A few days after his daughter’s birth, Ziauddin looked up the family tree. Though not unusual for the patriarchal Pashtuns in the beautiful Swat valley of Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa or North West Frontier Province, women’s absence on the family tree of generations pained Ziauddin. Not one to follow the herd, he deviated from the tradition and put the newborn girl child’s name — Malala (grief-stricken) — on the document which he treasures now.
That was the first sign of challenging tyrannical patriarchy and advocating the girls’ right to reclaim their identity, a freedom to find their own space. This sums up the spirit behind He Named Me Malala, award-winning American filmmaker Davis Guggenheim’s documentary which premiered worldwide on Friday.
Saturday saw two events — packed screenings of the documentary for children from municipal schools at a theatre in South Mumbai and Gala for Malala, an event comprising music, drama, poetry and speeches at Mumbai University’s Convocation Hall in Fort. Toasting the Pakistani teenager Malala Yousafzai’s indomitable courage, the events proved that Malala is not alone in her battle against the tyrannical Taliban and anyone else who opposes girls’ education.
“It is not just a documentary. It is a movement for every girl child’s right to get empowered through education. We have been roped in to ensure the film reaches large audiences especially the girls and we hope by the end of this month at least five lakh children will have seen this inspiring film,” says Girish Kulkarni, founder, Snehalaya, an NGO working for the deprived girls and women. Several other organisations like Global Giving and The Malala Fund have joined hands to ensure that the Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala’s message “one child, one teacher, one book and one pen can change the world”, delivered so passionately and powerfully in her Nobel lecture, reaches the widest audiences. In the same lecture, mocking the brute who so mercilessly pumped bullets in Malala’s head and targeted her other friends on the school bus, she defiantly declares: “I had two options, one was to remain silent and wait to be killed. And the second was to speak up and then be killed. I chose the second one. I decided to speak up.” “The terrorists tried to stop us and attacked me and my friends on 9th October 2012, but their bullets could not win. We survived. And since that day, our voices have only grown louder,” she adds.
Her voice has grown so loud that, as the film captures so beautifully, parents in Nigeria find solace when Malala speaks against kidnapping of girls by terrorist outfit Boko Haram. She even reaches out to the hundreds of hungry and tired Syrian refugees who have escaped death and destruction. She is now topic of discussion among 600-odd school children, mostly girls aged 13-25, who saw the film on Saturday.
“Malala has shown us a way to speak out against injustice. She is an inspirational character and we all have joined her battle,” says Aradhna Valmiki, a 10th grader from Colaba Municipal School. Valmiki’s friend Shabnam Shaikh echoes: “We are all Malalas.”
The bigots, especially Taliban leader Mullah Fazlulah, also called Mullah Radio because he would always disseminate his deadly dictates through radio, argued Islam didn’t permit girls to get modern education and, therefore, in medieval madness, he ordered bombing of several schools in the Swat valley. “Such pronouncements are un-Islamic and Malala and her father were perfectly right in opposing them,” says burqa-clad Nilofar Qazi, a teacher who, like many others in the audience, felt elated at how Malala has bounced back from misery.
When his interviewer asks Ziauddin if he knows who shot at Malala, the indefatigable father who named his only daughter after Malalai, a poetess and warrior woman in Afghan history, justifiably replies: “He is not a person. It is an ideology.” Millions across the world have joined Malala to defeat this dangerous ideology.