New Delhi: There is a familiar pattern to how women are portrayed on South Asian television: wronged, silenced, redeemed or punished. But the Pakistani TV series Aik Aur Pakeezah, directed by Kashif Nisar, breaks that pattern and celebrates its characters’ agency without spectacle.
Written by Bee Gul, the social-impact Urdu drama that blends elements of crime, thriller, and emotion has generated conversation around cybercrime, digital privacy, victim-blaming, and the trauma caused by manipulated online content.
The show, which aired its first episode on 14 January and its finale last week on GeoTV, has been treated by viewers as something closer to a social intervention.
The story centres on Pakeezah, played by Sehar Khan, and Faraz, played by Nameer Khan, who seek justice after a video of them in a hotel room is recorded and circulated online without their consent. What follows is not only a story about cybercrime but also about how violence moves through family, community and legal systems. The scandal does not just remain outside; it also enters the victim’s home.
Pakeezah, a budding lawyer, is judged not only by strangers but also by her own family. Pakeezah and Faraz are then married, not as a romantic union but as a way to ‘erase’ the scandal and shift the burden of responsibility. This becomes a central plot point of the TV series that highlights the suffocating pressure of “familial honour” over the truth. The couple’s road to justice focuses on the mental and emotional toll the fight takes on the survivors.
The show explores themes of cyberbullying, forced marriage, gender violence, and the silent systems in place that prevent women from speaking out. Yet its most striking feature is not its subject matter but its treatment of women characters. It refuses to reduce women to victims, instead presenting them as thinking, feeling individuals navigating constraints who resist falling into the mould of a perfect victim.
“If you want to reach out to the masses, talk to them and create a discourse, you have to give them a reflection, a projection of society and how things are around them,” Gul told ThePrint. “Most of the things we see around ourselves, we go through them, or we know someone who has. We don’t name them because of shame. Even if it’s an uncomfortable watch, I have to push myself and my audience through it.”
It is a shift that has resonated widely. Scenes from the show have been dissected on social media, followed by long reflections on its impact and the female characters who play different roles. Even the title track has become a feminist anthem of sorts.
After the final episode, Reema Omer, a Pakistani lawyer and activist, wrote on X that the drama “has taken a piece of my heart with it,” praising its sensitivity and its treatment of women with dignity. Others have described it as “the finest Pakistani drama of the last 25 years, maybe ever.”
For Nisar, the response to the series has been unexpected.
“I was a little surprised,” he told ThePrint. “Anything that is a hard watch—anything that makes you uncomfortable—is usually not acknowledged or praised. But the reaction was much more than what we expected.”
A true incident
The drama is inspired by real-life cases of cybercrime and online harassment in Pakistan.
“While I was briefed about the TV series, I started researching crimes against women in Pakistan. It was immense and extensive. Multiple actual crimes were being discussed,” he said, adding that most of them reached the trials, but a lot were not even reported.
“The series is inspired by the Usman Mirza case, but not entirely,” he said.
Cybercrime in Pakistan surged in 2025, with over 1,50,000 complaints reported to the National Cyber Crime Investigation Agency (NCCIA).
Also read: Pakistan’s new ‘loot and plunder’ Bill—private developers get free land to build SEZs
A narrative shift
Gul, among the finest screenwriters in Pakistan, has often been acclaimed for her attention to what remains unsaid. She was also the first in Pakistan to adapt author Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things into a stage production, Talkhiyaan. Her earlier works were noted for their treatment of women and their post-modern narratives that “sometimes flow like the human life itself”.
What is significant is how narratives shift in the show and how male survivors are treated, touched upon through the vulnerabilities of Faraz. The show looks at an often overlooked question: how society responds to male survivors and their experiences.
Faraz, an engineer, is a distinct character. He is equally a survivor of the crime, yet he navigates it differently from Pakeezah. His struggles are different, and yet, he defiantly chooses to standby her in Pakeezah’s pursuit for justice.
“He had to ‘un-hero’ himself,” Gul said while talking about Faraz’s character. “We are not used to men who stand by us without conditions— just being there, reassuring us that they are there for good.”
The series was the brainchild of Kashf Foundation, a grassroots organisation known for its work in women’s economic empowerment in Pakistan. This is their seventh show on issues of social justice. Previous projects such as Udaari, Rehaai and Zard Patton Ka Bunn have addressed topics ranging from abuse to education and female rights.
“They gave me data and presentations on how crimes against women happen,” Gul said. What stood out was the accessibility of digital abuse. “You don’t need a weapon in the traditional sense. A cell phone becomes a weapon. You can ruin someone’s entire life.”
Her focus then is not on shifting the narrative but on the reactions. A central concern for her was how the story handles blame.
“One of the first questions people ask the survivor (especially if she is female) is, ‘Why did you go there?’” Gul said. “That was my biggest challenge—to make the audience forget to ask that question. I saw that perspective changing. People started feeling for the survivors, both male and female.”
Beyond the ‘hard’ state
For Nisar, the choice of subject is personal as much as professional.
“I have two daughters. I have seen what women go through. That’s why I choose these stories,” he said.
He believes meaningful change depends on women themselves. “Change in society cannot be brought by a man—it can only be brought by a woman,” he said. “Until she is empowered, nothing really changes.”
Having long worked within what he describes as a restrictive media environment, the choice is intentional. In Pakistan, television occupies a central cultural role. “Drama is too big in Pakistan—it’s next to religion,” Nisar said. “There is no film industry in the same way, so television reaches every household.”
“But it’s a hard state,” he said in reference to Pakistan. “A security state. Media and communication are under strict control.” In that context, television becomes a critical platform.
“I always felt that drama is the only medium through which you can talk about anything,” he said. “If the state is using this medium for its narrative, for propaganda, then you can also talk through it. Otherwise, your message won’t reach anywhere.”
But the message is reaching and resonating not just domestically but globally. Gul describes receiving messages from women across borders—many of whom she does not know.
“Whatever I have written in my career in almost a decade, I have always found women across the border trying to connect and telling me it’s their story, they could see themselves in it,” she said.
What emerges in these exchanges is a form of connection that resists categorisation. “Look at this beautiful sisterhood which already exists,” she said. “We are told that women are each other’s enemies—but deep down, there is this language of love, of trust, of supporting each other. This connection is priceless.”
(Edited by Saptak Datta)
Click Here For The Original Source.
