Empires of the Indus

by Alice Albinia

  As the sweeper’s sari-clad daughters stand around his body weeping, an argument breaks out in the courtyard between the older sweepers and the younger generation, over the extent of the discrimination still practised today in Pakistan. An old man wearily expounds his view that ancient Brahmin enmity is to blame for their woes. A younger man, dressed in a crisp shirt and trousers, responds angrily that there is ‘no impediment, our community is going ahead’. Another man interrupts, saying that many of their children, at least, have acquired slightly better employment, as chambermaids in five-star hotels or toilet cleaners in air-conditioned shopping malls. At last the old pandit speaks. An emaciated man with a loud clear voice, he recalls how Jinnah ordered their leader, Magsi Bhagwan, to go to India and bring the sweepers back. ‘Jinnah said to Magsi Bhagwan, “Your people must not go to India. Those that have gone must come back to Pakistan. We will give you whatever you need, housing, employment, education for your children.”’

  The pandit turns to me. ‘There is nothing wrong with this job,’ he says. ‘I have seen Scheduled Castes in your Europe.’ (He is referring to the fact that there are cleaners in the West; that we too have an underclass to do our dirty work.) ‘Even Muslims do this cleaning when they go abroad. But they wouldn’t do it in Pakistan, all the same. Especially not the Mohajirs.’

  What the Mohajirs would and would not do was the nub of the problem. ‘Mohajir’ is an Arabic word meaning migrant. It has a religious connotation, denoting the faithful who followed Muhammad to Medina from Mecca in 622 to escape religious persecution. Many of the north Indian Muslims who came here in 1947 as refugees gave themselves this name in order to evoke the suffering they had undergone for the sake of Pakistan. They felt that they were entitled to some compensation–a house vacated by a Hindu, a job with the central government, a perk of some description.

  For many refugees, there was safety–as well as cultural continuity–in numbers. Barely 6 per cent of Karachi’s population spoke Urdu–the Mohajir tongue–before Partition. But in 1947, so many refugees came to the city, it was the Sindhis, Baluch and others who were obliged to learn the immigrants’ language, not vice versa. Whole streets of old Delhi–teachers, merchants, schoolchildren–decamped to Karachi. For months leading up to Partition, the newspapers in India had been full of small ads offering the exchange of like-for-like businesses, shops or residences in the neighbouring countries. For many refugees, especially the young ones, the transition from one country to the other was relatively painless. For Mohajir businessmen, it was often far easier to get lucrative contracts here than it had been in India. In Pakistan, some migrants got very rich, very quick.

  But Pakistan did not visit such fortune on everyone. By 1948, Sindhis were rapidly coming to the conclusion that they had gained least from the country’s creation, and they began to resent the wholesale takeover of their homeland. Dawn sensed this resentment and scolded the indigenous inhabitants: ‘If Pakistan had not been established, where would Sindh and the Sindhis have been?’ Sindhis and Mohajirs were begged to desist from ‘jealousy and bickerings’ and to ‘live as brothers’. As for the refugees from the Punjab, everyone should understand that they had ‘suffered greatly’ and should not be judged collectively on the abysmal behaviour of some ‘bad characters’.

  But as it was with the people, so with the government. For immigrant politicians from India, there was one stumbling block to the smooth consolidation of power: the incumbent Sindhi administration, run by Muhammad Ayub Khuhro. A rural Sindhi landlord, Khuhro was also a consummate politician. He had wide experience of the Muslim League (he had been in local politics from the age of twenty-one); he had very close links with his local constituency, and Sindh was his power base. Unfortunately, he fell out with Jinnah over the issue of whether or not Karachi should be separated from Sindh–a suggestion to which the entire Sindhi administration was opposed. On 26 April 1948, Khuhro was dismissed for ‘gross corruption and maladministration’. The charges levelled against him were so numerous that the case began to look ridiculous and the government dictatorial.

  But the Pakistan Government, it seemed, could not stomach dissent. On 15 June, six weeks after Khuhro’s arrest, the (unelected) central government placed G. M. Syed–another forthright Sindhi politician–under house arrest. Six days later, an official at the American embassy wrote in a confidential letter to Washington that the Pakistanis ‘continue to lean on the authoritarian props on which the British Raj rested…present authoritarian methods of government will become standard operating procedures.’ It was a disturbingly accurate prophecy of the trouble to come.

  Hamida, Muhammad Ayub Khuhro’s formidable daughter, lives in Khuhro Apartments, a tall, imposing block surrounded by palm trees in Clifton–the smartest part of Karachi. Hamida Khuhro is an establishment figure in Pakistan, and she speaks to me, in her pleasant, picture-filled drawing room, from the vantage point of the nation’s elite. The Khuhros did all right from Pakistan in the end. Muhammad Ayub Khuhro was too powerful (or too popular) to be kept out of power for long; his ‘dutiful’ daughter became a professor of history, wrote a book clearing his name, and followed him into politics. But Hamida has no qualms about speaking plainly of the ‘mess’ that Pakistan has become. Although, unlike other Sindhi aristocrats, she does not feel nostalgia for the Raj, she nevertheless blames the Pakistan Government for encouraging a ‘dangerous decline in administrative standards’. Above all, she indicts Jinnah as the architect of Pakistan’s ‘authoritarian culture’.

  For Hamida, as for many of Karachi’s inhabitants in 1947, Pakistan was a nasty shock (‘a Himalayan blunder’, as one disillusioned Mohajir tells me glumly). Her father himself ‘would never admit that it was wrong’ but Hamida, as a child, bewailed Pakistan’s creation. She was eleven years old in 1947. The ‘sleepy’ seaside town, with its empty beaches, sturdy stone architecture and child-friendly tramline, had been her nursery–and she, scion of the local nobility, was the centre of its world. Then Partition happened. Overnight, ‘comfortable, secure’ Karachi was whisked away, and in its place arose a city of never-ending crises, of desperate, wailing humanity, of ambitious Delhi politicians and their glamorous, socialite begums. Khuhro remembers her Hindu school-friends disappearing with no explanation to India, and the Mohajirs who took their place bragging about the ‘exotic and exalted’ Indian cities they had come from. Far worse than these childish squabbles was the grim discrepancy that emerged between the Muslim League’s grandiloquent vision of an Islamic homeland and the tawdry reality of Pakistan, with its ‘squalor and insoluble problems’. The nation that was to have swept them off their feet with its devout Islamic vision and its streets paved with gold, proved dysfunctional from the start.

  As a brand-new country, Pakistan was searching for meaning. Its government-appointed scribes immediately began rewriting Indo-Muslim history in a manner befitting the new homeland; but heroes were needed and everybody looked to the founder of the nation. Even before his death, Jinnah was promoted as the national ideal: selfless, self-regulated–and Islamic. Today, children all across the country learn their ‘Alif, Bay, Pay’ beneath a poster called ‘National Heroes’ which shows Jinnah leading an army of peasants towards the promised land. The real Jinnah has been conveniently forgotten. Ardeshir Cowasjee, the outspoken Parsi columnist of Dawn, shows me a photograph of Jinnah snapped in a rare, informal moment: impeccably clad as usual in a Savile Row suit, crouching on the lawn with his dogs (dogs are deemed unclean in Islam), a cigarette clamped in his smiling mouth. Cowasjee claims that this photograph also hangs in the President-General Musharraf’s office. How ironic, then, that most Pakistani citizens are only acquainted with the officially sanctioned Jinnah: straight back, poker face, top to toe in what is deemed to be Islamic dress.

  Jinnah may not have manufactured the image bequeathed to the nation but he certainly consented to his own beatification. In 1938, he agreed with his colleagues that henceforth he should be known in the imperial manner as Quaid-e-Aza
m (Great Leader). Opening the State Bank of Pakistan in 1948, he travelled to the ceremony–so the state-authorized biographer wrote eulogistically–in ‘one of the old Viceregal coaches…the escort wore the startling red uniforms of the bodyguard that had accompanied the Viceroys, in the grand old days before Partition.’ He encouraged the grouping of power around him, doing nothing to moderate his acolytes’ treatment of him as a quasi-king. It was almost as if Jinnah had forgotten that the fight for independence was not just about freedom from foreign rule, it was also about freedom from totalitarianism. Then again, it was precisely from a fear of democracy–the voting power of majority Hindus, and the dread that Muslims, as a minority in independent India, would be disenfranchised–that Pakistan had come into being.

  In those months after Independence was declared, Jinnah was faced with the conundrum of his own making–a safe haven for Muslims, yet one which he must save from being Islamicized by the mullahs. It required a fine legalistic mind to guide the new country to political stability. It also required time. By now Jinnah was dangerously, secretly ill with tuberculosis and lung cancer. Ensconced in the grandeur of the Governor’s House, isolated from his people by his hauteur and perilous state of health, well aware of the unscrupulous and opportunistic nature of the politicians who surrounded him, he must have felt that he had little choice but to put in place, as soon as possible, measures to safeguard the continued existence of his nation.

  As a lawyer, he knew the importance of a written constitution. His sister, Fatima, later described how it became his highest priority. ‘He worked,’ she wrote, ‘in a frenzy to consolidate Pakistan.’ But in June 1948, less than a year after the state’s creation, Jinnah retreated to the hills. He was dying. Three months later, on 11 September, he was flown back to Karachi for emergency treatment. The ambulance sent to meet him from the airport broke down on the way home. For an hour, he lay on the roadside next to a refugee camp, on the outskirts of the city that he considered synonymous with his person. He died that night–if not a broken man, then a profoundly disillusioned one. He had wanted an undivided Punjab and Bengal; he had hoped to win Kashmir and Junagadh; he had fought for the moral high ground. His people, by 1948, were homeless, disorientated and angry. The central government was quarrelling with the Sindhis; the Mohajirs with the locals; the country as a whole with its neighbour.

  Everybody who remembers Partition remembers the hysteria and weeping when Jinnah died. The country went into mourning for forty days. Forty issues of Dawn were printed with a thick black border. The official cause of death was ‘heart failure’ (tuberculosis was considered a shameful slum disease).

  Jinnah died; and his country–much to the world’s surprise–lived on. India gleefully anticipated Pakistan’s swift and dramatic demise. But there was too much to gain from keeping this querulous infant alive. As Dawn wrote regally, ‘The Quaid-i-Azam is dead. Long live Pakistan!’ And the Prime Minister, giving voice to another fragile paradox, declared: ‘I believe that my nation is a living one and will sacrifice its life for defending and maintaining Pakistan.’

  After Jinnah’s death Karachi continued to grow like an unruly child. By the end of the twentieth century, it was the fastest-growing city in the world. As workers poured into it from all over the country, housing colonies and industries mushroomed. Civil amenities planned by the British filled to bursting point–then burst completely. Sewage and effluent seeped into the Delta, poisoning the water and killing the mangroves. On Karachi’s sandy beaches and crowded streets, new and old ethnicities, languages and cultures confronted each other.

  Still Karachi grows. Still more water is drawn from the Indus. And still the sewer people immerse themselves in the flux of the city’s fetid streams, segregated and exploited, indispensable and despised.

  2

  Conquering the Classic River

  1831

  ‘The Indus is a foul and perplexing river.’

  Lieutenant John Wood, 9 February 1836

  AT THE END of Ramzan, the morning after Eid has been celebrated with ‘religious fervour throughout the country’ (as Dawn writes year after year), while the rest of Karachi is sleeping off yesterday’s overeating, I go down to the harbour. I have a date with a fisherman. His name is Baboo.

  A wizened man in a blue knitted bonnet, Baboo assumes an air of profound gloom when I first ask him to ferry me from Karachi (the old Indus Delta, where Pakistan began), along the mangrove coast, and up the river to Thatta (the major port in the region until British times). ‘But there is no water,’ he says in an Urdu thick with the lilt and cadence, music and sorrow, of Sindhi, his mother tongue. ‘No water?’ ‘The Punjabis take all the water. Between Hyderabad and the Delta the river is dry. The only water is namkeen [salty; sea water].’ He scratches his head and looks up at the sky. ‘If you want to go to Thatta you should go by bus.’ He unwraps a packet of gutka–a perniciously cheap chewing tobacco–and folds it into his mouth. He swallows. He spits. ‘Or taxi.’ He seems thoughtful. ‘What about a plane?’ He smiles hugely. ‘That would be zabardast [awesome].’

  ‘But I want to go through the Delta by boat,’ I say, and turn to go. Baboo calls after me: ‘I will take you as far as we can go.’ ‘How far is that?’ ‘Along the coast to the mouth for 150 kilometres. The sea comes up the river for a hundred more. After that the water is so low my boat won’t make it.’ His despondent expression returns: ‘It will take at least two days to get that far by boat. Or three…’

  Only two days. The journey from the Delta to Karachi took the East India Company two hundred years.

  We sail out of Karachi, amid a throng of painted wooden fishing boats, on a bright November morning. Baboo’s crew of five strip off as soon as we clear the harbour and lounge on the deck in their thin cotton trousers, mending nets, singing in Sindhi, or laughing among themselves (most likely at my expense). But Baboo remains fully clothed as the sun beats down on the boat. He sniffs morosely, peers into the distance, and every now and then furnishes a dismal prognosis of our progress.

  I quickly discover why his boat was the cheapest on hire in Keamari: it is as decrepit as its owner is forlorn. Over the next two days, as the propeller breaks, the fan belt snaps and the engine floods, Baboo’s crew mend almost everything with a few blobs of spit and a small ball of string.

  The crew–three teenage boys and two hardened uncles–are all related, all from one village in the Delta. None of them ever went to school. Ali Nawaz is seventeen and can’t even spell his name. As we sit conversing on a pile of nylon fishing nets (I have become inured to the whiff of fish), Ali Nawaz watches curiously when I write down what he says in my notebook. He laughs when in the middle of the day–the sun is high in the sky, the water alluring, and the fishermen have been in and out of the river all morning–I jump off the boat (fully clothed of course) into the cool brown water. I watch him too, when he swims out with the nets to catch our supper. We watch each other and wonder.

  Ali Nawaz’s family comes from the river–from the Indus-fed Kinjhar lake that now supplies Karachi’s fresh water. As the lake dried up, so did the family’s trade, and they were forced out to sea in search of fish. The river was kind; life at sea is tough. Fishermen like Baboo sometimes spend ten days at a stretch out of sight of land. The unlucky ones stray into Indian waters–to be clapped in jail for years by over-zealous coastguards. Then there is the inclement weather. Ali Nawaz’s elder brother was drowned during the 1999 cyclone–none of these small wooden boats have life jackets, radios or flares–and they never found his body. So it is with the stoicism of lack of choice that Baboo and his men float for days on the surface of the Arabian Sea, hauling up the nets every two hours and packing the catch into ice in the hold.

  When their ancestors fished the Indus, Ali Nawaz’s uncle tells me, they worshipped Uderolal–the Indus river saint–but after moving out to sea they felt obliged to switch spiritual allegiance. These days they call themselves the sons of Moro (the mythical Sindhi fisherman who was swa
llowed by a whale). Once a year they make a pilgrimage to the shrine of Pir Datar, the most popular saint in the Delta, whose urs (death-anniversary celebration), gratifyingly, is on the same day as the Prophet’s birthday.

  Neither Baboo nor his crew are in a hurry. The hard work will begin once they have dropped me on the banks of the Indus somewhere upstream. So we proceed at a leisurely pace, winding slowly in and out of the Delta creeks that stretch between Karachi and the mouth of the Indus, stopping to mend broken parts, or so that I can pee behind a screen of mangroves. Every two hours they reheat some sweet milky tea; for lunch Ali Nawaz fries up some pungent, flaky white fish in a coriander paste; and we swap some fish for shrimp with a passing boat, and dine that night on jheenga omelette. The coastal route is well frequented, almost a school run: people from the Delta islands pass us on their way to Karachi; smarter fishing boats than ours draw up alongside and share our dinner; a boat with a rigged-up sound system playing pirated Indian film songs tows us for three hours after Ali Nawaz drowsily allows the propeller to drop into the thick mud of a creek and a blade snaps off.

  The Indus in the Delta is slow, serene and wide. It is thick and brown with the silt that has nourished the land it traverses, and which here in the Delta gives birth to the amphibious mangroves. With their gnarled branches and protruding roots, their shiny green undergrowth and dull, tarnished leaves, these sweet-salt trees resemble a crowd of old fishermen, gossiping eternally on the banks of the river, noting its floods and ebbs, as it fades and swells.