“Pakistan is undergoing a silent, youth-led cultural revolution,” said Bilal Hassan (commonly referred to by his internet alias, MystaPaki) in a viral Instagram reel covering the developments of the Pakistani music scene. The reel highlighted the growth of an organic, grassroots-led cultural movement in the face of restrictions, crisis and religious extremism, with virtually zero state support.

It is true that there is a cultural revolution taking place in Pakistan, highlighted by its music scene. Within it, hip hop has taken its rightful place, with the likes of Talha Anjum and Talha Yunus spearheading the cultural shift.

But if one were to hold a magnifying glass to the rap duo’s journey, one would find a struggle of over a decade backed by and representing a certain cultural movement in Karachi, pejoratively referred to as ‘mailas’.

Canonising the ‘burger’ and ‘maila’

Big cities have always been known for their home-grown styles, their unique dress codes, their calling-card music. Think London when you think punk, think New York City when you think rap, think New Orleans when you think jazz.

With local artists chronicling the city’s unique culture and ecosystem in their lyrics, Karachi can finally be regarded as a global city. In doing so, the talented duo immortalised its culture even as they grew it, acting as both historians and artists in the same body of work.

Today, Urdu rap has become a cultural juggernaut, growing beyond Pakistan to a sizeable base of fans in India and beyond. It was arguably pioneered and definitely put on the map by two young Karachiites, the two Talhas, collectively known as “Young Stunners”, bursting onto the scene with a viral slew of singles, such as ‘Burger e Karachi’ and ‘Maila Majnu’. These singles were spread through mp3 players and new smartphones in school buses; you had to know them and understand the rapid-fire references if you wanted to prove that you knew Karachi like an insider.

When Pakistan suppressed ethnic identities and cultures, it failed to find an equally rich replacement. These local Soulja Boys articulated how your life in Karachi could be so wildly different based on the area you lived in that little existed to make you feel like you truly belonged to the city. Yunus and Anjum possessed a unique ability to map the cultural strata of the city and they were deft, precise and brief. In just two songs, they canonised the ‘burger’ and the ‘maila’.

Becoming spokespeople for both, middle and working-class youth, the Talhas drew a derisive sketch of a group of elite youth who ruled Karachi’s society, while living on the city’s peripheries. Their astute observations propelled them to fame among an audience of urban youth who felt sidelined in their own city. The cultural commentary in Burger e Karachi was followed by Maila Majnu, canonising a subculture that informed much of their fanbase.

According to sociologist Mike Brake, subcultures distinguish themselves by their style. This style is marked by their gait, lingo and fashion. Quoting Young Stunners themselves, mailas are known for dressing in “skinny jeans, upar laal shirt aur chashmay neelay peelay” (red shirt on top and yellow purple sunglasses), hanging around Sea View and Atrium Mall and cursing: “wo galiyan jo aap aur mein tou de nahi sakte” (curse words that me and you can’t even utter) they write.

As the lyrics go, mailas dress in westernised clothings while not adhering to their colour coordination rules. Their attacks on cultural norms and values continue with their use of abusive language. Although cursing in Karachi is not uncommon — in fact, one could argue it is embedded in the city’s culture — mailas stand out by their use of ‘vulgar’ Urdu curse words, challenging the boundaries of ‘respectability’, put in place by our colonisers at first and now proudly succeeded by the English-speaking elite/middle class.

The song holds mailas in contempt for their working-class tastes, with the line “yeh woh loug hein jo aap aur mein tou ho nahi sakte” (these are the people me and you cannot be). One would expect due ire from mailas for this kind of betrayal. This was acknowledged by the rap duo in the very same song with “Mera pichhla gana inn ka favourite song hai, ye sunn kar bolein ge ‘jani ye tou bohat wrong hai’” (My previous song was their favourite, when they hear this song they will say ’this is very wrong). But the rage never seemed to ignite, perhaps because it was taken with humour.

The word maila, which translates to “dirty”, signals something sinister. The connotations behind maila are not only working-class but also darker-skinned. The cultural desire to discipline and improve the maila is considered an objective good, instead of an attempt to “civilise”, just one of many in Pakistan’s hidden and unacknowledged legacy of casteism.

It also mirrors the orientalist mindset of the coloniser and what Stuart Hall calls ‘The West and the Rest’, upon which many de-colonial authors have expanded on. At first, the rest was considered to be a completely distinct entity, incapable of embodying ‘civilisation’, but later, they came to be perceived as one that could be taught to be civilised. From a similar oriental lens of supremacy, upper middle classes too think of working class culture as ‘uncivilised’, which can be taught to do, look and be better. A classic example of such is “etiquette” classes where people are taught to eat, dress and speak in a much more “civil” or “polished” way.

Ethnicity is another factor. The line “khatay hain ye har paanch minute baad chhaliya” (they eat chaaliya every five minutes) expands the profiling beyond class. Maila-pan has been influenced by, and associated with, Muhajir middle and working-class youth. Therefore, the stigma attached to maila-pan is born out of the intersection of underserved youths’ class, ethnic identity and casteism.

MQM and the art of motorcycle shapatri

Understanding how maila-pan came to be can help us understand why a subculture so prominent engages in such self-denial. Many of its signifiers, such as motorbike-riding or the sunglasses or paan, can be seen as the cultural legacy of the Muhajir Qaumi Movement, later renamed Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM), a party with a controversial legacy.

MQM, was a party that grew out of a Muhajir (migrant) student organisation led by a young and charismatic leader named Altaf Hussain. This party is credited for Muhajirs gaining political consciousness and defining themselves as migrants who left everything behind in India to create Pakistan, finding refuge mainly in Sindhi urban centres.

The MQM and its base of youth supporters challenged Jamaat-i-Islami’s (JI) monopoly over Muhajir politics in Karachi. The fomer, with its secular nationalist politics, courted a generation of youth that challenged the lifestyles of their Jamaati fathers.

Slickly dressed in pants and shirts, MQM workers represented the westernisation of the non-privileged classes in Karachi and a movement away from religion-based politics. As they fought to establish power, the MQM created a symbolism to distinguish itself. According to Dr Ayyaz Malick, the mohallas became battlegrounds where street smarts and navigation were refined. MQM foot soldiers were known for their stylised bike-riding through the sprawling web of the city — most learned it to escape or instigate deadly situations. They flaunted these skills as separating urban Muhajirs from rural “simpletons”.

Someone who shows this kind of mastery is bestowed informally with the honorific title of “shapatar”. Unlike in the heyday of MQM, when this skill was developed and used for a certain purpose, it is now more ornamental than utilitarian. At this juncture, mailas can be seen showing off their skills and tricks such as one-wheeling, lying on their stomachs on a speeding motorcycle or simply racing each other, much to the annoyance of other drivers who see this as a road and safety hazard.

No future?

If mailas are so maligned in Karachi, why is the subculture still thriving? The most obvious reason is everyone has the right to keep practising subculture rituals, especially if they have been a big part of their lives for years.

For the middle-class, it might be rebellion against their parents’ upwardly mobile “log kya kaheinge” (what will people say?) respectable ways. Another reason to continue adhering to these norms is that people who seem visibly maila would be generally safer in lower-income areas, which is where they spend most of their time. Not only would they be regarded as residents, they would also be seen as likely to respond with retaliatory violence because of how mailas are seen as reactive — unlike ‘burgers’, who are generally considered to be a soft and easy target.

Maila-pan is a youth-dominated subculture because many go through it as a phase. Ask your parents about the weirdest things their cohorts indulged in their youth and you might find that they used to be inspired by Bollywood movies to the extent that they had a distinguished style (lingo, fashion, gait and the whole shebang). People who spent decades devotedly emulating Amitabh Bachchan have seemed to retain no traces from that era. People grow out of subcultures and young people famously possess very little power, so these subcultures mostly don’t change what being Pakistani means.

Most subcultures start off as delinquencies. A group rebels from the ‘normal’ (or dominant) culture of a society. Some groups rebel while also aspiring towards power in the existing system. “Punk” in the UK started off as an insult targeted at delinquent young kids. It was eagerly repurposed and reclaimed by the counterculture because they wanted to be seen as a menace.

However, there seems to be an unwillingness to own up to maila-pan. Many people I observed were regarded as mailas by others but denied the label by pointing to someone they considered truly maila.

Maila-pan as a subculture exists in an uncomfortable liminal space, where the label is still pejorative. The stigma associated with maila-pan will stick until people stop acting and dressing up in their distinguished styles or the mailas proudly claim their difference. Maila-pan might just end up as one of the many phases different Pakistanis have gone through that they would rather not talk about. However, the only thing that that achieves is a largely homogenous and static Pakistani cultural field.

The question of reclamation or growing out of their lifestyles is not unique to the mailas. It is a question faced by everybody in Karachi, and Pakistan, from every class and background, because the state has attacked ethnicity, sect, region, and almost everything in between, that does not adhere to the dominant status quo. Some have to defend their identities more ferociously than others. From burgers to paindus, from waderas to sardars, from Pakhtuns to Hazaras, everyone is perceived as a juvenile subculture in Karachi. Identifying labels are distorted into insults by being associated with denigrating stereotypes and powerlessness, discouraging them from sharing a common language, culture and fashion. It is thanks to these subcultures that it is impossible to produce a sketch of an archetypal Karachiite.

Karachi, and Pakistan in general, would not be better off if all these individuals with their distinguishing quirks would be disciplined into conforming with the ideals of the dominant culture. If the disciplinarian mentality of Pakistanis to shun diversity continues, Karachi might end up as a homogenous hellscape with no future for the youth to artistically spread their wings.