Cosmopolistan

Abstract

One afternoon in the mid-1990s, when the army used to heavily patrol the campus of the University of Karachi to prevent violent clashes between student organizations associated with various ethnically organized political parties, I had a conversation with four students about culture. All four—two girls, two boys; one student of history, two of business administration, one of mathematics—were Muhajirs, that is, children of families who had migrated from India to Pakistan after independence in 1947. All of them described their family background as “modest,” the common term for families who were not overly rich nor overly poor, living in one of the fast-growing and overpopulated neighborhoods that had been built in the barren desert lands along the small and often dry Lyari river; families who valued formal education as highly as they valued Islam as the road to improvement and development, both in concrete personal matters and more abstractly in terms of the nation’s progress. All of them spoke Urdu and some English, all of them were jealous of me because of the opportunities I had to travel abroad and meet foreign people, and all of them cherished practical, middle-class ambitions such as a job with some security and a reasonable salary and a family life that combined the best elements of both the extended and the nuclear family system.