AFTER my last column on Balochistan was published, a reader requested a follow-up on Sindh and its literary representations, because “Sindh and Sindhis too are suffering in Pakistan”. In her recent article ‘Who has Sin’d?’ Ayesha Siddiqa makes a similar link between the troubled provinces of Balochistan and Sindh. I decided to research Pakistan’s southeast, as depicted in fiction by four women writers.

Sarah Ansari shows in her book about post-Partition Sindh (Life After Partition: Migration, Community and Strife in Sindh 1947-1962) that Karachi has long been a cosmopolitan city. (I will write about this metropolis in a future column). However, rural Sindh has been wrongly stereotyped as a backward outpost, subject to outdated customs, and ruled by landlords, tribal leaders and pirs. In fact, Ansari argues, “change, just as much as continuity was the order of the day”.

Social, economic and political change (and conflict) accelerated with Partition. Sindh was the province to take the largest number of migrants from India in 1947. Amid the optimism of Pakistan’s independence, muhajirs were supposed to be greeted as ‘new Sindhis’. Instead their reception became increasingly hostile as time passed. Many of the muhajirs who came were urban, wealthy, powerful, and believed that Lucknow and Delhi were culturally superior to the cities of Sindh and Punjab. This caused immense animosity, but Kamila Shamsie observes in British Muslim Fictions that “in such extensive migration there are always clashes between indigenous peoples and newcomers”.

One famous example of a Sindhi Hindu who travelled the other way is Bharatiya Janata Party leader and Ayodhya mosque-destroyer Lal Krishna Advani. He was born into a Hindu family in Karachi, and he and his family fled the city in 1947. The horrors of Partition that he witnessed contributed to his opposition to the two-nation theory and disdain for Muslims.

Urdu poet Fahmida Riaz was born in Uttar Pradesh but soon afterwards Partition propelled her family to Hyderabad in central Sindh. Her English-language story ‘The Daughters of Aai’ appears to be autobiographical fiction. Some village women come to Karachi to seek help from the narrator, a well-known, left-wing authoress. These women procreate at a young age: the main petitioner Aai is only 35 or 40 and she comes to plead for her mentally-disabled daughter Fatimah, who is pregnant. Fatimah has been raped, not for the first time, by an unknown assailant. It is too late for an abortion, but Aai fears an ‘honour’ killing may ensue if her condition is publicised. Eventually a local landlord’s new second wife, who has been faking a pregnancy to shore up her position, finds out about Fatimah and asks for the baby. When Fatimah returns to the village after the birth and secret adoption, the other women pretend she was possessed by djinns and is now a holy woman.

This dénouement reminds one of Qaisra Shahraz’s debut novel The Holy Woman, which is about the Sindhi virgin Zarri Bano. When her brother dies suddenly, Bano’s father breaks off her engagement, since she is now his heir. He forces her to ‘marry’ the Quran and retain her inherited land for the family’s patriarchs. This cruel practice occurs in parts of Sindh and elsewhere in Pakistan. The Prevention of Anti-Women Practices Bill 2008 (passed in 2011) made it illegal, but this does not stop it fascinating writers. In Tariq Ali’s Night of the Golden Butterfly, the Sindhi character Zaynab marries the Quran to keep the money in the family. But Bina Shah, in her latest book A Season for Martyrs, which I discuss later, describes marriage with the Quran as one amongst a raft of myths associated with Sindhis.

In Pakistani-American Shaila Abdullah’s debut collection Beyond the Cayenne Wall, the story ‘Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Dust’ focuses on the “dying fishing industry” in a fictional town a 100 miles outside Karachi. The community portrayed are probably Makranis, Balochi-Sindhi fisherfolk. After protagonist Dhool’s husband loses his trawling livelihood, she becomes a rag-picker in Karachi, scavenging for scraps she and her four children can survive on. She leaves her husband when he accepts a proposal for their eldest daughter from an older man to pay his gambling debts. Returning to their shack one day, she finds that the predatory groom has carried off her barely pubescent daughter.

Another story, ‘Demons of the Past’, features a California-based, Karachi-raised woman, Siham, going to interior Sindh to confront the biological mother who gave her up for adoption. In the “timeless heritage” of this house which calls to mind “a castle in the fairy tales of Alif Laila”, Siham demands to know the truth about the father who impregnated her mother at 15. Reluctantly, the matriarch confesses that her dad was the one who raped her, so that Siham’s grandfather “was also [her] father!” In a sensationalist manner, Abdullah’s stories give the impression of a Sindh throbbing with such wounds as incest and child marriage.

Bina Shah’s A Season for Martyrs unfolds in Sindh of various eras, including the mid-18th century world of poet-mystic Shah Abdul Latif, and 1843 when Sir Charles Napier allegedly wrote his victory joke ‘Peccavi’, or ‘I have sinned/Sindh’. The contemporary storyline of 2007-2008 traces Benazir Bhutto’s return to and subsequent assassination in Pakistan.

Despite its historical strands, the narrative is defiantly modern, contrasting with earlier portrayals of Sindh as retrograde. The main character Ali is angered by the dominant media image of “Sindhis as bloodthirsty plantation owners who kept their poor peasants in chains and raped the village girls and chased down runaway bonded labourers with dogs”. Ali recalls 1990 when muhajirs in Hyderabad killed 130 Sindhis; his selective memory neglects the Sindhi reprisals against muhajirs that ensued.

Sindh’s diversity is evoked through the fact that Ali’s girlfriend Sunita and his colleague Ram are both Hindus. Readers are reminded of Muslims’ and Hindus’ long cohabitation in Sindh and the syncretism that sometimes led to joint worship at rural Sufi shrines. But this is no narrowly pro-Sindhi narrative, and Shah is even-handed about “the alphabet soup that made up Pakistani politics: PPP, PML, Q, N, F, ANP [Awami National Party], BNP [Balochistan National Party], MQM [Muttahida Qaumi Movement] — everyone jockeying for a piece of the very valuable pie”. What’s more, despite her popularity in much of Sindh, Benazir is far from being idealised in this narrative, and Shah is alert to her flaws and corruption. The narrative voice concedes that travel to rural Sindh seems like a “step back in time”, and waderas or landowners are a mixed bunch, some corrupt and lascivious, and others honourable.

Common threads that bind these writers’ representations of Sindh are their interest in women’s oppression and methods of protest. To varying degrees, they explore women’s labour, participation in religious life, and their place in feudal society. Riaz, Abdullah, and Shahraz treat rural Sindh as a backdrop and are critical of its patriarchal culture. Shah brings the region to front and centre, and warns against accepting received ideas about Sindh. Hope lies in the women characters’ resourcefulness, ingenuity and faith, which James C. Scott would call “weapons of the weak”. Although Scott scrutinises Malaysia and is concerned with class rather than gender, his identification of “the tenacity of self-preservation — in ridicule, in truculence, in irony, in petty acts of non-compliance, in foot dragging, in dissimulation” is applicable to Sindhi females resistance to intersectional oppressions. In different ways, all four authors position women as the vehicle of empowerment, sovereignty and human rights in Sindh.

CLAIRE CHAMBERS teaches global literature at the University of York and is the author of the forthcoming book Britain Through Muslim Eyes: Literary Representations, 1780-1988.