Empires of the Indus

by Alice Albinia

  More popular in Pakistan than Lahore’s own movies is the 1983 film made by the Indian director Kamal Amrohi of the Razia Sultana story. Watching a pirate copy bought in Karachi’s Rainbow Bazaar, I am bemused to see that the Punjabi film star Dharmendra was cast as Yaqut the Ethiopian. During the course of the film, Dharmendra’s famously pale complexion waxes and wanes. In tender love scenes, he is fair and lovely as usual; only when his character is angry or anxious does his skin colour darken. It is almost as if the film-makers could not countenance a black romantic lead–only a black character as victim or threat. Towards the end of the film, Razia’s minister denounces her relationship with Yaqut as a ‘blemish on Turks. We Turks are white. Our blood too is white. Turks will never agree to an alliance with a black. This Turk girl thinks that Yaqut is a human being.’ The film was presumably meant as a critique of such racism, but with its ambivalent portrayal of Yaqut it did little to counteract the Bollywood stereotype.

  Bollywood’s pale-hued aesthetic, of course, is merely a reflection of India’s ancient prejudice. The Sanskrit law books of classical Hinduism, and those of the Jains and Buddhists, proscribe contact between the upper and low ‘black’ castes. In the nineteenth century, when European scholars began translating India’s oldest Sanskrit text, the Rig Veda, some read into it a primordial clash between the immigrant authors (the arya, hence Aryans) and the indigenous population. In his History of India (1920), Vincent Smith canonized this image with a description typical of imperial racism that contrasts the colonizing Aryans (‘tall, fair, long-nosed and handsome’) with the ‘aborigines’ (‘short, dark, snub-nosed and ugly’).

  The Rig Veda theory has long since been discredited, partly because this ancient text is simply too obscure and abstruse to deliver neat hypotheses, but also because the Europeans appeared to be reading their own racism and colonizing project into a literature arguably innocent of such intentions. Even in the nineteenth century there were some scholars who were by no means sure that the references to the enemy’s ‘blackness’ meant their skin. Could the authors of the Rig Veda be referring to the clouds, or the night, or the ‘spirits of darkness’? Perhaps they were asking their god to chase away the rain clouds from their grazing pastures. But the damage had been done: the clash of skin colour predicated between two sectors of India’s population invaded the national psyche. With ancient Hindu skin-colour consciousness, immigrant Muslim superiority and British racial stereotyping, attitudes to skin colour in India were never simple.

  It is unsurprising, then, that in south India, where the population speak non-Sanskrit-based languages and skin tone is generally darker than in the north, a movement has grown up portraying Indian history in those old colonial terms, as a clash between white invaders and black aborigines. The ‘Dravidians’, as they call themselves in the south, draw explicit parallels between their own perceived plight two thousand years ago, and those of African slaves in the Americas. A controversial Internet polemic, The Bible of Aryan Invasions, calls upon ‘Dravidians all across the world…to realize that their suffering at the hands of Caucasoids did not start in the eighteenth century with the rise of plantation slavery in the South, but dates back several centuries and started with the Aryan invasion of India’.

  If Indian racism was rooted in the caste system, and reinforced by British colonialism, then it would follow that the creation of an independent, caste-free Islamic country in 1947 should have simplified life for Sheedis. But many of the Mohajirs who migrated into the country at Partition considered themselves to be of Turkish, Arabic or Persian stock, and the racism with which they regarded the indigenous populations–the more populous Bengalis far away to the east of India, as well as the local Sindhis–is well documented. And so, while as Muslims in an Islamic country the process of assimilation should have been fairly easy for Pakistan’s Sheedis, because of their African features they were often treated with derision.

  Today, Sheedis are divided on the issue of their African descent. In Sindh–where a ‘Black Power’ movement briefly flourished in the 1960s–Sheedis are proud to be black; proud, as Iqbal says, that their physical appearance links them to a worldwide community of ‘African brothers and sisters’.

  But things are different for the Negroid Makrani population along the Baluchistan coast, west of Karachi. Initial scientific research on a small sample group of these people showed a weak link–12 per cent of paternal Y-chromosomes–to sub-Saharan Africa. (If it is true, however, that women were the subcontinent’s slave majority, and that ‘mixed’ Sheedis often have a non-Sheedi paternal heritage, analysis of maternal mitochondrial DNA would have made more sense.) Whatever their exact genetic make-up, the Negroid Makranis who have intermarried with local tribes, taken local names and adopted local customs, prefer to forget, ignore or deny their ancestors’ origins. Partly, this reflects the extent to which they have been assimilated into Baluchi society. But it is also symptomatic of the stigma that Negroid features carry in this society.

  In Karachi, a Baluch-Sheedi friend, Khuda Ganj, offers to help me investigate the city’s African history. He takes me on the back of his turquoise Vespa through Lyari, where he lives, to meet a local journalist. ‘His mother,’ says Khuda Ganj, ‘was a Sheedi. Maybe he can tell you about Sheedi culture.’ Khuda Ganj’s own interests lie more with economic than racial emancipation. ‘Fifteen years ago my house was a Communist cell,’ he shouts back at me as we veer round a corner, swerve to avoid a chicken and skim across an open sewer.

  We arrive at the aptly named Mombasa Street, where the journalist lives, and are ushered into his office. But it soon becomes clear that the journalist does not consider himself to be a Sheedi, despite his maternal heritage. He quickly loses his temper with my questions. ‘We never use the word “Sheedi”,’ he says. ‘Culturally, linguistically, these people are Baluch. In Sindh they call themselves Sindhis. African culture has no relevance. Some people have a vested interest in being “Sheedi” in order to get government benefits. This is their racket. Why are you studying these things? Why are you highlighting black people? I am fed up with black issues.’

  Dismissing my question about Mombasa Street with an impatient wave of his hand, he says: ‘This whole area of Lyari is called “Baghdadi”. My people migrated from Baghdad, Syria, the Middle East. Not from Africa.’

  I climb back on to Khuda Ganj’s scooter, and we drive on, to visit another friend of his, a Communist party member with pictures of Che Guevara all over his sitting-room walls. ‘You must go into the interior,’ the Communist says (meaning rural Sindh, as it is known to city-dwellers). ‘In Badin town you will find Sheedis who are proud of their African heritage. There you can meet the descendants of Muhammad Siddiq, a Sheedi writer and educationalist known to his community by his pen-name, “Mussafir”.’

  So it is that early one morning I eventually take my leave of the fisherpeople I have been staying with in Thatta, and drive east through the threadbare settlements which line the road into the desert. My taxi arrives at high noon in Badin, a town of such pleasing diminutiveness that donkey carts and horse-drawn victorias are the only public transport and the Mubarak Bakery (with its salt-sweet cumin-flecked biscuits, bottles of pop and bundles of soap) is the smartest shop. It is in Badin that the modern network for Sheedis has converged under the auspices of the Young Sheedi Welfare Organization (YSWO), run by Iqbal and founded by Faiz Muhammad Bilali, a tall serious advocate, with a face as grave as his wife’s smile is wide.

  YSWO was started twenty years ago to improve the educational prospects of Sheedi children in the area. Back then only thirteen Sheedi children in Badin district went to school. (Iqbal was one of them.) Recently, and it is a measure of the community’s success, YSWO has broadened its mandate to include any deprived social group in the vicinity, and there are plenty of those. In particular, it supports the Muslim and Hindu villagers whose livelihoods were ruined after the infamously expensive and faulty Indus drainage canal burst its mud banks in 2003 and poured i
ndustrial effluent and sewage all over their fields and homes. Here in Badin, the Indus is not known for its fecundity. It is known, rather, for its lack: for the impoverished trickle of water supplied to farmers through concrete canals, and for the hellish deluge of waste water that passes through the district on the way to the sea. (And thus each Badin home, including ours, receives diluted sewage as drinking water.)

  When I arrive in Badin, I plan to be away from Thatta for a day. The Sheedis at YSWO, however, assume that I am staying throughout the marriage season–or at least until all girls of marriageable age in the office have been betrothed. They present me with a red tie-dyed shalwar kameez, see off my taxi driver, and I am ushered along the town’s back streets to my new accommodation. ‘But all my spare cash is in Thatta,’ I say to Iqbal. ‘We can lend you some money,’ he says. ‘Is there anything else you need?’ Thus begins my residence in Badin, one that will last for five weeks, until the start of the Islamic month of Muharram.

  I am to stay in the house of Faiz Muhammad Bilali, with his family of forty-four people: stepmother, siblings, spouses, offspring, and offspring’s offspring. Faiz Muhammad is the eldest of three brothers, each of whom has a different surname, after the famous Africans of early Islam. Faiz Muhammad is ‘Bilali’ (from Bilal), his middle brother is ‘Qambrani’ (after the slave freed by Ali) and the youngest is ‘Sheedi’ (friend of the Prophet).

  It is in this house that that I discover just how fundamental family relations are to people’s lives in Sindh. Every time a visitor or friend from town is introduced to me, the varying degrees of separation from the Bilali house are laid out like a map–‘my uncle’s wife’s brother’s daughter’s husband’. If the house is the focal point of the social lives of forty-four people, the calm centre of this whirlwind is the grandmother, Addi Vilayat, whose own name means literally ‘Sister from Abroad’. She sits all day in the large central courtyard, preparing food, drinking tea and greeting newcomers, as her three daughters-in-law and all their children swirl around her. Some of the household’s women work as housewives; others pull burqas over their heads and walk through the streets of Badin to school, to their jobs in the Young Sheedi office, or to a women’s sewing centre. The men come and go. At mealtimes they hover like hungry, forgotten ghosts–though once I witnessed a young father cooking his children dinner (a thing as rare in Pakistan as a free and fair election).

  On my first day in the house, a thin mattress is unrolled from the pile on the verandah and laid out for me in the room where Addi Vilayat and four of Faiz Muhammad’s daughters also sleep, between the wardrobe (where the girls’ gold and silk wedding trousseaux are locked away) and the bathroom door, such is the pressure for space in this ever-expanding house. Then these teenage and twenty-something women sit me down in the shadow at the edge of the courtyard, so that our toes dabble in sunshine, and explain. ‘Sheedis,’ they say, using the English phrase, ‘have gender-balance.’ Men are known as ‘the husband of so-and-so’, not the other way round. Children can opt to take their mother’s family name. ‘My husband and I,’ says Baby, a whip-thin woman coiffed in spangly combs and clips, ‘live here in my parents’ house.’ Her husband is the ghostliest of the ghosts: he shares Baby’s room, three doors down from mine, but in the weeks that I spend in the house, I never once meet him.

  Elsewhere in the world, the proverbial cheerfulness of black people–the ‘happy-go-lucky singing-dancing Negro’–has been derided as a stereotype, but it is in similar terms that Faiz Muhammad’s daughters describe themselves to me. ‘Leva is very important to us,’ they say. ‘It came from Africa. Humein dukh nahin lagta–we never feel sorrow–only laughter. Sindhi culture is so sad and gloomy; there are too many problems for women–karokari [honour-killing], dowry–but there is nothing like that here. We manage to ignore these things and be happy.’

  Nevertheless, this is also a house of divergent, sometimes conflicting, interests. Faiz Muhammad Bilali has worked all his life for the social emancipation of his people, and is emphatic about the importance of the link between Sheedis and Africans elsewhere in the world. ‘All our education and improvements in status are due to the work of Mussafir,’ he says, referring to the man I was told about in Lyari. ‘He instructed us to be proud of our African culture. Our grandfathers used to know some African words. We still have our mugarman drum and songs. We support the West Indies in cricket and have read Nelson Mandela’s book in the Sindhi translation. Muhammad Ali, America ka King Luther [Martin Luther King], Booker T. Washington, Kofi Annan: we think of these American Sheedis as our brothers. But the Sheedis in America went ahead, and we lagged behind. If it hadn’t been for social injustice, Sheedi people would have risen higher. This is our great sadness.’

  His middle brother, however, who spent many years working as a government clerk, has recently become a pious Wahhabi Muslim. For the Wahhabi and his children, this purist form of Islam is their most important social marker. Every morning I am woken before dawn, as the Wahhabi marches around the house, banging on each dormitory door to wake the family for prayers. (Every morning the women in my dormitory roll over and go back to sleep.)

  For some of the Wahhabi’s eight children, Africanness is a source of shame, not pride. Ever since the youngest daughter was eleven years old, she and her sisters have been using skin-lightening cream; they aspire to transcend the boundaries of Pakistani society by changing their skin colour. Their brother, who has a comparatively lucrative job on a nearby British Petroleum oilfield, set the example by marrying a fair-skinned non-Sheedi girl: ‘I do not want to be ashamed of my wife wherever I go,’ his cousins tell me he said. There is general exclamation among these girls when I say that ‘Sheedis’ in America and Europe call themselves ‘black’: ‘To us it is an insult.’ They look up to Michael Jackson, a ‘world-famous Sheedi’, but also a Sheedi who has successfully obliterated his African image.

  Although Faiz Muhammad’s daughters are proud of their blackness, even they at times succumb to the monolithic Pakistani ideal of beauty. When the eldest daughter comes to be married, every evening for weeks leading up to the ceremonies, she bleaches the skin on face, hands and feet (those parts of her body which will be visible beneath her wedding garments). A pale bride is an obligation for the family–even if everyone knows it is fake. ‘It is only for the marriage photos,’ she says apologetically; ‘otherwise I will be laughed at for my blackness.’

  All month, in preparation for the wedding, the girls strut around the courtyard, practising Bollywood dance songs. Although Faiz Muhammad speaks enthusiastically about the mugarman drum, there are no plans to have one at his daughter’s wedding. Nor will they be dancing the leva, as at the village wedding I went to with Iqbal. The family does not own a mugarman drum. Nobody in Badin does. ‘You will have to go to Tando Bago to find one,’ says Iqbal. Then he adds: ‘You can visit the tomb of Mussafir while you are there. It is as important for Sheedis as that of Hosh Muhammad in Hyderabad.’

  Rural Tando Bago–a village thirty kilometres to the northeast–is at the other end of the spectrum from Sheedi social advancement in urbane Badin. Here there are old men and women who can still remember words and songs in African languages; who play the mugarman; and who tell stories of their ancestors’ journeys. Yet the caste system is entrenched: Tando Bago’s Sheedis work only as labourers, and live in Kandri Paro, a ghetto set apart from the houses of their fair-skinned employers.

  I drive to Tando Bago with Kulsoom, Iqbal’s wife, who was born there. The houses in Kandri Paro are small and cramped, made of tumble-down brick, and without the spacious courtyards found in the rest of the village. They open directly on to the street: the women sit at their front doors, peeling vegetables and calling out to their neighbours. It does not take long to find the one man in Kandri Paro with a mugarman. He plays it for me, but half-heartedly: the buffalo skin on the top is ripped, and it will take them months to raise the funds to repair it.

  Kulsoom leads me along the main street to visit Tan
do Bago’s oldest and most venerable resident. Mianji Phoota claims to be one hundred years old. He sits bolt upright outside his rickety brick house, with its unkempt thatched roof, on a sagging charpay bed. Kulsoom and I sit on a charpay facing him. ‘Our community began,’ he says, ‘with a wife and husband who came from Africa as slaves. All they had was a drum. They don’t know where they had come from, only that they had been bought by the Talpurs. The wife was made the wet nurse of the Talpur children. They were our ancestors.’

  From the neighbouring house, octogenarian Papu calls out: ‘My people knew where they came from–Zanzibar.’ Later she says, ‘In those days blackness was a sign of poorness.’ Sheedis intermarried only with the other poor castes: the Mallahs (fisherpeople), the Khaskeli (labourers), the Katri (dyeing caste) and Kori (clothmakers); hence the ‘mixed’ Sheedis, like Iqbal’s wife, with their straight noses and lighter skin. ‘But we say that as long as your hair is curled you are a Sheedi,’ says Papu, stroking Kulsoom’s coiled locks.

  Papu’s assertion, that her ancestors came from Zanzibar, is matched by several academic studies linking East and Southern African culture with the subcontinent’s Sheedi communities. A North American musicologist found that an African family in the Deccan, India, sang an old folksong identical to one she had recorded in Tanzania. There are some known Swahili-language survivals among the ‘Black Sidis’ of Gujarat in India; and Sheedi tribal names from Sindh, recorded by Richard Burton in the nineteenth century, have been linked to Swahili-speaking tribes. The four-footed mugarman drum, unique in the subcontinent, is considered to be a relative of the ngoma drum from Zimbabwe. Even Mali enters the picture. In Lyari, Khuda Ganj played me the music of Ali Farka Touré, which has recently become popular with Sheedis there because its rhythms are considered similar to those played by Pakistan’s famous Sheedi musicians such as the late Bilawal Beljium.