South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies

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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

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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
a
Department 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 asuhail@emory.edu; 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’, in Web 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 predomi-
nantly 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 geog-
raphies 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 literature. How-
ever, this literature builds on evidence that already has a strong geographical bias. Parti-
tion historiography locates its empirical focus primarily on Punjab, Uttar Pradesh and
Bengal. These areas formed the ‘core’ of British India and shared a form of direct rule that
produced familiar political subjectivities through which coherent narratives about Parti-
tion were constructed.
Direct rule in British India’s core was effected through two modern techniques: the pro-
duction of a public sphere, and electorates based on the ‘rule of colonial difference’.14 This
public sphere extended ideas of difference beyond the walls of the mosque, madrasa and
jamaatkhana into a space where competing imaginations about a moral and political com-
munity collided. The translation of the rule of colonial difference into an electoral form
meant that the political classes had to appeal to diverse localised polities based on broader
notions of religious and/or linguistic identity. In this way, the moral community sought to

9. See Gyanendra Pandey (ed.), Unarchived Histories: The ‘Mad’ and the ‘Trifling’ in the Colonial and Postcolonial World
(New York: Routledge, 2014).
10. David Gilmartin, ‘Partition, Pakistan, and South Asian History: In Search of a Narrative’, in Journal of Asian Studies, Vol.
57, no. 4 (1998), pp. 1068–95.
11. Ibid., p. 1071.
12. See also Joya Chatterji, The Spoils of Partition: Bengal and India 1947–1967 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2007).
13. The difference between direct and indirect rule is in the forms of imperial governmentality rather than the degree of
British intervention. Zones of indirect rule constituted much of what became Pakistan and so produced a distinctive
political subjectivity.
14. Gilmartin, ‘Partition, Pakistan, and South Asian History’, p. 1074.
15. See Shahid Amin, ‘Gandhi as Mahatma: Gorakhpur District, Eastern UP, 1921–22’, in Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakra-
vorty Spivak (eds), Selected Subaltern Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 288–348; and Shahid
Amin, Event, Memory, Metaphor: Chauri Chaura 1922–1992 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996).
894 A. SUHAIL AND A. LUTFI

subsume local diversity.15 But the core zones of direct rule did not constitute the entirety of
colonial geography; what became Pakistan was mostly subject to indirect rule. These zones
of indirect rule included the vast geographies that the Baloch traversed and occupied.
Instead of the semi-representative electoral system which was in place in the core area
of British India, the zones marked as the ‘frontier’ had different hierarchies of power.
Without an electoral system in place, there was no need for the political classes in these
regions to flatten out differences in the interests of producing a larger, more homogenous
electoral community. However, after Partition, the Pakistani nation-state attempted to
extend the rule of colonial difference and technologies of governance to all the territories
absorbed into direct state rule through military and economic coercion. Hence Partition
was experienced as colonisation by many of the Baloch.
Moreover, even within the ‘core’, there were many populations that were not folded
into these dominant modes of political subjection. This was especially true for those who
lived in the port cities on the Arabian Sea because although these cities were part of the
British Indian colonial administration, they were also nodes in a larger imperial network
that extended into the Indian Ocean.16 The political classes in the zones of direct rule
sought to make claims to represent an ever-increasing, homogenised moral community.
For the Muslim League, this moral community presented itself in the idea of Muslims as a
nation, i.e. the ambiguous idea of ‘Pakistan’. However, in the Indian Ocean entrep^ots, the
existence of diversity and difference was essential to economic, social and political life. A
diverse city, open to receiving all who arrived from across the sea, would capture the dis-
tinct worlds its peoples brought to it.
Consider, for example, the thousands of slaves who fled to Karachi from the Omani-
held parts of the Makran coast throughout the nineteenth century. While slavery had
been abolished in the British Empire (formally in 1833), it persisted in Britain’s vassal
state, the Sultanate of Oman; this uneven legal–political geography allowed the Makrani
slaves to escape to the young city. Thus, uneven geographies of power, exemplified by
varying regimes of regulation of slavery, allowed for the arrival of much-needed cheap
labour, and allowed the ex-slaves freedom and identity. In Karachi, this Afro-Makrani
population was recognised as Baloch.
Partition, as the moment of the establishment of the nation-state of Pakistan, meant an
end to such differential terrains of power. Moreover, it did not just restrict mobility, it
foreclosed the opportunity for populations such as the Baloch to be Baloch in all their var-
ious ways.17 Where the Baloch had earlier adapted to the uneven geographies of British
rule, Partition greatly weakened their strategies of accessing resources across these regimes
of power.18
We thus extend and complicate Gilmartin’s criteria for the Partition narrative by situ-
ating Partition within a longer chain of events particular to Karachi—i.e. the series of
migrations leading up to 1947. Moreover, our subject, the diverse Baloch populations,
does not conform to the normative subjectivities whose experiences usually inform

16. See Sugata Bose, A Hundred Horizons: The Indian Ocean in the Age of Global Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2006); and G.A. Das, India and the Indian Ocean World. Trade and Politics (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004).
17. Also see Nita Verma Prasad, ‘Indian or Arabian? The Construction of Territorially Based Identities in the Raj 1866–88’, in
Cultural and Social History, Vol. 9, no. 2 (2012), pp. 187–205.
18. See Thomas R. Metcalf, Imperial Connections: India in the Indian Ocean Arena, 1860–1920 (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 2007).
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 895

Partition narratives. However, before we proceed with our case, we need to consider the
city of Karachi in a new light. The next section places the city within the economy of the
Makran coast and the Indian Ocean.

Last Stop on the Makran Coast

Until 1936, Karachi, along with much of Sindh, was a part of the Bombay Presidency. It
had a functioning municipal administration buttressed by steady economic and popula-
tion growth,19 and the Makrani Baloch were major contributors to this growth. Many of
them were ex-slaves from the Omani-administered Makran,20 while others were poor
fisherfolk who had moved into the city to obtain a steady income; still others were escap-
ing political instability in Greater Balochistan.21 The Makrani Baloch joined the Mahesh-
waris, Kachhis and other ‘indigenous’ Baloch groups to form the working classes of the
city,22 employed on British city-building projects at the port, in road construction and in
mining operations. By the 1940s, they were also working for multinational banking inter-
ests and for a well-established, Gujarati-speaking Parsi and Sindhi Hindu mercantile class
that was common to all Indian Ocean entrep^ots.23
The Partition of British India dramatically transformed the social and demographic
constitution of the city. Karachi lost about half of its pre-Partition population with the
departure of its Hindu and Jain residents, but the arrival of Muslim immigrants, i.e. the
Muhajirs, increased the city’s population by unprecedented proportions. These (largely)
Urdu-speaking migrants radically transformed the ethno-linguistic character of a city
where once Gujarati and Sindhi had featured amongst the cacophony of languages heard
on the streets.24
Most significantly, the government of Pakistan declared Karachi a federally administered
zone despite resistance from the local political classes in Sindh. The city also became the des-
tination for internal migrants from the territories that now constituted Pakistan (Table 1).
These statistics on migration patterns, however, signal more than just demographic
shifts. They tell of the undoing of social relations and modes of existence forged over the
course of a century. Karachi’s Baloch population had borne witness to the founding of the
city under the British, the development of its ‘natural harbour’ into an international deep-
sea port, and the establishment of a strong mercantile class.25 These developments also
made them a bona fide urban working class in the city’s emerging political economy. Par-
tition threw this dependable structure into disarray, and as the city transformed around

19. See Azmat Ali Budhani, Haris Gazdar, Sobia Ahmad Kaker and Hussain Bux Mallah, ‘The Open City: Social Networks and
Violence in Karachi’, LSE Working Paper No. 70, London, Mar. 2010.
20. See S.S. Jayasuriya and R. Pankhurst, The African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2003);
and Edward A. Alpers, ‘The African Diaspora in the Northwestern Indian Ocean: Reconsideration of an Old Problem,
New Directions for Research’, in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Vol. 17, no. 2 (1997), pp.
62–81.
21. Martin Axmann, Back to the Future: The Khanate of Kalat and the Genesis of Baloch Nationalism 1915–1955 (Karachi:
Oxford University Press, 2008).
22. Also see Arif Hasan, Understanding Karachi: Planning and Reform for the Future (Karachi: City Press, 1999).
23. See Edward Simpson, Muslim Society and the Western Indian Ocean: The Seafarers of Kachchh (London: Routledge,
2009).
24. Sarah Ansari, Life after Partition: Migration, Community and Strife in Sindh, 1947–1962 (Karachi: Oxford University Press,
2005).
25. The mercantile class was dominated by communities of Sindhi Hindus, Gujarati Memons and Parsis, among others.
896 A. SUHAIL AND A. LUTFI

Table 1. Increases in Karachi’s population via immigration, 1947–59.

Year Total migrants Immigrants Internal migrants
1947 531,650 502,675 28,975
1948 206,125 190,250 16,475
1949 119,475 102,650 16,825
1950 157,125 133,000 24,125
1951–52 138,776 102,250 35,326
1953–54 99,824 57,974 41,850
1955–56 74,500 30,324 44,176
1957–58 72,200 23,844 48,356
1959 9,122 2,981 6,141
Total 1,409,297 1,145,948 262,249
Source: Soofia Mumtaz, ‘The Dynamics of Changing Ethnic Boundaries: A Case Study of Karachi’, in The Pakistan Development
Review, Vol. 29, no. 3/4 (1990), pp. 223–48. We understand that the data for 1949 and 1951-52 have errors, and do not total
correctly. However the errors are not significant enough to amend the force of our argument and therefore we have retained
the figures (despite mathematical errors) as we find them in the original publication.

Table 2. ‘Ethnic’ populations and economic niches in Karachi, 1947–90.

Economic niche per ethnic Economic niche per ethnic
Ethno-linguistic group group (1947–60) group (1960–90)
Sindh Baloch D D
Sindhis D AD
Gujarati speakers B B
Religious minorities BD BD
(contemporary)
Urdu-speaking Muhajirs ABD ABD
Pashtuns – CD
Punjabis – ABCD
Refugee populations – B
Illegal immigrants – D
A D Administrative & public B D Big & small business C D Transport D D Skilled &
services unskilled labour
Source: Soofia Mumtaz, ‘The Dynamics of Changing Ethnic Boundaries: A Case Study of Karachi’, in The Pakistan Development
Review, Vol. 29, no. 3/4 (1990), pp. 223–48.

them, the Baloch found themselves on the lowest rung of a completely different social and
economic ladder (Table 2).26
Even though the Baloch established themselves as the entrenched working class in
British Karachi, they had historically been a peripatetic cosmopolitan people. Baloch sol-
diers, labourers and traders had been setting forth from the Makran coast into the Persian
Gulf and beyond for centuries.27 Contrary to their representation as territorial tribals in
colonial texts, the Baloch were a group that maintained ties of kinship and commerce
across the Indian Ocean.28 However, the rule of colonial difference had meant that the
Baloch had had to learn to negotiate an uneven political, economic and legal terrain.29

26. See Markus Daechsel, The Politics of Self-Expression. The Urdu Middle Class Milieu in Mid-Twentieth Century India and Pakistan
(New York: Routledge, 2006); and Sarah Ansari, ‘Partition, Migration, and Refugees: Responses to the Arrival of Muhajirs in
Sind during 1947–48’, in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Special Issue, Vol. 18 (1995), pp. 95–108.
27. See Beatrice Nicolini, ‘The Baluch Role in the Persian Gulf during the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, in Compara-
tive Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Vol. 27, no. 2 (1997), pp. 384–96.
28. Reliable historiography on the Baloch is sparse. However, see Beatrice Nicolini, Makran, Oman and Zanzibar (Leiden:
Koninklije Brill, 2004); Nina Swidler, Remotely Colonial: History and Politics in Balochistan (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2014); and Inayatullah Baloch, The Problem of Greater Baluchistan: A Study of Baluch Nationalism (Stuttgart:
Steiner Verlag Wiesbaden, 1987).
29. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1993).
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 897

Though much of the Indian Ocean world was subject to British influence by the twenti-
eth century, the Empire’s assertion of power was not uniform.30 As indicated above, under
British rule, the Baloch lived in zones of both direct and indirect rule, which offered differ-
ent kinds of opportunities and limitations.31 For instance, moving to Karachi from the
Sultanate of Oman meant emancipation for an Afro-Makrani slave;32 for an aspiring mer-
chant, moving from Karachi to an area of indirect rule, like Gwadar, meant being able to
deal in commodities banned or heavily regulated by the British.33 However, with Partition
and the construction of ‘national’ boundaries, many of the possibilities that had opened
up through Baloch mobility across areas of indirect and direct rule were closed off.
Thus, we argue that the Baloch experience offers new perspectives on the disruptions
and reaffirmed continuities Partition provoked in their lives. Most crucially, they enable
us to understand Partition as a temporally and spatially dilated series of migrations and
transformations, rather than as the singular event it is represented as in nationalist and
statist imaginaries, which locate it in 1947 and tether it to the bounds of the nation-
state.34 Moreover, dominant Partition narratives about Karachi and Sindh are often either
a lament for the departed Sindhis or a retrospective explanation for how the Muhajirs
came to dominate locally.35 The narratives we collected from two of Karachi’s oldest
neighbourhoods, Lyari and Qiyamahsari, tell a somewhat different story. The residents of
these neighbourhoods, while sharing in the larger Baloch cultural milieu, represent the
diverse ways in which the Baloch of Karachi experienced Partition.36
Lyari is the historic home of Karachi’s working classes. Popularly called the ‘mother of
Karachi’, the lives and livelihoods of its people were tethered to the port, to British infra-
structure projects, and to the city’s burgeoning industrial sector. Lyari’s Baloch were cru-
cial to the specific relations of production that emerged in Karachi over the hundred years
of its career as a city. The ‘Partition’ narrative of these Baloch tells the story of the disrup-
tion of these relationships because many of those with whom they had struggled in work-
ing-class solidarity, and for whom they had worked, suddenly left soon after August 1947.
However, if the stories of Lyari’s Baloch signal the disruption of specifically urban rela-
tions of production, then the story of the Baloch from Qiyamahsari is one of the continu-
ance of relationships that stretch across the Indian Ocean. Since Partition, Qiyamahsari

30. H.V. Bowen, E. Mancke and J.G. Reid (eds), Britain’s Oceanic Empire. Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds c. 1550–1850
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
31. Sameetah Agha and Elizabeth Kolsky, Fringes of Empire: Peoples, Places, and Spaces in Colonial India (New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2013). Also see James Onley, The Arabian Frontier of the British Raj: Merchants, Rulers and the British in
the Nineteenth Century Gulf (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
32. E.A. Alpers, ‘Flight to Freedom: Escape from Slavery among Bonded Africans in the Indian Ocean World, c. 1750–1962’,
in Slavery and Abolition, Vol. 24, no. 2 (2008), pp. 51–68.
33. Emrys Chew, Arming the Periphery: The Arms Trade in the Indian Ocean During the Age of Global Empire (London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
34. Critiques of the statist imaginaries for Partition abound. See Kamran Asdar Ali, ‘Progressives and Perverts: Partition Sto-
ries and Pakistan’s Future’, in Social Text, Vol. 29, no. 3 (2011), pp. 1–29.
35. Tahir Naqvi, ‘Migration, Sacrifice and the Crisis of Muslim Nationalism’, in Journal of Refugee Studies, Vol. 25, no. 3
(2012), pp. 474–90.
36. The Baloch in Karachi were aware that Partition meant re-colonisation for Balochistan. The state of Kalat comprised
most of what is now the Pakistani province of Balochistan. It declared independence from British tutelage on 11
August 1947 in order to establish a parliamentary republic. However, against the sentiment and efforts of the Baloch
people, the state of Pakistan soon annexed the state. Baloch nationalism, like all nationalisms, posits an ontology
traced back into antiquity, but imagining the Baloch people as a ‘nation’ was only triggered by Pakistan’s annexation.
That this imagination drew upon ethnic, linguistic and geographical continuities did not imply that it meant the same
thing for everyone.
898 A. SUHAIL AND A. LUTFI

has become a middle-class neighbourhood; a sizeable number of its residents have benefit-
ted from their links to the Persian Gulf region. During Partition, when connections with
post-colonial India became difficult, the residents of Qiyamahsari decided to renew their
ties with the Persian Gulf. Karachi always was one node in a vast cultural, economic and
political network spanning the Indian Ocean. The Qiyamahsari narratives highlight the
inhabitants’ redoubled participation in this transnational network, which allowed them to
improve their position in the post-Partition city.37

Lyari’s ‘Indigenous’ Proletariat

Born a few years before Partition into a working-class family, Ramzan Baloch, the editor
of the journal Sada-e Lyari, recalls his childhood in Lyari well and fondly. His recently-
published autobiography, Lyari’s Unfinished Story, highlights how the people of Lyari con-
tributed to Karachi’s growth and glory.38 Lyari, one of the oldest and most resource-
deprived neighbourhoods of the city, lies at the heart of Karachi, continuing to provide it
with a steady flow of labour as it had in pre-Partition days.39 Ramzan recalls the Lyari of
his youth as a ‘bastion of love and fraternity’. His earliest recollections are of Thursday
evenings when neighbours would distribute fruit amongst the children. At this time there
was no regularisation of property in Lyari and settlements were spontaneous. People
would come to the city seeking a livelihood, and build their homes wherever they could,
and were immediately embraced into the community. ‘Bambayya Urdu’ was the lingua
franca of the area, although Sindhi, Balochi and Gujarati featured prominently too. The
language of instruction in most of the schools in Lyari was either Sindhi or Gujarati.
Many of our informants assert that much of the Sindhi-speaking working-class popula-
tion in Karachi was and is of Baloch descent.
Our informants place the emergence of identity politics firmly in the period of
President Ayub Khan’s rule, a decade after Pakistan’s formation. They imagine pre-
Partition Lyari as a bastion of progressive anti-colonial activism amongst its working clas-
ses, and speak of working-class solidarity and the conscious maintenance of social rela-
tions across ethnic and religious boundaries. For example, several informants remember a
popular lullaby in Lyari thus: ‘[We are] the creed of Hanafia, [but are] people of Ali’; and
‘Whatever we have earned is that which is gifted to us by those that are destitute amongst
us’. Both these instances demonstrate a conscious disregard for sectarian (Shia/Sunni),
class and caste divisions.
Prominent workers’ rights activist Usman Baloch also emphasises the ‘social cohesion’
among the working people of Lyari at that time. The city’s British administrators were
keen on city-building, which meant that there was always a need for cheap labour. During
World War I, Karachi had become an important ship-repairing hub and military airfield.
New factories and industries soon followed as the region’s capitalists began investing in

37. The sharp distinction we make between Lyari and Qiyamahsari is more analytical than empirical. Not everyone in Qiya-
mahsari sustained a connection to the Persian Gulf; similarly, not everyone in Lyari is bound to the city and many par-
ticipate in transnational networks. We emphasise the distinction to underscore our argument about the distinctive
ways of being Baloch in Karachi.
38. Ramzan Baloch, Lyari’s Unfinished Story (Karachi: ARM Child & Youth Welfare, 2015).
39. See Adeem Suhail, ‘The Clothes have No Emperor! Reflections on the Crisis of Violence in Lyari Town, Pakistan’, Centre
for Muslim and Non-Muslim Understanding Working Paper, University of South Australia, Adelaide, 2015; and Laurent
Gayer, Karachi. Ordered Disorder and the Struggle for the City (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2014).
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 899

the young city, which had a sound urban infrastructure. The imbalance between demand
and supply of labour promoted steady in-migration from neighbouring regions, and long
before Partition, Karachiites had dubbed it a ‘city of migrants’ in which Lyari was the
most popular destination for new migrants.
Usman Baloch echoes the popular idea that ‘the labours of Lyari’s people gave birth to
the bustling city’, and that is why Lyari is called the ‘mother of Karachi’. As most people
from Lyari found work through kin and neighbourhood networks, and there was enough
work for all to survive on, Lyarians cultivated a studied indifference to difference. Most of
Lyari’s residents were refugees of sorts—people escaping tribal warfare in Western Balo-
chistan, or dwindling resources and shrinking economic opportunities in the Makran, or
slavery in Oman. In Lyari, they learned to develop a kind of cultural flexibility born of a
mutual recognition of subalternity that became a generalised cultural character of Lyari
up to the time of Partition.
Lyari had acquired considerable importance in the imagination of the Makran Baloch
by the 1860s.40 By 1864, the city was connected by telegraph and steamer with Makran
and beyond. A decade later, its railway was extended to meet the main lines in British
India. Political instability across the Goldsmith Line41 and the persistence of slavery in
Omani territories made Karachi an attractive destination for immigrants of Iranian and
Afro-Baloch descent. These migrants increased the already substantial Baloch populations
in Lyari, Malir, Qiyamahsari and Mangho Pir, among other localities in or near Karachi.
However, it is clear that the British treated Lyari as a ‘black hole’ into which the work-
ing classes of Karachi disappeared every night after contributing their sweat and toil to
constructing the budding metropolis. One informant, Mansour Ahmad Baloch, recalls
that in the mid 1930s:
Lyari was in many ways a spontaneous outgrowth of the British colonisation of the city of
Karachi. For them and for the capitalist classes of Karachi, the KPT (Karachi Port Trust), the
factories that needed labour, the Cotton Exchange, and the building labourers. All the
unnamed masses that stepped up to staff those posts eventually ended up in this area, Lyari.
So it was spontaneous in that poor people came here and marked out their own little zone,
their little ‘jhuggis’, according to their resourcefulness and ability; it was order out of chaos. It
was treated like a wasteland out of which labour would magically appear each morning and
into which it would disappear each evening. If someone wanted to do something there, of
course no bank would give you a loan because your only collateral was your labour, property
not being regularised.42

Ramzan Baloch’s accounts of his father’s struggles exemplify many of the testimonies
that we were able to collect. Ramzan’s father was a day labourer who worked at the port
as a carrier. Often he would look for construction work to supplement his income; on
other days, he would try his luck amongst the fisherfolk. Ramzan notes in his autobiogra-
phy that although these were happy times for him, his mother did not remember them as
such. Instead, she remembers extreme poverty and uncertainty. She would remind him of

40. See Hamid Nazir, Wadi-e Lyari (Karachi: Akasi, 1992).

41. The Goldsmith Line was the border demarcated by the British Empire in 1871, which divided Greater Balochistan into
two parts. The eastern portion is situated in present-day Iran and the western portion forms Balochistan Province in
present-day Pakistan. Thus, the Goldsmith Line today demarcates the Iran–Pakistan border.
42. Interview with former Lyari resident and activist, Mansour Ahmad Baloch, Dec. 2015.
900 A. SUHAIL AND A. LUTFI

instances when stormy weather would wash away the walls of their meagre dwelling and
they would have to rebuild their home.
Most informants—including Maheshwaris and Kachhis—claim that ethnic and reli-
gious difference was not politicised in the era preceding and immediately following Parti-
tion. Naran Das Bisla, a prominent labour rights activist from pre-Partition days, is still
remembered with admiration and respect by those who were politically active in the
workers’ rights movements in Karachi after Partition. These accounts indicate that ideas
of a religious or ethnically-defined ‘moral community’ were not politicised among the
working classes of Karachi then. For instance, Muslim, Hindu and Christian residents of
Lyari shared communal water taps without paying heed to divisive notions of purity or
contamination. Ramzan writes:
There were two taps near our place that were enclosed by a wall, designated for womenfolk,
where clothes were washed. Water carriers would fill up from these taps and transport water
to dwellings for a fee of 1 anna. Further down the block was the men’s tap, which was situ-
ated next to the animals’ tap.43

These taps were shared by all. Others echo Ramzan’s assertions by emphasising that the
only difference Lyari’s working classes were actively conscious of was that between the
exploiters and the exploited.
Although there was ample work to go around, making a living wage was still a difficult
task for Karachi’s poor. Lyari’s poor relied as well on the vibrant, but often-overlooked,
economy which was the exclusive domain of Baloch women. Bibi Jan, born in the early
1930s, is a retired custodial worker who has lived in Jumman Shah Lane in Lyari since
birth.44 Her parents were first-generation migrants to Lyari and came to the city after dis-
putes over date palm groves drove her father from Kech. Over the eight decades of her life
in Lyari, Bibi Jan has not felt the need to learn Urdu, relying entirely on Balochi. She
recalls the Lyari of her youth as a ‘jungle’ compared to the densely-populated inner-city
neighbourhood that it is now. She remembers wide swathes of unsettled land along the
riverbank where she swam and played as a young girl.
Bibi Jan’s testimony is important to our otherwise rather male-centred narrative. The
gendered skew in our data set is mostly a function of the limitations of our own access to
Baloch women in Lyari; much of what Bibi Jan has to say corroborates and augments the
larger narrative. As the men we interviewed remember their participation in the building
of urban infrastructure, port activities and industrial labour, Bibi Jan recalls a very differ-
ent kind of economy that was peculiar to Lyari’s working-class Baloch women. She
describes in detail the ways in which women augmented struggling household finances
through collective enterprises that drew on cultural knowledge and transnational kinships.
One method of earning money was through women from the same Baloch kin group
making seasonal trips to their village in Iran. These partly served to maintain ties with the
larger kin network in Iranian Balochistan, but they were also entrepreneurial trips during
which the women would buy cheap everyday items such as towels, shoes, washing soap
and clothes in bulk. They would then return to Karachi and sell their merchandise to
households in their neighbourhood for a small profit.

43. Ramzan Baloch, Lyari’s Unfinished Story, p. 16.

44. Interview with Bibi Jan, North Karachi, Summer 2014. Bibi Jan is a pseudonym.
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 901

Many of these women were employed as house-cleaners in affluent houses in Karachi.

Bibi Jan recalls how people had such faith in the Baloch that ‘the bania would openly leave
his valuables and house in the care of his Baloch servants without a care in the world. That
is unimaginable now’. She also recalls how families raised goats for milk and had their
own little wood ovens for baking bread: ‘The idea of “bakery bread” or even the Pathan
naan shop was not there at the time’; and she maintains that even the Maheshwari and
Kachhi residents of Lyari copied this Baloch tradition and still follow it today.
Ramzan Baloch’s father found ‘prosperity’ when he started working at Lea Market for a
Hindu wholesaler. In recognition of his hard work, he was offered the opportunity to sell
vegetables in a tiny wooden cabin that he built himself. Only then was he assured a steady
income. This was the first time that the family had ‘real vegetables’ and meat to eat, rather
than their usual fare of bread and onions, molasses or dates. Indeed, income inequality
was stark in pre-Partition Karachi, with the affluent classes residing in what Laurent
Gayer calls the ‘white’ city, and the working classes inhabiting Lyari and its environs, or
the ‘black’ city.45
Usman Baloch remembers how he developed political sensibility by seeing his father
and his workmates struggle for their rights. Calling the residents of Lyari the ‘indigenous
proletariat’ of Karachi, he recalls how people toiled at the Tool Production Yard and the
Cotton Exchange to earn paltry wages. The British administration passed the 1926 Trade
Unions Act in the aftermath of the Soviet Revolution to discourage the radicalisation of
port workers; rather than providing more civic amenities, they sought to instil a ‘sense of
association with the law’ amongst the workers. The workers however took the opportunity
to strengthen their unions, and thus the Act became the basis of one of the earliest organ-
ised labour struggles in Karachi. The biggest commercial interests in the city were owned
by its British, Gujarati Parsi and Sindhi Hindu residents, while the working classes were
composed of the Baloch, Kachhis and Maheshwaris. Most of the working classes lived in
Lyari and were active in labour politics. Informants recall that while the majority of those
involved in labour struggles were Baloch, the movements were led by educated Sindhi
Hindu comrades.
In fact, many of our informants argued that working-class solidarity in Lyari, which cut
across ethnic and religious divides, prevented ethno-nationalist anti-immigrant sentiment
from erupting despite the influx of Muhajirs. Lala Faqir Mohammad fondly recalls ‘wel-
coming Muhajir immigrants into Haji Camp, sharing food and blankets with the immi-
grants in the ensuing winter’.46 Journalist Latif Baloch remembers how the migrants came
to claim large parts of Lyari as their home. He asserts that ‘Agra Taj Colony’ and ‘Behar
Colony’ are names in which Lyari garbed itself to honour the memory of its newest resi-
dents’ old homes: ‘We, the Baloch, still organized ourselves in the city as if we were in the
wilderness. The Muhajir taught us how to live like city-dwellers’. Others who were active
in the Karachi Port Trust and Karachi Municipal Corporation unions recall how educated

45. Laurent Gayer, ‘Guns, Slums and “Yellow Devils”: A Genealogy of Urban Conflicts in Karachi, Pakistan’, in Modern Asian
Studies, Vol. 41, no. 3 (May 2007), p. 517.
46. Interview with Lala Faqir Mohammad, Lyari, Nov. 2015. Lyari’s Muhajir residents acknowledge Baloch hospitality, but
focus more on how they ‘tamed the wilderness’ of Lyari. We have not made a comparative valuation of the relative
veracity of these narratives, but privilege the Baloch accounts because the Archive on Partition already has the Muhajir
narrative.
902 A. SUHAIL AND A. LUTFI

Muhajir workers were ‘experts at organizing politically and soon became our educators
and our union leaders’.47
Latif Baloch believes the key to this culture of hospitality and harmony was the ‘hotel
culture’ that was peculiar to Lyari. Lyari’s ‘hotels’ were tea-houses where men would con-
verge after a day’s work to meet their friends. These spaces enabled them to engage with
diverse people and ideologies, and this is why Lyari’s Baloch could simultaneously wel-
come the Muhajirs to their city and lament the departure of their former Hindu neigh-
bours. Usman Baloch wistfully recalls the departure of Hindu compatriots at the West
Wharf:
Everyone knew they were leaving with everything that they had built in their lives in this city.
The donkey-cart drivers of Lyari who transported this luggage to the wharf were mostly Lyari
Baloch. Rather than seeing these as coveted valuables, they saw them as the remnants of a life
interrupted. Not a case of looting was heard of. The departing were those we struggled with
or struggled against, old connections, now severed.48

Statist Partition narratives may proclaim the period as the birth of a nation—
Pakistan—but as the foregoing demonstrates, Lyari’s residents were intensely uncertain
about what Partition meant for them. As the Pakistani state moved to incorporate the
independent Khanate of Kalat within its territorial boundaries, they were forced to recon-
sider what being Baloch meant. My informants point out that almost all the major politi-
cal movements for Baloch rights germinated in Karachi. However, while the annexation
of Kalat was vexing, they were beset with growing apprehension about their role in ‘post-
colonial’ Karachi.
Many of Karachi’s Baloch mark Partition as the beginning of the politicisation of eth-
nicity in the city. Partition brought about a new political order that saw ‘the Baloch’ as
just one ethnic group in an ethnically-diverse city and not as the ‘indigenous proletariat’
they saw themselves as. Nevertheless, established local activists and journalists like Rahim
Bakhsh Azad and Latif Baloch maintain that the line between Leftist ideology and Baloch
nationalism was always blurred; dedicated communists who emerged as community lead-
ers in Lyari were also celebrated Baloch nationalists.49 They promulgated what Baloch
activists of the time recall as a ‘nationalism of the proletariat’.
These Baloch leaders considered the Muhajir immigrants as comrades in the class
struggle even though the greater availability of labour led to a drastic fall in wages and job
availability. The educational and vocational skills many Muhajir brought with them
meant there were fewer jobs for Lyari’s ‘unskilled’ workers. Major sources of employment
were still adjacent to the Lyari area, but the recruitment pools began to shift elsewhere.
Labour unionist Mohamad Baloch declares that ‘Partition was like the arrival of brethren.
You are happy they share in your labours, but then, there is also that moment when the
last piece of bread is to be shared and there is hunger growling in both bellies’.50 By the
mid 1970s, this ‘hunger’, coupled with greater government oppression in Balochistan,
meant a slow dissipation of this ‘nationalism of the proletariat’. This was the period in

47. See Latif Baloch, My Reminiscences (Karachi: Self-published, 2014).

48. Interview with Usman Baloch, Karachi, Jan. 2016.
49. Lal Bakhsh Rind, Akbar Barakzai, Yusuf Nasqandi and Yar Muhammad Yar are still revered names as both communists
and community leaders.
50. Interview with Mohamad Baloch, Lyari, Nov. 2015.
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 903

which the era of identitarian politics grasped Karachi, never to really relinquish its hold
again. The Baloch became just another ethnic minority in the new matrix.

Cosmopolitan Qiyamahsari
If Lyari was home to an ‘indigenous proletariat’ tethered to the city, then Qiyamahsari’s
Baloch were a cosmopolitan people. A small neighbourhood of about five hundred house-
holds, there is not much to differentiate Qiyamahsari from other enclaves of ethnic
minorities in Karachi. Residents of the neighbourhood, however, consider Qiyamahsari a
significant node in Indian Ocean geography.
Today’s Qiyamahsari is as much a part of Bahrain as it is of Karachi; most of its resi-
dents have at least one family member employed in Bahrain. Many others have relatives
in other parts of the Persian Gulf. Some residents have stickers of Gulf states’ national
flags on their vehicles. The vertical expansion of houses here is called ‘Gulf growth’, since
remittances from the Gulf pay for it. Many families have even acquired passports from
the Gulf states.
This section highlights how despite the emergence of border regimes and the parochi-
alisation of cosmopolitan groups into ethnic minorities, Partition only managed to re-
orient the transnational aspects of the subjectivity of Karachi’s Baloch.51 Instead of Kara-
chi being the terminus for Baloch migrants, it became a way station on the route to the
Gulf. Through the experiences and memories of the residents of Qiyamahsari, we demon-
strate how Baloch migratory networks mediated the changes brought about by Partition.
We focus in particular on the experiences of a prominent Qiyamahsari resident, Naseem,
and his family.52 Naseem is widely recognised in his neighbourhood as an elder and a
community leader. His role as an elder derives from the respect his family commands
among Qiyamahsari’s residents, whose migrations to and from Karachi have been man-
aged by his family for generations. Thus, one of Naseem’s responsibilities as an elder is to
preserve the history of his people and memorialise their journeys.
Naseem claims that his family had been facilitating migrant labour in the Indian Ocean
region long before moving to Qiyamahsari. He tells stories of his own ancestors’ migration
to Karachi in a style similar to the Baloch epic tradition. Internal rifts within his tribe in
western Makran saw his forebears move to Karachi as military labour contractors to the
Talpurs in the nineteenth century,53 and they were stationed at the Manora fort at the
time of the British conquest of the city in 1839.54 Naseem’s ancestors were subsequently
banished to an old Baloch settlement on the outskirts of Karachi—Qiyamahsari.

51. Theoretical insights are from Engseng Ho, ‘Before Parochialization: Diasporic Arabs Cast in Creole Waters’, in Huub de
Jonge and Nico Kaptein (eds), Transcending Borders: Arabs, Politics, Trade, and Islam in Southeast Asia (Leiden: KITLV
Press, 2002), pp. 185–201.
52. Names of this family have been changed at the request of the principal subject.
53. The most comprehensive collection of epics in the Balochi language that have been translated into English remains
Longworth Dames, Popular Poetry of the Baloches (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1905).
54. The Baloch guard at Manora Fort are mentioned in the memoirs of Seth Naomal Hotchand. See Naomal Hotchand
(Alumal T. Bhojwani, trans.; H.E.M. James, ed.), Memoirs of Seth Naomul Hotchand. C.S.I. of Karachi, 1804–1878: A Forgot-
ten Chapter of Indian History (Exeter: William Pollard & Co. Ltd, 1915).
904 A. SUHAIL AND A. LUTFI

Karachi became a British military headquarter in the region, and areas adjoining the
settlement were soon annexed to station military reserves.55 Roads were built to facilitate
troop movements, incidentally connecting the port to Qiyamahsari. Bandar Road, one of
the main arteries of the contemporary city, still runs almost directly between Qiyamahsari
and the port. Naseem’s ancestors took advantage of this development and signed an
agreement with the British whereby they could settle Qiyamahsari under their own rule,
as waderas.56 Through kin networks in Balochistan, they would import cheap labour for
British city-building.
The early twentieth century saw Karachi emerge as a major industrial hub in the
region. The diversification of its mercantile classes’ investments saw steep demands for
labour to work in the salt fields, rock mines, cement factories and in public works. As
news of these opportunities spread, traders and workers poured into the city from various
parts of the Indian Ocean region. Facilitated by Naseem’s forebears, Baloch immigrants
mostly settled in Lyari owing to its proximity to sites of work. As Lyari became the quin-
tessential working-class neighbourhood of the city, Qiyamahsari and its environs slowly
developed into localities that were more affluent. Prosperous Gujarati Parsi and Sindhi
Hindu merchants settled there too, and could often afford to match the lifestyle of colonial
officers. They built verdant gardens and spacious bungalows in areas adjacent to
Qiyamahsari.
Around the same time, the Baloch population of Qiyamahsari also grew. Naseem’s
great-grandfather’s ‘guests’ and clients who came to Karachi in search of employment
were sheltered in the neighbourhood until they found homes closer to the city’s commer-
cial and industrial centres. However, many never left Qiyamahsari and instead built per-
manent residences there. Several informants in the area corroborated Naseem’s claim that
although Qiyamahsari was usually only supposed to be a transitional abode, it became
home due to the generosity of Naseem’s great-grandfather. Qiyamahsari was now neither
desolate nor disconnected from the city proper. It had become a Baloch settlement in a
prime location within the city whose people shared the commute to the port or the indus-
trial area with affluent Sindhi traders, Parsi merchants and colonial officials. By then,
Naseem’s great-grandfather was also mediating the relationship between the Baloch of
Qiyamahsari and the rest of the expanding city; his task was to maintain order as
Qiyamahsari became a peculiar site where members of starkly different classes met. The
burden of this task was lightened by the fact that Naseem’s family not only arranged for
labour to come to Karachi, but also facilitated the export of labour to the Persian Gulf
where the family had always had important links. This aspect of their work was amplified
after Partition, as the fates and functions of the Indian Ocean entrep^ots changed.
Soon after Partition, Naseem’s family saw their affluent Hindu neighbours leave. Con-
trary to Naseem’s grandfather’s expectations, the arriving Muslims were not a like-
for-like replacement for the Hindu, Jain and Parsi bourgeoisie that had left for India.

55. Much of the city of Karachi’s early design and planning were based on the needs of the British military. See
Muhammad Ali Nasir, ‘Reading Malir Cantonment in Karachi, Pakistan: Some Notes on Residential Barracks and Spatial
Dynamics’, in Contemporary South Asia, Vol. 22, no. 4 (2014), pp. 362–76.
56. Here wadera is used not in the traditional Sindhi sense of the word, i.e. an official functionary of the British Empire who
collected taxes and managed populations, but more along the lines of a community leader of a communally-owned
goth or settlement/village. The landscape over which the British sought to expand Karachi was covered with scores of
these tiny settlements.
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 905

Firstly, there were many more refugees than anyone had anticipated. Secondly, unlike
their former neighbours who lived in neat colonial bungalows, the incoming refugees
lacked the most basic resources. The once prosperous locality with its wide streets was
now replaced by refugee camps and neighbourhoods separated by narrow lanes. Finally,
Muhajirs were now competing with the Baloch for the same jobs and resources that the
departing Hindus had offered the latter in past decades.
Despite these factors, Naseem argues, the Baloch were initially optimistic about the
possibility of sharing the city with its latest arrivals. What had been an empty and largely
quiet landscape now buzzed with the bustle of tea-shops, street vendors, shops and restau-
rants, to which Qiyamahsari’s residents did not object. All of Naseem’s closest friends, he
emphasises, were Muhajirs. One of these friends ‘tied his wedding garlands’ rather than
his own brother, as is customary. However, Muhajir settlements were also choking off
space for Qiyamahsari’s growth, where Baloch migrants would have settled. Naseem tells
us that over time, the football grounds where he played as a child were colonised by the
city’s new working class.
Moreover, post-Partition developments in the city’s economic life also attracted
migrants from within Pakistan.57 People flocked to Karachi and competition for the lim-
ited jobs in the city intensified with every passing month. It was in this context that
Naseem’s father decided to draw on his larger Baloch networks. Rather than competing
for shrinking resources within the city, Qiyamahsari’s Baloch set their gaze seawards once
more. As acquaintances brought news of oil developments in the Gulf and in Iran,
Naseem’s father began planning ways of revitalising migratory routes to the Gulf.
From within Naseem’s family, his eldest sister was the first to depart. Naseem explains
that Baloch women usually marry into their mother’s family, and so his sister was married
to his aunt’s son, who had long been settled in Bahrain. When much of Naseem’s family
was flocking to Karachi in the early decades of the twentieth century, his mother’s clan
was moving westwards into Bahrain. When Naseem’s sister’s wedding was arranged, the
groom was earning a good income as a policeman in Bahrain. Naseem’s brother followed
soon after to join the Bahraini security forces. Just as Partition and its aftermath saw a
drastic shrinking of opportunity and resources for the Baloch of the city, the need for mil-
itary labour in Bahrain produced opportunities there.58 Prominent Baloch ‘facilitators’,
much like Naseem’s grandfather, began recruitment campaigns on the Makran coast for
work in Bahrain. Naseem’s brother, born and raised in Karachi, returned to the family’s
ancestral village in Makran, although he had never been there before, in anticipation of
being recruited. Sure enough, he soon found himself employed as a defender of the Bah-
raini state. Naseem would eventually join his siblings, as contacts in Bahrain continued to
facilitate employment in the Bahraini military and work visas for Qiyamahsari’s Baloch.
Interestingly, in Bahrain as in Karachi, the large Qiyamahsari contingent managed to pre-
serve a sense of community, enabling mobility and the flow of remittances to their fami-
lies in Karachi. They shared their neighbourhood and homes with others from
Qiyamahsari. Naseem also became a facilitator of visas, work, loans and travel

57. V. Belokrenitsky, ‘Rural-Urban Migration and the Urban Poor in Pakistan’, in Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern
Studies, Vol. 8, no. 1 (1984), pp. 35–46.
58. See Dirk H.A. Kolff, Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy: The Ethnohistory of the Military Labour Market in Hindustan, 1450–1850
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
906 A. SUHAIL AND A. LUTFI

arrangements for his people. In many ways, he was still the wadera of Qiyamahsari, albeit
in Bahrain.

Conclusion
Early writings on Karachi describe a walled city with two gates, the Salt Gate or Kharadar
that opened towards the ocean, and the Sweet Gate or Mithadar that opened on to the
Lyari River. Time has erased the physical traces of these gates, and by 1947, the city itself
had overflowed their bounds many times over. In a metaphorical sense, though, the two
gates still captured the range of possible forms of social and economic life available to the
city’s inhabitants at Partition.
The Salt Gate represented their connections with the networks of trade and kinship
that spread across the Indian Ocean. It represented the port, which became the main
source of livelihood for the people of Karachi and exemplified the vicissitudes of being a
community of fisherfolk and day labourers. Socially, it engendered subjectivities that at
once linked the extremely localised concerns of the city-dwellers with the cosmopolitan
cultural milieus in which they participated. Politically, it marked the limits of ‘direct rule’
within the sphere of influence of the British Empire. Beyond the Salt Gate lay the perils
and possibilities afforded by the unevenness of indirect imperial rule.
The Sweet Gate, by contrast, represented a more situated subjectivity. Like the droves
of migrants that the city had absorbed in past decades, those who dwelled on the banks of
the Lyari River welcomed Partition migrants in much the same way. There were subsis-
tence agriculturalists amongst these people of the riverbank, and there were labourers.
These were people whose toil and sweat had given birth to the city. Finally, the Sweet
Gate represented an ethos that stated ‘those that are here, are from here’.59
Partition marks the end of the very efficacy of this metaphor. On the one hand, all the
risk and opportunity represented by the Salt Gate was coded into strictly regulated zones
of national and international territories and waters. On the other hand, the ethos of social
syncretism and class-based solidarity represented by the Sweet Gate gave way to a very
different way of organising life in the city. Soon after Partition, the city would be forever
transformed by entering the folds of an identitarian political order.
This article has highlighted how the oldest inhabitants of the city, the Baloch who dwelt
between the two gates, were not silent witnesses to the birth of a nation; they were central
to the growth of that nation’s first capital. They were as significant to the relations of
production that produced the city as were those who left the city at Partition. Nor were
they simply a trifling feature60 of the landscape when the Muhajirs arrived during the
long Partition.
Sometime after Partition, the Lyari River became clogged with industrial waste and
eventually dried up, but the city had changed long before that. Only half of the current
inhabitants of Lyari are Baloch, and most people do not know Qiyamahsari by its historic
name. A new port presents itself as the gateway to the world—the airport. By the 1960s,
the Baloch had ceased to dominate blue-collar work in the city, and had ceded leadership

59. See Engseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2006).
60. Cf. Pandey (ed.), Unarchived Histories.
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 907

in the workers’ struggle to others. Most importantly, post-Partition, the Baloch of Karachi
were forced to associate being Baloch with belonging to the province of Balochistan. This
territorialised notion of identity sought to untether them from the city that their forebears
had created.

Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding
The Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Social Science Research Council (SSRC-IDRF Program) and
American Institute of Pakistan Studies (AIPS) provided funding for this research.