Drawing a Shifting Landscape

The Act of Drawing Lines

The colonial maps at the Sindh Archive are full of correction lines that attempt to trace the changing course of the Indus River, and the land at the edge of the delta that was constantly morphing into new contours, as the river made contact with the sea.

In the nineteenth century, year upon year, new boundaries were laid down by colonial officials as this abundantly fertile deltaic land was fixed and propertied. But when the surveyors returned, they always found the delta had shifted, evading and defying their previous lines. They repeated their measuring exercises and set out to make new maps.

These shifting lines haunt the certainty and permeance of the map. They tease and taunt , unravelling the hard cartographic line that separates land from water. For, in the delta, land has a different relationship to water. Landmasses flow and move in sync with the flows of the river, with the rhythms of the sea and the cycles of the moon. In this soaking ecology, the logic of the map breaks down.

What does it mean to map a shifting, mobile landscape, or to anchor permanent forms to impermanent things?

In the delta, we are repeatedly told that the river has the highest claim on land.

The earliest colonial map of the Indus Delta was made by Alexander Burnes during his spy mission of 1831. While docked at Hyderabad, Burnes made several voyages to the mouths of the Indus creeks. In his memoir, he talks at length about the unpredictable banks which made navigation in the delta’s “foul and muddy” waters both dangerous and difficult. In places, he writes, “the water is cast with such impetuosity from one bank to another that the soil is constantly falling in upon the river and huge masses of clay hourly tumble into the stream, often with a tremendous crash.” He describes the frequency with which the creeks get silted up, often moving the position of the mouths of the river. It is clear from his descriptions that land is constantly being made and remade by water. Yet, he claims with great pride and conviction: “a map of [all the mouths of the river], now lay before me.”

Seven years later, colonial officials were sent to Karachi to survey and map its coast in preparation for conquest. What the British found was, not a hard coastline, but an undulating landscape that shifted with tidal flows and rhythms. Varying degrees of wetness everywhere.

The map from Thomas Greer Carless’ survey of 1838 registers the diversity of textures and temporal land-water formations. In its first encounter with the colonial gaze, this landscape refused the flatness of the map, demanding to be reckoned with on its own terms.

Through the course of the nineteenth and twentieth century, maps and hydraulic technologies reorganised the mobile landscape of soaking ecologies into a propertied and regulated geography. Irrigation infrastructure redrew riverine courses, fixing them through embankments and restaging water through new, alien epistemologies of waste and value. The movements of an alive and breathing river were now read as breaches that obfuscated hard cartographic lines. The colonial ports of Karachi, Bombay and Calcutta are all products of imposing the logic of the map on fluid landscapes. Colonial processes of draining, drying and reclaiming–what Debjani Bhattacharya calls technologies of fixing–conjured stable land from watery terrains, in an effort to create the solid grounds of urban planning.

Temporal Practices of Remembrance and Resistance

Despite these attempts at severing the city from its wet ecology, all Sindhi fisherfolk we meet remind us of Karachi’s place within the Indus Delta. There is a practice of narrating the seventeen creeks of the delta, beginning with Korangi creek in Karachi. Some fisherfolk also include the four creeks that are now in India.

Korangi creek, Fiti creek, Khuddi creek, Khai creek, Paitiani creek, Dabo creek, Chaan creek, Hajamro creek, Turshan creek, Khobar creek, Goro creek, Sangri creek, Kair creek, Mul creek, Wari creek, Kajhar creek, Sir creek.

The narration and repetition of these names evoke a sense of connection between these creeks and coastal areas. An orality and way of understanding the creeks that doesn’t necessitate fixing. A knowing that emerges from repeated acts of living and travelling within the delta.

Through imperial regimes of water, the sacred Indus River in Pakistan has been dammed, cut and distributed into the largest irrigation system in the world. Without the constant flow of river and silt, the rising sea has been submerging the delta. While the river has long gone missing, feelings and memories of aquatic intimacies continue to circulate, embedded in the body, the land and in language. They hold a multispecies yearning for sweet water, for the beloved river.

Fisherfolk still use the word darya, meaning river, when referring to the nearby sea. Fatima Majeed, Vice chairperson of the Pakistan Fisherfolk Forum, explains to us that when the river used to flow, it used to extend far beyond the coast, pushing back the sea. People living in the creeks were living by the river, not the sea. "While the sea surrounds us now," she says, "we still call those waters darya, remembering where the river used to be."

Since the construction of Kotri Barrage in 1954, seventy percent of the delta's inhabitants, over a million people, have been forced to leave their ancestral creeks as their homes and lands have drowned. Aziza Dablo, a fisherwoman from Paitiani creek, explains to us how there is barely anything left in the delta. "The sea feels veeran, desolate. Nothing is the same as before. The sea is rising. The land is shrinking. So much land has gone into the sea. Sab kuch ulta pulta ho gaya hai. Everything is turned upside down." Aziza’s family, like many other displaced fisherfolk communities, have found their way to Karachi–Pakistan’s largest city. A sinking, disappearing delta offset by the ever-expanding coastline of Karachi.

Most of these fisherfolk, while they now live in Karachi, still go to fish in their ancestral creeks, maintaining their connection to the delta. This connection is visually embedded in their neighbourhoods. Murals of the sea, the river, its creeks and shrines abound. Apparitions that collapse distance.

We first visited Paitiani creek with Masi Kulsoom, who now lives in Rehri Goth in Karachi. Walking along the edge of the coast, she pointed far out into the sea, to where her home used to be, where her ancestors were buried. She talked of all the fruits and vegetables that grew here, of the past abundance of sweet water and fish, of shops which would sell gold. People from all around the delta would come to shop here. Her family was amongst the last to leave, shifting to Karachi fifteen years ago. Yet, as we walk with her, there are barely any signs of their settlement left. The only marker we find is a shrine. The island is full of ephemeral footprints leading up to it.

In the creeks where most if not all human inhabitants have left, a network of sacred shrines, built around burial sites, continues to persist. Drawing on ancient, syncretic devotional practices across the Indian Ocean, these shrines function as miraculous anchors that ground, sustain and guide. In a world rendered increasingly ulta pulta by the climate crisis and infrastructural violence, the shrines function as an orientation device. Located at the threshold between land and water, they emerge as key points of reference through which communities make sense of their transfigured landscapes.

We encounter a mural of Ghulam Shah Dandai’s shrine in Mul Jetty, located in the historic fisherfolk settlement of Ibrahim Hyderi in Karachi. This informal jetty was built in 2009 by a fisherfolk family who had been displaced from Mul creek. They named it after their creek, and commissioned this mural as a visual manifestation of their island and its shrine. Chacha Ali, the owner, tells us: "It's very simple, this mural keeps us connected."

As communities have been displaced from their homelands, shrines take on a new visual, devotional form and materiality through these murals. Their painted surfaces are embedded with sacred cosmologies that store ancestral knowledge; the delta’s sounds, tastes and textures; and kinship with saints, water and marine life. Through the murals, we dwell in a landscape that is alive, aware and expressive, imbued with memories and stories of miracles that cast the river, the sea, and all living beings in between, in a web of relation and reciprocity.

While colonial regimes of visuality present mapping as detached acts of observing and measuring the landscape, here drawing is not about fixing and enforcing. Drawing is a sacred ritual, a way of maintaining sacred relation to disappearing homelands. These murals form an embodied mapping practice that beckons and makes place for the delta’s sacred worlds. A practice of representation not intended to fix and forget, but to resist and remember. These murals are counter-archives of both loss and possibility. They form spaces of grief and mourning, that reckon with loss, but also sites of hope and imagination that claim the future.


- Shahana Rajani and Jeanne Penjan Lassus

[1] Alexander Burnes, Narrative of a Voyage by the River Indus (London: J. Murray, 1834), 231.
[2] Ibid, 29.
[3] Debjani Bhattacharya, Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 5.

Shahana Rajani is an artist whose practice traces the landscapes and visualities of development, militarisation and ecological disturbance using multidisciplinary methods and media. Community-based and collaborative approaches to research are central to her work. She is a co-founder of Karachi LaJamia (with Zahra Malkani), an experimental project exploring radical pedagogies in relation to struggles around land and water in Pakistan.

Jeanne Penjan Lassus is an artist and filmmaker based in Bangkok. Her works draw from reflections on sensory perceptions and porosity of spaces and bodies. Enquiring how we–humans and other beings–sense and make sense of our environments, her practice focuses on how our perceptions shape our experiences, influence the way we move and extend into space and form the language we use.

This essay draws on a two-year research project Embodied Cartographies and Visual Entanglements in the Indus Delta, supported by the Alserkal Arts Foundation Research Grant 2020-2022.