South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies

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Muhajirs as a Diaspora in Intizar Husain's The Sea

Lies Ahead and Kamila Shamsie's Kartography

Priya Kumar

To cite this article: Priya Kumar (2016): Muhajirs as a Diaspora in Intizar Husain's The Sea Lies
Ahead and Kamila Shamsie's Kartography, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, DOI:
10.1080/00856401.2016.1236316

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SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES, 2016
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2016.1236316

ARTICLE

Muhajirs as a Diaspora in Intizar Husain’s The Sea Lies Ahead

and Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography
Priya Kumar
Department of English, University of Delhi, Delhi, India

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This essay argues that diaspora is a useful analytical category for Aage Samandar Hai (The Sea
understanding certain migrant populations engendered by Lies Ahead); diaspora; Intizar
Partition, but not all Partition migrants can be designated as Husain; Kamila Shamsie;
diasporas. Through a close reading of two novels—Intizar Husain’s Kartography; Muhajirs;
Partition literature; Pakistani
The Sea Lies Ahead (translated from the Urdu original Aage literature
Samandar Hai by Rakhshanda Jalil) and Kamila Shamsie’s
Kartography—I show how Urdu-speaking migrants from India’s
Muslim minority provinces who migrated to the urban centres of
Sindh have invented and preserved themselves as a diaspora in
post-Partition Pakistan. Both novels enable us to see how Muhajirs
have become a community based on a shared ideology of
displacement that is kept alive in the group’s memory.

Consider the Muslims of Uttar Pradesh… . They were confronted with the fact that in order
to survive they had to make a new nation; they had to make new bastis or face the taunts of
those who had lived for generations in the cities they had migrated to. And they were
taunted. They were told that they had to stop feeling nostalgic for the ancestral lands they
had left behind; face the new reality; accept the place they had migrated to as their own. I
believe that the struggle of the mohajir, the exile, or the migrant was the most unique and dif-
ficult one of our times.1

This paper seeks to open up a much-needed conversation between Partition studies and
South Asian Diaspora studies. Conversations on South Asian Diaspora studies and Parti-
tion displacements have hardly ever converged because the assumption has been that Par-
tition refugees and migrants were eventually absorbed into the new national orders of
India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, and that they became unmarked citizens of their respec-
tive nations. Moreover, South Asian Diaspora studies have tended to focus on the overseas
Indian—or South Asian—diaspora at the expense of diasporic groups within the region.2
My essay argues that diaspora is a useful analytical category for understanding certain
migrant populations engendered by Partition, but not all Partition migrants and their

CONTACT Priya Kumar priyahkumar115@gmail.com

1. Intizar Husain, interview with Alok Bhalla, ‘Partition, Exile, and Memories of a Lost Home’, in Alok Bhalla (ed.), Partition
Dialogues: Memories of a Lost Home (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 108.
2. For more on diasporas in the region, see B.P. Giri and Priya Kumar, ‘On South Asian Diasporas’, in South Asian Review,
Vol. 32, no. 3 (2011), pp. 10–26.
© 2016 South Asian Studies Association of Australia
2 P. KUMAR

descendants should be designated as diasporas. The diaspora rubric is more relevant for
understanding some Partition migrants than others, and even for these communities, the
sense of being a diaspora waxes and wanes over time in response to contemporary events
and crises. My focus is on the Urdu-speaking migrants—those who are invoked in my epi-
graph—who migrated from the Muslim-minority provinces of (mainly) North India after
Partition and settled in the urban centres of Sindh, Pakistan. I provide a close reading of
two novels—one written from the perspective of the migrant generation and the second
written from the perspective of the younger generations—Intizar Husain’s Urdu-language
novel Aage Samandar Hai (1995), the second in his acclaimed trilogy (translated as The
Sea Lies Ahead by Rakhshanda Jalil in a wonderful recent translation), and Kamila Sham-
sie’s English-language novel Kartography (2002). Both The Sea Lies Ahead and Kartogra-
phy enable us to understand the Muhajirs of Sindh as migrants who have become a
community based on a shared ideology of displacement—in other words, the novels show
how the Urdu-speaking Partition migrants of Sindh have invented themselves as a dias-
pora over time for various complicated reasons.
Most theorists of diaspora tend to privilege the homeland and attachment to the home-
land as a core characteristic of all diasporas, whereas I argue that the case of the Muhajirs
enables us to instead conceptualise diasporas as migrant groups that have fashioned them-
selves as communities based in large part on their shared migrant past and by their recur-
rent memorialisation of this past—such that displacement comes to shape their very sense
of self and their relationships with other communities. For instance, theorists such as Wil-
liam Safran and Robin Cohen insist on the centrality of the ancestral homeland to diaspo-
ras.3 Drawing on and extending Safran’s work, Cohen provides an amended list of
diasporic attributes, including the retention of a collective memory about the homeland,
an idealisation of the ancestral home, a ‘collective commitment to its maintenance, resto-
ration, safety and prosperity, even to its creation’, and the development of a return move-
ment as key characteristics.4 However, while it is true that India—or rather, Indian
cities—serve as a place of memory for the migrant generation of Muhajirs, the Muhajir
diaspora is not so much about retaining ties to the ancestral land as it is about preserving
the memory of migration itself. The (continued) attachment to the homeland may not be
a necessary characteristic of all diasporas, especially when erstwhile homelands lie in
enemy territory. My argument thus resonates with Aisha Khan’s theorisation of diaspora.
Khan points out that while many people may have migrated throughout history, not all
migrant populations can be characterised as diasporas:
… only some populations have become communities based in large part on a shared ideology
of displacement that actively has inspired their culture, and cultural production. The differ-
ence between diaspora and migration is not simply [or not necessarily] about retaining a feel-
ing of belonging to a homeland or the creation over time of communities symbolically
connected to ancestral origins. It is also about consciously interpreting one’s culture as indeli-
bly marked for all time by the experience of being uprooted… .5

3. Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 2001); and William Safran, ‘Diasporas in Modern
Societies: Myths of Homeland and Return’, in Diaspora, Vol. 1, no. 1 (1991), pp. 83–99.
4. Cohen, Global Diasporas, p. 26.
5. Aisha Khan, ‘Rites and Rights of Passage: Seeking a Diasporic Consciousness’, in Cultural Dynamics, Vol. 19, no. 2/3
(2007), p. 148; emphasis added.
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 3

In other words, ‘a consciousness emerges among members of a community that memo-

rializes (keeps alive the memory of) its illegal or immoral displacement…in everyday dis-
course’.6 We see such a consciousness at work in the case of the Muhajirs—both in the
migrant generation that is depicted in The Sea Lies Ahead and in the younger, Pakistan-
born generations that are portrayed in Kartography, even though Raheen, the protagonist
of Kartography, rejects the label Muhajir as a marker of self-identification. The Muhajirs’
self-fashioning as a displaced community that keeps alive in its memory an awareness of
its shared history of migration reveals how a particular migrant population originating,
largely, in the cities and towns of northern India with many locally-circumscribed identi-
ties before Partition, came to invent and maintain itself as a diaspora in post-Partition
Pakistan. Significantly, this diasporic group also constructed for itself a strong ethnic
group consciousness from the 1980s onwards.

The Sea Lies Ahead

Through its motley cast of characters and its use of heteroglossia, The Sea Lies Ahead
sheds light on how the migrant generation of Muhajirs constructed itself as a diaspora
despite the many differences among those who comprised this generation. The novel is an
emblematic first-generation diasporic fiction that helps to illuminate many of the charac-
teristics of diasporas outlined by theorists such as Cohen, Safran and Khachig Tololyan,
but it also helps us to productively complicate some of the formulations of recent diaspora
theory, especially the tendency to conflate both diaspora and homeland with the scale of
the nation. This tendency is especially evident in mainstream South Asian Diaspora stud-
ies, which has tended to ignore regional diasporas, instead concentrating on the overseas
Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi or Sri Lankan diasporas.7
The Sea Lies Ahead displays many of the characteristic features of diasporas such as
scattering and dispersal as a consequence of Partition/Independence, nostalgia for the lost
homeland, and what Tololyan calls a ‘re-turn, a repeated turning to the concept and/or
the reality of the homeland’—rather than a desire for a literal return.8 The novel is replete
with characters like Mirza Sahab, originally from Delhi, and Karbalai Sahab from Shikar-
pur who are filled with sadness about their separation from their ancestral home towns.
Mirza Sahab can only allude to Delhi through Mir Taqi Mir’s plaintive verse about a deso-
late Delhi, ‘Dilli jo ek shehar thaa aalam mein intekhab’ (‘Delhi, that was once the pre-
eminent city in the world’), while Karbalai Sahab, in a classic diasporic trope, dreams of
returning to his beloved Shikarpur, but it is a dream that is never meant to be fulfilled.9
However, where theorists of diaspora typically tend to equate the homeland or the ‘old
country’ with the nation, The Sea Lies Ahead brings out how there is no single ‘centre’ or

6. Ibid., p. 147.
7. The works of Claude Markovits, Papiya Ghosh, and Claire Alexander et al. represent an important exception. See Claude
Markovits, The Global World of Indian Merchants 1750–1947: Traders of Sind from Bukhara to Panama (Cambridge/New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Papiya Ghosh, Partition and the South Asian Diaspora: Extending the Subconti-
nent (Delhi: Routledge India, 2007); and Claire Alexander, Joya Chatterji and Annu Jalais, The Bengal Diaspora: Rethink-
ing Muslim Migration (London/New York: Routledge, 2016).
8. Khachig Tololyan, ‘Rethinking Diaspora(s): Stateless Power in the Transnational Moment’, in Diaspora, Vol. 5, no. 1
(1996), p. 15.
9. Intizar Husain (Rakhshanda Jalil, trans.), The Sea Lies Ahead (New Delhi: Harper Perennial, 2015), p. 24. I am grateful to
Frances Pritchett for helping me to clarify 1995 as the original date of publication of the Urdu-language edition.
4 P. KUMAR

point of origin for its various Muhajir characters and how homeland cannot be equated
with the nation-space of India, since India is also enemy territory. Indeed, there is a dis-
crepancy between how India (the nation-state) functions as an ideological enemy on the
one hand, and how Indian cities/towns serve as sites of memory for the first generation
on the other. Instead, homeland is evoked at the scale of the home town—Delhi, Lucknow,
Meerut, Shikarpur—precisely in order to bring out the heterogeneous place-based identities
of the Muhajirs. As the narrator’s friend, Majju Bhai, says: ‘And it isn’t as though muhajirs
are all of one type. Some are from the east, some from the west, some from the north,
some from the south. Rivers from across the length and breadth of Hindustan came tum-
bling and gurgling to meet the sea’.10 Harking back to the original, more inclusive definition
of the term Muhajir, which includes all migrants from India irrespective of where they
came from, this statement emphasises that Muhajirs were not a homogeneous community,
especially in terms of their origins. Even if one were to go by the more recent, narrower
understanding of Muhajirs as Urdu-speaking migrants from India’s Muslim-minority prov-
inces, the novel goes to great lengths to showcase the heterogeneity of the community by
accentuating the diverse, locally-circumscribed identities of the migrant generation such
that migrants are referred to by their places of origin in India. Thus we meet the Lucknow-
walas, the Meerut-walas, the Dibai-walas and the Dilli-walas, among others, who all express
attachment to the ancestral homeland left behind in India.11 Husain paints a particular pic-
ture of India as it features in the Muhajir memory of the country—an urban India of a par-
ticular kind that has more or less disappeared.
The attachment to the homeland is articulated chiefly through nostalgia for food and
through the preservation of culinary practices specific to the home town. For instance,
Karbalai Sahab bemoans the fact that he has not eaten the same besan laddu since he left
Shikarpur; another elderly man from Sandila, a place famous for its laddus, tells Majju
Bhai: ‘I have spent 35 years in Pakistan. In all this while I have not eaten a laddu. Ai sahib,
I don’t know what’s wrong, but there’s no taste in the food here, and the laddus here are
nothing but lumpy mounds of sugar’.12 Another Muhajir character, Tausif, organises a
kebab-paratha party in memory of the annual Nauchandi Mela in Meerut; he tells his
guests: ‘You may regard this too as our Nauchandiwala paratha and these seekh kababs…
as the Khair Nagar “brand” seekh kababs’.13 Indeed, Tausif proudly asserts that these
made-in-Karachi ‘seekh kababs’ are even better than the originals from Meerut. Here, we
encounter the characteristic diasporic attempt to recreate the homeland by means of ritual
or symbolic practices that allow the diaspora to claim even more authenticity for itself
than the homeland culture. Significantly, these different culinary practices often become
the basis of very humorous conflicts in the novel among the various Muhajir characters,
reflecting their diverse identities. For example, Tausif’s marital alliance with the daughter

10. Ibid., p. 36.

11. Similarly, Sarah Ansari points out that many of the co-operative housing ventures and colonies that emerged in Kara-
chi in the late 1940s and early 1950s ‘catered very specifically for people from particular places in India’, reflecting and
consolidating the diverse place-based identities of the migrants. ‘Thus by the mid-1950s, the map of Karachi included
a large number of “colonies” with names which reflected either the identities of many of their residents or, alterna-
tively how they identified themselves’. Consider, for example, Aligarh Colony, Bihar Colony, Hyderabad Colony, Delhi
Colony, Usmanabad, Agra Taj Colony, Bangalore Town and Kutch Colony, among others. See Sarah Ansari, Life After
Partition: Migration, Community, and Strife in Sindh 1947–1962 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 140–2.
12. Husain, The Sea Lies Ahead, pp. 38–9.
13. Ibid., p. 58.
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 5

of a Lucknowi family breaks up, in part because he launches a ‘panegyric on the gur rewri
and gazak’ of his erstwhile home town Meerut, to the horror of the very refined Saiyad
Aqa Hasan and his wife Basho Bhabhi, who are very proud of their Lucknowi origins,
their chaste highbrow Urdu and their ability to distinguish between table sugar (qand)
and crystal sugar (nabad).14 The novel shows how food becomes an important means for
upholding and preserving the memory of different ancestral homelands left behind in
India—and hence maintaining different locally-circumscribed identities—among the
migrant generation.
Given the lengths Husain goes to in order to establish the differences between various
Muhajirs, how does it enable us to think about Muhajirs as a diaspora, if at all? According
to the paradigmatic Jewish-centred definition of a diaspora, it results from the displace-
ment of a group that already has a clearly-defined delimited identity in the homeland: ‘dis-
placed but homogenous and established “ethnies” that, while still in their homeland, were
already endowed with protonational social and cultural characteristics’.15 The novel
clearly shows that the Muhajirs did not have—and indeed do not have—such a cohesive
identity. Yet, in his qualification of the Jewish-centred definition, Tololyan emphasises
that ‘quite loosely related populations possessed of many different, locally circumscribed
identities in their homelands, but regarded as “one” in the hostland, can be turned into a
diaspora by the gaze of that hostland’.16 Similarly, the novel shows how the various Muha-
jir characters come to see themselves as ‘one’ despite the many differences and conflicts
between them. They articulate their collective identity in terms of a shared link to a past
migration history, such that the very act of displacement shapes their personhood as a
community. Husain highlights the Muhajirs’ shared experience of dispersal, the terrifying
experience of the journey, the much-anticipated moment of arrival, and the struggle for
survival in Pakistan. The narrator Jawad recalls the early days in Karachi when suddenly
one would run into someone familiar and be asked: ‘You? When did you come? How did
you reach here? By which “special” [train]? Were you attacked… . There would be some
tender-hearted compassion, some lamentations at the loss of all material belongings’.17
This is how he meets Misbah, who was part of the same caravan that had boarded the
same ‘special’, and after the perilous journey to Lahore, each had gone wherever they
could to find temporary shelter; eventually most of the migrants, we are told, ended up in
Karachi. Misbah invites him into his shanty, and the narrator, once again, accentuates the
Muhajirs’ common experience of living in shanties in the early post-Partition era—‘all
manner of snobs, gentlemen, dandies, sophisticates, aristocrats and other genteel folk
were living in them’.18 Migrants often had to go to enormous trouble to get possession of
a shanty and many quarrels broke out over them, although eventually many of them
moved out to more affluent dwellings. Majju Bhai underlines the shared significance of the
era of the shanties for Muhajirs when he says: ‘My dear, the Karachi of today has risen

14. Ibid., p. 40.

15. Tololyan, ‘Rethinking Diaspora(s)’, p. 13.
16. Ibid; emphasis added.
17. Husain, The Sea Lies Ahead, p. 16. But the narrator also goes on to emphasise how each individual was also focused on
his own survival; after all that had occurred, if one were to ask for help, ‘long-lost friends would display the same alac-
rity in slipping away. Who would help another? Everyone was looking out for himself’. See p. 11.
18. Ibid., p. 12.
6 P. KUMAR

from the yeast of the Karachi of the shanties… . The true Karachiwala is one who has lived
in a shanty’.19
Similarly, the novel shines a light on the often life-threatening train journeys that many
Muhajirs had to undertake when they crossed the new border into Pakistan. Karbalai
Sahab recalls how they left Shikarpur at a strange hour and how apprehensive they were
about whether they would even make it to the train station. The narrator has a somewhat
analogous traumatic experience which emerges from his memory after he is shot in the
chaotic present of the novel. He remembers how frightened people were during the train
journey from India and how relieved they were when they arrived in Pakistan. An elderly
man says: ‘Thank God we have come away from that land of fear’; another character says:
‘Don’t talk about bullets now; we are in Pakistan. No one will point a gun at you’.20 (Of
course, this comment appears ironic in light of later events and the banality of violence in
the present of the novel.) Not only does the novel dramatise the Muhajirs’ common expe-
rience of dispersal, the fearful journey, and the struggle for survival; it also brings out how
the Muhajirs continue to hold on to the often traumatic memory of these events, such
that this memory has become a part of their sense of self as a community. Indeed, it is
also what marks them as different from the other communities of (West) Pakistan who
were not forced to move from their homelands. Aqa Hasan, an elderly man from Luck-
now, asks: ‘What do these people here (the existing population of Pakistan) know about
the sorrows we have faced? With such grief, we have pulled up our roots and dragged our-
selves across these long hard miles? And here…here we have seen new twists and turns’.21
The twists and turns refer to the Muhajirs’ sense of alienation in the present, which has to
do with the change in state policies towards them since the 1970s, their relative loss of
privilege, and the influx of new migrants to the city that they claimed as their own—
Karachi. This consciousness about their collective experience of displacement has stayed
with the Muhajirs over the years, and it sharpened with the rise of the Muhajir Qaumi
Movement (MQM) in the 1980s. Thus there is a clear sense among the Muhajirs in the
novel that they comprise a community—a community forged by a shared history of
migration, flight, dispersal and a perceived sense of discrimination in the land of arrival.
The narrator Jawad gets his first job thanks to Mirza Sahab who, he is told, is ‘one of us’,22
while Majju Bhai, who is deeply entrenched in the Muhajir community, refers to other
Muhajirs as ‘our brothers’.23
Indeed, it is through Majju Bhai that the narrator encounters the various Muhajir char-
acters in the novel, and these encounters facilitate the heteroglossic character of the text.
Closely related to the term polyphony, Mikhail Bakhtin used the term heteroglossia to
refer to the multiplicity of voices present in a literary work, including those of the author,
the narrator and the characters.24 He argued that most literary works involve a plurality
of voices that often interact and compete with each other. Polyphony can take place
between characters; between certain characters and the author and/or narrator; between

19. Ibid.
20. Ibid., p. 263.
21. Ibid., p. 51; emphasis added.
22. Ibid., p. 23.
23. Ibid., p. 231.
24. Mikhail Bakhtin (Michael Holquist, ed.; Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, trans.), The Dialogic Imagination: Four
Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, [1981] 2011).
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 7

the official ideology of the author’s culture and the subversive ideology that writers may
express directly or obliquely; and between the traditional conventions of the literary genre
in which the work is written and those exhibited by the text in question.25 In The Sea Lies
Ahead, Husain uses polyphony as a literary device to bring out the diverse platial and culi-
nary attachments of the various Muhajir characters, but polyphony also takes place
between most of the Muhajir characters acting as a group, and the narrator.26
The narrator is used to interrogate many of the community’s peculiarities; the novel
sets him up as an individual exilic figure who has a deeply ambivalent relationship with
his fellow migrants. Unlike the closely-related concept of exile, which can be applied to an
individual or collective experience of forced migration, diaspora, by definition, has to do
with a collective experience of displacement. Tololyan emphasises the importance to dia-
sporas of collective practices, norms and discourses. He underlines that a diaspora is not
merely ‘a clump of individuals living outside their ancestral homeland’; to be recognisable
as a diaspora, a diasporic social formation must have collective practices and knowledge—
linguistic, musical, literary, social and political (one could add culinary and religious prac-
tices to the list)—that are different from those prescribed by the dominant culture and
that highlight the similarity of diasporic individuals to each other.27 A diasporic individual
is one who interacts with such practices and values, ‘honoring some and transgressing
others’.28 Tololyan is critical of the humanist intervention in the discourse of diaspora for
attending to questions of (individual) identity without paying enough attention to ‘the
structures of diasporic polity and collective being within which such subjects are embed-
ded’.29 The Sea Lies Ahead draws attention to the many complex collective aspects of dia-
sporas, but the novel’s protagonist, Jawad, does not quite belong to the community of
Muhajirs; rather, he stands apart from his community. Cultural practices like mushairas
(poetic symposia at which Urdu poetry is read) that have been invented and maintained
by Muhajirs as a symbol of their attachment to their former homelands bore him; he feels
detached from the other migrants. ‘The truth is that so many of their signs and gestures
went over my head… . The background of those signs and symbols was the life of Karachi,
that is the way of life that these people had forged upon their arrival in this city. I had very
little to do with it’.30 In her book Life After Partition, Sarah Ansari describes how the refu-
gees ‘superimposed their customs, habits and interests and made it [Karachi] their own’,
such that the city had virtually become a ‘north Indian transplant’ by the mid 1950s.31
However, Jawad describes how he feels like a stranger in his neighbourhood even though
he has lived there for years. He does not feel like he belongs to the community of
Muhajirs in the same way as Majju Bhai does. Exile is presented as a matter of willed indi-
vidual choice for the narrator rather than the consequence of being positioned as a

25. For a succinct summary of Bakhtin’s arguments, see Ross Murfin and Supriya M. Ray (eds), The Bedford Glossary of Criti-
cal and Literary Terms (Boston, MA/New York: Bedford/St Martin’s, 2009), p. 224.
26. However, there are certain exceptions like Mirza Sahab, who is more aligned with the narrator and who profoundly
impacts the narrator’s thinking.
27. Tololyan, ‘Rethinking Diaspora(s)’, pp. 29–30.
28. Ibid., p. 29.
29. Ibid., p. 28.
30. Husain, The Sea Lies Ahead, p. 68; emphasis added.
31. Ansari, Life After Partition, pp. 148, 145.
8 P. KUMAR

stranger-outsider: ‘If someone is bent upon remaining aloof from the lives and times of
one’s neighbours, then who would know him?’32
Moreover, in sharp contrast to the other Muhajir characters in the novel (with the
exception of Karbalai Sahab of Shikarpur), the narrator is haunted by his platial attach-
ments to his ancestral home town, Vyaspur, and by his memories of his cousin and closest
childhood friend Maimuna, who still lives there. While most of the other Muhajir charac-
ters hold on to an idealised vision of their former home towns, they do not express any
desire to maintain contact with their ancestral homelands in their present—let alone
‘devote funds or human resources to assist or influence the economy, culture and politics
of the homeland’ (something that is typical of many diasporas)—given the Muhajirs’
ambivalent relationships with their country of origin and their fear of being stigmatised in
Pakistan.33 Many of the Muhajir characters in the novel look down upon their relatives
still in India and are arrogant about their (modern) Pakistani present. For instance, when
Tausif learns that Jawad has left to visit India, he chastises him, asserting the superiority
and authenticity of diasporic food and practices when compared to those of Indian Mus-
lims. Tausif’s sister Baji Akhtari asks: ‘What is left there? The truth is that the real excite-
ment was because of us. Who is left there now? Only the no-good inconsequential types
remain… . Those who belong to the low castes such as teli, tamboli, bhatiyare, ghasiyare,
or idlers like Khairul Bhai’.34 Another character, Basho Bhabhi, states that ‘there is noth-
ing but dust left there since we came away’; her husband Aqa Hasan refers to Lucknow as
a ‘lost land’.35 The Muhajirs’ attachment to the ancestral home is firmly located in the
past: anything else would be viewed as a betrayal of their Pakistani present, despite the
fact that they bemoan their present-day alienation in Pakistan and the chaos in Karachi.
However, the novel chooses to underline the narrator’s persistent and abiding ties to his
home town in India. When Jawad returns to Vyaspur years after Partition, he feels whole
again, as if all his scattered selves have come together. His attachment to place is articu-
lated mainly through his affective ties for the landscape and the natural environment,
especially the many beautiful trees and birds of Vyaspur. The text has many eloquent pas-
sages devoted to trees and the hold they can exert on a person. Recalling the magnificent
specimens of his childhood—the neem, peepal, kaithoo, jamun, tamarind and banyan—
the narrator calls them ‘my trees’; or, as he wistfully realises, they used to be his trees
because his present is located in another country.36 As cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan
explains, a place represents a pause in movement—‘the pause makes it possible for a local-
ity to become a center of felt value’.37 Intimate places are places of nurture and they can
range from the curve of a human arm or the shade of a tree to the planet itself: ‘Hearth,
shelter, home or home base are intimate places to human beings everywhere’.38 In
Husain’s novel, trees serve as an intimate place for humans and non-humans alike; they
are an intrinsic part of what constitutes home for the narrator, especially because they
served as the site of many warm childhood encounters with Maimuna. In one passage, he

32. Ibid., p. 182.

33. Tololyan, ‘Rethinking Diaspora(s)’, p. 17.
34. Husain, The Sea Lies Ahead, pp. 211–12; italics in original.
35. Ibid., p. 212.
36. Ibid., p. 7.
37. Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977), p. 138.
38. Ibid., p. 147.
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 9

describes how kites would fly in the sky, staying clear of the tops of tall trees, but when
they came near the peepal tree, they would become entangled in the branches as though
they had to come and rest: ‘And the manner in which they rested, it seemed as though
they would never fly off again’.39 Likewise, a dove would come flying from somewhere
and would sit tranquilly on the peepal’s branches as if it had found its ‘final resting
place’.40 Jawad describes how he feels overwhelmed with joy when he sees the neem tree
on his first morning back in Vyaspur and the birds erupting from its branches. Later,
when he comes across the rain-drenched neem, he recalls how he and Maimuna used to
run around the tree the whole day long and how they felt they were a part of it, as though
Maimuna had emerged from its trunk and he from its branches.41
Clearly, for the narrator, his ancestral home town serves as an identity-constituting
place in ways that are quite different from the other Muhajirs. Lawrence Buell describes
identity-shaping places in the following terms: ‘Minimally, one might stipulate that all the
places a person has lived that she or he still dreams about sometimes are embedded and
responsible for shaping present identity beyond what is consciously realized’.42 Upon his
return to Pakistan, the narrator muses on his tenacious ties to his ancestral homeland: ‘I
had gone back after an age to a place where every nook and cranny, every tree and stone,
its birds and its very air had been calling out to me for such a long time. No, they were
urging me from deep inside me, they were pushing me there’.43 Such ties call into question
post-Partition national identities and cartographies, and can be read as a betrayal of the
nation-state when viewed from a narrow nationalist perspective. However, like his narra-
tor, Intizar Husain has always been very vocal and eloquent about how his identity has
been shaped by his Indian past. In an incisive interview with Alok Bhalla, reflecting on
how the question of identity could not be easily resolved for many Muslims who migrated
to Pakistan, he says: ‘I have, therefore, been asserting repeatedly, that we should not only
acknowledge the historical and cultural past which we left behind in India, but that we
should also make it an important aspect of our present concerns’.44 (The vexed and com-
plex relationship to the Indian past has been a recurrent concern of much of Husain’s
oeuvre.)
In contrast to its affective and nostalgic portrayal of the ancestral homeland, The Sea
Lies Ahead portrays the Karachi of its present as a city in decline: throughout, it under-
lines the banality of violence in Karachi and how violence has become an everyday matter
for its residents. Early on in the narrative, Jawad enumerates the disturbances that have
disrupted the life of the city in the form of dacoities, murders, bombings and masked
men, but after his return from India, he is appalled by the city’s deterioration and the
pace at which it has happened. Robberies, abductions, murders and Kalashnikov-wielding
masked men have become routine. The historical frame of the novel is deliberately left

39. Husain, The Sea Lies Ahead, p. 9.

40. Ibid.
41. We encounter many similar, beautiful passages about trees in Husain’s earlier novel Basti, but whereas in the earlier
novel, trees—along with a koyal (part of the cuckoo family)—provide a kind of bridge between his ancestral home-
land and the unnamed Lahore of his present, in this text, Karachi never really becomes home for Jawad. See Intizar
Husain (Frances W. Pritchett, trans.), Basti (Delhi: Oxford University Press, [1979] 2007), pp. 74–6.
42. Lawrence Buell, Writing for an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and Environment in the U.S. and Beyond (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), p. 69.
43. Husain, The Sea Lies Ahead, p. 200.
44. Intizar Husain, interview with Alok Bhalla, ‘Partition, Exile, and Memories of a Lost Home’, p. 99; emphasis added.
10 P. KUMAR

obscure, but the reference to Kalashnikovs makes clear that the novel is set after the Soviet
invasion of Afghanistan and after the USA started sending arms to the Afghan mujahid-
een via Karachi, consequently making weapons more easily available to organisations like
the MQM. Indeed, since the foundation of the party in 1984, MQM cadres have routinely
displayed weapons to demonstrate a form of ‘hypermasculinity’,45 and in 1986, the MQM
was the first Pakistani political organisation to showcase Kalashnikovs at public rallies. As
one MQM cadre told Ann Frotscher: ‘Believe me, there is no greater feeling than having a
well-oiled, loaded Kalashnikov in your hostel room cupboard, with the whole hostel
knowing about it. You feel like a king’.46
In the novel, Karachi is variously invoked as the ‘City of Summons’, the ‘City of Calam-
ities’ as well as a ‘gigantic torture chamber’ in order to accentuate the constant sense of
violence and insecurity that prevails there.47 All that the narrator and his acquaintances
can do is lament the state of affairs in the city or deploy black humour to cope with the
senseless violence. At one point, when Jawad wonders aloud what is happening to the
city, Majju Bhai blithely responds: ‘Stop thinking, or leave this city… . This is the only
way to live in this city’.48 Majju Bhai’s comment underlines their helplessness in the face
of the violence that has overwhelmed Karachi. Rafiq Sahab, another resident of the city
(one of the few non-Muhajir characters we encounter), underscores the routine nature of
violence in many parts of the city when he says that the youth of his neighbourhood—
presumably supporters of the MQM—have only two pastimes: firing and mushairas.49
The use of black humour as a means of coping with the violence becomes evident when
Rafiq Sahab jokes that the poets are far more cruel and unbearable than the gunfire in the
city since one is unable to avoid them or their mushairas. In a more serious vein, however,
he tells the narrator that a mushaira has its own utility and the people of Karachi have
understood that mushairas are a kind of ‘cure’ for the times they are living through—in
other words, they become a means of domesticating the constant violence in the city.
Indeed, The Sea Lies Ahead is very much in the centuries-old elegiac shehr afsos (liter-
ally, lament of the city) tradition, as Rakhshanda Jalil, the translator of the text, observes.50
The novel deploys the cities of Granada (from Moorish Spain) and Dwarka (from the
Mahabharata) as allegorical figures for Karachi in order to mourn the decay of the city.
In the interspersed surreal sections of the novel, which take us to Moorish Spain, we
encounter a character called Ibn-e-Habib who is evoked as a figure of double exile: his
ancestors had been forced to flee from Seville to Malaqah (Malaga, a city in coastal Spain);
when the Catholics attack the city, he, in turn, migrates from Malaqah to Granada. He
tells his friend Abdullah the naan-seller, who lives in Granada, that his breast is burdened
with two sorrows: ‘the separation from Seville which was my ancestors’ sorrow and the
separation from Malaqah which is my own sorrow. The graves of my ancestors are in

45. Nichola Khan, Mohajir Militancy in Pakistan: Violence and Practices of Transformation in the Karachi Conflict (London:
Routledge, 2010).
46. Ann Frotscher, Claiming Pakistan: The MQM and the Fight for Belonging (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2008), p. 144.
47. Husain, The Sea Lies Ahead, pp. 177, 232. The MQM cultivated techniques of violence that included torture both
against its enemies and dissidents within the group, all of which contributed to the perpetual sense of danger in the
city.
48. Ibid., pp. 35–6.
49. Ibid., p. 229.
50. Rakhshanda Jalil, ‘Introduction’, in Intizar Husain (Rakhshanda Jalil, trans.), The Sea Lies Ahead (New Delhi: Harper
Perennial, [1995] 2015), p. xi.
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 11

Seville and my own umbilical cord is buried in Malaqah’.51 Ibn-e-Habib’s attachment to

Seville illustrates Buell’s notion of attachment to fictive or virtual places, particularly for
diasporic individuals and communities. Buell suggests that places can matter to an indi-
vidual or a community even if they may not have experienced them directly. For example,
how much did it matter, he asks, if some of the Israelites were ‘children of captives’ who
had never been to their ‘native land’?52 Ibn-e-Habib’s friend Abdullah also displays this
kind of (second-generational) connection to fictive places when he says that although he
is a son of Granada—his umbilical cord is buried there—he belongs to the ‘soil of Cor-
doba’ because his ancestors had migrated from Cordoba.
Simultaneously, the text evokes Granada as a hospitable and cosmopolitan city that
welcomes migrants and homeless people from all over Andalusia (Moorish Spain), much
like the Karachi of the early post-Partition era. Thus Abdullah, who extends hospitality to
Ibn-e-Habib when he first comes to this city, tells him: ‘My dear, Granada is a strange city
and stranger still is the fact that there has been a deluge of those who have been uprooted.
From distant corners of Andalusia, caravans upon caravans of those who have been
uprooted and forced to flee their homes have been arriving to camp in Granada’. As in
the Karachi of the novel’s present, ‘there are fewer people from Granada in Granada and
far more migrants and homeless people from outside’.53
While Granada (and Dwarka) are employed as metaphors for Karachi, the characters
of Ibn-e-Habib and Ganesh serve as figures for the narrator (and perhaps Husain himself)
in their inability to put aside the memory of their ancestral homelands. On the one hand,
the text enjoins migrants to imagine a new home for themselves in their lands of arrival—
to mingle with its soil and air, as it were. Accordingly, Abdullah’s grandfather advised his
children: ‘And so my sons, surely we belong to the soil of Cordoba, but what is gone is
gone. So bid farewell to that city or else its memory will eat you up like termites. Now Gran-
ada is our Cordoba’.54 On the other hand, the novel places at its centre characters who are
haunted by their deep attachment to former homelands, as we have seen in the case of
Jawad and Ibn-e-Habib. It also accentuates such attachments by using the Mahabharata
as a sub-text, particularly through the figure of Ganesh. Ganesh has migrated from
Mathura to Dwarka, but unlike most of his migrant cohort, he is unable to forget his
home town. In the beginning, we are told, others who had migrated from Mathura also
remembered the city, but eventually the hustle and bustle of Dwarka made them forget it.
Like Aqa Hasan and Basho Bhabhi’s relationship to Lucknow, they only remember
Mathura like a long-lost dream and eventually the dream fades from memory. Ganesh is
the only one who is unable to forget the city of his birth, and hence he, like the narrator
and Ibn-e-Habib, is condemned to be unhappy. Yet the text also affirms such unspoken
belongings to ancestral homelands as being constitutive of individual and collective iden-
tity, as we have seen.
By the end of the novel, both Dwarka and Granada, like Karachi, are in imminent dan-
ger of being destroyed. Ibn-e-Habib tells Abdullah that this large, kind-hearted city (Gran-
ada) has now begun to scare him. Abdullah’s response confirms the sense of peril: ‘That

51. Husain, The Sea Lies Ahead, pp. 207–8.

52. Buell, Writing for an Endangered World, p. 71; emphasis added.
53. Husain, The Sea Lies Ahead, p. 209.
54. Ibid., p. 283; emphasis added.
12 P. KUMAR

time is long gone when our forefathers got off at the shore, turned their backs to the sea
and burnt all their boats. Now the angry sea is not behind us but ahead of us, and we have
made no boats’.55 Typically, Andalusia has been evoked as a symbol of lost glory in much
transnational literature by Muslim writers, but in Husain’s novel, it also becomes indica-
tive of a future of further displacement—a symbol of fear. Thus, Husain’s evocation of
Andalusia gives an original twist to the trope of the lost Andaluz. The metaphor of the
angry sea also recalls Majju Bhai’s seemingly unconcerned response when asked what lies
ahead for the Muhajirs and he replies ‘the sea’, a statement that resonates with the title of
the novel.56 The sub-text here is President Ayub Khan’s notorious declaration—aage
samandar hai (the sea is in front of you)—that warned Urdu-speaking Muhajirs not to
vote for Fatima Jinnah in the 1965 election because they had nowhere else to go. Subse-
quently, in the 1980s and 1990s, when MQM leaders evoked the sacrifices of Partition or
recalled Ayub Khan’s threat to drive Muhajirs into the Arabian Sea, they were calling into
question the very basis of Pakistan as a safe and permanent home for all subcontinental
Muslims. In a similar vein, Husain’s novel seems to be questioning the intertwined
notions of a home and homecoming—constitutive features of Pakistani nationalism—
from the perspective of the Muhajirs.
The Karachi of The Sea Lies Ahead is a city that is spiralling into chaos because of the
unending violence that has been generated, in part by the MQM. The novel offers a pow-
erful indictment of this second generation of Muhajir youth who will resort to any means
to make territorial and identitarian claims on the city. By the end of the novel, unknown
assailants have shot both Jawad and Majju Bhai, and while Jawad survives, Majju Bhai’s
fate is left open-ended. This sense of looming peril is what binds together the Dwarka,
Granada and Karachi of the novel even though they are separated by eons.
At the same time, it is significant that Karachi is not portrayed as unique or as an aber-
ration; rather, it is viewed as a metonym for Pakistan. When Jawad asks Rafiq Sahab his
opinion of Majju Bhai’s comment about leaving Karachi, the latter says: ‘Why Karachi?
Then you will have to leave Pakistan’.57 Clearly, Karachi is to Pakistan what a part is to a
whole. Unlike the other characters, Rafiq Sahab is not a migrant from India; he is a Lahori
married to a woman from Lucknow who lives in Karachi. In response to the narrator’s
query as to why he does not live in his ancestral city of Lahore, he tells him that Lahore,
too, is a part of Pakistan; it is not outside the country. Earlier, in a very cynical comment
on the state of affairs in Pakistan, Rafiq Sahab says that if one were to sift through the his-
tory of Pakistan, two things would starkly stand out: ‘Mushairas and Kalashnikovs’—a
harsh indictment, indeed, from one of Pakistan’s foremost literary chroniclers.58
Through its nuanced and multi-vocal depiction of the migrant generation of Muhajirs,
the novel offers powerful insights into a range of diasporic subjectivities and the many
complex collective structures within which such subjects are embedded.

55. Ibid., p. 312; emphasis added.

56. Ibid., p. 51.
57. Ibid., p. 240.
58. Ibid., p. 178.
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 13

Retaining a Diasporic Consciousness: Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography

In this final section, I revisit Kamila Shamsie’s novel Kartography to examine how it illu-
minates the predicaments and dilemmas of the younger generation of Muhajirs in the
Pakistan of the 1990s, even though its protagonist Raheen rejects the label Muhajir as a
marker of identity. While I do not offer a close reading of Kartography here, I examine its
interrogation of the elitist Sindhi narrative of autochthony and nativism.59 By questioning
the ‘indigenous’ construction of Muhajirs as enduring strangers, the novel highlights how
our very ideas of being ‘at home’ and in place often rest on the exclusion of others desig-
nated as strangers and outsiders. I underline the importance of the novel’s imaginative
attempt to recuperate a more hospitable idea of home and place that is neither exclusion-
ary nor territorial. However, I also interrogate the novel for its inability to see how Muha-
jirs in turn have constructed an ‘imagined autochthony’ for themselves in response to
what they view as the onslaught of outsiders—the new migrants to the city from other
parts of Pakistan as well as from neighbouring countries.60

Still Immigrants
At the centre of the novel is the story of two childhood friends, Raheen and Karim, whose
parents were once engaged. The novel alternates between two time-frames: the 1980s and
the 1990s, and 1971 when Pakistan endured a civil war which culminated in the creation
of the new nation-state of Bangladesh. The story of the fiance swap is at the heart of the
novel and allows the author to pose many important questions about the evolving legacies
of 1971 for later generations of Pakistanis, but I will focus on the strand of the novel set in
the 1980s and 1990s that looks at the situation of the Muhajirs and the historical forces
transforming their beloved city of Karachi.
Although Raheen is a ‘burger’—a member of the English-speaking elite of the city—
early on, she begins to understand what it means to be positioned as an outsider because
of her family’s migrant past and their origin in North India. She encounters the Sindhi
narrative of autochthony and nativism which articulates the belief that Sindhis have a
prior claim on Karachi by virtue of birth and origin, and that Muhajirs do not belong
there because they are strangers who came from elsewhere and speak a different language.
As a young girl, she overhears her parents’ friends Laila and Asif, who belong to the
Sindhi feudal elite, discussing their fears about the newly-established MQM. Laila says:
Karachi’s my home, you know. Why did those bloody Muhajirs have to go and form a politi-
cal group? Once they’re united they’ll do God knows what. Demanding this, demanding that.
Thinking that just because they are a majority in Karachi they can trample over everyone
else. Like they did in ’47. Coming across the border thinking that we should be grateful for
their presence… . Do you hear the way people like Zafar and Yasmin talk about ‘their

59. For a more detailed reading of Kartography, see Priya Kumar, ‘Karachi as Home: The Uncanny Homecoming of Muhajirs
in Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography’, in South Asian Review, Vol. 32, no. 3 (2011), pp. 161–82.
60. See Mohammad Waseem, ‘Mohajirs in Pakistan: A Case of Nativization of Migrants’, in Crispin Bates (ed.), Community,
Empire and Migration: South Asians in Diaspora (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), pp. 250–2, for an interest-
ing argument about how Muhajirs have given substance to a form of nativism. I have more to say on this in the
conclusion.
14 P. KUMAR

Karachi’? My family lived there for generations. Who the hell are these Muhajirs to pretend
it’s their city?61

Through the device of Laila’s diatribe, Shamsie shows how ideas of being ‘at home’ and
in place can encourage xenophobia and hostility towards those designated as strangers or
newcomers, especially when the ideas rest upon ideas of ownership and territoriality. The
young Raheen realises that according to the nativist narrative, people like her and her
family are positioned as perpetual outsiders in Karachi. Aisha Khan notes that while
diasporic consciousness may take different forms of memorialisation over time, ‘what
remains a key constant is a community’s emphasis on its awareness of its outsider-foreign
origins’, and the ‘struggle in local contexts to overcome the stigma with which outsider-
foreign origins contend’.62 Thus Raheen wonders: ‘What kind of immigrant is born in a
city and spends his whole life there, and gets married there, and raises his daughter there?
And I, an immigrant’s daughter, was an immigrant too… . If I told them Karachi was my
home just as much as it was anyone else’s, would they look at me and think: another
Muhajir. Immigrant. Still Immigrants, though our family had crossed the border nearly
four decades ago’.63
In contrast to many ‘middle-class’ Muhajirs—especially those who support the
MQM—who appropriate the term to designate their identity, both Raheen and her father
Zafar resent the label Muhajir because it implicitly positions them as outsiders/strangers
(or at best guests who must be welcomed) in the city. Thus Zafar rebukes Asif for using
‘Muhajir’ to designate migrants from India: ‘And as for that term immigrants… .’64 The
telling ellipsis and the italicisation of the term immigrants demonstrates his resistance to
being labelled a Muhajir. In the novel, the term ‘immigrant’ is used as the English transla-
tion of the word Muhajir, indicating why Raheen and her family find it problematic and
reject it as a term of self-definition.
Yet, while affluent upper-class Muhajirs like Zafar and his family resent the label
Muhajir, they also reiterate many of the themes and narratives that have become central
to the diasporic consciousness of the Muhajir community. Raheen’s mother, Yasmin, tells
Raheen: ‘We left India in 1947—we left our homes, Raheen, think of what that means—
saying we cannot live amid this injustice, this political marginalization, this exclusion’.65
Similarly, Zafar tells Asif that ‘Muhajirs came here leaving everything behind. Our homes,
our families, our ways of life. We can’t be blamed if some—mind you some—of us came
from areas with education systems that made us qualified for office jobs instead of latrine
cleaning, which is the kind of job you seem to think immigrants should be grateful for’.66
The use of the collective pronoun is indicative of Yasmin’s and Zafar’s sense of identifica-
tion with the Muhajir community, even though they dislike being labelled as Muhajirs.
What is more, both Raheen and Zafar sympathise with those who identify as Muhajirs,
such as the car thief that Raheen and Karim encounter in Mehmoodabad. This chance
meeting highlights the increasing sense of alienation and exclusion felt by many working-
class Muhajirs. Raheen realises that her privileged class position protects her from the

61. Kamila Shamsie, Kartography (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 2002), p. 38.
62. Khan, ‘Rites and Rights of Passage’, p. 147.
63. Shamsie, Kartography, p. 39; emphasis added.
64. Ibid., p. 202.
65. Ibid., p. 285.
66. Ibid., p. 202; emphasis added.
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 15

everyday struggle engendered by ethnic conflict, yet she sympathises with the car thief
because the quota system discriminates against Karachiites, especially Muhajirs, who have
no family domicile outside the city. Zafar too believes that the quota system is ‘wreaking
havoc’ on Muhajirs and, combined with police brutality, is pushing them to the point
when ‘they’ll pick up guns and detonate bombs’.67 The novel thus highlights how discrim-
inatory state policies first put in place by the Bhutto regime have forced many younger
middle- and working-class Muhajirs to revivify their identity as a besieged diaspora
shaped by the experiences of displacement.68
If The Sea Lies Ahead shows how the migrant generation of Muhajirs constructed
themselves as diaspora based on their shared experience of flight, hardship and survival,
then Kartography sheds light on how the descendants of Partition-era migrants in urban
Sindh resurrected and preserved a diasporic consciousness in response to events in Paki-
stan in the 1980s and 1990s. Yet, unlike the older generation in The Sea Lies Ahead, the
Muhajirs in Kartography do not express any nostalgia for their ancestral homelands in
India; Kartography emphasises that Karachi is the only home that second- and third-
generation Muhajirs like Zafar and Raheen have ever known.
However, as the narrative unfolds, ‘home’ becomes more and more strange and fearful.
Towards the end of the book, Raheen describes her fear when violence reaches a part of
the city often visited by her and her friends: ‘Rocket launches and gunfire in Boat Basin… .
How often we’d stopped in that part of town over the years… . How could the violence
reach somewhere so familiar?’69 She describes the ‘extra-judicial killings’ routinely taking
place and the ruthlessness of the security forces towards MQM militants; she wonders
‘could this city—my city, this ugly polluted, overpopulated, heartbreaking place—retain
its spirit after all this battering?’70
As a counter to what Buell aptly terms ‘place-eroding historical forces’, Shamsie seeks
to recuperate Karachi as a ‘hospitable’ or ‘cosmopolitan’ place, where no individual or
group can claim to be the primordial guardian or the host.71 Towards the end of the novel,
Raheen writes a very eloquent and elegiac letter to Karim in which she seeks to preserve all
that is beautiful about Karachi in the face of all the forces that are rupturing the city. The
letter begins with a beautiful image of hospitality. Raheen describes how, during the
month of Muharram, Karachiites open their houses so that Shia women in purdah can
make their way to their place of worship in safety:

Back and front doors are flung open, and the women walk through the hallway of one house
to the hallway of another until that alley within houses takes them all the way to the door of
the Imam Baragh. It is an alley without name, it is an alley that ceases to exist when the

67. Ibid., p. 203.

68. To be sure, the rural Sindhi perspective is sorely lacking in the text. Only at one point does Raheen ask: ‘[W]hat did I
really know about rural Sindh, after all? Nothing. Too confusing to accept that the aggrieved could also be the aggres-
sors. Too difficult to untangle the mess of a situation in which there weren’t clear cut rights and wrongs’. Ibid., p. 202.
But the novel does not really allow us to access this point of view or make any narrative space for it.
69. Ibid., p. 282.
70. Ibid., pp. 283–4.
71. Buell, Writing for an Endangered World, p. 58. The novel’s vision of a hospitable place—where no one has prior claim—
dovetails with Derrida’s account of cosmopolitan cities of refuge. The key difference between the two, however, is that
where in Derrida, everyone would live as a stranger among strangers, in Shamsie, emotive and affective ties to a place
are crucial to our sense of place and of self. See Jacques Derrida (Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes, eds), Cosmopoli-
tanism and Forgiveness (London: Routledge, 2001). For a more detailed account of hospitality in Derrida and the nov-
el’s vision of Karachi as a hospitable place, see Kumar, ‘Karachi as Home’, pp. 161–82.
16 P. KUMAR

moon disappears, but it is an alley all the same and one that says more about Karachi than
anything you’ll find on a street map.72

Throughout the letter, Raheen underlines Karachi’s ‘dual’ character and reminds Karim
that ‘at its best, Karachi is a place that is intimate with strangers’, or in Derridean terms, it
is a place that is welcoming to all strangers, much like the Granada of The Sea Lies
Ahead.73 This image of neighbourhood hospitality is crucial to Shamsie’s overall vision of
Karachi as a city that is friendly to all the different ‘ethnic’ communities that live there.
The novel maintains an idea of home and place that does not privilege the nativist claims
of any one community, but one where everyone will have the power to be the host in
what Mireille Rosello eloquently describes as a ‘chain of possibly incommensurate hospi-
table gestures’.74 Such an idea of home and place is in direct contradistinction to nativism
and autochthony, which are premised upon ownership, possession and mastery of the
home, rather than the more just, open and accommodative idea of home that Kartography
envisions.
Nevertheless, the novel is more concerned with refuting the Sindhi narrative of autoch-
thony than with undermining the ‘imagined autochthony’ of the Muhajirs. Previously I
have suggested that if hospitality has to do with the ethical claims that the stranger makes
on us, then there must be room for the stranger to lay claim to the very home from which
s/he has been excluded or rendered indeterminate.75 However, laying claim to one’s home
in the way that Rosello describes—where everyone has the power to be the host—does
not mean inaugurating a new politics of territoriality and nativism. The influx of new-
comers to Karachi from other parts of Pakistan from the 1960s onwards, sparked by
industrialisation of the city, led to an inverse nativism on the part of the Muhajirs. Ironi-
cally, from then on, Muhajirs increasingly began to see themselves as indigenous people—
‘sons of the soil’—who needed to protect their city from the onslaught of newcomers and
outsiders. As Jaffrelot notes: ‘Paradoxically, a migrant community claimed to be recog-
nized as the natural ruler of a fraction of Sindh on behalf of an imagined autochthony’.76
Indeed, the MQM set up Karachi—and to some extent, Hyderabad—as the last Muhajir
stronghold: ‘a city so utterly connected to the fate of Muhajirs as a diasporic people that
they would never give it up lest they be exterminated’.77 Significantly, the notion of

72. Shamsie, Kartography, p. 296.

73. Ibid., p. 298.
74. Mireille Rosello, Postcolonial Hospitality: The Immigrant as Guest (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 18.
Writing about immigrants in France, Rosello cites the story of a migrant worker from Abdelmayek Sayad’s L’immigra-
tion, ou, Les paradoxes de l’alterit
e, who lived in a foyer, a worker’s residence that precludes the possibility of dwelling
as if one were at home because he cannot invite his interviewer to partake of his hospitality. Rosello goes on to ask
the important question of what it would take for the ‘postcolonial guest’ to be ‘at home’: ‘Being at home is being
where you can not only eat and drink but also invite someone to eat, to drink, to chat. Being at home is being where
you can be the host, where you can offer hospitality… . The migrant worker shows that the right to offer hospitality
would construct his dwelling place as a home that he could, finally, appropriate’. Rosello suggests that to be at home,
the stranger must be able to offer hospitality—‘that is, not reciprocate, but lengthen the chain of possibly incommen-
surate hospitable gestures’.
75. See Priya Kumar, ‘Beyond Tolerance and Hospitality: Muslims as Strangers and Minor Subjects in Hindu Nationalist and
Indian Nationalist Discourse’, in Elisabeth Weber (ed.), Living Together: Jacques Derrida’s Communities of Violence and
Peace (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), pp. 80–103.
76. See Christophe Jaffrelot (Cynthia Schoch, trans.), The Pakistan Paradox: Instability and Resilience (Gurgaon: Random
House India, [2013] 2015), p. 169. Of course, autochthony is, in a way, always imagined—as well as experienced—but
never natural or primordial, despite the claims of nativists.
77. See Oskar Verkaaik, ‘Violence and Ethnic Identity Politics in Karachi and Hyderabad’, in South Asia: Journal of South
Asian Studies, Vol. 39, no. 4 (Dec. 2016), doi: 10.1080/00856401.2016.1228714.
 SOUTH ASIA: JOURNAL OF SOUTH ASIAN STUDIES 17

Karachi as a Muhajir homeland was based on the idea of inclusion and cosmopolitan-
ism—Karachi as a place that welcomes all Muhajirs from all over India. But in a paradox,
that same sense of cosmopolitanism is now perceived to be under threat from new
migrants who do not understand the spirit of Karachi; an initially accommodative idea of
home becomes the basis for a politics of exclusion and separation. While Shamsie’s efforts
to recuperate Karachi as a ‘hospitable’ or ‘cosmopolitan’ place can be read as an implicit
refutation of both Sindhi and Muhajir narratives of autochthony or ownership, the novel
is more invested in interrogating Sindhi nativism at the expense of the Muhajirs, even
though they became the majority in the city after Partition. She is not as attentive to the
ways in which more recently arrived strangers—such as the Pakhtuns—have been con-
structed, and how a new politics of exclusion has come into play.

Conclusion
A number of scholars have commented on how the Muhajirs constructed an ethnic iden-
tity for themselves in a process that lasted three to four decades, aided and enabled by
state policies of identifying and categorising people along ethnic lines. Scholars such as
Jaffrelot, Frotscher, Ansari and Verkaaik have noted how Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s policies
paved the way for the emergence of a Muhajir ethnic identity in the 1970s.78 If these poli-
cies paved the way for a nascent Muhajir ethnic identity, the violence of the mid 1980s
and the 1990s ‘made real the notion of a Muhajir ethnic group or qaum, the essence of
which lay in the history of persecution’.79 Certainly, Muhajir ethnic consciousness arose
in response to a (perceived) history of discrimination and a relative loss of privilege over
the decades.
However, if we understand ethnicity as a form of collective identity based on shared
cultural beliefs and practices, including language, customs, history, descent, stories about
a common past, etc., then we must ask: what particular aspect of their history or culture
did the former migrants from India—spearheaded by the MQM—draw upon to consoli-
date the notion of a Muhajir qaum80 The construction of an ethnic identity is based on a
process of social self-definition. As Stuart Hall notes, ethnic identities are always forged
‘through the eye of the needle of the other’—that is, they are always constructed in relation
to other groups and their perceived characteristics.81 The selection of certain criteria for
determining who belongs within a group and who must be excluded becomes a significant
part of this process, although the criteria may change over time.

78. See Jaffrelot, The Pakistan Paradox; Frotscher, Claiming Pakistan; Ansari, Life After Partition; and Verkaaik, ‘Violence and
Ethnic Identity Politics’.
79. Verkaaik, ‘Violence and Ethnic Identity Politics’.
80. Jyoti Puri, Encountering Nationalism (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), p. 174.
81. Stuart Hall, cited in Puri, Encountering Nationalism, p. 175.
18 P. KUMAR

Ann Frotscher makes the important point that ‘their origin in the cities of northern
India became the principle criterion for the identity of Muhajirs’ [as an ethnic group],
which led towards further ascriptive characteristics.82 To that, I would add the memory of
a shared experience of dispersal and the travails of starting a new life in a new location.83
Muhajirs were able to invent themselves as a qaum by building upon and resuscitating the
notion of a shared diasporic identity. Indeed, one could argue that a ‘strong ethnic group
consciousness sustained over a long period of time and based on a sense of distinctiveness,
a common history and the belief in a common fate’ is an intrinsic characteristic of most
diasporas; thus the Muhajirs have displayed a key characteristic of diasporas by inventing
themselves as an ethnic group.84
My essay has demonstrated how the Muhajirs came to fashion themselves as a diaspora
and to preserve a diasporic consciousness over time despite the many differences among
Muhajir migrants from India. Through my reading of The Sea Lies Ahead and Kartogra-
phy, I show how the repeated memorialisation of their Partition-engendered experience
of displacement in both the migrant generation and subsequent generations—to the
extent that the idea of displacement came to shape their very sense of self and their rela-
tionship with other communities—has enabled the Muhajirs to construct themselves as a
diaspora, and eventually as an ethnic community.

Acknowledgements
My grateful thanks to Oskar Verkaaik for his thoughtful comments on this paper. Many thanks as
well to Rakhshanda Jalil for sharing her insights on The Sea Lies Ahead with me, and to Professor
Alok Bhalla who provided me with many helpful references to Partition literature on migration.

Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

82. Frotscher, Claiming Pakistan. ‘These characteristics include their shared language Urdu—almost all of them spoke Urdu
but not always as native speakers and they often used different dialects—their urban lifestyle and the fact that the
vast majority settled in the urban areas of Sindh, and their largely middle-class background with a certain level of liter-
acy’ (p. 89); emphasis added.
83. Today, the term Muhajir encapsulates people of the most disparate origins and even linguistic backgrounds, including
Gujaratis, Hyderabadis and people from the former Madras Presidency, even though they may inhabit a somewhat lim-
inal position vis-a-vis the larger group. See Karen Leonard, ‘Hyderabadis in Pakistan: Changing Nations’, in Crispin
Bates (ed.), Community, Empire and Migration: South Asians in Diaspora (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001),
pp. 224–44.
84. Cohen, Global Diasporas, p. 26. In contrast to Cohen’s formulation, Tololyan suggests that in ‘ethnicizing states’ such as
USA, Canada and Australia, diasporas are viewed as a subset of ethnic groups such that ‘all diasporans are ethnic
groups, but not all ethnic groups are diasporas’. He acknowledges, however, that this may not be the case in the rest
of the world where ethnicity is not as well defined by government regulations or indigenous discourse. See Tololyan,
‘Rethinking Diaspora(s)’, p. 32.