Pakistan's folktales: Where strong women slay demons, men wait passively

ISLAMABAD: The debate over how to write "strong female characters" has consumed Hollywood for years. But in the folklore of Pakistan, etched into tombs, preserved in 17th-century manuscripts, and sung across five distinct regions, women have been swimming rivers, crossing deserts, debating clerics and slaying demons for half a millennium.

Consider Sohni, from Sindh's Shahdadpur, where her tomb still stands. Every night, she navigates the treacherous Chenab River on an unbaked clay pot to reach Mahiwal, who waits passively on the opposite bank. She is the risk-taker, the boundary-crosser, the agent of her own desire. When the pot dissolves and she drowns, it is her conscious choice to enter the water rather than accept a life without autonomy. Mahiwal is merely the prize at the finish line.

Or Sassui, immortalized in Shah Jo Risalo and anchored to the Kech-Makran route in Balochistan. She walks barefoot across the blistering Thar Desert to find her kidnapped lover Punnhun. The entire Hero's Journey, the trials, the suffering, the confrontation with the antagonist, belongs to her. 

Punnhun sleeps. Sassui acts. When threatened with assault by a shepherd, she doesn't wait for rescue; she commands the earth itself to open and swallow her, protecting her agency through spiritual ascension. She is neither damsel nor deity, she is sovereign.

These aren't anomalies. They're the rule.

In Punjab's Jhang district, a tomb dated 1471 CE verifies the existence of Heer. In Waris Shah's epic, she doesn't weep silently when forced into marriage, she engages the Qazi in fierce theological debate, citing Islamic jurisprudence to argue that forced marriage violates divine law. She schools the clergy. Ranjha, meanwhile, is a passive flute-player content to herd her buffaloes. He is her disciple, not her savior.

From the Pashtun highlands of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa comes Gul Makai, preserved in 17th-century prose manuscripts. This woman stops an inter-tribal war by wielding the Quran as rhetorical weapon. She forces an all-male Jirga (council) to submit to her interpretation of sacred text. Her agency is intellectual, theological, revolutionary. Malala Yousafzai didn't choose this name accidentally.

Even the "damsel" archetype collapses. In Sindh's Sehwan region, Momal builds a palace rigged with lethal puzzles to test and reject male suitors. She controls the gaze, the space, the rules. In Balochistan's heroic age, Hani is forced to marry the powerful Mir Chakar Rind to save her true love. She refuses to consummate the marriage for thirty years by turning her body into an unconquerable fortress. Her "no" is more powerful than a king's armies.

And then there's Durdana Chelmard from folk anthologies, the monster-slayer who dresses as "the strength of forty men" to kill the demon terrorizing her kingdom, not for glory, but because the men failed. She is Gretel defeating the witch while Hansel cowers in the cage.

These Pakistani tales, with their documented tombs, 17th-century manuscripts, and centuries-old oral traditions, prove that female agency runs deep in human storytelling. Women swimming rivers. Women crossing deserts. Women debating scripture. Women slaying monsters. Not as exceptions. As archetypes.

Perhaps the answer to writing strong women isn't innovation. Perhaps it's remembering what storytellers already knew five hundred years ago.