About Rahain

Rahain is PTV at its most unflinching, a portrait of rural Punjab where the distance between the village and the city is measured in ruined lives rather than miles. Written by the celebrated fiction writer Mansha Yaad and directed by Tariq Jameel, it braids several stories together: a student pulled between the classroom they found in town and the fields that raised them, a kabaddi player whose leg and whose future are taken in a single stroke, and a young woman who leaves home only to find how little mercy waits outside it. Tauqeer Nasir leads as Jura Bhatti, with Saleem Sheikh as Khalid and Ghayyur Akhtar as Chaudhary Akbar, one of the landholders whose reach shapes every household around him. Feudal power, illiteracy, and the injustices nobody bothers to name are the real antagonists, and the serial lets them do their damage in full view.

Editor’s Take

Mansha Yaad took a PTV award for Rahain back in 1988, and you can see why in the writing. He came to television as a serious short-story writer, and it shows: the cruelty here is structural, built into who owns the land and who never got to finish school, not parcelled out to a moustache-twirling villain. Our one gripe? Spreading the story across so many lives leaves a few of them thinner than they deserve. Unglamorous, angry, and still worth your evening.

— PakMediaTrendz Editorial