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

Abstract

The Parallel Movement, or Street Theatre as it is loosely called, in province of Punjab, Pakistan, emerged during repressive era of General Zia-ul-Haque's Martial Law regime (1979-1989).' This form of theatre raises several questions about nature of relationship between Pakistani Islamic state and society. The most pertinent of these for my project is question of state's coercive relationship with its female citizenry. Related to this is issue of male-female relationships in society and how these relationships are complicated by class stratifications that inevitably affect way gendered politics (and policies) actually get played out. There is also increasingly vexed issue of national versus ethnic identity-a conflict which is reflected through language politics of theatre groups; linguistic choices reveal 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 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 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 words, let us, as postcolonial critics and scholars, turn our attention to other sites of enunciation, as Walter Mignolo has urged (1993:120). This elsewhere is really a turning inward toward postcolonial nationstate in order to cast a critical gaze at a decolonizing process that has simultaneously constructed a normative constitutional subject of new nation (Spivak 1995:2o3): in Pakistan's case, middle class, urban and male, or upper class, feudal and male. Within last decade or so, Ajoka (the major Parallel group in Pakistan) as well as its regional spin-offs, notably