Ironically, I have no words to speak in praise of this movie. Shot in Pakistan, Bol, directed by Shoaib Mansoor ( of Khuda ke Liye fame), is a lesson in courage. The story begins when Zainub Khan has been found guilty by Pakistan's Courts and is to be hanged. Her last wish is to tell her story before the media, and after approval, she relates how her family was compelled to leave Delhi during 1948 and re-locate to Lahore. This is where her father, Hakim Sayed Hashmutallah Khan, married Suraiya, and hoping to sire a son, instead ended up with 7 daughters. The 8th child turned out to be a hermaphrodite and Hashmutullah wanted it dead but Suraiya insisted that she will not let anyone know so as not to shame her husband. They named the child Saifullah, and hired a tutor to teach him at home. After a failed marriage, Zainub returns home, notices that the tutor was molesting her brother and asks him to leave. With dwindling income from his father, unable to attend school, his mother giving birth to still-born babies, his siblings uneducated, Saifullah is then himself compelled to seek employment. In his work place, he gets sexually molested and returns home bearing wounds of his torture. The poor victim is subsequently killed by his father, who somehow prefers to strangle his son than live with the shame of his plight. In the process, he has to bribe the police by embezzling Rs.2 Lakhs from the Masjid where he presides as a Khajanchi. In order to return the money to the Masjid, he starts to tutor children of prostitutes with the help of Saqa Kanjar. When their neighbor's son, Mustafa, proposes marriage for his daughter, Ayesha, he refuses, as they are Shiah, and plans to marry her to a much older male. Things change rapidly when Saqa makes a proposition that will change everyone's lives forever.
What is palpable throughout the movie is the absolute dominance of the staunch, Quraan quoting father, played to perfection by Manzar Sehbai so much so that one would wish to strangle him for bringing such misery to the lives of his wife, his helpless daughters, and his eunuch son. He is a God faring man, who follows the holy book to the T, yet sees no fault in treating his daughters as mere objects. His double standards reach to intolerable heights when we see that he goes groveling to the same low caste pimp for money to teach his kids lessons in Quraan whom he had literally treated as an untouchable in an earlier scene. But even more appalling is when he agrees to sleep with the pimp’s granddaughter, Meena, with the belief that since he has sired 7 daughters, he would probably impregnate Meena with a daughter too, and then this girl would become a star prostitute in the future. All this is conducted secretly, with no clue to his family, in the same matter of fact manner as when he strictly forbids the marriage of his second daughter to her lover, who happens to be a Shiah.
But the title “Bol” stands for one person’s constant efforts to curb this patriarchal dominance in the household. That person is the eldest daughter, who has been a victim of domestic violence in her husband’s house, and who is back in her parent’s house only to bear witness to her father’s unbending ways. I lost count of the number of times he thrashes her, as the number of times she speaks out, entreating, with love and respect, beseeching him to let the girls work and help him financially. Throughout, the heartless father treats her like a slut, yet she and her hope for change endures. The last thing that she asks everyone gathered, before her hanging, is that if killing your children for the sake of honor is unacceptable, then so is giving those children birth and then not living up to the responsibility of bringing them up with love and care.
Two things that stand out in the movie, and infuse the narrative with lyricism and beauty are the mellifluous music and the Urdu that the protagonists speak even at the most mundane scenes. Songs like “ Din pareshaan hai”, “Hona tha pyaar”, “Dil Jaania” give voice to the multitude of emotions that the characters feel, especially the hapless son and daughters , who snatch moments of joy and fun only when their father is out of the house. “ Kaho, aaj bol do” is a rock concert song that one of the daughters and her boyfriend, Mustafa, played by Atif Aslam, sing, inspite of the fact that she would never attempt to do that in front of her own father.
In all, a very beautiful movie, giving voice to an emotion commonly born when in the name of religion and enforced morality, hapless people are subjugated and made bereft of freedom and their right to happiness.
