There are no slammed doors in Dilawar’s house.
No loud music. No carefree laughter. Not even the simple pleasure of standing outside when it rains. Instead, everyone tiptoes.
In Raqaas, Hum TV’s latest exploration of honour, misogyny and domestic control, fear has become so thoroughly embedded in a family that Dilawar (Babar Ali) does not need to police every moment himself. His wife Nighat does it for him. She is so frightened of her husband that she has learned to sacrifice her daughter’s every small pleasure in the name of keeping her safe. Don’t play music. Don’t enjoy the rain. Don’t make noise. Don’t attract attention. Every minuscule moment of freedom is subject to scrutiny.
This fear is well-founded. Dilawar is a controlling patriarch whose temper the family has learned to manage. He is also known for having killed his own sister in the name of honour.
Farah Sadia makes Nighat a particularly disturbing kind of mother. She isn’t indifferent to her daughter’s suffering; she is bewildered by it. But she is complicit in the very system that is suffocating Urooj. In trying to protect her daughter from Dilawar, she becomes the primary person policing her.
That is the most compelling idea in Raqaas: misogyny does not survive on the strength of men like Dilawar alone. It survives when everyone around them learns to organise their lives around their anger.
Unfortunately, the drama’s execution does not always match the strength of its premise. The pacing is sluggish and the performances are patchy. Komal Meer’s Urooj can veer from bratty to belligerent almost within the same breath, making her rebellion feel immature.
Danyal Zafar, fresh from the success of Zanjeerain, takes on another restrained role as Hamza, the mysterious, closed-off music teacher who lives nearby. So far, Hamza has barely spoken with Urooj, but his presence introduces the possibility of another world: music, expression, and a life beyond the suffocating boundaries of her father’s home. Whether the character develops beyond the familiar grumpy-and-mysterious male lead remains to be seen.
Meanwhile, Fawad, Dilawar’s right-hand man, has been selected as Urooj’s husband. By the second episode, Urooj discovers her parents arranged her marriage without consulting her. She reacts to this revelation with understandable frustration. In Dilawar’s world, Urooj does not get to choose what she listens to, where she goes, how she behaves or, ultimately, whom she marries.
Her life is simply another decision for him to make. As Nighat says, “only one opinion matters in this house.”
Visually, Raqaas has one undeniable advantage: its setting is stunning. The lush green landscape gives the drama a pastoral beauty, contrasting with the claustrophobia and menace in Dilawar’s home. Unfortunately, the camera work rarely makes the most of it.
