, messy, vague, surprising, frustrating. This complex web has been spun over decades. The web of censorship does not start with Zia, and it certainly does not end with Zia, as the military entrenchment in Pakistan’s media starts to take different forms over time. Over time, I have tried to ask the question: is Zia-ul-Haq really the big story in our cultural archives?

As found footage travels, as it does in Video Home System, it may lose critical histories and relationships to other archival objects. The interpretive approaches surrounding archival footage can weaken when displaced from points of origin. Migration also happens to images and footage and archives - and displacement, as always, is an unsettling process that requires and deserves attention and care. It might then be helpful to ask: what would happen if the film did not insert footage of Zia-ul-Haq’s footage in relation to Disco Deewanay? What would happen if we excize, exorcize, surgically remove, reframe, annotate the screen with something more than Zia? Can we trace a history of Nazia’s image which displaces Zia-ul-Haq’s main character energy in cultural accounts and introduce us to different historical actors and settings within the entertainment industry? What would it mean to re-work the story of this image and charge it with multiplicity? We can start with –

1980

It is the year 1980, and this year, the Hindi film Qurbani (1980) featured a playback soundtrack from Nazia Hasan, Aap Jaisa Koi, produced by a British Indian producer. The song becomes a subcontinental hit, and Nazia is interviewed by Herlald, an English publication in Pakistan the same year. She feels she is coming up against traditions of classical music, which have been more mainstream on television in Pakistan up until this point, and she advocates for pop by saying that she wants to feel like not-at-a-funeral when listening to music.

1981

It is the year 1981. The sibling duo release their album Disco Deewanay and Herald publishes a cassette review for this album, reporting that EMI, the production company for the album, was selling 2500 cassette copies of this album every day. The sales in Pakistan appear to be even better than the sales in India, where 55,000 copies of this album were sold in the first three days.


In October later that year, Herald does another interview with the sibling duo in which they speak about the musical experimentation in Disco Deewanay, ranging from reggae to rock’n’roll. The duo also locates themselves in the pop cultural landscape of the U.K., where they spent most of their lives.

1982

In 1982, Nazia and Zohaib release their second album, Boom Boom, which does not receive as favourable a review as Disco Deewanay, as this Herald report thinks that the genre of pop music feels transitory rather than substantial:

1986

In a 1986 interview with Herald, Zohaib talks about the albums Hotline and Young Tarang, and says that television allowed some unexpected songs from these albums to gain popularity.

1993

Nazia and Zohaib, now no longer teenagers, and five years after the death of Zia-ul-Haq, become part of a Lipton advertising campaign, enjoying tea on the pages of a magazine in floral teacups.

2018

In 2018, found footage of Disco Deewanay appears alongside cropped found footage of Zia-ul-Haq in Video Home System.

2019

In 2019, found footage of “Disco Deewanay” plays at the Reel Asian Film Festival in Toronto, Canada.

2021

In 2021, Nazia’s image makes it into the Reel Asian Film Festival anthology.

2024

In 2024, in the midst of my field work for my PhD dissertation, I am sitting with ______ at the back of _____ in Karachi, who is showing me a USB full of production stills from the 70s, 80s and 90s, which he has _____ from a deteriorating archive (omissions…deliberate).

2025

I am back from Karachi, settling back in Toronto, Canada. My orientation to Nazia’s image from the production archive has now suddenly changed. I am now studying it from the vantage point of being here, a million miles away from the context that gave rise to this image and its storage.

2026

And back to 2026.

I think about my own relation to this image. More than artist/scholar/researcher/writer, I am simply — someone who has left. I consider the travelling image of Nazia in my hands, and wonder how I am able to annotate her image with history. I wonder about circulation, about found footage, about how images travel and sediment in visual economies. And why does it matter anyway to provide this charged history? Why does it feel so deeply personal to almost want to rescue this image in the festival archive, to say no, no, there’s something more! I want to say, Vital Signs, the band that appears in the second half of Video Home System, was a pulse in tandem with corporate sponsors and nationalist aesthetics of course, but also also our affective response to the world, my own, my sisters’, the words that float in our collective unconscious, that pan across our neighbourhood in our family videos with my dad singing off-tune one of the band’s songs – I want to rush to provide all of these explanations, but to whom exactly? And why?

For anyone who has left, we are in formation, still a little bit in disbelief that the twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-eight, thirty years or so spent at home are now a thing of the past. There is a lot of grief in movement, especially movement born out of compulsion, so much grief in losing language, visual, cultural, in friendships, in love, re-working our physical and mental environments to make space for a new history, new surrounding, new frames – and perhaps that is why it feels so urgent to rush towards tending to something that feels remotely our own. No in-betweens, no hyphenations, no liminality - just us. I remember walking out of Queen of My Dreams (2023) from the TIFF Lightbox in tears of anger and grief, because I wanted to rescue my city from the cinematic screen and its schemas of representation, and knowing that I am not able to. I see familiar sites from Karachi on the big screen but feel like I am in a warped time-vortex, with the audience around me at TIFF Lightbox laughing and swaying along to visual and historical elements on-screen that simply feel untrue to me.

I am still stunned at the categories of art, film, galleries, content, aesthetics that this cultural landscape in Canada provides but ones that are still so radically new to anyone who leaves/arrives/settles, ones that are vastly more resourced with circulation and cultural influence. The stage is larger and yet somehow we feel smaller. We move between desire and grief, always on the brink of failing to have left entirely, grieving a previous way of knowing the world, and frantically looking up ways to inhabit this one (google search “how to be an artist”) - to anyone who will listen, “there is something more.”