Of Land and Longing

A dear diary of sorts, before I can gather my thoughts to write more coherently.

In a film by Shabnam Virmani “How Can I Forget? - The Legend Of Marui”, Rita Kothari talks about Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai's Sur Marui. Here Bhittai Sahab tells us the story of Umar Soomra II, the rule of what is now Sindh and Rajhastan, and Marui, a woman from the village Malir. Umar heard of Marui’s beauty in his court and was told that such beauty only belonged in his castle. So, he leaves for Malir and tries to convince Marui to come with him, promising her the riches of Umarkot, telling her:

Come with me Marui,

I’ll decorate you in gold!

Drop your rugged shawl,

Don my priceless robes!

Marui, of course, resists:

Keep your precious clothes,

I’ll burn them all to ashes!

She also reminds him of her love for Malir:

My joyous destiny is sifting

the sweet berries of Malir,

My place, O King,

is in the jungle

Enraged by her refusal, Umar kidnaps her and takes her to his fort where she keeps lamenting for Malir and asks to be taken back. After years of imprisonment, Umar eventually does return Marui to her Malir. He realizes that you cannot replace a beloved.

In the film, Rita Kothari asks that when Bhittai sahab talks about the concept of Malir, is he expressing it not as a geographic place but rather a sikk, longing, or remembrance for home and for the self? It should be noted that the film explores this through the fuzziness of Sindhi-Hindu identities and partition. As someone who is neither Hindu or Sindhi really, but we'll talk about that in a bit, nor has experienced partition, I believe it is not my place to talk about that. What I do want to explore is this sikk for home and the self.

This is one of those words that is so incredibly difficult to translate that I don’t want to attempt it. If I were to describe its essence, I would hold it akin to longing with love, invoking a nostalgia that stirs you. Somehow, it’s difficult to translate into English, but in Balochi sikk becomes zahirwaari (wistful nostalgia) or traanag (remembrance). Perhaps it’s not the translation that is the problem here, but my relationship with the languages.

But for this piece’s sake, where does my sikk begin?

The stories I’ve heard of my people are those of being nomads, of moving around the Iranian Plateau, making our way to Balochistan and roaming between the Kacchi plains all the way to the Indus. I often refer to myself as an indigenous person, not because I can trace thousands of years of history on this land, but because I don’t think I have anything but my land. Where does that land begin and end? I couldn’t tell you. Until a century and a half ago, my ancestors were in the foothills of the Keerthar mountains and then they began their journey westwards. I don’t know why they moved or what that must’ve been like, but every evening when the sun sets just the right amount, I can see the outline of the Keerthar.

The British drew their borders, and people have certainly maintained labels based on those borders, but where do the borderless go?

What does it really mean to be Baloch when you reach the borders? I don’t think the identities blur necessarily. I think they become less rigid. The definition of being Baloch no longer seems easily expressible in ordinary terms. Because what of those who don’t know their language, or the ones who replaced theirs, or the ones who find a home in all the languages they know? I come across people that discount Baloch identities if they live anywhere beyond Sandeman and Goldsmith’s borders. The arbitrary lines barely matter now. The same violence exists for you if you’re a Buledi in Kandhkot or a Mazari in Taunsa, perhaps under a different name. If not the same violence, then the memories of violence remain. If it was the military that exiled the Bugtis from their land, I’m not sure if the Magsis exiling farmers from their lands is any different. The strange thing is that people see spilt blood as different from starved stomachs. Except, we don’t. To us, it is one and the same. The same violence. The same ones that perpetrate. The same bodies that bear it.

People in my family often remark that we live in a bar, a wasteland. We toiled for the angrez to build their canal system, to make the wasteland abad, just for Pakistan to take it away. But they will always return to this bar despite their words. They will return when there is no water, they will return when the sun scorches their backs, and they will return when the floods wash their lives away, again, and again.

After the reconfigurations of the canal system and climate change, my land has become empty fields dusted in white, always reminding us of what was, what happened, and what is. There are births that are remembered for the floods that they witnessed. There are those that are remembered for empty stores and stomachs. Somehow blood is split here, even there aren’t any weapons involved.

I visited my grandmother’s village for the first time when I was 16. It was empty and quiet. The quiet bothered me, but to ask anything meant to stir memories. No one wanted to speak the violence into existence. The stories would spill out of course, of abductions, of killings, of guns held to heads, and I would start to understand why everyone has become so comfortable with the quiet.

Has being of this land always meant watching it be ravaged, or being ravaged with it?

Whenever it rains, my mother comments in Balochi, “Mulk Malir bezh’a” [The land has become Malir]. In her words, Malir exists as an ideal, of what could be, what we sometimes see the glimpses of. Marui’s Malir was in the physical sense, empty, a desert, yet to her it was greater than the riches of Umarkot. I thought that we had perhaps misinterpreted Bhittai sahab along the way, thinking of Malir as a beautiful place when it was just home.

Umar couldn’t understand why Marui preferred her bar to his riches. I wonder if those who visit know that our love is for the bar, the empty land, it becomes beautiful because it is ours, not because it is beautiful to begin with. Marui wasn’t Baloch, but I understand her, I think she would understand me too.

I talked to my mother about this a bit more, curious about why the rugged mountains of Quetta or the suffocating empty plains of Kacchi, felt like Malir to us. Does home really become more beautiful because its home? Or is that ‘aesthetically pleasing’ ceases to exist when it comes to our own land?

The earliest narratives around conservation and in a way around the conceptualization of nature always based themselves on and around beauty. The father of conservation John Muir believed that nature should be untouched and pristine, a belief that he extended to aesthetically beautiful lands. Interestingly, the places where he wanted to establish national parks were also homes to indigenous groups, who were of course, violently removed.

We have our own stories like that. The Indus Delta and its mangroves are to be untouched, not to be interacted with. How could I explain to them that the life in the Indus that extends into these mangroves, also extends to the generations that have lived with and taken care of them. I think the Native American enemies of John Muir would perhaps understand the people of the Indus Delta far more than the ones that will read this.

Inquilab flows in Baloch blood, that’s what I have heard my entire life. Those who fight are memorialized, even if the fight isn’t, even if what they were fighting for isn’t. The Baloch find aesthetics of revolting for this land quite beautiful. The sentiment mostly exists in the music, often uninterpretable to the outsiders, maybe for our own good. There is probably a very interesting media studies piece in there if anyone dares to write about it.

I’m always apprehensive of people talking about a Baloch quom. The Baloch have always existed in pieces, and we forget that often. We were meant to be borderless, fluid, maybe that’s why I find the fight for azaadi so hard to accept. What of the people that Chakar left in Punjab? Or of those that broke their backs to win land in Sindh? What of the kin that is not Baloch but of this land? Will they be asked to leave? There was never really a quom so to speak, ever in history as far as we know it, at least for any purpose other than war. I suppose that is still true today.

I started writing thinking about Marui, and I am still thinking about her. She said she will live when her dead body is buried in Malir. That seems rather revolutionary, doesn’t it? To live even if you are dead, so as long as you are of your land. She seems to exemplify the same stubborness of the people around me. It started out as a fight for an arbitrary Balochistan as drawn up by the British, led by the most powerful families from the most powerful tribes. I think most people admitted defeat there. But really, I wonder, if the ones up there know that the fever dream is alive once again, borne this time out of anger and vengeance rather than anything else. People want to die for the homeland again, except it’s a homeland that has been imagined. This fervor that exists seems to thrive off nostalgia and seeks to restore a memory.

Among us, there is sikk, remembrance, but I wonder for what.