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  • Dancing Girls of the Swat Valley
  • Shaheen Buneri (bio)

Mingora, Pakistan—Along a dimly lit alley, the wooden doors of small brick houses are barred shut. The silent passage lies just off the Banr, a street once known for Swat Valley's famous dancing girls. This area in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province still houses many of the most respected musicians, singers, and dancers of the Yousafzai Pashtun tribe, the region's dominant ethnic group. But today, the Banr is like any other street in the city—dark and lifeless. In the past, music and dancing continued through the night, but now the party ends at 9 p.m. We knock on a door and enter a modest home where the walls are


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Judy H

[End Page 73]

lined with images of Pashto film stars and Swati handicrafts. Nagina, a popular, 20-year-old dancer and singer, steps into the room, which serves both as her bedroom and living room. Wearing traditional dress—her shalwar qameez and a dopatta (a long scarf) hanging from her shoulders—she sits on a tattered sofa. Feigning shyness, she seldom speaks but constantly smiles.

Nagina, a pseudonym, returned home this summer after fighting between Pakistani forces and Taliban militants in the valley killed 700 people and displaced another 2.5 million. While the Taliban patrolled the city, her life was in danger as they went from house to house searching for women like Nagina to attack and, in many cases, to murder. Now, she can begin anew her career as a dancer and has even started singing as well. "There are new TV and FM radio channels that organize musical concerts," she smiles. "The market is huge as now music CDs are exported to Afghanistan and the Middle East," she explains, twisting the golden bracelets on her left wrist. She sings with her sister in music videos, which are in demand as the music market recovers from the Taliban assaults. Still, she says, her future is bleak.

Both the Taliban and radicalized Pakistani society consider performers to be sinners. In Pashtun areas, a singer or dancer is known as dam or beghairat (a person without a sense of honor). "We don't have any respect in this society. People come to us just for enjoyment," Nagina says. "Generally we are not considered morally good people." Several of her neighbors, all very talented, were popular when they were young, she says, but everyone deserted them, and now they live a hard, lonely life.

This rejection by villagers coupled with an aggressive Taliban campaign against everything beautiful has made it difficult for artists to live decently. Compared to the conservative societies of the Pashtun tribes that live across the 800-mile border in Afghanistan, society in the Swat Valley has traditionally been more accommodating. This picturesque valley was once the home of the Hinayana sect of Buddhism and a regional center of Himalayan civilization that extended from Tibet to Kashmir. When the Yousafzai Pashtuns from Afghanistan conquered the valley in the 16th century, they turned it into a center of Pashtun culture. Previously, the Yousafzais never practiced their religion in the current extremist form, so Buddhist, Hindu, and Sikh archeological sites were never damaged or destroyed, as happened when the Taliban rampaged across neighboring Afghanistan. The Yousafzai Pashtuns were open-minded, their own dances and folk songs influenced by the region's Buddhist past.

Indeed, Swat was the only place in the Pashtun belt where girls from the families of professional singers and musicians could choose singing and dancing as a career. Today, the Swat Valley can still feel justly proud of the remarkable contributions of a host of Pashto folk singers, who perfected their craft, then harmonized it with modern musical trends. Rahim Shah, the 35-year-old Pakistani pop star [End Page 74] and heartthrob, popularized tappa—a genre of Pashtun folk music—by singing it with pop music. Another, Nazia Iqbal, born in Swat, boasts a fan base stretching from Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province across Pakistan, Baluchistan and southern Afghanistan to a broad swath of the Pashtun diaspora around the world. But at home four years ago, society took...

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