When the British decided to annex Sindh, they sent young officer Alex­ander Burnes to survey the Indus covertly.

Despite their mistrust of the English, Sindh’s rulers obliged Burnes after finding no arms in his luggage. They failed to appreciate other weapons of conquest: surveying instruments — which Burnes used in the dark to calculate and measure the Indus. Later, he gushed about the blank canvas possibilities of this “virgin land” (related by Alice Albinia in Empires of the Indus).  

The colonial legacy of mapping indigenous lands, according to artists Shahana Rajani and Zahra Malkani of the collective Karachi LaJamia, “as banjar [barren], ghairabad [uninhabited] and ghairmehfooz [unprotected]”, is a “visual strategy still employed by state surveyors and private developers.”

Working on the intersection of landscape, architecture and art, their first project was the 2013 publication Exhausted Geographies. It explored the politics of mapmaking and attempted to challenge existing representations of Karachi, a city presented as teeming with the potential of violence.

The art collective Karachi LaJamia recently won the prestigious 2025 Asia Arts Future (South Asia) Award for its work on the intersection of landscape, architecture and art since 2015. Its founders reveal what inspires their artistic practice and what they hope to achieve through it

Returning to Karachi after their graduate studies, they noticed the ubiquity of “terror maps” in the media, which visualised red zones of Karachi. In an essay for Exhausted Geographies, Nausheen Anwar said these maps created visions of terror that were used to support and justify the violence of the paramilitary Karachi operation:

“Neighbourhoods such as Malir and Gadap are represented as insecure and barren to legitimise urban expansion and expropriation across lands belonging to Sindhi and Baloch communities.” The artists’ early work explored alternatives “to represent land as visual artists.”

Karachi LaJamia was formed urgently and tragically in 2015: the murders of Sabeen Mahmud and Karachi University professor Dr Waheed-ur-Rehman became a “wake-up call.” According to the duo: “Through T2F, Sabeen provided us with a vital space for cultural engagement and community. Her murder made visible the brutal ways in which intellectual and cultural discourse is silenced in our country.”

Malkani and Rajani were both teaching at the time and witnessed “surveillance and censorship” within cultural spaces, art schools and universities. Shocked at the silence after the murders, they felt decades of depoliticised education was to blame. In an impassioned Facebook post, they announced the creation of Karachi LaJamia (earlier branded as the Karachi Art Anti-University).

It was a call to action and a history lesson in student repression in the country: “We wanted to believe that it was still possible to come together for deeply political pedagogy and programming in the city and there was only one way to find out.” 

What are their thoughts about today: the landscape of censorship around Palestine on Western university campuses and art museums and, in Pakistan, the new laws to police social media?

“Yes, we live in some pretty terrifying times. While all of this is horrifying to witness, we take strength from the fact that the resistance is alive and well. In the US and Europe, students and faculty

came together to create vibrant, joyful spaces for dissident pedagogy in the form of the encampments they set up on their college campuses.

“They took pedagogy outside of the classroom and into their own hands. In our courses, we often say that Karachi’s long history of ecological resistance is pedagogy, that protest is pedagogy. We saw in these encampments the way in which students made teaching, learning, creativity, community and protest a singular practice, everyday life.” 

The group further adds: “The sinister developments in Pakistan today are not unprecedented. Baloch and Pakhtun communities in Pakistan have been subject to this kind of silencing and unspeakable brutality for a long, long time. Substantial swathes of Pakistan have survived and struggled in the shadows of internet blackouts and enforced disappearances. It is good to remember that these authoritarian measures are not unprecedented, so we can also know that the tools, the roadmaps, the practices to cope, to resist and to overcome are out there. People have been doing this work.”

To learn from Karachi’s rich history of resistance in the city, Karachi LaJamia has collaborated with the Sindh Indigenous Rights Alliance and the Pakistan Fisherfolk Forum to organise public courses. They cite the late Gul Hasan Kalmatti as a mentor, teaching them the long histories of dispossession and occupation of maqami [local] lands in Karachi:

“He taught us that knowledge is meant to be shared and used as a tool for collectivity and liberation. Through our courses, we wanted to build solidarity with ongoing struggles around land, and to platform and centre the radical pedagogies of community/activist/cultural spaces in Karachi.”

Informative and investi­gative, Karachi LaJamia’s practice, borrowing a phrase from critic Jonathan Jones, deepens what news is. Rajani and Malkani’s installation at the 2017 Koel Gallery show ‘We Ate the Birds’ documented Gadap’s continuing struggles against Bahria Town.

Offering a glimpse into their pedagogical methods, they displayed tea, soil and newspaper clippings, from their six-month course, ‘The Gadap Sessions’, which showcased “how the land and ecology is a bountiful source of knowledge… how there is a rich history of academic and scholarly production around these topics in Sindh.”

So, are maps irredeemable? While researching Karachi’s rivers, the collective were touched by activists “drawing maps of the rivers for us” mid-conversation, a reminder that drawing and mapping “is the intimate work of invoking, protecting and remembering Karachi’s disappearing rivers.” Unlike colonial maps, “representation is not the unfolding of violence, but the loving practice of connection.”

Last year, they published a series of children’s activity booklets to introduce the centrality of the river in our ecology and culture. The most recent one, Let’s Draw a River, encourages children to partake in the memory practice of drawing rivers.

On February 7, 2025, at the Asia Arts Game Changer Awards in New Delhi, Karachi LaJamia received the Asia Arts Future Award. What are the next steps and what are they working on now?  

There’s 10 years’ worth of research in their archive which they are revisiting to create teaching materials: “For this we are working on a series of children’s books, and a series of pamphlets called Sailaab Syllabus. We are also working with some activist archives that give insight into the rich history and poetry of environmental defence in Karachi, and we are really looking forward to sharing that research.”

Karachi LaJamia is the winner of the 2025 Asia Arts Future (South Asia) Award, presented annually by Asia Society India Centre at the Asia Arts Game Changer Awards to a promising artist or art collective from South Asia that displays a commitment to their craft and is building a body of work that enables a deeper understanding of their region and cultural landscape to regional and global audiences.

Zehra Hamdani Mirza is a Karachi-based writer and artist

Published in Dawn, EOS, February 9th, 2025