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Writer Bee Gul, the powerhouse behind Aik Aur Pakeezah, is worried about the hypocrisy with which Pakistani TV shows are censored.

Speaking to Nadia Khan and Zohaib Ahmed on their show Rise & Shine, Gul drew contrasts between how her latest TV project was policed for morality and how other popular shows can get away with a whole lot more.

The writer recalled receiving a great many objections to a scene in the first episode of Aik Aur Pakeezah where the male lead Faraz is shirtless — an important detail in the narrative based around sexual coercion and blackmail. “All I asked was that his bare shoulder be shown, even then we had to blur it,” she said

Gul lamented that another Pakistani drama was recently able to show a fully shirtless hero swimming in his pool and billions of people were okay with one depiction but not the other. “It’s very problematic that this is what people want to watch, and perhaps we have brought the viewer to this point… We need to think about where we’re taking our media, what we’re showing, what we aren’t. A crime is censored, but presenting the male body as an object of attraction, that’s glorified.”

She also said that while production houses and channels were now more receptive to unorthodox, even evocative scripts like Aik Aur Pakeezah, there was still a gap between where the media landscape is and where it should be. She said audiences aren’t as open to such stories yet, possibly because they haven’t had the necessary exposure to them.

Attesting to how the industry had changed since she first entered, Gul recalled how she was discouraged when she submitted her first script. “My very first serial was an adaptation of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and when I sent in the script I was asked very bluntly if I thought I was writing for European cinema and [told] that nobody would understand what I was trying to do with the script. So, the discouragement was there from the very start, that my writing style was too different and I was saying something nobody else was.”

She said there was a need for Pakistan’s entertainment industry to pay due regard to writers as “the backbone of a project”. To that end, she said she and Kashif Nisar — the director of Aik Aur Pakeezah — were working to launch a new platform where writers could work and be paid their royalties in a fair and transparent way.

The writer was asked about her earlier remarks on never writing for TV again. She said she would, but only if she had the necessary creative freedom, which she said the Kashf Foundation had given her for her latest show.

Cover photo: Bee Gul/Facebook