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Bhānds in the Drawing Room: The Popular Punjabi Theatre

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Comic Performance in Pakistan

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Comedy ((PSCOM))

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Abstract

The bhānd entered the Lahore Arts Council’s colonial-styled drawing room comedies in the 1970s. While the elite practitioners resisted these interventions, the so-called ‘low’ performers exposed the legitimate theatre’s exclusions in the mushrooming of the popular Punjabi theatre (1980–), giving way to playful subversions of class hierarchies and gender norms, which have been subject to frequent moral disapproval and censorship. It then presents case studies that explicate these interventions: Kuch na Kaho (Don’t Ever Speak, Baral 2002), which addresses class strife; Eik Tera Sanum Khana (Your Place of Idols, Jee 2003), wherein transgendering probes patriarchy; and Billo, Billi aur Baali (Billo, Billi and Baali, Anon 2004), where female performers adopt the bhānd mode in rejoinder to the censorship of the woman dancer (2002–2004).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, USA

    Claire Pamment

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  1. Claire Pamment
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Pamment, C. (2017). Bhānds in the Drawing Room: The Popular Punjabi Theatre. In: Comic Performance in Pakistan. Palgrave Studies in Comedy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56631-7_5

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