The postcolonial city in South Asia

Abstract

As a colonial invention, Karachi embodies the dynamics of postcolonial movement, diasporic populations, class inequality, new aspirations and abrasions, and a radical assortment of ethnicities and cultures. While Karachi remains a space where relations of power established during British colonial rule linger, it is also a site where new structures of power and a politics of identity have been negotiated and autochthonous claims contested. In the 1980s the rise of Muhajir militant nationalism inscribed within Karachi's landscape punctured dreams of a cosmopolitan city aligned with the visions of its postcolonial elite. Karachi's brutal ethnic riots and subsequent army operations brought to light the violent, anarchic side of the city. For many Karachi was never the same again. Engaging with history, anthropology, and postcolonial theory and geography, I reflect in this essay on the changing nature of the Pakistani metropolis in the context of its ethnic marking and various national projects. I consider how new formations are intertwined with Karachi's reconstruction, especially current missions that endeavour to transform the insurgent metropolis into a space symbolic of a progressive and secular Pakistan.

From Partisan Universal to Concrete Universal? The Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement in Pakistan

“…With the onset of neoliberalism and financial deregulation, regimes of accumulation shifted all over Pakistan. Today, material and discursive articulations of the “urban” in Karachi are formed at the intersection of post‐colonial state‐/nation‐formation, the “resurgence of imperial power … [and] the coalescing of these dynamics with new global neoliberal futures” (Anwar 2014:22). Agricultural depeasantisation and war in various parts of the country led to massive rural‐urban migrations, more than doubling Karachi’s population in the decade of the 2000s.…”

Sindh in Karachi: A topography of separateness, connectivity, and juxtaposition

“…'Sindhis are reclaiming their city after seventy years of Punjabi and Mohajir colonization'. Hasan's optimism about middle-class Sindhi reclamation of native land downplays his own and others' work on the loss of Sindhi pastoralist and village life at Karachi's Western edges, and the forced disappearance of around 3000 goths (villages) of predominantly Sindhi and Baloch agro-livestock and pastoralist communities in the past two decades (Anwar, 2014;Hasan, 2015). Most peri-urban settlements here occupy uncultivated, state-owned land which colonial custom had made accessible for tenants' (migrants, workers) homesteads (Anwar, 2018).…”

“…Many recent large-scale infrastructural and development projects in Karachi, funded by Chinese loans and US aid and loans, disrupt ideas of imperialism and Empire as essentially Western and align with major imperial reconfigurations of urban planetary power involving China in Africa, Asia, and Europe (Sidaway et al, 2014). They reflect a complex urbanity comprised of colonial and postcolonial contradictions, fractured social scales, identity politics linked to place, and global neoliberal imaginaries of a world-class city linked to replications of Dubai or Singapore (Anwar, 2014).…”

Planetary postcolonialism

“…Kumar (: xv) has noted in the context of Bosnia that contemporary partition often ‘draws on structures of ethnonational negotiation … developed under colonialism’. Here we would support Vazira Fazila‐Yacoobali's () call, in regard of the lengthiest of these partitions, for ‘alternative regional histories to make other forms of belonging and politics available to the rhetoric and memory of Partition—and thus [to] shift the very possibilities of how its future unfolds.’ In her study here of Karachi, Nausheen Anwar () contributes to the postcolonial rewriting of partition, noting that the city of Karachi became a ‘Muhajir city’, defined by the diverse population to migrate there as a result of Partition. As Anwar notes, this status and the intra‐refugee tensions it generated continue to define the fate of Karachi, a city that lives with a long aftermath of violence bequeathed by Partition.…”