The Baloch of Karachi and the Partition of British India

South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies ISSN: 0085-6401 (Print) 1479-0270 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/csas20 Our City, Your Crisis: The Baloch of Karachi and the Partition of British India Adeem Suhail & Ameem Lutfi To cite this article: Adeem Suhail & Ameem Lutfi (2016) Our City, Your Crisis: The Baloch of Karachi and the Partition of British India, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, 39:4, 891-907, DOI: 10.1080/00856401.2016.1230966 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2016.1230966 Published online: 13 Oct 2016. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 312 View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=csas20 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES, 2016 VOL. 39, NO. 4, 891–907 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2016.1230966 ARTICLE Our City, Your Crisis: The Baloch of Karachi and the Partition of British India Adeem Suhaila and Ameem Lutfib aDepartment of Anthropology, Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA; bDepartment of Cultural Anthropology, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA ABSTRACT KEYWORDS This essay approaches the Partition of British India through the Baloch; cosmopolitanism; perspective of the Baloch inhabitants of Karachi, who locate the city historiography; Indian Ocean; at the centre of diverse political geographies and cultural lineages. Karachi; labour; memory; We specifically look at the testimony of the residents of Karachi’s narrative; oral history; Partition; Sindh historic neighbourhoods of Qiyamahsari and Lyari. Their narratives demonstrate how Partition spelled the end of certain forms of socio- political life in the city, while reaffirming others. Together, these narratives help re-conceptualise Partition as a temporally and spatially dilated series of migrations and transformations, rather than as an event unproblematically tethered to the space and time of nation-states. Introduction In 1947, on the cusp of Partition, Karachi was a very different city from the small port with a ‘natural harbour’ that it had been just a century earlier when the British wrested the small fishing town out of Talpur hands. The city would go on to become the first capi- tal of Pakistan and one of the most populous cities in the world. However, it is safe to say that Karachi’s career as a city began when the British established it as a military base from which to subdue the rest of Talpur Sindh.1 The Talpurs were a Baloch dynasty that had largely favoured Hyderabad and Shikarpur as centres of administration and commerce.2 The site where the British built modern Karachi, in fact, was only acquired by them in 1795 from the Khanate of Kalat.3 It appears that Karachi was more firmly integrated in the fishing economy of the Makran coast than it was within the Talpur political imaginary. Thus, in many ways, Karachi’s career as a city of Sindh begins with the British as well. CONTACT Adeem Suhail [email protected]; Ameem Lutfi ameem.lutfi@duke.edu 1. Matthew Cook, Annexation and the Unhappy Valley: The Historical Anthropology of Sindh’s Colonization (Leiden: Brill Publications, 2015). 2. M.A.M. Talpur, ‘The Vanishing Glory of Hyderabad’,inWeb Journal on Cultural Patrimony, Vol. 1 (2007), pp. 47–65 [http://www.webjournal.unior.it/Dati/19/72/Web%20Journal%203,%20Hyderabad.pdf, accessed 16 Aug. 2016]; and Claude Markovits, The Global World of Indian Merchants, 1750–1947: Traders of Sind from Bukhara to Panama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 3. Edward H. Aitken and J.W. Smyth, Gazetteer of the Province of Sind (Karachi: Mercantile Steam Press, 1907), p. xxxviii. © 2016 South Asian Studies Association of Australia 892 A. SUHAIL AND A. LUTFI In British hands, Karachi became a significant port in the commercial and migratory networks of the Indian Ocean region. The Baloch, predominantly those from the Makran coast, claim to be amongst the city’s earliest settlers. They make their case by pointing to prominent neighbourhoods in contemporary Karachi that still have Baloch epithets as their names, for example Lyari, Orangi and Korangi. The Baloch were not only present at the birth of the city, they were amongst those who gave birth to it. However, they largely claim Karachi not as an ur-site for claims to autochthony, but argue for the city to be imagined as a rich tapestry woven through the lives of diverse peoples. It is through the combined labours of this mesh of peoples that Karachi came to be the bustling megalopolis it is today. In this essay, we argue that the Partition narratives of the Baloch provide us with a fresh analytical perspective on the city as well as on Partition itself. Firstly, their narratives allow us to reimagine Karachi as a city implicated in multiple geographies across the Indian Ocean through its residents’ kin and trade ties. Secondly, their diverse articulations of belonging to the city decentre the supposed tension between local identities and larger moral communities that have dominated Partition studies. Finally, they allow us to extend Partition both temporally and spatially and reposition the territories and subjectivities that dominate Partition narratives. Reconsidering Partition For a long time, scholarly work on Partition dealt with it as a ruptural ‘event’. Contempo- rary historians, however, have recognised that the impact of Partition continued for deca- des after 1947;4 just as historians have expanded the temporal location of Partition, we argue its spatial dimensions must also be reconsidered. We contend that central to the construction of the narrative of Partition is what counts as the data set from which the narrative has been extracted. We ask who are the ‘stock’ characters of the Partition story, and who has been left out?5 What sequence of causal linkages produced Partition as an ‘event’, and what other characters and plot lines could possibly be aggregated as elements of this narrative?6 Gyanendra Pandey suggests we consider Partition as the beginning of a process of ‘nationalisation’ of disparate peoples, of folding multiple locations and contexts into the idea of the nation as a moral and political ‘community’.7 He highlights how this process carried an immense potential for violence, and entailed the coercion and domination of peoples who were not allowed to participate when the new nation’s moral community was being imagined.8 These peoples were to be assimilated into a hazy model of the ‘ideal citizen’, from whose construction they were excluded. The Baloch were one such people, 4. See Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia. Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 5. See Mushirul Hasan (ed.), Inventing Boundaries: Gender, Politics and the Partition of British India (New Delhi: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 2002); and Ayesha Jalal, The Pity of Partition: Manto’s Life, Times, and Work across the India–Pakistan Divide (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013). 6. See an excellent treatment of the same in Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). 7. Gyanendra Pandey, Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer- sity Press, 2001). 8. Cf. Faisal Devji, Muslim Zion: Pakistan as Political Idea (London: Hurst & Co., 2013); Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); and Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 893 and we contend that their experiences have not yet entered the ‘Archive’ of South Asian historiography.9 David Gilmartin observes that the ‘Archive’ is still seeking a narrative that at one and the same time satisfies three critical historiographical criteria:10 first, it must situate Parti- tion in a diachronic chain of events rather than treating it as a momentary disruption of order; second, it should provide insight into the complex dialectical relationship between the ‘high politics’ of the political elites and the ‘everyday-ness’ of subaltern politics; and finally, it must resist the temptation to represent Partition ex post facto as the birth pangs of a nation-state. Gilmartin proposes that these criteria could be satisfied if we understand the Partition narrative as being underpinned by the tension between multiple construc- tions of identity and the search for a moral community.11 Such an understanding locates the narrative in a longer chain of political contradictions that emerged from attempts to aggregate different political identities into a single moral community, i.e. the nation. The struggle to suture a moral community from divergent identities was predominantly the concern of the nationalist bourgeoisie and did not extend to other geographies within with British Empire. The data set composed of their attempts at this suture, continues to allow the high politics of the nationalist bourgeoisie to speak for all the geographies and peoples that they only claimed to represent.12 The desire to forge a broader community out of disparate localised identities remained the project of the nationalist elite. However, people living at the frontiers between direct and indirect rule had other concerns; Baloch testimony locates Karachi at this frontier.13 Gilmartin’s framework ably captures much of the existing Partition

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