Lost & Found: mapping Hindus in Karachi

Karachi, Sindh, Karachi

By Priya Pinjani
critical urbanism, archiving, collective memory, religion

Open Artist Call to bring historical narratives, social practices & cultural forms to the foreground to foster new dialogue amongst the public

I want to start with this map.. it marks the trajectories of 18 families, including mine, to Karachi. “Which part of India are you from?” This is the follow up question posed to me, almost always, after the one asking my name. I find it quiet amusing. It raises some rather obvious concerns; What does a Hindu look like? Must all Hindus conceive and give birth in India? Would an Indian Hindu leave his or her country and move to a Muslim-majority Pakistan? I have been conditioned to refer to myself as what I am not, rather than what I am. Thus, I am a Pakistani Non-Muslim unrelated to India by blood or history.

Religion materializes in a quantifiable manner in Karachi.. with spaces of worship, festivals, work calendars, work hours, design, legal documents, attire etc. They are artifacts of recognition and reaffirmation of beliefs in this plurastic city. The following are Pakistan’s 2 largest religions.. 96% green and 2% white. The urban forms for both, vary from one another, by purpose and user, and so, they allow for congregation and disintegration of Pakistanis simultaneously.

This map shows the countries by their largest religious populations… Pakistan has been consistently “high” for its government restrictions and “very high” for social hostility score.

What do these restrictions do for the Hindus in the city? 1, 2, 3, 4,

But it wasn’t always like this. Hindus once were close to 60% of the citys population. This is a project of violences in Karachi, that started with massive migrations in 1947 at Indo-Pak Partition to massive State led religious exclusion by 2017.

It hasn’t been a smooth process between 47 and 17.

We can broadly divide the timeline into periods of Colonialism, Islamic Socialism, Islamization, some confusion and then what is come to be known an Islamic Moderation.

But what’s important is that the country’s policies carry the message that 1 muslim male = 2 muslim females = 2 hindu males or females. (This can be discerned by the Anti-Rape law under the Shariah, that requires 2 male muslim witnesses to prove rape, or 4 muslim females, or 4 Non-Muslim male or females)

In Karachi, capital supersedes religion in most cases. So, depending on where you sit on that graph, exclusions and insecurities for Hindus including kidnappings, forced conversions, profiling, lack of physical and social infrastructures, have led to complete absence from the public. I am not working towards equity, as the agencies involved are too large a single-handed intervention. However, I am working towards visibility… amongst the publics. Visibility here can be seen as the first step to “change” or the last, doesn’t matter. Either way, it (re)builds agency, and (re)constructs the narrative that has long been ignored, shifted, removed and replaced.

With that, I propose a civic engagement campaign titled Lost & Found: mapping Hindus in Karachi. It has four components that feed into each other and are to be developed in phases of sorts, starting with this Open Artist Call. Part of my motivation is to take the tools that people are using to foreground this narrative! And mapping a great tool to engage in specific problems – a visualization of spatial, and non-spatial, relationships of actors, processes, events and spaces.