Emergent Conversation 25
This essay is part of the series
First Responders: Crises, Indeterminacies, and (Joyful) Determination in the Global South
By Sana Malik
Woman activists of Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party shout slogans against the disqualifying decision of former prime minister Imran Khan on a street in Lahore on October 21, 2022. Former Pakistan prime minister Imran Khan was disqualified October 21, from running for political office for five years, his lawyer said, after the country’s election commission ruled he misled officials about gifts he received while in power. Photo by ARIF ALI/AFP via Getty Images.
Every evening after Asr prayers, a group of six women, including Naz Aunty (a pseudonym), in the age group of early fifties to sixties convenes at the park in a posh neighborhood of Lahore, Pakistan. These upwardly mobile women are all housewives, except for one of them, who worked as a teacher for sixteen years before resigning to give more time and attention to caregiving duties at home. The ladies moved to this neighborhood within the last decade from smaller cities outside of Lahore, or after spending time abroad in Canada or Dubai. Although none of these women knew each other before they started walking in the park during the pandemic, their walk at the designated time between Asr and Maghrib prayers has become an important ritual they partake in every day.
The park is an ordinary public space, where women of all ages walk briskly in counterclockwise circles on a walking track, elderly men exercise in the green patch, young boys play cricket, and small children play on the slides and swings. It is also a space where Naz Aunty and her walking partners became friends.
I encountered Naz Aunty and her walking partners when I was living in Lahore during my fieldwork in 2022. After noticing their group every evening on my own walks, and sharing polite greetings from afar, I easily became the subject of their curiosity. Returning to Lahore as an anthropologist conducting fieldwork, I mentioned that I was interested in studying how urban women engage in public spaces like the Women’s [Aurat] March in Pakistan. Although the park was not my intended field site, I was struck by the groups’ camaraderie, humor, and social dynamics during our interactions in the park. The inside jokes and level of ease among the women signaled that they may have known each other for a long time, but I learned they had only become acquainted more closely on their daily walks during the pandemic.
Through our conversations, I also learned that socializing and making friends outside of family was not encouraged by many of their in-laws, but those restrictions had inadvertently been relaxed in Covid as people flocked to public parks during lockdowns.
Naz Aunty shared with me that she started walking in the park after her mother-in-law passed away over a year ago. While her mother-in-law was alive, she disapproved of Naz Aunty going to the park or meeting other women in the neighborhood. Over time, these daily walks in the neighborhood park not only offered Naz Aunty and her neighbors the possibility of friendship and community during Covid lockdowns, but also an outlet for them to be transgressive and have fun, exchange stories and gossip, and poke fun at men—often their own husbands.
In the early months of 2022, I noticed the conversations during the walks shifting from the pandemic, family matters, and kids to Pakistani politics. The former Prime Minister Imran Khan was then facing a vote of no confidence, which generated heated debates among the group. When Khan started holding public rallies before his ouster, the group of women carpooled to attend large gatherings late at night, walking for hours in the streets to make their participation in the protests known. These protests continued into the month of Ramzan, and despite domestic obligations, humidity, and long days of fasting, they continued to attend. Naz Aunty often packed sandwiches and drinks to share with her friends during the long hours spent in the street at night. It was evident that once this group of friends started engaging in political rallies together, their friendship also shifted, transforming from a support group to one based on political solidarity.
For upwardly mobile urban women like Naz Aunty, Imran Khan’s populist party Pakistan Tehreek e Insaf (PTI, Pakistan Movement for Justice) offers a “middle space” between the growing influence of the West in urban Pakistan and the conservative clergy’s restrictive visions of women’s roles in the public sphere (See Malik 2024). Since 2013, Imran Khan’s populist movement—avowing the arrival of “Naya Pakistan” (New Pakistan)—has relied heavily on street protest, political rallies, and inter-city long marches. The former Pakistani cricket team captain, and philanthropist turned politician was finally elected as Prime Minister in 2018 after leading a consolidated anti-corruption political campaign against former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif. Khan’s support base is comprised overwhelmingly of urban women like Naz Aunty and her walking partners, who seek traditional family values alongside a growing engagement in political spaces—and have had an integral presence at PTI rallies and protests. His political campaign has been covered by local and international media channels extensively, displaying the use of street power, music, and women’s participation to curry the favor of urban classes.
Soon after befriending me in the neighborhood park in early 2022, Naz Aunty invited me to her house in Lahore. When I arrived at her place on an early summer morning, she was sitting in the verandah reading the Quran with her male teacher, dressed impeccably in a pale green shalwar kameez with a dupatta covering her head.[1] Upon seeing me, she concluded her class swiftly and led me to her ornately decorated drawing room—adorned with feathers, fur trims, and brass fittings. Naz Aunty has never worked outside the house but takes great pride in her household activities, especially cooking. Her house was sparkling clean, the air conditioner was running, and the fragrance of homecooked bread wafted in the hallway. It was Ramzan so Naz Aunty couldn’t offer me tea, much to her dismay.[2] I had heard of her cooking expertise many times during our walks where she touted her Kashmiri heritage proudly. “I’m baking some bread for Iftar tonight” she shared, adding “next time you come over, I’ll feed you!” (Fieldnotes April 15, 2022).
Naz Aunty is a stay-at-home mother and has three adult children. Her older daughter got married in 2021, and her younger daughter is pursuing a bachelor’s degree at one of the most liberal educational institutions in Pakistan, located in Lahore. Lahore is the capital of Punjab—the most populous province in Pakistan—and the second largest city in the country. It has been an important historical site of political agitation since the British colonial era and is considered the educational and cultural hub of Pakistan due to the large number of universities and centers of learning located here. However, in our early conversations in the park, Naz Aunty had quite vocally shared her disapproval of feminist movements in Pakistan, especially events such as the annual Women’s March—known as Aurat March in Pakistan—that is popular among students at her daughter’s university. As I began asking her about the challenges of raising daughters in Pakistan, Naz Aunty lamented:
Look, I am a bit conservative! (Dekho, meri thori conservative hoon!) I know my daughters support women’s movements such as #MeToo and the Women’s March (Aurat March), but I am completely against these things! First our mothers-in-law snubbed and controlled us, and now our daughters and daughters-in-law tell us not to get involved in their lives! We got stuck in the middle! (Hum beech mai reh gaye). We are the middle generation that didn’t get either privilege! (Fieldnotes April 15, 2022).
Naz Aunty’s comment signals a tension many of my interlocutors in her generation experience in urban Pakistan—of finding themselves caught between the push and pull of domestic responsibilities alongside their newfound political subjectivities. While these tensions can become more pronounced in moments of crisis or indeterminacy, I learned that crises can also offer hopeful opportunities for women like Naz Aunty and her neighbors.
Naz Aunty and her walking partners became friends in a moment of rupture, when social distancing made public parks a prime site for socialization in urban Pakistan during the pandemic. These friendships were also cultivated at a later stage of their lives, in their fifties and sixties. While I have explored Naz Aunty and her friends’ political subjectivities elsewhere (see Malik 2024), this essay uses Naz Aunty’s comment as a springboard to pay closer attention to the political possibilities of friendship, and how friendship may offer an analytical frame to understand the myriad forms of relatedness that can emerge in individual and collective moments of rupture and uncertainty such as Covid-19.
Female friendship has been a dominant theme in contemporary and popular Western media, feminist theory, and among participants in transnational women’s movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In urban Pakistan, the younger generation of women who lead the Aurat March and other feminist collectives center friendship as feminist praxis in their activism and as an alternative, transgressive form of kin-making. In comparison, less is known about friendships that are not forged around liberal goals or in the pursuit of gender equality. Naz Aunty and her walking partners are not members of a feminist movement, nor do they identify as feminists. However, their friendships offer a conduit for deeper engagement with new public and political spheres that are beyond the realm of their familial and domestic responsibilities.
During our conversations, Naz Aunty shared her struggles of juggling her bed-ridden mother-in-law, three children, and a household for most of her married life, until her mother in law’s recent passing. These were recurring themes in her walking partners’ lives too—they often detailed their domestic chores, food menus of the day, and caregiving activities during their daily walks. However, despite this relentless laboring in the private sphere, Naz Aunty maintains staunchly that a woman’s foremost role is in the household. Being a house-proud mother, she hopes that her daughters will inculcate similar values in their marital homes. Although Naz Aunty realized her political disposition in her fifties—which allows her to engage in political spheres she was alienated from in her youth—she does not encourage her daughters to participate in activist projects that could potentially steer them away from household and family life.
Sharing anecdotes of times spent navigating her in-laws and domestic responsibilities, she asserts, “I know this may sound backward, but struggle is necessary in life and should be passed on to our children in some way” (Fieldnotes April 15, 2022). Naz Aunty claims that her struggles in the domestic sphere over decades are now bearing fruit in her fifties, because she can leave the house daily for her walks in the park, make new friends, and most recently, attend political rallies supporting the erstwhile Prime Minister of Pakistan, Imran Khan.
With Naz Aunty’s recent foray into local politics and rallies, she shares that her daughters often jokingly say to her “Mother you have become a free bird lately! (ammi aap azaad ho gayee hain)” (Fieldnotes April 15, 2022). She shares that she has some inner guilt about this but also reminds me that she struggled for many decades before earning this type of freedom that comes to her daughters more easily.
Mothers in the Middle
Activists of the Aurat March gather during a rally to mark International Women’s Day in Karachi on March 8, 2021. Photo by ASIF HASSAN/AFP via Getty Images.
My interactions with Naz Aunty and her friends revealed that they consider themselves a generation quite consciously “in the middle.” While their mothers’ generation was entirely anchored in domestic life and their daughters are increasingly demanding equality in the public sphere, these women see their value as fundamentally tied to their domestic roles as mothers, wives, and daughters. Their walks in the park during the pandemic have become a site where these women are able to craft friendships that simultaneously provide a way to discuss the problems of domestic life, as well as become the basis for deeper engagement in politics around populist politicians like Imran Khan.
Khan’s politics offered women like Naz Aunty a politics of the middle which allowed them to explore their political subjectivities while also realizing their goals of family life, marriage, and children. Although Naz Aunty claims to be conservative and religious, she occupies a middle space between the strict dictates of the clergy and the liberal ideals of the women’s movement that she insists make life difficult for young women. Therefore, a politics of the middle proves to be actually transformative for women like Naz Aunty who claim to have been “stuck in the middle” of the expectations of their mothers-in-law and the admonitions of their daughters.
In a funny and sweet moment one afternoon while we were having tea together, Naz Aunty’s daughters referred to their mother and her friends’ involvement in politics as an indication that they have become “free” (azaad); but instead of feeling the exhilaration of freedom felt by their daughters or younger women who attend the Aurat March, these friends also feel a sense of guilt for having reneged on their domestic duties. This suggests that Naz Aunty and her friends are not women seeking freedom from domesticity, but instead freedom to have relationships and possibilities that straddle domestic and public life, constraint and agency, and choice and duty.[3] The political world they hoped to create through their activism is similarly a politics of the middle which is profoundly transformative and hopeful, and at the heart of this transformation are the new female friendships crafted through their daily walks.
Since Khan’s imprisonment in 2023, the current political moment in Pakistan is witnessing increased crackdowns, imprisonments, and censorship of political dissidents under the authoritarian Sharif government. The government has visibly targeted Khan’s female supporters and party members, alongside his family members and other party workers. In this milieu, Khan’s symbolic value as a figure of hope for my interlocutors stands in stark contrast to his inability to pursue politics freely under the shadow of his prison sentence. This engenders new challenges and contradictions for women like Naz Aunty and her friends, as they renegotiate ways to exercise their newfound freedoms and political subjectivities amid persistent and emerging indeterminacies, still finding their way “in the middle.”
Sana Malik received her PhD in Anthropology from Emory University in 2025. Her research explores the diverse political trajectories of feminist and non-feminist activists participating in Pakistan’s emerging public spheres. As a PoLAR Digital Editorial Fellow, Sana curated an Emergent Conversation on “First Responders: Crises, Indeterminacies and (Joyful) Determination in the Global South” that highlights narratives of how people make everyday life livable amidst ongoing indeterminacies in the Global South.
Notes
[1] Shalwar kameez is the national dress of Pakistan which comprises a long tunic with loose fitting pants. A dupatta is a scarf or stole used to cover one’s body and sometimes head in Pakistan, as a symbol of modesty.
[2] Muslims fast in the holy month of Ramzan (in Urdu) or Ramadan (in Arabic) abstaining from food and drink from sunrise to sunset. The breaking of the fast is referred to as Iftar or Iftari.
[3] I am grateful to Dr. Arsalan Khan for his discussant comments on a version of this paper presented at the American Anthropological Association (AAA) annual meeting in Toronto, 2023.
Works Cited
Malik, Sana. 2024. “The Rise of Aunties in Pakistani Politics.” Sapiens, July 30, 2024. Accessed November 2, 2025: https://www.sapiens.org/culture/pakistan-politics-conservative-womens-movement/.