Growing up in the ’90s, one of my guilty pleasures was scanning the film ads in newspapers. Punjabi and Pashto cinema posters jumped out: heroines poured into shiny, tight-fitting dresses, men strutting around with curly wigs and moustaches so thick they looked like props. It was loud, garish, and larger than life.

Back then, I didn’t think too deeply about it. It was just part of the cinematic wallpaper of the era. Until one day in my late teens, I found myself standing outside Capri Cinema in Karachi with a group of friends. The house was full, no tickets to be had. We needed to kill time, so we barged into a nearby cinema showing a Pashto film instead.

What unfolded inside had us half-laughing, half-gaping in awe. The sheer size of the women on screen, the glittering costumes, the exaggerated dances, and the camera angles zooming in places you didn’t expect — everything was amplified, excessive, unapologetic. For us, it was a comedy of excess.

Much later in life, I realised it wasn’t random, nor was it simply bad filmmaking. There was a pattern, a recurring thread. The obsession with heavy-set women in Punjabi and Pashto cinema wasn’t accidental — it was cultural, even primal.

The obsession with heavy-set women in Punjabi and Pashto cinema isn’t accidental. It is cultural, even primal. Abundance, fertility and desire are all embodied in the form of the heroine

And it wasn’t unique to Pakistan either. Pulp cinema across the world, especially films catering to resource-scarce or working-class audiences, echoed the same theme: abundance, fertility and desire, all embodied in the form of “thicc” heroines.

There’s an old anthropological truth: in societies where food scarcity is the norm, fat isn’t shameful. It’s aspirational. It means survival, health, fertility. A fuller female body was historically coded as capable of bearing children and carrying life. Thinness, by contrast, often meant illness or famine.

Cinema, especially the kind targeted at the masses, absorbed this instinct. For the urban elite, thinness might symbolise sophistication, but for truck drivers, farmers and daily-wage labourers cramming into small town theatres, desire was expressed in fuller forms. The “thicc heroine” wasn’t just a woman on screen — she was abundance made flesh, a rebellion against hunger itself.

Punjabi cinema thrived on earthy excess. Actresses such as Anjuman and Mumtaz weren’t cast in spite of their size; they were celebrated for it. Their dances carried the weight of rural sensuality, their curves wrapped in sequined dupattas and figure-hugging suits. Folk songs had already paved the way, they were sung about long before they were filmed.

The heroes, meanwhile, were caricatures of rural masculinity — curly wigs, chest-thumping moustaches, and dialogue delivery that shook the stage. But they revolved around the heroine’s body. Without her, they were incomplete.

If Punjabi films flirted with excess, Pashto films dove headfirst into it. The mujra sequences became infamous: close-ups, shimmering outfits, voluptuous heroines filling the frame. Actresses such as Mussarat Shaheen built entire careers out of this aesthetic, their bodies and dances unapologetically central to the experience.

Pashto cinema catered to a primarily male, working-class audience — truck drivers, daily-wage earners, men seeking escapism after gruelling days. For them, these heroines weren’t “fat”. They were desirable, real, raw. The camera lingered on every curve because that’s what the audience demanded.

The men on screen, with their oversized moustaches and rifles slung over their shoulders, projected power. But the women — heavyset, glittering and defiant — embodied the ultimate fantasy: fertility and indulgence in a world where life was often harsh and unforgiving.

This obsession with curves isn’t unique to Pakistan. Travel across the pulp traditions of the world and you’ll see the same archetype. In the Blaxploitation films of 1970s United States, Pam Grier, with her busty frame and fierce attitude, became an icon. Mexican ficheras films in the 1970s and ’80s were cabaret-style pulp, where voluptuous women in glittering dresses became the entire selling point.

Nollywood in Nigeria still celebrates the “orobo” — slang for fat women — as desirable, often mocking skinny women. Turkish Yeşilçam cinema placed lush, maternal actresses such as Türkan Şoray at the centre of national imagination, while Egyptian films of the 1950s to ’70s made belly dancers such as Naima Akef household names. Even rustic Italian pulp comedies leaned on the trope of the wide-hipped, fiery peasant woman. In all these cases, cinema that catered to the masses leaned toward curves. The “skinny beauty” was reserved for highbrow or Westernised productions.

Why does this divide exist? Because cinema mirrors aspiration. The urban elite aspire to the Western standard: thin, toned, cosmopolitan. Their films reflect that fantasy. The working class, meanwhile, dreams of indulgence and fertility — a world where scarcity is erased by the heroine’s overflowing body.

To laugh at these films, as we did in our teens, is to miss the point. What looked like absurdity — odd camera angles, glittering outfits, oversized women dancing without restraint — was, in fact, a visual shorthand for life itself. These films were telling their audience: you may be poor, you may live with scarcity, but here is abundance, here is fertility, here is desire in its most unashamed form.

Today, in the age of Instagram influencers, body image debates have become globalised. Fitness culture prizes toned stomachs and sculpted figures. Yet the word “thicc” has made a comeback, ironically first as internet slang, now as a full-fledged trend. Kim Kardashian, Beyoncé, and countless others have rebranded curves into aspirational aesthetics.

But there’s a crucial difference. In pulp cinema, thiccness wasn’t curated or surgically enhanced. It was organic, sometimes awkward, always real. The glittering costumes of Punjabi mujras and the gaudy close-ups of Pashto pulp didn’t present “perfect” bodies. They presented bodies as they were: heavy, sweating, moving, alive.

I often think back to that day outside Capri Cinema. We laughed as the Pashto heroine swirled on screen, her body moving with a rhythm unfamiliar to our teenage eyes. But what seemed comical then was actually a raw truth: cinema doesn’t just tell stories, it projects desires.

And pulp cinema, whether in Peshawar or Mexico City, understood one thing better than the polished elite productions ever could: in a world marked by scarcity, nothing is more desirable than abundance.

The thicc heroine, shimmering under the hot studio lights, wasn’t just dancing for applause. She was dancing as a reminder that life, in all its excess, still existed.

The writer is a banker based in Lahore. X: @suhaibayaz

Published in Dawn, ICON, October 12th, 2025