We, the honorable.

In Pakistan, the Aurat March (Women’s March) processions, their truth preaching slogans and anthems, and honest placards receive a lot of backlash that is proliferated by the mass media, labelling the people in attendance as those without ghairat (honour) and casting off their brave cries for seeking truth and demanding justice as slander and vulgarity. A common narrative that exists revolving around the March states that these marches are defaming religion and faith. I have attended the Aurat March in Karachi, the Aurat Azadi March (Women’s Freedom March) in Islamabad and have known them to be a platform for women, the members of the LGBTQ+ community, and the disenfranchised minorities, to voice their woes of socio-economic injustice, social and religious insecurities, that have gone perpetually unheard and as a safe space to explain the misinterpretations of the mass media.

The first March I attended was in Karachi, my hometown. I took photos of my friends from university, strangers and their witty and bold placards demanding the right to have inheritance, explanations of equality truly means, of revolutionary arms held together and fists thrust forward up in the air. And in the second, I was volunteering for the Women’s Democratic Front in Islamabad. I was briefed to take photos of the truth that people were speaking; the truth about their virtue, their pain, and their unbridled honor. In these set of photos, I have photographed placards, primarily written in Urdu that explain that voices are being raised against misogyny, rape and sexual abuse, social injustice, domestic violence, the words on these placards acknowledge the rights that religion gives its followers, and demands that the people of authority who have taken these rights away, give them back to those who they so rightly belong to.

These photos attempt to showcase the true spirit of the women’s marches in Pakistan, one whose demands are as honorable as the people who speak them.

This is an ongoing project, the next march I hope to photograph will be in Lahore in 2021.