MULTAN, Jan 6: A committee constituted by local authorities to monitor stage plays has reportedly advised the actresses to give up using their names containing the names of sacred personalities as prefix or suffix.

EDO (literacy) Prof Sharif Nishter, the monitoring committee head, has reportedly told actresses in a meeting that if they cannot change their names they are better advised to change their profession to maintain sanctity of the holier part of their names.

The EDO also directed them to come in veil and 'bawazu' whenever they were summoned by the monitoring committee. He warned them to obey the committee's performance guidelines otherwise they would be sent behind bars.

When contacted, the monitoring committee head said the attribution of holy men's name with stage actresses had damaged their sanctity. Aneela Ali, one of the actresses who attended the committee meeting, told Dawn that most of the actresses were given names by their parents and they all owed the same degree of respect to sacred personalities as any other Muslim could bestow upon them.

She said that stage dramas were the essential part of the show business and audiences would stop coming to theatres if the authorities imposed their own criteria. Multan theatre producers association's Zawar Hussain Baloch alleged that the monitoring committee was harassing the stage artists.

He said neither the DCO nor the DPO had any authority to take action against the artistes as they could only report violation, if any, of the Dramatic Performance Act to the relevant quarters in the provincial government.

When District Nazim Riaz Hussain Qureshi was contacted, he said that he did not support obscenity, but too many restrictions would drain the element of entertainment from the theatres.

He said the monitoring committee was not constituted by him but by the DCO under the powers delegated to him by the provincial home department. However, he said under the district government system, the Zila Nazim office could hear appeals against any action/decision of the subordinate bureaucracy.

He said he would take notice of the overdoing of the monitoring committee only when the aggrieved parties would want him to do so. "I do not want to confront with the district bureaucracy without being asked to do justice", he added.