In Delhi was the true arch. Not the semblance or the charlatan, but the true-blue horseshoe throwing the superstitions of the beam to the wind. All experience was this arch and the seventeen-year-old neophyte in the city a hapless Ulysses staring through it—into that “untravell’d world whose margin fades/ For ever and forever when I move”¹. Everywhere these gossamer threads, cutting through mid-week traffic and into the ‘cursed’ fort, the ‘lost’ stream, citadel upon citadel, capital upon capital: this was the “quartzite city”² I arrived in from Kolkata, whose faces in turn lay hidden from my sight in the way a city withholds itself, even as it bleeds into your senses, in childhood. Not much was knowable in familiarity. But here in strange Delhi where I had come to live, there was a secret whose surface I was just beginning to scratch. Years later, when I was at university, we would go to the Parthasarathy Rocks, find a spot in the crook of a boulder, and spend hours looking at vast swathes of wild, untamed forest, heady jungle, sylvan other-worlds stretching as far as the eye could see. What was here before us? What breathes with us still?

At Khoj Studios in Delhi last year (2024), I had the opportunity to see Hamare Siyal Rishte (‘Our Watery Relations’), a long-term research project by Karachi LaJamia, founded by Shahana Rajani and Zahra Malkani and recently awarded the Asia Arts Future – South Asia Award, as part of the 2025 Asia Arts Game Changer Awards, an Asia Society India Centre initiative. This project, realised with the help of the Pakistan FisherFolk Forum and the Sindh Indigenous Rights Alliance, presented a multi-pronged engagement with the sacred riverine geographies and aquatic landscapes that have come to produce the solastalgia of Karachi, a city where the colonial imperatives of large-scale ‘development’ and ‘modernisation’ continue to clamour over long-enduring indigenous ecological epistemes. A particular component stayed with me as I walked out of the exhibition and into the city that day, a “teaching tool in four acts” called ‘A thread, a weave, a braid, a river’³ that said:

This is a dispatch about the city as river.
This is a dispatch about the desert as wetland.

The dispatch sought to trace the rich networks of waterways centred around the Malir river in Karachi, now being destroyed by major infrastructural projects like the Malir Expressway, cutting into the path of the river to connect elite gated communities like Bahria Town and DHA City in Gadap—an indigenous neighbourhood, previously deemed the ‘green-belt’ of Karachi, now adjudged “ghairabad, banjar aur ghairmehfooz” (uninhabited, barren and insecure)⁴—to the city centre. As is the case with urbanisation in India’s cities, whether in Mumbai’s Aarey Forest and sundry projects under the umbrella of ‘Mumbai Upgrading’, or in Kolkata’s wetlands, these large-scale undertakings in Karachi are predicated upon a logic of erasure, an arrogant amnesia that restlessly swats away the ghosts of consequences embedded in nature’s life-cycles and the wisdom nurtured by communities who have loved and known this land intimately as river mountain pasture, mourning and resisting its desertification today with the kind of memory that only love could yield.

The scaffolding for the dispatch, and indeed much of Karachi LaJamia’s engagements with the city, across other projects like The Gadap Sessions⁵, and Jinnah Avenue, a haunting video evoking the consequences of Bahria Town’s takeover of Gadap through road infrastructure (“In every road, a dream of its own undoing”⁶) emerges around four vectors — to see/to sense; to name/to remember; to draw/to love; to walk/to witness — which seem to produce a manifesto for reimagining and reconstituting our relationship to the cities we inhabit. To see is to recognise the city for what it really is, beyond the miasma and trappings of capital — one thinks of Delhi’s Ridge at night, a haunting and hauntological presence, a dense forest with eyes like any other, boring into the concrete. To name is to understand its ancient taxonomies, derived often from the ecological and stripped of their orientation today — the video informs us that Malir, in Balochi, means three coming into one, evoking the relationality and reciprocity of a braid, and Gadap, in Sindhi, means the intersection point for waterways. To draw is to resist the violence of Empire’s cartography — Khuda Dino Shah, a senior indigenous activist maps Karachi’s rivers by hand, a loving exercise that reminds us “naming and drawing are ancient, animate, and embodied practices”. It is in the nature of rivers to intertwine, and as Karachi LaJamia gleaned from this exercise:

“Representing is not the act of seeing everything from nowhere. Like the braid and the river, representing is the making of relation.”

And finally, to walk and to witness is to tread with care, sometimes upon vulnerable ground, in our desire to understand our cities’ landscapes, to see that desire not as ambition but as a pilgrimage of sorts through the knowledge of those that have walked before us or walk alongside us in a metropolis experienced as enclosures.

This teaching tool serves as an antidote to many things: the dissolution of curiosity and wonder in the modern urban imaginary, the loss of our sacred geographies that pass unmourned into bureaucratic haze, the loneliness that has come to characterise urban life in our apartment complexes, the estrangement of the city from its own natural landscapes and its projection instead as a prosthetic offshoot catapulting an anchorless populace into schizoid progress, constituting the self and the other in a relentless loop. Much has been written about these wrangles that bedevil the urban, these impulses that flagrantly violate what David Harvey calls the “right to the city”⁷. Partha Chatterjee, for instance, has argued that globalising processes have enabled the waning of ‘political society’ in major Indian cities to pave the way for the emergence of a ‘civil society’ serving bourgeois interests and thwarting the promise of social equality and community in the metropolis.⁸ Richard Sennett has theorised a politics of friction that is fundamental to the generation of what we call a city, identifying and indicting urban designs that yield ways of living which are tormented by the fear of proximity and contact.⁹ Harvey in turn calls for imagining cities as sites that need to be claimed by the exercise of collective power.

Karachi LaJamia, whose work is embedded in these discursive contexts, chose to exercise that power with a form of creative, public pedagogy: a pedagogy whose sensitivities, counter-epistemes, and longue-durée engagements stand to yield an art practice. One may view this practice through three broad lenses that are in conversation with each other: ‘ecopedagogy’¹⁰, the ‘pedagogy of the city’¹¹, and a pedagogy that defers to the sacred as a way of knowing and caring for our world. Hamare Siyal Rishte, for instance, draws upon the knowledge that the city’s oldest waterways bequeath:

“We learn from the river a pedagogy of presence and relation.”¹²

There is a violence with which the city removes us from learning in, alongside, and from nature in the ways that indigenous communities often do, leading to the privileging of certain epistemic modes and the disempowerment of others. Tagore’s Visva-Bharati, a hundred years ago, was an institutional step towards recognising and countering that ecocidal impulse. In Karachi LaJamia’s practice, ecopedagogy is not only the practice of learning from nature but also having the very experience of learning, in the cognitive sense, absorb the rhythms and methods of the landscapes that surround us — inculcating routines and solidarities of care, softness, slowness, and renewal that are so often elided by the intransigent, often unimaginative, cultures that pass for rigour in the academe.

The pedagogy of the city— while inherently speaking to an environmentally sensate mode of learning inasmuch as the urban is no longer divorced from the ecological but in fact constituted by it— gestures towards a form of sociality in the city through collective study, enabling the reclamation of public space and the sharpening of a situated consciousness about the city, its violence, its politics, against the intellectual regimes of segregation that keep an urban public from recognising itself as a public, with promises of ‘safety’. In A Stateless Study, a syllabus designed for the exhibition Proposals for a Memorial to Partition in 2022, Karachi LaJamia defined this way of learning as situating “ourselves in our larger social context instead of barricading ourselves from it, to learn, seek and produce knowledge collectively while exploring new ways of inhabiting, knowing and being with the city, and being with each other.”

A pedagogy that draws upon the sacred and the city’s relationship with the sacred is a response to the secularisation and asphyxiation of bodies of knowledge whose life-worlds resist the burdens of Enlightenment rationality. In A Stateless Study, a range of exercises seek to overturn and reimagine traditional modes of remembering cataclysmic historical events like the Partition and their legacies. In one of these exercises, the shrine of Abdullah Shah Ghazi, which has been securitised since 2010 owing to purported terrorist attacks, is asked to be reimagined:

The sanitised, barricaded shrine we see today stands in the wake of the many devotional worlds, human and non-human, development seeks to disappear. And yet, shrines are homes to the ecstatic practices of dhamal that bring to life the hidden, the passed on, the unseen. In an ecstatic moment, contemplate how you could be one such vessel, for the dead, the disappeared, the divine.

Another exercise, this time in map-making, too draws upon the affective core of the sacred, allowing it to mediate our relationship with space:

Before the coloniser’s map making practices mobilised drawing as a destructive tool, in many mystical traditions drawing was considered a devotional practice. A form of worship, a way to make visible and manifest the unseen, the dead, the divine. These drawings were imbued with spirit and held sway over the forces of the universe. Make a memorial map, a devotional drawing for something you loved and lost in this city, animate it with ritual and imbue it with spirit, and bring the lost to life again.

In all of Karachi LaJamia’s oeuvre, across the breadth of their deeply political practice, I find these interventions the most radical and the most moving, suffused with the poetics that shapes much of their idiom, that counters protectionist anxieties with a vocabulary of tenderness, that meets a post-9/11 world’s paranoid discipline with the unruly resistance of devotion.  Like Delhi, it would seem Karachi too is a city one cannot understand or hope to love without an engagement with the sacred, with a whole system of political theology that has often served as its ecological defence, located as it is in Sindh, a province whose mystical cosmologies around the Sindhu River have given birth to some of the greatest aesthetic traditions we have in the world today. These are crucial forms of knowing that precede urbanity but need not be in dissonance with it insofar as they might help us imagine other forms of urbanity, that hold indigenous traditions and particularities like so many mangroves against the onslaught of globalisation’s tyrannical intellectual order and the governmentalities of its knowledge. These generative life-worlds are capable of flowing into the lifeworld of the urban — we learn from the river a pedagogy of presence and relation.

Indeed, there is much about Karachi as imagined in Karachi LaJamia’s pedagogy that reminded me of Delhi and is wont to remind others of various South Asian cities they hold dear, that have shaped their thinking. Situated in deeply local contexts, Karachi LaJamia’s practice then has a poignant Southasianism, a quality that testifies to the project’s resonance across borders, cultures, contexts. In Delhi too, our pedagogies of the urban must emerge from the Aravallis, the Ridge, the Yamuna; from gathering in public spaces within and beyond the university to educate, organise, agitate; from the dargah, from the enchanted stream, from the djinns. These are the ways in which we may learn to reconstitute urban life, the forms which may emancipate our imagination and reinvent the city to mean more than the detritus we encounter today in gated communities, the policed campuses of Jamia and JNU, in razed landscapes and shrinking rivers.

Much of Karachi LaJamia’s work is framed against the ‘militarised university’ from the regimes of Ayub Khan and Zia to the present and the ‘everywhere war’ as witnessed and resisted in Pakistan, which are themes Rajani and Malkani have written about extensively. The Karachi Operation and the crackdown on alternative spaces like T2F, the OPT-RTI and the Syed Hashmi Reference Library shape the contexts leading to the opening of Karachi LaJamia in 2015, “an experiment in radical anti-institutional art pedagogy”¹³, Jamia meaning university and La serving as a negative prefix to denote the “non/un/anti-University”. The methods of this pedagogy are outlined in A Stateless Study: an adoption of the small-scale and intimate, embracing slowness and site-specificity in ways that engender deeper, more meaningful possibilities of engagement; the humility to “learn from those who came before us”, and to recognise that a project such as this does not operate in isolation, existing always in a community of “languages, methodologies, and alliances within, and beyond, the university”; and approaching “research as relation” and “study as solidarity”, a practice of sociality and gathering— Rajani tells me one of their public meetings saw a rapper, a furniture maker, a journalist, and a doctor, alongside the usual group of students, artists, and activists — that is in many ways constitutive of the idea of the citizen. Cities have the potential to gather people from all walks of life in ways that villages and smaller towns riven by deeper prejudices can’t and this act of gathering as a mode, as a practice, has consequences for not only the social fabric but also the futures of collectivity, cultural work, and knowledge-production in South Asia: in knowing this potential lies much of Karachi LaJamia’s intervention, rooted as it is in a redemptive love for the urban.

In Jinnealogy, an evocative study that explores the relationship between the bureaucracy and the secularisation of the sacred geographies of Delhi, Anand Vivek Taneja writes:

We have lost so much that we are largely unaware that we have lost anything, even though we are surrounded, in Delhi, by the traces of the departed… We must be able to imagine the lost past in order to realize that we have lost it. But the imagination is a language too — one that needs to be learned. To make the mute remains of the desert campsite speak, one must know a whole grammar of trace and gesture, an entire language of longing, a way of inhabiting the traces of the beloved.¹⁴

Karachi LaJamia’s practice is in making that learning possible, in developing the faculty for that imagination — and the music for those languages — in the tradition of all great creative practice; in weaving and threading the ecological, the sacred, and the urban into a braid, in illustrating that “like the braid of Malir, collective study is also a coming together.”

Title image: An image of an engagement in Karachi conducted as part of Hamare Siyal Rishte (2021–Ongoing).    

Note: The title of this essay is an allusion to Faiz Ahmad Faiz’s poem ‘Yahaan Se Sheher Ko Dekho’/ ‘If You Look at the City from Here’      

All images courtesy @ Karachi LaJamia.