The Hum TV drama — written by Imran Nazir, directed by Danish Nawaz, and produced by Momina Duraid — is a complete rarity. It foregrounds questions about religious exploitation vs the sacred, without moral simplicity.

“I have played many characters in these five years. I went on-set, donned the look of the character, played the part, and then signed another project and repeated the process for it … But Kashf … she stays with me. I am unable to let go of her. I don’t know when this will end, I don’t know what my own end is. All I know is that Kashf has me completely within her grasp. — Hira Mani, in an interview by Maisooma Batool, Oct 31, 2020

The Pakistani TV serial Kashf (Unveiling) on Hum TV — written by Imran Nazir, directed by Danish Nawaz, and produced by Momina Duraid — is a complete rarity. I am so lucky to have stumbled upon this show in St. Paul, Minnesota, at my husband’s insistence, where clever, glamorized, agenda-based TV shows with their bite-sized wisdom is standard fare. So, we watched it on YouTube, ads and all, and some of the early episodes with a friend who has promised to finish watching it in New York. Kashf foregrounds questions about religious exploitation vs the sacred without moral simplicity. The show startled me, and I tried to make my friends watch it: “It sounds dark,” they said. Writing this review/essay is my second effort at persuading my friends and readers to watch Kashf.

Kashf dares to engage with the sacred and the profane with the intensity of a Greek tragedy. It has deservedly won wide acclaim for its well-patterned story, plot, dialogue, brilliant direction, and extraordinary performances by the actors: Hira Mani, Waseem Abbas, Junaid Khan, Hajra Khan, Sameena Ahmed, Saleem Miraj, Saji Uddin, Lubna Aslam, and Amir Qureshi. Kashf, the lead character, played by Hira Mani reminds us of Alyosha in Dostoevosky’s Brothers Karamazov who lives and dies with a purity and gentleness that eludes everyone else. The collision in Kashf is between gentleness and careless cruelty, but the show throws this central question at the audience: “What if the original comes to us in the form of a counterfeit?”

At first, my teacher-mind kept making connections for the classroom: Is Kashf like Joan of Arc? Is Kashf like Antigone who gives up everything for her loyalty to a brother she does not even really like? Is Kashf in the predicament of Iphigenia in Aeschylus’s Orestia, the daughter who is sacrificed by her father, Agamemnon? Even the arrogant and insensitive Agamemnon had to make sure that Iphigenia is his child, and that he loves her like a father so that the sacrifice could feel like one. But Imtiaz, the father in this show — played brilliantly by the veteran actor Waseem Abbas — is a father in name alone, a father who does not love his children because they are daughters who are burdens until they can be turned into investments.

In an interview titled “Who says that Kashf does not have a happy ending?” Danish Nawaz, the director of Kashf, claims that he “does not think that Kashf is a tragedy” even though the events are tragic. Whether Kashf is “a tragedy or not” could be debated, but the show has the narrative structure of a Greek tragedy. The lead character — young Kashf — is trapped in an impossibly difficult situation, and there are no easy answers to what can be done, and that is what interests us as viewers. Simon Critchley, in his book The Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us, argues that this question of “What should I do?” animates ancient Greek tragedy. Critchley says that the gift of tragedy to the spectator is to make us see “a disoriented, baffled character struggling with this question of “What is the right action?” This is why the ancient Greeks watched tragedies by Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides so that they could come face-to-face with the effects of mysterious unknown forces that besiege human beings. Kashf shows the mysterious forces that surround us by using clairvoyance, telepathy, dreams, and prayer. These may not fit with our current ideas about skepticism and science, but they take us into unknown parts of ourselves.

The plot of Kashf is simple: there are two brothers, Imtiaz and Faiyyaz, and they live in adjacent houses and share a terrace. Faiyyaz’s family lives upstairs, and despite his wife’s contempt for her husband’s brother’s family downstairs, this is a family that Tolstoy would call a “happy family.” They love their children Wajdan and Shumaila more-than-adequately and equally. Imtiaz’s family is poor, chaotic and “unhappy” because the father-figure, Imtiaz, is fraudulent, selfish, and greedy. Imtiaz wants his daughter’s clairvoyant dreams to make him rich. He is also servile, and servant to the diabolical Matiullah — the arch-villain — to whom he owes money. Imtiaz’s mother takes her son’s contentious point of view in everything, is demanding, bossy, and loves eating! Imtiaz’s sister, Ashi, who had been married off to the violent and diabolical Matiullah by her brother Imtiaz, now divorced, lives with Imtiaz and his family because her income as a teacher is useful to the struggling family.

Kashf, the oldest of Imtiaz’s three daughters, is distinct. Kashf is also the only one in the family who prays with any moral attention, while the others sanctimoniously invoke Allah every chance they get. Kashf is betrothed to Wajdan, her cousin, and they naturally belong together. Kashf discovers that dreams happen to her in which she can foresee shadows of future events, but unlike a clairvoyant, she has no control over them; nor is she a Pirni. The process of setting her up as a Pirni begins when Aunt Suraiya comes home to thank Kashf for the dream that miraculously saves her life and keeps her from getting on a plane, which she learns has crashed. When the aunt presses 5,000 Rupees in Kashf’s hand, saying that Kashf henceforth is her murshid, we see Kashf flinching in terror from what she and we the viewers recognize: that her dreams can no longer be anything but clairvoyantly true, and not even her own anymore. Kashf’s father immediately sees a business opportunity here. A clairvoyant Pirni in today’s meretrious, guilt-heavy market is currency itself.

But Kashf is a real artist; a real artist involved in making counterfeit paintings. Unlike Joan of Arc, Kashf does not claim that her revelations are proof of Allah’s benediction. On the contrary, she is baffled and asks Qari Sahib, a true Pir, what her dreams mean, and how an ordinary girl like her, who cannot even pray without getting distracted, be the recipient of this gift? Qari Sahib tells her that she must keep her dreams to herself. Kashf, however, finds her dreams so terrifying that she cannot keep this secret to herself. Qari Sahib also tells her that her simplicity, humility and gentleness is the reason why Kashf is “the chosen one.”

“Chosen” is the last thing Kashf feels. She is speaking a strange new language over which she has no control. Her prayers get more earnest. He sets up a “Kashf Bibi Ka Asthana”, and Kashf is handed a terrible new responsibility, to dream dreams that foretell people’s futures, and sit on a pulpit as a Pirni. Hira Mani’s face animates gentleness. This really is the life-affirming power of this show. Religion for the marketplace — this is her father’s plan. The business takes off; people start to pour in for solace, and the money starts to pour in. Imtiaz is the gatekeeper counting the coins, making sure no woman gets in to see Kashf unless a “Nazrana” has been deposited in the donation box, while Kashf’s family-members harangue her for money.

Kashf sees everyone around her changing, and she sees the bad faith. She goes silent. Her family gets richer every day. The darkness begins. Her loneliness gets deeper. And we ask ourselves: Why does she consent to her father’s demands? Does she not recognize who he is? Perhaps, that is a central quality of goodness, that it wishes good for others — even for people like Imtiaz who is after all her father, even if only in name.

Only Wajdan’s love and his unquestioning loyalty is vouchsafed for Kashf. Only to Wajdan, she remains real. The love and faithfulness of Wajdan and Kashf where they give each other everything, even what they do not possess, is beautifully evoked, and makes this show a poetic tragic love-story like Sadqay Tumhare or Devdas. What Wajdan gives, or gives up, and how he abandons himself in his love of Kashf startles the viewer!

But Kashf is beyond the narcissism of passion; she is elsewhere.

If Imtiaz, her father, strikes the first blow against Kashf, Zoya, her youngest sister, strikes the second blow. Zoya covets Kashf’s fiancé, Wajdan, with a greed that matches Imtiaz’s greed for money. When Kashf speaks her heart to Wajdan, telling him how devastated she is, and how strange all this is, he begs her again to go away with him. Zoya records this conversation and publishes it on social media, revealing to everyone that Kashf is not a true Pirni but a hoax who treasures a secret love. The ironies of this are not lost on the audience! Is Kashf the shadow or the reality of the pure and gentle Pirni? Is Kashf saintly? Is Kashf the original figure of the sacred who is forced into the profane embrace of religion by fake clerics like Mattiuulah and her business-agent father? We wonder about this when Kashf is looking at herself in the mirror in her new garb of a Pirni. Kashf pleads with her mother to stop this Asthana: “We are building our house with the suffering and misfortune of others.” Her mother persuades her that she is doing God’s will.

Only through the betrayal and violence of the people around her, Kashf’s gentleness becomes visible. The days are a torture of demands and the nights a torture of dreams. But Kashf’s gentleness suffuses her like a fever. Her cheeks are red, she prays, tears fall from her eyes. Even with Zoya, Kashf does not depart from her gentleness. Is this failure? Servitude of a simple heart? These are the questions about gentleness that Anne Dufourmantelle, who gave her life to save two children from drowning, explores in her tremendous book Power of Gentleness: Meditations on the Risk of Living (2018).

Life places gentleness within us originally … Gentleness is primarily an intelligence, one that carries life, that saves and enhances it. Because gentleness has degrees of intensity, it has a transformative ability over things and beings, it is a power (p. 8-9).

Kashf shows us what happens when gentleness is sold by its destroyers. The show is roughly divided into three parts — Part 1 shows us Kashf’s new life as agitated dreams fall on her sleeping eyes, and she is forced to figure out why this is happening to her. There is no sleeping, no dreaming, no elsewhere for this young woman. Each dream that happens to her is like Prometheus having his liver eaten up by the eagles, little by little.

Part 2 of the show has to do with Kashf as a Pirni (a clairvoyant) and her work with the suffering women who narrate their problems to her. Kashf is always truthful with the women and her truthfulness and listening is full of compassion. That alone gives them deep relief, and their problems are resolved. In another terrifying dream, she sees her father and grandmother and her wily sister Zoya grabbing wads of money that she is throwing at them from a raised platform.

Next, Kashf dreams that Zoya is taking away her fiancé Wajdan, who Kashf loves with her whole being and soul. Zoya’s vindictiveness is like her father’s greed. When Kashf dreams her most terrifying dream where she sees Wajdan dressed as a bridegroom, and the scene shifts to reveal Zoya being married off to Wajdan, Kashf knows that she has been chosen for punishment. Her tears are unstoppable. Kashf goes to her aunt Ashi (her pupho) for comfort. There is no doubt that Zoya, the scheming sister, her father’s lieutenant in deviousness, is going to grab Wajdan. Everything seems random and perverse. When a wealthy millionaire murid of Kashf donates a house to the family, and the family moves into a nice, air-conditioned house, Imtiaz announces his plans for expansion of Kashf’s Asthana so they can get a bigger house, Kashf is truly ashamed for her father. She gets on her knees, bows her head and prays. But Kashf is not completely unarmed against Imtiaz’s greed or against her sister, Zoya’s scheming.

In Part 3, the show moves towards the end. The miraculous marriage of Wajdan and Kashf is the brief interlude of happiness in this part of the show but Kashf, against Wajdan’s advice, returns home to save Zoya from a disastrous marriage to evil Matiullah, and is once again trapped by her family. Wajdan has been attacked by Matiullah’s men, and he is injured in his head. Wajdan is in the hospital and her family has lost everything because Matiullah engineers this destruction. Only Wajdan’s love sustains her, and she needs money for the treatment, and once again is manipulated into sitting in Matiullah’s Asthana. Wajdan tells Kashf he would rather die than let her sit at Matiullah’s Asthana, but she is unable to listen to him even though she loves him absolutely and he loves her absolutely. There are no tears now. Wajdan can see the destruction that her gentleness threatens, and he lashes out at her: “Tumhari muhabbat bhi joothi, tumhari ibaadat bhi joothi” (Your love and your faith are equally false). She can see how angry he is, how hurt he is. When he tells her: “Galti ho gayi, yaar, tum se kabhi muhabbat nahi karni chahiye thi (it was a mistake to love you),” the ground gives away from under her. Then comes Wajdan’s talaq, and the final stage of the inevitable end begins. Kashf reaches towards her bed, lowers herself and something seems to have snapped inside her. Zoya is there ready with her taunt, and this is when Kashf reminds us of the scene where Jesus rails against the hypocrites. She is stern when she tells Zoya: “Everyone will be destroyed, no one will get anything.”

In the climactic scene of the show, Kashf’s parents are debating how to observe Kashf’s iddat (after the divorce from Wajdan), and also somehow keep the money coming in. Some well-wisher sends Kashf zamzam, and her mother fetches it for Kashf, and we see her drink the water plaintively.

When Kashf goes to the Asthana that day, she looks determined and deathly pale. We see Kashf sitting lifeless on Matiullah’s ugly sofa — his so-called “Asthana” — unable to move or speak while women plead with her for an answer to their problems and questions. Kashf has never lied to the women. She has no nostrums for the suffering women. She gives them the only advice she can muster: “Namaz padho, dua karo.” Kashf’s gentleness has become a force; she has now become herself, despite everything. She has activated what she has in her, her gentleness, into courage.

The final scene, like all the dream-sequences in the show, is so powerful that it shifts the ground from under the viewers. Kashf says wearily to the women, among them her mother is present: “Sab munafiq hain. Jhoothi muhabbat. Jhoothi ibaadat” (Everyone is selfish, self-serving. False love. False worship). Kashf tells the women that “the time has come for her namaz” and retires to pray in the next room. When her mother tries to raise her, she finds that Kashf is not breathing. Kashf gives up her life in a state of grace — in sajda. She has cast off the structure, her family. Kashf’s mother is weeping wildly, and her foolish father finally falls silent.

In the evening traffic, we see Imtiaz with a begging bowl, looking as manic and desperate as before. Only Matiullah, the architect of this devastation, knows what he has done; he looks scared, and his hands are raised in desperate prayer. Wajdan, who has given himself over to the otherness of madness, is the only one who understands her language, her dreams. Wajdan is sitting on the street outside by a wall weeping.

He was sweeping the courtyard, and feeding the cats. When he looks up to see a body being taken to the burial ground, he remembers what he must do, and he walks up, and gives his shoulder to the coffin being carried to the burial ground.

The opening dream-sequence with which the show opens is now communicated to us — that Kashf and Wajdan are for eternity, not for here. To close with a quote by Anne Dufourmantelle: “Gentleness lurks. Lying in wait . . . Collectively and individually, we are survivors of a long traumatic history. I don’t think hate is enough to survive on.”

This essay was part of June 2021 issue, which got delayed due to the pandemic and was released on October 15

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Kashf, the Pakistani TV serial, has it all: clairvoyance, dream, the sacred and the business of religion

The Hum TV drama — written by Imran Nazir, directed by Danish Nawaz, and produced by Momina Duraid — is a complete rarity. It foregrounds questions about religious exploitation vs the sacred, without moral simplicity.

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