It will damage the society and spoil our women
This is an urgent plea to all cinemagoers in Lahore: please do not watch the Kangana Ranaut starrer Bollywood movie Queen. By the time you read this, most cinemas must have already taken it down, considering it was released two weeks ago. However, I believe it should never have been released in Pakistan and I am surprised that it was given the green signal by the censor board.
On the face of things, there is nothing in Queen that would result in it failing the censor board’s test. And whatever there was – a kiss or two, a bit of vulgarity here and there – was already censored by the board. However what needed to be banned, what really should have been censored, didn’t manage to grab the censor board’s attention.
Vikas Bahl’s Queen contains elements and scenes that can have a disastrous effect on Pakistanis, and it is very irresponsible of those sitting in the censor board to ignore all these things and instead just focus on kissing scenes. The rest of the movie can do significantly more damage than those few vulgar scenes.
Queen showcases the transformation of what really was the perfect South Asian girl into her unrecognisable form. A woman whose universe centred around her wedding; the marriage; would-be husband; family’s needs, wants and desires, all of a sudden starts to focus on herself. Teaching a Pakistani woman – or a South Asian woman, for that matter – that she can focus on her own self, think about her own life, her own aspirations, and that none of this is actually a bad thing, can prove to be very very dangerous.
For ages we have been producing women of a particular brand. They are taught certain things, told to act in a particular way, expected to mould their life according to a set of rules, all of which is designed to maintain their men’s stranglehold over them. Our women are told what is good for their man, best for their family regardless of what she thinks about it, is all that matters. Any woman defying these norms is a bad, bad woman and is slammed as such.
Now, even though many other movies and shows have endeavoured to put these evil thoughts in our women’s heads, and have had their respective successes as well, the path taken by Queen is unprecedented and hence prodigiously more menacing. The almost blasphemous feministic material is all over the movie, without ever presenting itself as such.
Why Queen is extremely dangerous is because it does not have the self-importance of your average “feminism” movie. It does not come with the pretext that it will change the universe; it does not clamour about giving the South Asian women a strong, powerful message. And hence, through its subtleties and simplicity it manages to do exactly that. Queen manifests the profoundness of simplicity. This makes it so much more dangerous for a Pakistani man than any feministic nonsense in the world.
Almost every Pakistani woman can relate to Rani (the character Kangana Ranaut plays), and by the time the movie finishes, a lot of them would be asking those questions that the society has been doing its best to shield parry away from them. Queen makes the women ask if the societal norms are right. It makes them perceive their lives and their own selves differently. She is a different woman coming out of the cinema – different in a very independent, very self-confident way. Every Pakistani woman would start to, or want to, see a reflection of Rani inside her own self. And once that happens, all the societal handicaps that our women are bestowed with would be jeopardised.
It’s solely the censor board’s responsibility if Pakistan starts producing independent women.
I would like to request all the readers to make sure that the women in their houses do not end up watching Queen. All the cinemas that are still playing the movie should be permanently closed for the damage they are causing our society and all DVD shops should be raided to ensure that the pirated versions of the movie are not sold either. This is in the best interest of this country.