Road Construction, Mobility & Social Change in a Wakhi Village
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Road Construction, Mobility & Social Change in a Wakhi Village Shimshali Perspectives in Words and Pictures 1"35o'SPOU.BUUFS&*OUSPEVDUJPO QQJ © 2020 selection, editorial matter and captions, David Butz & Nancy Cook; individual photographs, the photographers. All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-7771450-4-0 (e-book). Published in Canada. Road Construction, Mobility & Social Change in a Wakhi Village Shimshali Perspectives in Words and Pictures Edited by David Butz & Nancy Cook Wakhi & Urdu Translations by Karim Khan Saka © 2020 selection, editorial matter and captions, David Butz & Nancy Cook; individual photographs, the photographers. All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-1-7771450-4-0 (e-book) Published in Canada Road Construction, Mobility & Social Change in Shimshal Introduction Road Construction, Mobility & Social Change in a Wakhi Village Legend 74° 75° 76°E C Shimshali Perspectives in Words & Pictures Provincial boundary AFGHANISTAN H K 37°N i I Karakoram Highway (KKH) l i k N Shimshal Road Reshit The Shimshal Road R A Misgar . n j e r av Khunjerav Pass Chapursa u R . UNKWA n h HT R K G Shimshal is a farming and herding community of about 250 households, located in the Gojal sub-district (Tehsil) of AK . h -P u R G O Sost j e r a v Pakistan’s Gilgit-Baltistan administrative territory (see Figure 1). The community consists of four agricultural villages E J A L R . B S U Y Kaibar B - . (Farmanabad, Aminabad, Centre Shimshal, and Khizerabad) located between 2,800 and 3,200 metres elevation, an D R H ISHKOMAN - him I S K S sh T extensive system of high-altitude pastures extending to 5,000 metres, and several small hamlets which villagers occupy al R u d . I l R. C seasonally for farming or pastoral purposes. All Shimshalis are descended from (or are married to descendants of) T R Shimshal T a GULMIT r a Mamu Shah, who settled the area some 14 generations ago. Like other communities in Gojal, Shimshal is ethnically and YASIN z B I Attabad n linguistically Wakhi, and its inhabitants belong to the Shia Ismaili Islamic sect. ALIABAD u Chalt His H r r pa G h i z e R i v e G r R As recently as 1970, it took a week’s walk and several more days by pony track for Shimshalis to reach the nearest GUPIS i l g G NAGYR Hopar . i t market town. By the early 1980s, completion of the Karakoram Highway (KKH) along the main Hunza River valley and R i v Nomal Hispar L e r improvements to the 60-kilometre footpath between Shimshal and the highway had reduced this journey to four days. I 36° The community began building a link road to replace the footpath in 1985. At that time, Shimshal was among the least G accessible communities in Gilgit-Baltistan. Shimshal constructed its link road over 18 years, with significant monetary GILGIT N and logistical assistance from government and NGOs – most notably the Aga Khan Rural Support Program (AKRSP). T . K a Villagers lobbied tirelessly for funds and laboured heroically on the route itself, blasting, chipping, and shoveling the H R Y n ldu R g ra . B t A road out of solid rock and across landslide areas, often on stretches considered impossibly dangerous by government E i B Askole R r e - r I n R a d Dasso contractors (see Figures 2 & 3). Each year the journey got shorter and more people made the trip with increasing . u S D BUNJI s A h T frequency. The road opened to vehicular traffic in Autumn 2003, reducing the journey between the highway and the TAJIKISTAN s R i t i v e r g CHINA o a village to less than three hours. Within months Shimshal’s first jeep drivers had established intermittent passenger and r e r r I n d u s R i v R S R freight service, enabling villagers who were lucky with timing and could pay the fare to make the round-trip to Aliabad P . AFGHANISTAN A (the closest market town) or Gilgit (the regional capital) in a long day. N E I PA L K PAKISTAN H CHILAS SKARDU T Shimshalis enjoyed relatively unimpeded vehicular travel for the following six years, until January 2010, when a INDIA U T N massive landslide downstream from where the Shimshal road joins the KKH dammed the Hunza River, forming a lake K L W that submerged 23 kilometres of highway. Although the Shimshal road remained open, along with the route north to the A A Chinese border, the road link south to Aliabad, Gilgit, and metropolitan Pakistan was blocked. Along with 20,000 other 0 10 20 30 40 50 35°N Gojalis, the residents of Shimshal found their access to markets, administrative services, employment and educational kilometres B opportunities significantly constrained (see Figures 4 & 5). By summer 2010, a jeepable track had been carved over the catastrophic landslide deposit, and rudimentary boat service was ferrying goods and people between where the KKH Figure 1: Shimshal & Gojal in Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan (source: Cook & Butz, 2015) disappeared into the lake at Husseini and where it re-surfaced at Attabad. These hasty infrastructural developments 1 2 Road Construction, Mobility & Social Change in Shimshal Introduction re-established a modicum of down-valley connectivity, but at much cost to villagers in terms of convenience, time, The Book predictability, and expense. This remained the situation for five years: villagers could travel between Shimshal and the KKH relatively easily along their new link road, but could not get themselves, their produce, or the supplies they needed To date we have published several articles that provide scholarly analyses of the road’s implications as well as of the across the lake without prohibitive cost and inconvenience. Material hardship was lessened somewhat by substantial disruptive mobility effects of the Attabad landslide disaster. These attempt to contribute specific insights and arguments donations of disaster relief, mainly from the Chinese government and FAO, but villagers nevertheless experienced to academic debates relating to disaster recovery, infrastructure development, road impacts, gender and mobility, and themselves as “stranded,” their projects and ambitions constrained if not entirely on hold. The KKH road link was re- mobility studies more generally. This book has a different purpose. Here we are more interested in presenting individual established in Fall 2015, after much of the lake was drained and a series of tunnels were dug to circumvent the portion of Shimshalis’ subjective and personally-situated perspectives on the road’s significance to them, with as little analytical highway that remained flooded. Shimshal was once again connected by a continuous road link to Gilgit-Baltistan’s market intervention or impulse to generalization as we can manage. We are motivated in this endeavor both by the desire to and administrative towns, and to the cities of down-country Pakistan (see Figure 6). honour the insights, experiences, worries, hopes, interpretations and aesthetic sensibilities of our Shimshali participants, and by the conviction that so-called “road impact” scholarship will not advance in rigour or relevance until the complicated, multi-layered and ambiguous perspectives of road construction’s intended “beneficiaries” are treated more The Project seriously in their own right. We first visited Shimshal in 1988, three years after AKRSP funded the road’s first phase of construction. Since then we have made 11 additional trips to the community of between two weeks and four months each, including five The Photos & Captions visits during the road-building phase (1985-2003), two after its construction but before the Attabad disaster (2003- 2010), three during the period when the KKH link was severed (2010-2015), and one trip subsequent to the KKH’s Having described the book’s intentions in this manner, it is crucial immediately to forestall any impression that we think realignment (2015-present). Not surprisingly, we have observed that speculation about “what the road will bring” and the photos and captions that follow offer a “pure,” unfiltered, or definitive portrayal of these individual Shimshalis’ how simultaneously to exploit and control its affordances has been a prominent theme of private conversation and understandings of the road’s significance for them and their community. It is well-accepted that self-representation is a public discourse in Shimshal since before our first visit, and remains so a decade and a half after the road’s completion. social practice, which is always mediated by the context of its production, reproduction, and reception. For that reason As social scientists with long-standing interests in identity, modernization and social change in northern Pakistan, we a few words about how the photos and narratives were produced and later selected for this book are in order to guide are fascinated by the Shimshal road’s social implications, and as an aspect of those implications, by the discourses that readers in making sense of its contents. circulate in Shimshal regarding it. Therefore, in 2007 we obtained the community’s permission systematically to study the road’s significance for social change and continuity in Shimshal. Our investigation was inspired by Shimshalis’ own • Most photographers had access to cameras for a maximum of 24 hours, which limited the locational range of their preoccupations, an existing rich literature on road construction and accessibility in northern Pakistan (focused mainly on pictures. Only three individuals (Mirza Aman, Javed Shafa, Sophia Naz), pictured locations outside the permanently- the KKH), our dissatisfaction with the treatment of “road impacts” in development studies literature, and the emergence of settled villages. As a result, the book’s visual content – and to a lesser extent its narrative content – is narrowly- a theoretically sophisticated “mobilities turn” across the social sciences.