Mochi in Hyderi Market

Idrees Ali Asghar Salemwala

 The Afghani Community has been a part of Pakistan since the 1980s Soviet-Afghan war,

when Pakistan provided asylum to around 3 million refugees. However, despite being the

humble gesture, Pakistan in the long run suffered a great economic loss, as catering refugee crisis

in providing basic life necessities of education, food, and shelter became difficult, being a

developing country.1

Hence, being un-accepted by the masses, class politics and discrimination was soon

followed by violence that worsened the socio-economic condition of the Afghan Community.

Being unaccepted, mistreated, and observed as the lower-class, the Afghani Community had

nothing to offer except for themselves in an unknown land. They scattered into major cities to

find jobs like janitors, garbage collectors, laborers, and some found settlements with the skills

they inherited from their ancestors.

The Afghani Community dominates the profession of a Cobbler in Pakistan. A Mochi

(an Urdu term for Cobbler) masters the craft of using an awl and a nylon thread to stitch and

repair shoes, bags, and other products. It is a tradition inherited from generations of skilled

Afghani craftsmen and has been an important skill that allowed the community to have a source

of income that respected their dignity, tradition, and independence.

Being interested in class and racial politics, research was conducted focusing upon the

notion of a Mochi in an urban space (in Karachi) and documenting the response of that urban

space towards the Mochi. The notion of the Mochi speaks about the craft and its deep connection

to the Afghani Community at large, while the response of the urban space focuses upon the

context of class and racial politics infiltrated with violence, despair, and helplessness.

1
Cheema, Pervaiz Iqbal. “The Afghanistan Crisis and Pakistan’s Security Dilemma.” Asian Survey 23, no. 3 (1983)
 The explored urban context is of the main Hyderi Market in North Nazimabad, Karachi,

where five Mochis currently reside. The research includes personal interviews with each one of

them, discussing questions based upon the themes of class politics, ancestral craft,

discrimination, and the response of that urban space. E.g.:

 The struggles and challenges they have been through in the past (violence, lack of

assistance, discrimination, starvation, etc.)

● Reason to choose this specific urban context (i.e. Hyderi Market)

● Which generation of the Refugees do they belong to? (after the migration from the 1980s

- Afghanistan to Pakistan)

● Since how long are they practicing the craft? Whom did they learn it from?

● How are they treated in the urban context as:

o Individuals?

o A Community?

● Where would they go if removed from this area?

● How are their children being educated? (discussing Basic education, the continuation of

the traditional craft, family and business planning, learning new skills)

The interviews provide evidence of the severe discrimination and violence the Afghani

Community has to face throughout their lives. They used to remember their early days without

any income and nights without food and shelter. They used to collect trash, clean sewers, and

work as laborers to earn a wage that lasted only for a day. Due to class politics, the provided

wage was so low that three of them did not even have a family until they were 35 years old. They
continued their struggles until they were independent enough to buy the essentials required to

continue their inherited skill of a Mochi.

The Mochis in Hyderi varied in the age groups and their stay in the Hyderi market. The

youngest one had been in the area for a month while the eldest had been there for 6 years. When

asked about selecting the specific urban space (Hyderi market), majority of them were not clear

about why and how they ended up in Hyderi, while few of them had a friend/family that

mentioned a lot of work in the market area.

A vivid example of discrimination and class politics based upon henry Lefebvre’s ‘The

Right to the City’,2 was how each one of them was thrown out of the main market into the

outskirts of the area – utterly being denied the right to the area where hundreds of different

people are whole heartedly welcomed to shop and eat.

Additionally, neither did they have a permanent construction like a shop or cabin nor a

portable medium like a cart; all they had was a peti3 to house their everyday essentials and a roof

for shade. The roof and the peti become the marker for the Mochi’s settlement and are the

contact points4 to be with the urban space. The peti and roof withstand the violence of the urban

space with the Mochi, meanwhile protecting his goods/essentials and his identity in the urban

space. Hence, the three selected objects for this project are the peti, the roof, and the awl.

● Peti (a box): a peti is a heavy-duty box, made out of either galvanized iron sheets or

wooden pallets, and has a latch and padlock to store and protect the essentials of the

cobbler. It varies in size and houses all the goods and essentials of the shop. The

2
Lefebvre, Henry. “The Right to the City”
3
A peti is a box used to store and protect things.
4
“Contact Points: Museums and the Lost Body Problem.” Sensible Objects : Colonialism, Museums and Material
Culture”
 scratches, dents, and faded textures on the peti indicate the violence it has been through

while the wear and tear of the latch and padlock provide proof of the Afghani protecting

themselves from the violent surroundings.

● Roof: Mochi uses an interesting palette of materials to construct the roof. The palette

consists of re-used scraps like construction nets, cloths, plastic bags, reclaimed lumber,

and bamboo. The weak construction quality of the roof denotes the class and racial

politics that have weakened the Afghani community; the construction method portrays

the impermanence of a Mochi’s settlement, as the roof has to be repeatedly assembled

and disassembled either due to intolerable violence or unavoidable restricted measures.

● Awl: the signature and principal tool of a cobbler’s craft, presents the tradition of the

Afghani Community. The front-notched needle firmly holds the thread while passing it

through the thickest rubber making a sharp clicking sound, while the soft round handle at

the rear becomes invisible as it is held completely into the palm of the cobbler. Hence,

when the Mochi is mending an object, all one can focus is on the sharp sound that a

piercing awl makes - remembering and connecting to generations of craftsmen that kept

the tradition alive regardless of all the hardships.

The curatorial method focuses upon providing a sensory experience to the viewer that

places them ‘into’ the urban context, being ‘with’ the Mochi’s space. The method entails the

viewer to notice the present, observe the violent nature of the urban space, and understand the

‘art of noticing’ as directed by Anna Tsing.5 Hence, the nature of video has jerks and glitches,

depicting the regular hardships of the Mochi.

5
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. “What’s Left? - The Arts of Noticing.” Essay. In The Mushroom at the End of the
World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins.
 Reflecting upon Rosalyn Deutsche's quote, "there is no space without violence, and there

is no violence that is not spatial"6, the video is set on a loop to accentuate the daily hardships and

violence faced by the Mochi in the urban space. The loop repeats three times, each targeting a

specific object – the peti, roof, and awl. The video revolves around a point that is the threshold

between the Mochi’s residing space and the outer urban space.

The frame consciously hides the front edge of the roof to strengthen the idea that the roof

does not act as an element of demarcation, instead, it only acts as a shade. The video begins and

ends on the peti to accentuate the fact that the peti houses all the goods and to protect everything

from the violators, it is locked-up completely.

The clicking sound throughout ideates the presence of the awl. By dominating the audible

aspect of the awl over the visual, the viewer is urged to understand the depth of the Afghani craft

that binds generations of Community together. To conclude, it is evident that the video in loop

enables the viewer to implicitly understand the gesture behind the repetition – each time with a

new object? stronger violence? or evoking the question as Donna Haraway states, “With whose

blood were my eyes crafted?”7

Bibliography

6
“Rosalyn Deutsche.” Gender Space Architecture – The Question of Public Space, 2002
7
Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial
Perspective.”
Primary Sources:

1) “Contact Points: Museums and the Lost Body Problem.” Sensible Objects : Colonialism,

Museums and Material Culture, n.d. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781474215466.ch-009.

2) Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the

Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–99.

https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066.

3) “Rosalyn Deutsche.” Gender Space Architecture – The Question of Public Space, 2002,

150–55. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203449127-25.

4) Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. “What’s Left? - The Arts of Noticing.” Essay. In The

Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins.

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015.

Secondary Sources:

1. Cheema, Pervaiz Iqbal. “The Afghanistan Crisis and Pakistan’s Security Dilemma.”

Asian Survey 23, no. 3 (1983): 227–43. https://doi.org/10.2307/2644271.