What’s one thing TV dramas like Meem Se Mohabbat , Kafeel and Parwarish have in common? It’s that many female actors in them look like they just got out of the schoolroom. The only thing making this more troubling is that some of them actually are in school – both in the dramas and in real life.
This underage casting trend recalibrates how Pakistani audiences view girlhood and its possibilities. Girls are being written into marriages and emotionally difficult relationships in unequal dynamics. Many TV series depict young girls playing adult roles; instead of casting them as adolescents navigating education, identity, or friendships, these series show girls as marriageable adults, romantic interests, wives, and emotional anchors. They compress, accelerate, and ultimately erase girlhood, both narratively and socially.
At first glance, this trend is just an extension of long-standing tropes and casting trends. It’s no surprise that young women have always been sexualised, commodified, and cast opposite much older men. Audiences have been conditioned to like young female actors. Pakistani TV has also historically relied on narratives of young, naïve, pliable girls paired with older, ‘more mature’ men.
These dramas frequently position the teenage heroine as both childlike and romantically desirable, or childlike hence desirable. However, what makes this recent trend more problematic is not simply the age gap — it’s the narrative insistence that these girls are ready for adulthood, that they can and should seamlessly transition into marriage and motherhood. This girl, this heroine is simultaneously someone to be dismissed, guided, disciplined, and ultimately possessed.
This trend is particularly concerning in a country where public discourse around women’s right to education, work, access to public spaces, and choosing a life partner is already very contentious.
Amid the ongoing debates over gender-based rights and responsibilities in Pakistan, this trend both normalises the adultification of girls, ie the premature attribution of adult roles and responsibilities to young girls, and also conditions the audience to accept it.
This adultification operates alongside implicit sexualisation of girls. Girls are not only expected to behave like grown women but are also consistently framed as desirable and thereby marriageable within adult romantic economies. It is critical to remember that violence against women in Pakistan often occurs because men believe that women should be available to them romantically, or because men insist that women should be available for marriage, or because men expect that women should unconditionally perform their gendered responsibilities as assigned to them by the patriarchy.
What happens when men watch the romanticised reassurances of the same beliefs and expectations on their TV screens? What happens when young girls watch romanticised versions of these patriarchal beliefs and fantasies portrayed as girls’ success on their TVs?
Let’s look at Meem Se Mohabbat , starring Dananeer Mobeen and Ahad Raza Mir. Roshi is introduced as a chulbuli, clumsy girl who, in the first episode, fails her Bachelors of Engineering admission test. Based on this, she is presumably 17 to 19 years old. Yet, by the last episode, the same teenager is married to her boss, who is a successful businessman and a divorced father of a five to six-year-old son with a speaking disability. During her journey from an intern to boss’s wife, the story problematises this age gap.
At one point, the boss’s girlfriend accuses Roshi and says, “ Tum apni kam-umri ka faida utha ker Talha Ahmed ko hasil kernay ko koshish ker rahi ho (you are trying to use your youth to get Talha Ahmed).” The boss, Talha, describes her as a “ gher zimadar, immature, aur kam-umer larki (irresponsible, immature and underage girl).” On the surface, this attention to their age gap highlights that the relationship is inappropriate.
However, the narrative also uses it to infantilise Roshi, to show that she needs a caretaker. The drama ultimately resolves this tension of their age gap — not by challenging or undoing the romantic relationship — but by romanticising it.
Not only does the series romanticise and neutralise their age gap, but it also declares Roshi responsible for this romantic resolution. In the last episode, she incredulously says to the boss, “ aap ne mujhse kahan shadi kerni thi (since when did you want to marry me)?” and he responds “ tumahri zidd aur mohabbat jeet gai (your stubbornness and love won).”
The series shows that the boss married the intern only because of her persistence, ignoring that he makes Roshi’s fiancé disappear on their wedding day to ‘save’ her and marries her himself. Young Roshi’s zidd or stubbornness is framed as triumphant, while the man’s hesitation due to the age gap is recast as his moral conscientiousness.
Focus on her triumphant zidd creates the illusion of Roshi’s agency, and it absolves the boss of any wrongdoing. The drama rewards the young intern by endowing both wifehood and motherhood on her. This pairing of a young girl with an older man reinforces a model of heterosexual desire, one that privileges male authority and female youth. The drama becomes a reassurance of this male desire because it first problematises, then normalises, and eventually romanticises this desire for the audience.
Meem Se Mohabbat also maternalises the young girl. It links her desirability to her capacity for care, her potential for motherhood. Many of the romantic moments between the couple occur when Roshi interacts with her boss’s son. Instead of showing her as an adult with the child, due to Roshi’s childlikeness and her age, they appear to be children of different ages. And somehow, many of these scenes are followed by the boss romantically gazing at her.
The boss also goes on to threaten Roshi that if something were to happen to his son, he would hold her responsible. Mind you, the girl couldn’t even take care of herself at the start of the series. He himself appears to be failing at taking care of his child. But he shifts his own failure as a father onto the girl before they are even married.
Let’s also look at Kafeel , starring Sanam Saeed and Emmad Irfani, which is a women’s rights-oriented drama. Zeba’s parents suspect she is having an affair, so they quickly marry her off to the first available man, Jami. She is not allowed to even complete her education. After she’s married, she learns that her husband is unemployed, irresponsible, and disloyal to her.
Her father encourages her to get a divorce, but other women, including her mother and grandmother, push against it. Zeba becomes the sole bread earner in her household and raises her three daughters and a son without any financial or emotional support from her husband.
But Zeba, seemingly, does not learn much from her own experience as a woman in a financially and emotionally abusive marriage. Instead of teaching her daughters the importance of financial autonomy, she hopes that they will marry up. The sole aspiration she shares for her eldest daughter is a good husband, big kitchen, and a big house after marriage.
Zeba’s sister is a successful architect and lives in a palatial house that she designed with her husband. But instead of actively modelling her to highlight the possibility of financial autonomy along with a successful marriage, the drama reduces her to a minor character.
Many episodes focus on the eldest daughter Javeria’s marriage and use it as a tool to highlight the problems they face due to their father. Zeba’s daughters’ friend, Daneen’s whole character is based on her desire to marry Zeba’s son, Subuk. Daneen is a school-going girl and is shown wearing a school (or perhaps a college) uniform in the drama. Even inside the school, the topic of conversation is her marriage with Subuk. We never learn much about these girls beyond their own or their mothers’ desires about their marriages.
We never learn what any of these girls study, what their interests are, or what their career aspirations are. Though both their mother and aunt are working women, instead of learning about the importance of financial autonomy, the daughters are shown to hope for a more responsible husband for their chances at a life better than their mother’s. It reduces young girls to dependents awaiting marriage, without ever assigning them complete personhood.
Within the plot, there is an internal contradiction: the series that aims to highlight women’s rights ends up centring teenage girls in marriage plots, making its own message ambiguous. It feeds into the widely-believed idea of daughter as a liability, a responsibility, a burden . The series gestures toward themes of women’s empowerment — showing, for instance, a mother who gains independence through employment and secures a khula . Yet this lesson is not extended to the daughters.
This reflects a broader pattern of feminist façade in television, where dramas flippantly acknowledge feminist ideas but rarely integrate them into their storylines. They create the appearance of feminist engagement without a substantive shift in narrative priorities.
By framing early marriage as romantic or inevitable, these dramas also make limited access to education, economic dependency, gender-based violence, and legal vulnerabilities seem inescapable. By collapsing adolescence into adulthood, these TV series actively reshape the boundaries of girlhood.
Many of these female actors presumably come from the upper-middle class, and are academically and professionally ambitious, as any young girls should be. But, ironically, their work provides the Pakistani public reassurances of regressive patriarchal beliefs. At a time when feminists are challenging early marriages, advocating for women’s education, and demanding greater autonomy for women in Pakistan, the persistent portrayal of teenage girls as wives and mothers strengthens the barriers keeping women down.
This trend suggests that, despite the changing discourse, the fundamental expectations placed on girls remain the same.
These series also shape the aesthetic orientations of the audience as they get used to seeing girls in adult roles, and thereby age out senior female actors. Female actors have always faced this gendered ageism and often share how their professional prospects dwindle or become limited while their male counterparts continue to play heroes.
Comments on female actors’ social media posts are often ageist. Recently, in an interview, Firdous Jamal defined a heroine as a “15 to 16-year-old, or at maximum 18 to 20-year-old girl” who is “ chulbuli”, “chanchal” , “innocent” and “excites the audience”.
Unsurprisingly, the actor playing the eldest daughter in Kafeel, Nooray Zeeshan, is 16 years old . She shared that she was offered multiple roles because she looks ‘innocent’. This casting practice eliminates or limits the possibility of work for female actors after a certain age. Patriarchies have always prized women’s innocence and naiveté and underage casting exacerbates this. Teenagers are the desired target of both patriarchy and capitalism: young enough to be moulded, old enough to be sexualised and commodified.
In centring teenage girls in adult roles on screen, these dramas offer both a reassurance and a continued fantasy to their male audience, of a world where young girls remain available to older men, where girls remain financially and emotionally dependent, hence exploitable.
For the female audience, these dramas romanticise the misconception that their value lies in their youth, their innocence, and their marriageability. But this reassurance and romanticisation comes at a cost that girls and women continue to pay for everyone’s entertainment.
