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THE first Karachi Literature Festival 2010 was the crucible. Since then, each year, it has moved higher up the ladder to its present maturity as the 16th KLF, held this year on Feb 7-9 and as usual at the Beach Luxury Hotel.
The first KLF 2010 had an attendance of 5,000. This year, the number has risen to over 50,000.
Over the years, the format of the KLF has remained the same: three days of discussions, presentations, and book launches by authors and academics, poets and performers. This year over 70 sessions competed for attention, 200 speakers for the microphone, and 26 book launches for readers.
Certain names were still recognisable from the first KLF 2010: the éminence grise of poets Iftikhar Arif and the journalist Ghazi Salahuddin. Others like Bapsi Sidhwa and Fahmida Riaz have passed on to that higher LitFest in the sky. Fresher faces and newer voices have taken their place.
A question arose: what is the soil of Pakistan?
One could not do justice in this column to every speaker. They were too diverse, too talented, too prominent in the tapestry of modern Pakistani literature to be dismissed in a sentence. Collectively, they form the Narratives from the Soil — the theme of KLF 2025.
A question arose: what is the soil of Pakistan? Pakistan’s geography has been the victim of political mathematics: born of division in 1947, added to with the accretion of the states (for example, Khairpur and Bahawalpur), and subtracted from in 1971. Unlike India which is the constitutional sum of its parts, we are disparate physical parts of an ideological whole.
When skeletons of contention remain even today between us and our neighbours —– southern Sir Creek, in the north Azad Jammu & Kashmir, and the north-western Pak-Afghan border — what is the territory that Pakistanis should defend, and if called upon, to die for?
Yet soil is what gives us our identity, distinguishes us from ‘the other’. Today, that distinction has become blurred as many of our intellectuals have migrated to the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, etc. They are now ‘the other’. They “perceive themselves in universal terms, yet identify with Pakistan”.
This year, one noticed a larger number of such hyphenated nationals who, having crossed their own Rubicons, have returned (albeit temporarily) to assuage their longings for Pakistan.
The most articulate and symbolic of them (certainly the most elegant) was the British broadcaster Mishal Husain. She introduced her book Broken Threads: My Family from Empire to Independence (2024).
Herself British by birth, she used the lives of her Indian-origin grandparents to recreate the social and ethnic traumas of the 1940s, when genealogies turned a page and blood irrigated our soil.
Readers who prefer to review literature through darkened bifocals crowded into the session ‘Crime Fiction and the Pursuit of Justice’. The popular crime author Omar Shahid Hamid (a serving DIG, police) parried questions from Tooba Masood Khan. She and Saba Imtiaz have collaborated on a controversial exhumation of the Mustafa Zaidi case of the 1970s, luridly titled Society Girl: A Tale of Sex, Lies and Scandal.
For readers too young to recall, in October 1970, Mustafa Zaidi (an ex-civil servant and Urdu poet), was found dead in his home. His mistress — a married socialite Shahnaz Gul — lay unconscious in the next room. Questions swirled on whether he had committed suicide or had been poisoned.
Fifty-four years later, that mystery remains. Someone asked Omar whether as DIG he would have investigated the case differently. The answer should have been obvious. Forensics and fact-finding techniques have improved considerably since then.
To learn how far the police have come since its inception in the 1840s, KLF delegates were taken to the Sindh Police Museum, opened in 2019. It is located in the Sindh Police main headquarters, Saddar. Its extensive collection contains historic photographs, artefacts, antique swords and weaponry. To a history buff, it is a treasure trove of old police files, reports from the hyperactive Intelligence Department and court records of celebrated cases.
One particular section is devoted to the Pirs of Pagaro, the spiritual leaders of the Hurs in Sindh. Pir Pagaro VI had been hanged in 1943 by the British for rebellion. His two young sons — later Pir Pagaro VII and Sain Nadir Shah — were taken to the UK (as was the Sikh Maharaja Duleep Singh in the 1850s) for gentrification. They returned to Sindh, unconverted.
The Police Museum, like its counterpart the Pakistan Railways Heritage Museum near Islamabad, have used historic buildings to preserve and showcase the chronology of their departments.
Such museums, like the annual KLF, provide vital reminders that any nation that neglects its history, culture and literary narratives is doomed to forfeit them.
The writer, an author, was a keynote speaker at the KLF.
Published in Dawn, February 13th, 2025
