My first memories of Nafisa Shah are when she was my English teacher in school. Back then, she was a shy but spirited ajrak draped young woman with a bright genuine smile.
Now, 16 years later, Shah is anything but shy. The fiery journalist is now the Nazima of Khairpur district. On her job she deals with numerous arduous situations on a daily basis, which would have made a lot of men run for cover.
When I went to meet her at her office there were dozens of people with myriad issues for her to solve. Shah looked calm and graceful while dealing with each case. As the office continued to be inundated with burly men complaining of arrested relatives, property disputes and stolen buffaloes, she hastily promised me an interview in the evening at her residence.
It was a cool night when I waited for Shah in the drawing room of her simple family home. Life-size portraits of Z. A. Bhutto, Sindhi craft and a portrait of a dupatta clad, smiling Shah served as staunch reminders to visitors of her strong political and ethnic affiliations.
Nafisa Shah finally walked in with a cheerful smile and an uncovered head for a change. Vibrant even in the evening after a tiring day, she animatedly attended numerous phone calls regarding issues as diverse as Muharram security arrangements to the proposed new districts in Sindh.
Daughter of veteran politician, Syed Qaim Ali Shah, she was born into a hardcore political family. “Our lifestyle was linked with the national politics,” she began. “My first memories of Karachi were of living in the enormous Commissioner House, behind the US embassy, that has now been made the Anti Terrorist Court.”
The political highs and lows of her father exposed Nafisa to a changing lifestyle peaking with ministerial luxuries and ebbing with martial law miseries. “When my father was out of power, we would move into smaller houses. Sometimes we’d move back to this dilapidated family home and we would realize again that this was where we really belonged. Somehow my father’s political ups and downs made me more independent and resilient,” she adds.
Her mother was the prime influence in the life of all of Shah’s siblings. “My mother was the second of my father’s three wives. She belonged to a highly educated family herself and saw to it that we all got sound education. In fact, my sisters and I were the first generation of girls in my family who went to school. It was my mother who opened this purdah observing haveli to modernity and emancipation.
“My mother died of a terrible illness when I was only nine,” Shah recounts. “During the martial law, my father was under arrest and later was on numerous political engagements, thus he made a fleeting presence for us. My brothers and sisters, therefore, took on specific roles to compensate for a disjointed family and very resiliently clung to the strict foundation laid by my late mother. A brother would drive us to school, a sister would get us ready, and all of us would take turns to do the dishes and the cooking. We started giving tuitions at a very young age to be independent and self reliant.”
The streak of independence coupled with an increasing sense of restlessness appeared when Shah was in her high school. “I did my O Levels from St. Joseph’s Convent and A Levels from Karachi Grammar School. A majority of my school friends went abroad for education and I also wanted to study from the Ivy League universities but could not make it there at that time. To find my bearings I decided to start earning money right after A Levels and thus started teaching.”
She adds thoughtfully, “It was maybe the lack of a family with proper parental roles that made me a restless soul. Had I belonged to a normal family, who knows I might still have been happily teaching at a primary school somewhere.”
After short lapses of working for different magazines, Shah joined a political magazine and thus began her roller coaster journey into the Pakistani socio-political cauldron that captivated her for quite some time. “It was a small set-up with a family like environment. I admired Razia Bhatti and she was like a mother figure to me. She had the capability of bringing out the best in people.”
There, Shah wrote boldly on violence against women, children and animals and her writing on Karo-kari brought her acclaim. “I loved writing about society and culture at the magazine. I had no inhibitions about travelling to remote and backward areas of Karachi and even the farthest corners of Sindh. The Karo-kari issue was something literally untouched by the English press at that time and I don’t want to sound presumptuous but my writing on the issue was the first exposé of its kind in the English press. Even today I feel the same stuff is being recycled and nothing new is being added to the subject.”
After Bhatti’s sudden death, Shah felt her own burn out had occurred and it was perhaps time to move onto a newer milieu. She proceeded to do her Masters in Social Anthropology from Oxford in 1998. She continued to dabble in painting while at Oxford, arranging some live drawing workshops simultaneous with her academic pursuits.
Coming back home she undertook an even bigger challenge; bringing a positive change to her hometown — Khairpur. It seemed an uphill task three years ago to re-engineer the workings of the rural district that was once a magnificent estate of the Talpur dynasty.
The perfectionist in Shah is still not satisfied with her pace of work for uplifting the district’s state. She says, “Being a Nazima can be so frustrating at times. There are overwhelming problems gaping at you, ranging from law and order to the civil infrastructure. No matter what you do, there is always a lot more to be done. Nevertheless, I have taken it up as a great challenge and still haven’t lost my steam.”
The most unnerving aspect of being the administrative head of a district, for Shah, is the interplay of corruption and collusion right under her nose. She says, “It is so easy to criticize the system as a journalist, which I did unabashedly. But it’s quite another story to be in the government where it is as though you are up against a wall. Politics and collusion can break your own team of subordinates who suddenly stop being civil servants and take up their political agendas as workers of their respective parties to serve their private interests, rather than working for the people in general.”
And how would Shah explain her own links with politics in a country where politicians are perceived to have the least integrity of all citizens? Shah counters, “I might be a bad politician but I am resolute about being a good administrator. It is a highly tall order, but I want to try and prove that there can be a paradigm of alternative politics in Pakistan.
“I want to prove that you can be an honest politician and still win elections. And that you can do away with ‘patronage politics’, which I feel is still very rampant in urban areas. I have tried to take a pro-poor approach in governing the district and favouring people irrespective of their political affiliations, and in doing so I might have lost quite a bit of votes.”
What has Shah been able to do about Karo-kari while being the Nazima? “Nothing,” she declares flatly. “I am helpless as far as it is concerned. It is part of the system. It is an informal means of justice for the people who have been denied their basic right of legal protection. It is a multi layered, subjective and brutal though speedy response to the lack of justice. And nobody else but the state is responsible for nurturing this ugly reverse paradigm of justice. Over the decades, we have had law making by the power hungry elite; be it military, bureaucratic or Islamic elite. Years of faulty law making has procreated oral or private justice; Karo-kari being one of its ugliest manifestations.”
And what does Shah plan for herself in the future? She sighs and says, “I want to finish my PhD that I had enrolled for at Oxford. The title of my thesis is Honour, moral power & violence; a case study of Karo-kari in rural Sindh. I want to stay at Khairpur and see if my alternative political paradigm is of any consequence. Though I don’t want to be involved with politics in the long run. I might start painting again because it is another form of writing for me. I still see myself as an artist.”
My first memories of Nafisa Shah are when she was my English teacher in school. Back then, she was a shy but spirited ajrak draped young woman with a bright genuine smile.
The political highs and lows of her father exposed Nafisa to a changing lifestyle peaking with ministerial luxuries and ebbing with martial law miseries. “When my father was out of power, we would move into smaller houses. Sometimes we’d move back to this dilapidated family home and we would realize again that this was where we really belonged. Somehow my father’s political ups and downs made me more independent and resilient,” she adds.
