With little scholarship available on theatre in Pakistan, a book that promises to offer insights into the lesser-known tradition of folk theatre may be viewed with keen anticipation. In its heyday in the fifties, this nomadic tradition rooted in Punjab waned towards the seventies, leaving most of its practitioners destitute and impoverished.

Fouzia Saeed’s book, Forgotten Faces: Daring Women of Pakistan’s Folk Theatre, is dedicated to the memory of the women artists engaged with this tradition with a view to acknowledge their contribution and pay homage to an art form now inexistent.

The book however, revisits a previous publication on the same subject (Women in Folk theatre, Fouzia Saeed, Adam Nayyar, Lok Virsa 1991) in almost its entirety with a few additional insights and updates. Now reprinted in a colourful hardbound coffee-table book format, enhanced with photographs and unfortunately marred with some typographical and pagination errors, Forgotten Faces is essentially a reordered, marginally updated version of the first.

For readers unfamiliar with the previous text, Forgotten Faces will provide informative material on the social and economic structure around this tradition of folk theatre. The text elaborates upon the functioning and administration of a largely patriarchal form from the manner in which spaces were organised, to the methods employed in booking performers, finalising payments and the culture around monetary awards bestowed upon the stars by the audience. Early chapters also introduce readers to some historical background and the range of theatre groups that existed when the practice was in its prime. This section of the text proves valuable in terms of information around the practical workings of this art form.

While men dominated this tradition both in its infrastructure and its audience, it was the women performers whose craft formed the basis of a theatre group’s success. It is the lives of these women — Khurshid Kuku, Naznin Mano, Surayya, Rukayya Jabeen, and in particular, Bali Jatti — that Saeed’s text largely focuses upon. The biographical accounts of the actresses’ personal lives indicate their contradictory existence as stars on stage and victims of abuse at home, and lead the reader through a steady stream of events that emphasise the challenges they faced as they opted to embrace the life of folk theatre.

Written in the first-hand, Saeed’s narrative details her quest for legendary performer Bali Jatti and the resistance she met before being admitted into her confidence. Saeed’s conversations with the performer who once ruled over the hearts of her audience and competed with the well-known Inayat Hussain Bhatti and Alam Lohar on stage, form the basis of the text. Tracing her life from childhood to the time when Jatti lived a near reclusive life, Saeed’s anecdotal account reveals the trials and tribulations Jatti faced as a newcomer on stage to the point when she made her mark as the foremost performer in folk theatre and finally to her last impoverished years. Readers trace Jatti’s life through a difficult marriage, her husband’s infidelities and her own liaison as well as her associations with different theatre groups. The text establishes Jatti’s forceful nature that enabled her to confront an often volatile audience and allowed her to take on adversaries on stage. To her credit Jatti established her own theatre company under the name of Shama Theatre, which survived for 12 years.

Saeed’s own background as a social activist advocating women’s rights motivates her to celebrate the now forgotten lives of the women in folk theatre through their personal hardships. Her works on women in the red light district of Lahore (Taboo) and sexual harassment in the work place (Working with Sharks) reinforce her interest. Nevertheless, Saeed’s emotive accounts of the lives of the folk theatre women provide merely tangential insight into the folk form itself. Apart from some mention on the titles and characters of the plays, we remain little informed on the content and stylistic nature of the craft. More importantly, the text misses a timeline and therefore a context within which to place the information provided. The author repeatedly reinforces her objective to pay homage to the lives of these courageous women and to motivate a younger generation to respect tradition and heritage. Yet we discover very little of the intricacies of this tradition through the otherwise elaborately related life histories.

Given that the theatrical form is now virtually extinct, this book could have provided a valuable opportunity to archive a lost tradition.

While Saeed states that this new text was motivated by her desire to present her documentation in a new light, there is little evidence of a new perspective. A large part of the research for this book was carried out in the late eighties and the few updates included in Forgotten Faces reveal the lives of the next generation of the protagonists discussed. We revisit the main characters of this book through their children and find that the majority of them have either dismissed their parents’ past or are struggling within the media industry to make a name. New additions to the text also include Saeed’s account of a theatre festival organised in 1990 by Lok Virsa in which Jatti was honoured as a chief guest.

Casually written, Saeed’s text moves fluidly, albeit a little shapelessly from one section to another. Her first hand narrative accounts interject the text often to the disadvantage of the main discussion. The book’s renewed layout is over-designed, sometimes impeding the readability of the text. Chapter headings and sub-sections may be easily confused in the book’s inconsistent design.

For the reader familiar with Saeed’s first book on this subject, Forgotten Faces will offer very few new insights. For the reader interested in scholarly research on the subject, it may provide little assistance given its anecdotal nature. For the casual reader, it will provide a colourful view into the private lives of the protagonists, with perhaps a lateral view of the theatrical form itself.

This perhaps then, is the reader that will form the main audience for this book.

The reviewer teaches at the Department of Fine Arts at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, Karachi and is the director and sound designer for Zambeel Dramatic Readings

Forgotten Faces: Daring Women of Pakistan’s Folk Theatre (Theatre) By Fouzia Saeed Lok Virsa, Islamabad 128pp. Price not listed