Partition and its echoes in Karachi: The political agencies of Fahmida Riaz and Perween Rahman

Abstract

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.