A Ubiquitous Wetness
This text was written six months after the cataclysmic 2022 floods in Pakistan, which I have also written about earlier here. These floods were widely recognized as an unprecedented catastrophe marking the beginning of a new era in the climate crisis. The disaster primarily hit Pakistan’s southern provinces of Sindh and Balochistan and left most of Sindh, the province that I am from, underwater, killing thousands, and displacing an estimated 33 million people. Struggles around water, and resistance against dam and drainage infrastructures in particular, have been constitutive of the political and cultural identity of Sindh since the inception of Pakistan in 1947. This struggle takes many intrepid and ecstatic forms, often bringing together devotion and dissent, protest and prayer. The sounds shared below were recorded during my travels in the region in the months after the floods.
A Ubiquitous Wetness
In Sindh a common greeting among mystics is ‘Haq maujood’ - the truth is present. To which you would respond: ‘Sada maujood’ - ever present. Haq here is often used to mean ‘truth,’ but it is also one of the 99 names of God - the ultimate, essential truth. Additionally, Haq is used to refer to one’s rights, one’s dues. The truth. Haq maujood. Sada maujood. It is a kind of daily witnessing, a collective affirmation of the truth, the divine, our dues - a singular ubiquity, ever present.
Sindh, ancient and eternal home to heretics and ascetics, renunciates and wanderers, rivers and lakes, rare species of dolphins and some of the world’s most venomous snakes, a drying delta and a bountiful desert, is one of the four provinces that comprise Pakistan. The devastating battering that this land and its inhabitants experienced in the 2022 floods only opened up a new chapter in a long history of brutalities meted out by an extractivist state drunk on development. Dams, canals, barrages to discipline the river, ceaseless construction along natural aquatic pathways, sand mining, the dispossession of water and land from its custodians and caregivers, the death and disappearance of dissidents, the hubris. Months later, while the displaced are sucked deeper and deeper into a relentlessly spiralling web of abject humiliation, injustice and suffering - food shortages, disease, unemployment, homelessness - the state continues to initiate new development projects in collusion with its international accomplices. New enterprises of environmental annihilation and dispossession to add to their ever expanding CV of climate crimes.
I share here three field recordings from March 2023 in three different parts of a Sindh still reeling from the 2022 floods - by a river, by a lake, by the sea. In English, we often refer to rivers, lakes and oceans as ‘bodies’ of water. Just as the colonial relationship to the body is marked by a craven desire for visibility, boundaries and containment, the state’s approach to our aquatic forms is marked by the desire to discipline, shore up and restrain. In The Invention of Rivers, Dilip Dacunha envisions these aquatic forms as not bounded and discrete bodies, not lines in the sand, but as a ubiquitous wetness: ambient, material and immaterial, seen and unseen. Using the example of the river Ganges he writes: ‘People in India apply the name Ganga not just to a river but also to a ubiquity they venerate through the icon of a goddess.’ In perpetual, mysterious flow, the river is dynamic, diffuse, divine - a shape-shifting, ambient, everpresence.
The example of the Ganga also applies here, in Sindh, with the river Indus, Sindhu. Sindhu is what we call our river but also the land that surrounds it. We name our children Sindhu. We were once called daryapanthi - the devotees of the river. Sindhu is not body, it is spirit. This spirit may be witnessed as water, as wetness, but is also encountered in saints, in shrines, in songs.
The recordings that follow are sonic amulets from teachers and guides, some who I sought and others who found me, in sacred, enchanted ecologies preyed upon by militarism, development and infrastructural violence. These invocations are the soundings of a different kind of infrastructure: forms hidden and manifest that shape, mediate and maintain our spiritual, interrealm and interspecies solidarities. These sounds emanate from a sacred geography of shrines, takiyas, thikanas1 that sprawl outwards from the lake to the river and across the Indian Ocean world - the boundless aquatic spirit made manifest.
The Lake: A Bulaava
Oh, I will flow with the waves
God, I will swim through the water
Dil e Badshah Pir Jilani is calling me
Dil e Badshah Pir Jilani is calling me
Oh, I will break branches to make my path
God, I will part the waters to make my path
Oh for my Pir Dastagir
Allah, for my Pir Dastagir
Dil e Badshah Pir Jilani is calling me
Oh, I will flow with the waves
God, I will swim through the water
This song, recorded on a humid afternoon in one of the last remaining boat homes in the Manchar lake, is a response to a bulaava: a sacred invitation, a summoning from a saint. The song states the intention to abide by this call, to set off on an aquatic journey in which devotee and water become one.
Manchar lake, once a thriving habitat revered for its rich biodiversity, is now increasingly a fatal, festering container for toxic effluent dumped by the World Bank and Asian Development Bank funded RBOD (Right Bank Outfall Drain). Not long ago, the fishers of Manchar ate bread made from the abundant lotus flowers, cooked their food in nutrient rich fish oil, ate a variety of strange and beautiful vegetables found nowhere else in Pakistan. The construction of the RBOD began in the 1990s, heavily contested by local communities, setting off the ongoing systematic destruction of this ecology. Today, the lotus rarely bloom, the fish may make you sick, the migratory birds won’t come back. Against this backdrop of disappearance, grief and loss, Manchar is sacred as ever. Shrines sprawl across its peripheries, shrines disappear and reappear from within the tides of the lake. The lake is still the wild site of mysterious encounters, the air above the water is dense with spirits and saints. In another song that afternoon the children sang:
Look, Jilani,
How he brings drowning boats to shore
Badshah Pir, in God’s name, don’t forget me
The spirits and saints of Manchar are loyal witnesses through centuries of deep lake time, through splendour and struggle. Immaterial beings that, as devotees, we too are obligated to loyally witness, to invoke, across time, through abundance and dearth. A witnessing together, against disappearance, of the everpresent aquatic spirit, the truth, our dues.
The Ocean : Zikr
Sindhu ka asli waris, Sindh ka asli waris, Mallah hai
-Haji Mallah2
This recording is from an evening at the home of Fatima Majeed, a renowned fisherfolk activist, and her father Majeed Motani, one of the founders of the Pakistan Fisherfolk Forum. Fatima’s uncle Ayub Mallah, also known as Ibbi chacha, begins by naming all the creeks from Ibrahim Hyderi, where we are seated, all the way to the oceanic border with India. Ibbi chacha’s recitation is a kind of Zikr, remembrance of the divine, in the form of a story narrating the journey of a group of fishermen. After crossing every creek up till Vasta, the fishermen turn back and lay a net. The narrative leads into a long string of invocations of the names of dozens of fish and shellfish, followed by praise and prayer for the wellbeing of the fisher community.
Some of Pakistan’s most violent internal conflicts have erupted over the erasure of local languages. Activist and poet Amar Sindhu once told me that Sindhi political life has been marked by two major struggles – one in defence of our language, and the other in defence of our river. Arfana Mallah, activist and academic, reminded me that these struggles are inextricably linked. We cannot protect our river without protecting our language, and we cannot protect our language without protecting our river. Enfolded in our language is centuries of ecological wisdom from our ancestors. ‘Jab hamari zabaan khatm hojati hai toh hamara dharti se rishta tootne lagta hai,’3 Arfana said. How will we invoke that which we cannot name? How will we converse without the language we co-created with this ecology?
Climate grief. Language grief. Ibbi chacha’s invocations are medicine bringing to life an oceanic world that is rapidly disappearing as it is drawn out of the hands of its custodians: those who know it, those who named it, those who learnt how to love it. Ibbi chacha speaks in an inherited oral tradition to invoke this oceanic world in repetition and ritual, to sound it endlessly into existence.
The River: Humkalam
The sound and the echo are one
If only you knew the secret of sound
- Sur Kalyan, Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai
This recording took place in an imambargah in the hometown of Dr. Bisharat Lanjwani, academic and raagi in the centuries old sonic tradition of Bhit Shah. As Bisharat told us, this town was built around an ephemeral tributary of the river Indus, when the saint Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai paused here in the midst of his travels to build a well. In this recording Bisharat along with Qaim Fakir recites from Sur Sri Raag:
Offer your devotions to the sea,
where boundless waters flow,
where pearls, diamonds, and rubies abound,
If you find even a fraction of its treasures,
devotee you will be complete
Sur Sri Raag is from the risalo of Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai - a sacred compendium of poetry, folklore and praise written at the banks of the river Sindhu. Today, almost 300 years later, the risalo remains a central text in both protest and prayer in Sindh.
When you sound, what you hear is the landscape sounding back at you. Humkalam. When I spoke about this tradition with Bisharat I wanted to learn how to listen. I was moved by his repeated use of the word Humkalam. Kalam is speech, poetics, discourse - and hum as a prefix makes it collective. A humkalam is an interlocutor. Bisharat used the word to describe his relationship with his instrument - the tamboro, invented by the saint Bhittai himself. How he listens and responds to the tamboro as it sounds. How the tamboro listens and responds to him. A kind of sonic solidarity. He used the word Humkalam to describe Bhittai’s ecopoetics, how the text brings a memory of a beloved landscape to life. How Sassui confides in the mountains and Sohni negotiates with the river.4 And he used the word Humkalam to describe the listener - as interlocutor. The listening brings the sound to life. The sound brings the listener to life. A symbiotic witnessing. Humkalam witness, and so enliven, create the world together.
In many cultures today, in the hierarchy of senses, vision is centred, predominant. Images are abundant. Seeing is believing. In many aniconic traditions, however, the sonic is privileged over the seen. Voice is privileged over vision. The divine, invisible and formless, cannot be seen, but is witnessed through the word. The divine cannot be represented visually, but can be invoked in language, in sound: dynamic, indiscrete, unbounded. Like the lake, like the ocean, like the river. Like the ancient, eternal spirits that circulate sonically in our oral traditions, hybrid languages and ecstatic beats. These are the sonic practices through which the living make the dead partners in struggle. Through which the dead make the living partners in struggle. Humkalam.
Acknowledgements:
This text is written alongside my own humkalam: the lake, the river, the ocean and all the sacred life and death they hold and unfold, Dr. Bisharat Lanjwani, Ghulam Ali Buriro, Shahana Rajani, Ayub Mallah, Fatima Majeed, Majeed Motani, Arfana Mallah, Ahmer Naqvi Abdul Majeed Mallah, Haji Mallah, Ahmed Hasan, Saadia Khatri.
Notes:
