This conversation between an academic (Ananya Jahanara Kabir, Kings College London) and a visual artist (Naiza Khan, London-Karachi) draws on an intellectual exchange of over a decade to dredge up submerged histories of the Indian Ocean that both share as part of their relationship to the port cities of Kolkata and Karachi respectively. Responding to key works by Khan that reference the monsoon as a sensory context for that history, the interlocutors mobilize a conjunction of near and far sites and sights. They thereby reveal the necessity of recognizing water in all its atmospheric states as a connector between African and Asian landmasses; as a releaser of creolized ways of life that are repressed by nationalist, nativist, and casteist narratives; and as a generator of alegropolitics, or the politics of embodied joy, through which to resist those convergent landcentric hegemonies.
This article, shaped as a conversation between a scholar and an artist, critically examines the mapping of the lived experience of Karachi after Partition through a discussion of the poetic journey of the feminist activist Fahmida Riaz and urban planner and architect Perween Rahman.1 These two activists were directly affected by the Partition, albeit in different ways, and it is through their creative practice that we try to understand the hauntings of the past in the present. This helps us to move beyond linear ways of interpreting the Indian Partition’s many effects on lived experiences of communities in Karachi. While Riaz writes of the death of metaphor and the inability of verse to capture the harsh realities of everyday life in a dystopian city, Rahman gives agency to the disenfranchised and dispossessed within the urban settlements of Karachi’s poor through a participatory model of community-based mapping. What emerges from the dialogue is a recreation of several voices across time and space that carry the echoes of Partition and the conditions that surround us now. It thereby offers a way to re-envision and reclaim an embodied form of mapping through memory and walking across disciplines to engender cultural change.
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