In the 1950s and 1960s, Pakistanis who had lived in a western country and then returned home were usually perceived to have become more informed and ‘modern’.
One way of observing this is to study the way the country’s once-thriving Urdu cinema portrayed such Pakistanis. For example, across the 1950s and 1960s, most Urdu films that had a character who had returned from Europe or the US was usually portrayed as a wise and enlightened person.
Cinematic narratives in this context went something like this: An educated city dweller was seen to be more level-headed and less religious than a person from the rural areas. And such a city dweller was usually a Pakistani who had gone to the West for studies or work.
Pakistani film actor Santosh often portrayed the character of the wise and enlightened western-educated hero in Urdu films of 1950s and early 1960s. Then, in the 1970s, Pakistan elected its first popularly elected government led by the left-liberal populist, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto.
Bhutto's populism was a regional version of social democracy that was supposedly positioned to be more rooted in the common wisdom of the ‘masses’. It is even more interesting to note how Pakistani films treated this new phenomenon.
As the radical social youth movements of the 1960s in the West exhausted themselves, they became more faddish in content. These emerging fads and fashions also arrived in Pakistan.
So whereas in the 1960s, most Urdu films had celebrated the US or Europe-returned Pakistani as a person possessing modern wisdom and progressive ideas, in the 1970s he/she was usually portrayed as a wild guitar-slinging and dope-smoking hippie.
In Urdu films, during the Bhutto era, though the ‘level-headed’ US/Europe returned Pakistani was still perceived as being progressive, many of his more socially ‘liberated’ contemporaries were seen seen through the prism of the so-called ‘masses’.
Interestingly, this perception of the ‘masses’ was mostly helmed by film-makers with petty-bourgeoisie backgrounds, though such portrayals did not mean that Pakistani society had shifted to the religious right. Not just yet. It was just that the urban liberal tenor of the Ayub Khan dictatorship (1958-1969) had mutated (during the Bhutto regime) into becoming a more populist notion.
Thus, Pakistani films of the 1970s came with a new narrative that now suggested that it was fine to be liberal, as long as one remained in contact with the cultural traditions of his/her surroundings.
So where the Europe-returned Pakistani hippie was portrayed as a bumbling hippie buffoon in most 1970s films, an urban Pakistani who was equally liberal but managed to slip in a dialogue or two about ‘eastern values’, became an admirable aspiration. Again, this projection was more of a petty-bourgeoisie perception, rather than of the masses.
The rootless hippie types were also shown to belong to rich families as a way to attack the industrial classes that the Bhutto regime was denouncing.
Two faces of west-returned Pakistanis in the Urdu films of 1970s: The progressive-rooted in-‘eastern tradition’ fella, and the rootless, wild, dope-smoking hippie.