Abro

  Reading a Province by Its Shrines Good evening. Before I show you a single map, I want you to picture something. Picture the Indus at dusk — a broad, brown, restless god of a river, sliding south through a land that receives almost no rain. Now picture, strung along its banks like beads on a thread, the domes and cupolas and whitewashed tombs of the men and women whom Sindh decided to call holy. That thread of the sacred, running from the northern gate at Kashmore down to the tidal creeks below Thatta, is the subject of today’s article. And today, we are going to read it quantitatively — as data. The evidence in front of us is a database of 624 documented religious sites spread across all 30 districts of modern Sindh: shrines and tombs, temples and mosques, churches, gurdwaras, stupas, a Parsi fire-temple, and a synagogue. The dataset was compiled from encyclopaedic and news coverage, heritage archives, devotional websites, and district profiles. Every site is geo-located; ...

    The crucial question is not why some people become killers, but why, under certain conditions, killing becomes ordinary. — Christopher R. Browning, Ordinary Men (1992)     The Familiar Face of Violence Imagine, for a moment, a village. It does not matter which village — in the Punjab of 1947 or the fields of East Pakistan in 1971, the contours are remarkably similar. There is a well at the center, shared by all. There are fields that flood together and drought together. There are marriages across lanes, loans repaid over seasons, and feuds resolved over shared plates of food. The village is, in anthropological terms, what Victor Turner called a communitas — a structure of mutual obligation, identity, and reciprocity that gives human life its texture and meaning. Now imagine that within seventy-two hours, that same village is on fire. The same hands that drew water from the shared well are now drawing blood. The same men who at...