Starting with an overview of the web series: Churails is a show uploaded on Zee5, written and directed by Asim Abbasi and starred Sarwat Gilani, Nimra bucha, Mehar Bano and Yasra Rizvi. The lives of these 4 women get intertwined when the character of Sarwat Gilani finds out her husband is cheating on her. After this the 4 women decide to run an agency to catch cheating husbands in action. They run this agency under the disguise of a burkha store called "Halal Designs", and call themselves churails. Initially, their plan worked perfect but when one of them goes missing, their investigation leads them to one of the bigggest Pakistani sex rackets.
It comes as no surprise that Churails was banned by PEMRA and PTA in Pakistan due to its supposedly lewd content. Pakistani conservatives were enraged at what sort of content was this show putting in front of our youth. There was a scene where a women has agreed that in order to become the CEO of a business she seduced the previous CEO and married him. Another scene was at the beach party where men had masks on of various predatory animals and were bidding on women. Now if we look at these issues in no way is this behaviour acceptable but when we talk about it we entirely forget that this is the sad reality of our society. No matter how much we deny somewhere in our country this is happening and to prevent this from happening in future we need our youth to be aware of such sensitive issues and Churails provided that platform of awareness for people but this was not acceptable.
Patriarchy is prevalent in our society, men make all of the decisions and run the households along with the country. Churails shows women in burkhas with hockey sticks in their hand, fighting men. Never has any Pakistani media portrayed women to be this bold and a contender for power in the society. Hence, this idea was not digested by the misogynist male mindset. Furthermore, this show presents themes like feminism, patriarchy, capitalism and child abuse; such topics can never be accepted easily in our culture.
These are my opinions on the previous banning of the show and the GIF below is my reaction on the ban. Do share your reactions and views in the comment section :)
Author: Kanza Nadeem.