Filmmaker Imtiaz Ali’s comments on burqa and parda have triggered a wider argument over personal freedom, cultural practice and social conditioning, after he questioned whether comfort within restrictive norms should be seen as genuine choice.
Ali, 55, made the remarks during a conversation with YouTuber Samdish Bhatia on Unfiltered by Samdish, where the discussion moved across Partition, patriarchy, cinema and the portrayal of women in his films. The director said he disagreed with the idea that people could be entirely at ease within practices he viewed as limiting individual freedom.
“I don’t like when someone says ‘I am comfortable in my burqa. I am comfortable in my parda’. It’s a degenerated society, if you feel like this, it’s not okay,” Ali said during the interview. He added that such comfort could reflect internalised victimhood, framing the issue as one of social conditioning rather than only clothing or religious identity.
The remarks drew sharp responses online, with supporters saying Ali had raised a legitimate question about patriarchy and the normalisation of restrictions on women’s public presence. Critics argued that his comments risked dismissing the agency of women who choose forms of dress linked to faith, modesty or personal conviction. The debate quickly moved beyond the entertainment industry, touching on familiar tensions between individual liberty, cultural identity and feminist critique.
Ali’s intervention carries added weight because of his reputation for writing female characters who often challenge convention. Films such as Jab We Met, Highway, Tamasha and Love Aaj Kal have placed women at the centre of stories about desire, escape, autonomy and emotional conflict. His admirers have long credited him with giving mainstream cinema heroines who are not merely accessories to male journeys, though some critics have argued that his work also romanticises rebellion within familiar commercial frameworks.
The timing of the comments has also drawn attention because Ali is promoting Main Vaapas Aaunga, his Partition-era romantic drama released on 12 June. The film stars Diljit Dosanjh, Sharvari, Vedang Raina, Naseeruddin Shah and Banita Sandhu, with music by A. R. Rahman and lyrics by Irshad Kamil. Set against the memory of displacement and longing, the film has been discussed for its themes of home, belonging and identity, placing Ali in public conversations that extend beyond cinema.
The controversy has exposed the difficulty of discussing dress practices in a polarised public space. For some, burqa and parda are seen as symbols of patriarchal control that restrict mobility, visibility and equal participation. For others, the same practices may be understood as expressions of faith, privacy, dignity or inherited culture. The central dispute is whether choice can be treated as fully free when it is shaped by family pressure, community expectations, social sanction or fear of exclusion.
Women’s rights debates across South Asia have often returned to this question. Campaigners against coercive dress codes argue that social approval can make compulsion appear voluntary. They say the language of comfort may hide deep patterns of conditioning, particularly when women face stigma for rejecting prescribed norms. Defenders of personal choice respond that liberation cannot mean replacing one form of control with another, and that women should not be judged for clothing decisions that outsiders may not fully understand.
Ali’s remarks were not framed as a policy argument, but they have landed in a cultural moment where celebrity comments are often amplified and scrutinised within hours. The director’s choice of phrase, particularly “degenerated society”, became the focal point of criticism, with some users describing it as blunt and insensitive. Others said the force of the language was necessary to challenge customs that continue to limit women’s autonomy in many households and communities.
