Researching the life of 'Pakistan's first social-media star' is sufficient to induce an acute attack of 'Qandeeliya', an obsession with Qandeel Baloch, model and actor, who set the internet ablaze with her raunchy videos. She gathered fans and courted controversy in equal measure, until she was strangled to death by her own brother to preserve the family's 'honour'. "Mama ko Qandeeliya ho gaya hai!" declared police investigator Attiya Jaffrey's children, describing their mother's preoccupation with Qandeel after her murder on 15 July 2016. Writing this review was not confined to merely reading a book – albeit an excellent one – but led to days and nights of being glued to videos and Facebook Live clips, and scouring the internet for anything and everything on the mesmerising Qandeel Baloch.
In The Sensational Life and Death of Qandeel Baloch, author Sanam Maher brings alive this extraordinary young woman, telling the complex story behind the more obvious flamboyance. Qandeel kept social media abuzz for about five years until she was silenced at the age of 26, making perhaps more headlines dead than while alive. Her risqué videos, however, live on – on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube – still garnering both adulation and abuse.
Amidst a deeply polarised public discourse with Qandeel symbolising the bold and sexually free Pakistani woman on the one hand, and epitomising depravity and disrespect for tradition on the other, the murder case continues in court. Qandeel's parents are determined to ensure that their son receives the death penalty for the murder of his sister. In telling the story of Qandeel's journey from an obscure village in Punjab province to the metropolises of Islamabad and Karachi, to further a career in showbiz and launch herself on the national and global online platform, Maher asks an important question: "How did one family come to crystallize opposing views on how a Pakistani woman can and should behave and the consequences of departing from that norm?" The author offers no pat answers, but allows readers to come to their own conclusions, making sense of the Qandeel Baloch phenomenon through stories – the ones she herself wove, and the ones that others told about her. The authenticity of the story of the 'real' woman – Fouzia Azeem – ceased to be as relevant, as the flamboyant persona of Qandeel took over.
Qandeel, the light