Mirāt ul-‘Urūson the Small Screen: Family TV Dramas and the Making of Pious Publics in Pakistan

Abstract

This article analyses three Pakistani television adaptations of Nazir Ahmad’s novel Mirāt ul-‘Urūs to better understand the role of television dramas, an entertainment genre, in shaping pious publics. Scholarly attention to the novel, notably Shenila Khoja-Moolji’s work (2018) on the two most recent adaptations, primarily discuss feminine piety, women’s education and modes of instilling middle class values for women in these narratives. This article shifts focus to examine more broadly how dramas contend with family tensions, how they conceptualise familial duty, and how this widened focus on family provides new insights on religion in these adaptations. The article explores the concept of ‘religious-adjacent’ issues (‘ side-chizen’), a category that emerges from ethnographic fieldwork in the Pakistani television industry. This framing helps us understand not only the ways in which narratives are structured around private piety and tensions arising from familial duty, but also the changing forms of circulation and online audience engagement of these dramas, all of which play an important role in shaping religious publics in contemporary Pakistan.