Empires of the Indus

by Alice Albinia

  There is something soothing, even empowering, in following the crowd, in conforming so closely to a national ideal where every turn of the head, every movement of the body during prayers is prescribed. In the West, to reject religion is a personal matter–society won’t even notice. Here, to reject religion is to risk your own life–to trivialize the sacrifices one’s parents and grandparents made in emigrating from India–to be seduced instead by the soulless solipsistic materialism of the West. For most Pakistanis, the script of combined religious and national identity has already been written. It was scripted in 1947, when Pakistan was born in the name of religion, and baptized in the blood of those who died trying to get here.

  ‘Great were the sacrifices involved in creating this country,’ my landlady whispers to me as we sit down after prayers. And thus whatever peccadilloes Pakistanis commit–however much whisky they drink or usury they indulge in–they exhibit a profound and sincere belief. Exuberant shows of piety are expected. Nearly everyone–generals and aristocrats, fishermen and factory workers–wears religiously acceptable clothes, makes virtuous donations, and brackets every utterance with a holy expression. (‘The most zealous upholders of traditional faith,’ a scornful Pakistani journalist tells me, ‘are the housewives.’) As we stand for the recitation of the Qur’an, I catch Arifa’s eye. The recitation is in Arabic: neither she nor I can understand a word that is spoken.

  It was Ramzan, 610 CE, when Muhammad first became aware that he had been chosen by God as his messenger. As he was meditating in a cave near Mecca, he heard a heavenly presence: ‘Recite!’ it told him, and Muhammad listened, remembered, and when he reached home dictated what he had heard to his wife and friends. The parts of the Qur’an that date from this era are ecstatic with phrases of mystical elation. But the dictation from God continued in a more prosaic vein over the next twenty-three years, and thus the holy book became by default a historical record, encompassing the growth of Muhammad’s persecuted sect, its move to Medina, and its eventual triumph over the doubters of Mecca.

  The Qur’an was compiled by the Third Caliph after Muhammad died–not chronologically, but in rough themes, and according to the diminishing length of its 114 suras (chapters). (Coincidentally, the arrangement of the Rig Veda, India’s oldest Sanskrit text, is analogous to this.) Every word was uttered by Muhammad himself, and no other religion has anything quite like it. Four men wrote up Jesus’ mission for him; Buddhism’s holy texts were written after its founder’s death; Hinduism’s canon was composed communally over thousands of years. Muhammad, however, provided his followers with a complete expression of his religious and social intent in one unrivalled volume. The first prose book in Arabic, springing anachronistically from an oral culture, it is poetry mixed with history, combined with legal and ritualistic considerations–guidance from on high on how to behave well. Its tongue-twisting, assonance-activated, verbally dexterous verses are designed to be read aloud.

  In the mosque we listen to the recitation of Sura ‘Abraham’, with its commanding description of Paradise as a garden ‘beneath which rivers flow’. This is a persistent theme in the Qur’an. After a lifetime of piety and fasting in the searing heat, ‘those who believe and do good’ shall enter a riverine paradise, lush and green with heavily laden fruit trees. Rivers resurface throughout the sacred book. In the holy lands of Islam, clean water is a precious resource; to pollute it is an abomination. Rivers are the common gift of God, and should not be sequestered by the few–a pertinent message for a city insatiably sucking water out of the Indus. By contrast, those who go to hell will be forced to drink ‘festering water’. Muslims often say that the ablutions required before the five daily prayers institute public and private cleanliness. The very name of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan–which translates as Land of the Pure (pak-i-stan)–inscribes this consciousness into the people.

  That night, I sit on the strand, watching the families who promenade here after prayers. This part of the seashore is not used by the people who live nearby. The rich swim away from the sewage (but under the eye of a nuclear power station) on private beaches an hour’s drive out of the city. For the poor there is Clifton beach, directly in front of my house. Every evening, till late at night, it is their playground. Huge floodlights illuminate the waves, there are ice-cream vendors, angel-faced Afghan boys selling roses, and men offering camel rides. Women come in their burqas or headscarves, with their husbands and children, to stroll on the sand and breathe salt-air sanity into their lungs, away from their cramped apartments for an evening.

  Modern Karachi has a reputation as an edgy, brutal city. It has borne the brunt of Pakistan’s political paradoxes: martial law; ethnic violence; the sectarian ravings of mullahs. There are riots and shootouts, bomb blasts and kidnappings. Power failures are common; corruption is normal; jumping red lights is prudent. For a city of such extremes, the dove-grey waters of the Arabian Sea often seem like its only solace.

  Karachi’s social strata radiate outwards from the coast, distinct as a caste system. The aristocrats, industrialists and soldiers dominate the ocean vista. One step back from the salt spray live the trades-people and petty government employees. Further north still, in ad hoc and illegal low-cost housing colonies, are the working classes. And in the faraway fringes, or in the undesirable interstices, subsist the sewer cleaners.

  Distinct, too, are the stories of 1947 that still survive within these strata. Almost every Karachi family has somebody who remembers the beginning of the nation, who was eyewitness to the pain, the trouble or the euphoria of Pakistan’s creation. If 1947 was the zero point–a blank state for every citizen–then where has the nation taken them from there? Where did those living by the sea come from, and how did they get there? What happiness or tragedy did Partition visit on those living in the impoverished north of the city? That night, sitting by the sea, I decide to gather Partition memories from these different sections of the city.

  An hour before sunrise, Arifa wakes me for sehri, the last meal before the fast begins (the opposite, then, of ‘breakfast’). By the time we hear the call from the mosque, it is daylight, and the fourteenth day of Ramzan: no more eating, drinking, sucking, chewing, smoking, love-making or tongue-kissing till sundown. Depending on when the new moon is sighted by the clergy (every year, splinter groups of Muslims, usually those in the North West Frontier Province, celebrate Eid a day earlier or later than the majority of the nation) there will be fifteen or sixteen more fasts to go.

  Later that morning, I meet the sewer man in Clifton again. ‘We sometimes go to the sea where you live, on Sundays,’ he says. ‘Where do you live?’ I ask; and he explains that his house is in the city’s very newest settlement, right on its furthest perimeter, the straining apex of north Karachi. ‘You work here,’ I say, ‘so why do you live so far away?’ He tells me that his house–along with those of his sister, parents and 77,000 other families–was bulldozed last year to make way for a contentious new road, the Lyari Expressway.

  The sewer man introduces me to his sister, who works nearby cleaning the bathrooms of a rich Hindu family. She is a beautiful, proud woman, who dislikes the work her brother does. Her husband cleans the toilets in a north Karachi mosque but she refuses to put her hands in the gutters. Her Hindu employers think of her as a Shudra (a Hindu of the lowest caste) and keep separate eating utensils for her–‘but I am Christian,’ she tells me in their hearing. Later, she says, ‘The Hindus do just as much nafrat [hatred] to us as Muslims.’ (And not just Hindus; even other Christians despise the low-caste converts. In Karachi’s Catholic churches, parallel services are held at Christmas: one in Urdu in the yard outside for the ‘local’ Christians, and one in English in the British-built church for the disdainful, Westernized Goans.)

  ‘I will take you to meet my parents,’ she says that afternoon. ‘They came to Karachi at Partition from Gujranwala in west Punjab.’

  We set off after her work is over; but though we leave the sea when it is not yet dusk, it ta
kes so long to negotiate the length of the city that it is dark by the time we reach the forlorn outpost where she lives. By now I have spent a long time in Karachi, exploring–and in the past few months, my explorations have led me to many unpredictable quarters. In Clifton–once an imperial ‘watering place’, now a high-gloss residential district for high-heeled begums–I have interviewed politicians by day, and after dark–for Ramzan nights are ludic–watched children playing cricket in car-lit alleys. In Defence, an elite housing scheme run by the Pakistan Army, I have dressed as a man and slipped into an illicit gay party. In Saddar, the old Hindu-British cantonment bazaar where multicoloured buses wheel and belch, I have wondered at the decaying nineteenth-century mansions hammered out in a rowdy profusion of architectural styles (‘Hybridized-Classical, Indo-Gothic, Imperial Vernacular, Indo-Saracenic…Anglo-Mughal’ is how a Pakistani architect describes it). On Burnes Road, where heroin addicts sit injecting each other in the thigh, I have eaten halwa and haleem cooked by refugees who came here in 1947, bringing their north Indian languages, culture and recipes with them. I have attended a wedding in Lyari, a settlement which dates to the time when Karachi was a Hindu port, the warm, winding streets of which are inhabited by fishermen, along with the descendants of African slaves and the country’s dogged Communists. I have dined in the vast concrete colonies of north Karachi, home to UMTs: ‘Urdu-Medium Types’, as the middle classes have been nicknamed by the snobbish English-speaking kids of Clifton. In the north-west finger of the metropolis, where the gradient of the Delta rises into the steep Baluchi hills, and Pashtuns have settled in this faint imitation of their homeland, I have met shy village mullahs and optimistic teachers. I have driven west, through Karachi’s ever-expanding periphery, to the oily workshops where gaudy ‘jingle-jangle’ trucks come after traversing the country, and further still, to private beaches where the rich and famous throw their parties. I have spent the night in a fishing village on Karachi’s easternmost tip. Yet this journey to where the Christian cleaners live, takes me further than ever before through the city’s swollen orbit.

  Two hours after we leave the sea, when everywhere I have ever been is far behind us, it begins to get dark. We must have travelled twenty-five kilometres from Clifton beach by now–yet still we travel onwards. The bus moves faster, across a shrunken river, past concrete tower blocks where faded washing hangs plaintively from balconies. Soon the settlements thin and peter out. Ahead is a wide dark plain. We have come to the point where the electricity stops. ‘Where are we?’ I say, for it is as if we have fallen off the edge of the world. As the bus judders on through the dark, fear and confusion grip me intermittently. Eventually I see lights in the distance. Twenty minutes later, the bus comes to a standstill at the mouth of a dirt street lined by large, two-storey houses. The electricity suddenly fades. ‘We’ve arrived,’ says the sewer man’s sister, and we climb down into the dark.

  The sewer man and his sister were given Muslim names by their parents, but she has named her children Arthur, Sylvester and Florence. The children are waiting for her at their grandparents’ house, sitting together in the courtyard, illuminated by a paraffin lamp. We sit down opposite them on a string cot and the old couple introduce themselves. As her husband puffs on his hookah, Saleemat Masih tells their story.

  ‘We were married in 1947,’ she says. ‘At the time, my husband was doing khetibhari [farm work] in Gujranwala.’ They had only been married a few months when there arrived in the village first one, then two, then a stream of Muslims from across the border. Finally the day came when the landlord sent a message: there was no more work, they had better get out. ‘So,’ says Saleemat, ‘we came to Karachi.’ But the situation here was no better. They had no patrons or credentials, and every job was taken. There was only one difference: city dwellers needed sewer cleaners. ‘We worked together in the gutters,’ says Saleemat Masih. ‘With Pakistan we began this dirty work. The Muslims gave jobs to their own kind. What did Quaid-e-Azam do for us?’

  Quaid-e-Azam, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, flew to Karachi (his birthplace, and Pakistan’s new capital) on 7 August, a week before British India was partitioned. At the time, Karachi was a tidy, quiet town; and the place where the Christian cleaners live now was a distant patch of scrubland in the desert. That year Ramzan also fell in August, and the long days and short nights of summer made the holy month of fasting particularly difficult. But Jinnah, who paid no heed to religious ritual, did not spare a thought for Islamic abstinence either. His hazy idea for a new country had suddenly come to fruition; the borders were about to be drawn; and all he had to do now was render some order from the bedlam.

  Some commentators maintain that Jinnah was taken by surprise when the British conceded his demand for a separate state for Muslims–was he using the idea of a separate Muslim homeland as political leverage, a bargaining tool? Had he banked on British and Congress pride in an undivided India? All agree that he was dismayed by the eventual British settlement–the poisoned chalice of a divided Punjab and Bengal–a ‘moth-eaten, truncated’ Pakistan, itself separated by a thousand miles of India.

  Suave Louis Mountbatten, eager to assure himself a dashing role in history, had accepted the job of Indian Viceroy in February 1947 on one condition: that by June the following year, Britain would be out of India. The post-war Labour government–anxious to disburden Britain of its empire–gave the green light to the Viceroy’s hectic schedule. Mountbatten arrived in India in March. In June he made the startling announcement that India was to be divided–not next year as he had agreed in London, but in ten weeks’ time. (‘The date I chose came out of the blue,’ Mountbatten recollected many years later. ‘Why? Because it was the second anniversary of Japan’s surrender.’) He then appointed Cyril Radcliffe–an ‘impartial’ British lawyer, that is, one with no knowledge of India whatsoever–to oversee the dissection of the country. In July, the two men drew lines on the subcontinent’s maps, Mountbatten ensuring that India got Calcutta, several Muslim majority provinces in the Punjab, and access to Kashmir. In August, loath to spoil a good party, Mountbatten delayed the announcement of the noxious new borders until two days after Independence was declared. Only once he had made his speeches, had his photo taken and received his thanks, could the killing begin.

  There had been problems throughout 1946–religious rioting in Calcutta, a heightening of Hindu-Muslim tension–and Jinnah himself had warned that the partition of Bengal and the Punjab would have ‘terrible consequences’: ‘confusion…bloodshed’. If the historian Ayesha Jalal is right–that Jinnah never wanted an impermeable division of India, that it was Congress which insisted on it–then 1947 can only be viewed as a tragic blunder. Perhaps, had Jinnah been able to predict that hundreds of thousands of people would lose their lives, he might have called the whole thing off. He certainly never imagined that such a massive transfer of population would be necessary; he had not conceived that the borders would be drawn so indelibly, or so bloodily. He had not packed away a single silk sock from his mansion in Bombay or his colonial bungalow in Delhi (fondly imagining weekend retreats to India with his equally naive sister Fatima). Until the very last moment he seems to have had in mind a vague cohabitation of dominion states; he even seems to have convinced himself that the nation he had won for Muslims would be a realm where religion didn’t matter. ‘You are free,’ he said three days before Independence in a speech that has become the mantra of Pakistan’s embattled secularists (and conversely is excluded from editions of Jinnah’s speeches by the pious), ‘you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques…You may belong to any religion or caste or creed–that has nothing to do with the fundamental principle that we are all citizens and equal citizens of one State.’

  Jinnah himself had many non-Muslim friends, and very little religious sensibility. His family were Ismailis and his father, Jinnahbhai Poonja, was a Gujarati hide dealer (whose own parents came from a village not far from that of Mahatma Gandhi’s). Moving to Karachi in
the wake of the colonial economic boom, Jinnahbhai quickly rose from being a small-time merchant to a prosperous banker (an aspect of Jinnah’s antecedents never mentioned in state-sanctioned biographies). So Jinnah grew up in Kharadar, at the seaside gate of the long-vanished Hindu fort, under a British dispensation, in a town run by Hindu and Parsi merchants. His family was a rare exception to the rule: that in Sindh, Muslims were either rural landlords or penniless peasants.

  Jinnah had begun political life in Bombay, where he already worked as a successful lawyer. At first, he was an ardent nationalist and member of the Indian National Congress. He joined the Muslim League in 1913, seven years after it was founded, and soon became known as the ‘ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity’. But by 1930, he had grown disillusioned with Indian politics, and in particular with Gandhi. By collaborating with the post-war Khilafat movement, a pan-Islamic campaign to reinstate the Caliph, and winning the support of the Muslim clergy, Gandhi, Jinnah felt, was inciting and encouraging religious frenzy. Despite his political success and national renown, Jinnah renounced politics entirely and retired to London.

  He was persuaded to return in 1934, by which time several different permutations of the Muslim state he would eventually create had already been mooted. But he still refused to whip up religious passions, continued to drink whisky, eat ham sandwiches and dress like a Brit. In 1937, he gave a speech in which he described Indian Muslims as ‘a nation’ apart from Hindus; nevertheless, of the twenty distinguishing categories that he mentioned–culture, language, architecture–not one was explicitly religious. When a holy man wrote to him suggesting he go to Mecca, Jinnah replied that he was far too busy. In 1947, according to Mountbatten, Jinnah even scheduled a lunch party to celebrate Independence though Ramzan wasn’t yet over: such a faux pas would have been an outrage to the pious and his advisers had to cancel. If Jinnah’s faith existed, it was of the lapsed variety. The depth of popular religious passions was his fatal blindspot.