Nick Axel: Your recent film, Four Acts of Recovery (2025), is about the communities of the Indus Delta in Pakistan. What happened to this landscape, and its people?
Shahana Rajani: The story of the delta’s destruction is long and slow. It is largely due to the construction of dams and barrages on the Indus River, which prevent the river from flowing into the sea. As the river can no longer push back the sea, nor deposit its silt, the deltaic land is being submerged by the sea. The latest statistics say only 10 percent of the active delta remains. Further inland, the intrusion of salty sea water has rendered huge swaths of previously rich and fertile land inhospitable and uncultivable. This has forced over a million people to leave their homes in the delta. Many of these displaced communities now live in informal settlements in the city of Karachi. In my earlier practice, I was invested in tracing the role of visuality and mapping in shaping and erasing landscapes. I was noticing the frequency with which state developers were labeling certain landscapes as banjar (barren) and ghairabad (uninhabited), be it in the Indus Delta or Indigenous neighborhoods on the outskirts of Karachi. These visualities had material and violent consequences for people, as they obscured and legitimized the destruction being unleashed on these landscapes by a globalized network of infrastructure, militarization and development. Over the last few years, activists and coastal communities brought to my attention another kind of visuality that exists amidst all of this violence and erasure: the ways communities are choosing to represent their own landscapes. I first started paying attention to this with my friend and frequent collaborator Zahra Malkani, when we would be sitting with activists and community elders and they would start drawing maps of the river for us. There was something so inherently different about these maps. To draw a map felt like a way to love, remember, invoke, and protect a landscape. It was an invitation to enter hidden worlds. Witnessing these mappings made me understand the expansive capacity of representational acts to become offerings and prayers for protection and remembrance. When I first came across a painted mural of the Indus Delta in a fishers neighborhood in Karachi, I could not stop looking at it. It felt like the most alive and breathing map that I'd ever seen.
Activist Khudadino Shah drawing a map of Karachi's rivers. Photo: Shahana Rajani.
NA: Before we go further, I would like to ask more about the Indus Delta. When did these dams and barrages start being built?
SR: The barrages start being built under the colonial rule of the British government. Sindh sees an immense acceleration of irrigation infrastructure in the first half of the twentieth century. In 1932, Sukkur Barrage is opened; the largest of all Indus basin projects of the colonial era. Its canal systems redrew riverine courses, fixing them through embankments, and redirecting and redistributing “waste” river water that flowed into the sea. The Indus Delta is an alive and shifting landscape, where the boundaries between land and water are always changing. For delta communities, the meeting of the river and sea is a sacred union that constantly makes and unmakes the land. All of the land around the Indus River as it comes down toward the sea is called kacha land.
Nav Haq: This is a very interesting description. I believe in the Urdu language, kacha means “raw” or “unadulterated,” correct; as opposed to “baked,” or somehow “sterilized,” or “finished”?
SR: Yes, but these are all modern associations. In old Sanskrit texts, kacha simply referred to marshy land, or land contiguous to water. However, if you look in an Urdu dictionary today, the word has all these negative associations such as raw, weak, imperfect, incomplete, undeveloped, etc. The urban conception and valuation of its opposite term, pucca, emerges from colonial preferences to contain flows of water, in an effort to create the solid grounds of urban planning. But in the kacha, land and water are understood as inseparable and intertwined; and silt, their intermediary. Colonial maps and hydraulic technologies attempted to reorganize these mobile, water landscapes into a propertied and regulated geography. But in this soaking ecology, quite literally, the logic of the map breaks down. Every year, British surveyors would come and make their maps, but the next year they'd come back again and all of the lines would've shifted. These maps are full of red lines and corrections that are dated with different years.
NA: When did the mapping of the Indus Delta begin?
SR: The first surveyor to make a full map of the Indus River and the delta was a British military officer named Alexander Burnes. In 1831, he is sent by the British on a spy mission to map the river. But the Talpur rulers of Sindh are really suspicious of his motives to travel up the river to Lahore, so they dock his boat and make him wait in Hyderabad for several months. While he's waiting for permission to travel, he makes a series of mapping voyages to the delta. In his travelogue, he describes with great disdain the foul and muddy waters of the delta, recording how entire banks keep falling and tumbling into the river. But even as he describes that the land is constantly moving and changing, after his third journey, he exclaims: “Aha. A map now lays before me.”
NA: It's strange how rather than seeing the limits of their own representational technologies, and admitting that the epistemology behind it is contradictory to the landscape, the British tried even harder to fix it.
SR: Absolutely, the contradiction between hard, cartographic lines and the movements of an alive and breathing river becomes so palpable in the delta. But even as British officials worked to fix the landscape, the river continued to evade their efforts. When Burnes is traveling up the river, he reaches Sukkur, which is where the barrage later gets built. He passes by the shrine of Khwaja Khizr, a prominent water saint located on an island in the river. Local fisherfolk narrate to Burnes that palla fish swim all the way from the sea, up the river, for pilgrimage here. He is told that after their pilgrimage, the palla fish swim back toward the sea without ever turning their tail towards the shrine, out of respect. Skeptical, Burnes writes frustratingly that the silt and muddy color of the river prevents him from seeing and disproving this assertion. It's interesting to think how the river and its murkiness is resisting the colonial gaze here, refusing to be rendered transparent. It is always withholding, keeping so much within it. The murals and paintings of the delta emulate this veiling. Fisher-artist Abdul Sattar explained to me that much like the river, paintings reveal its secrets only to those who know to look beyond the surface.
NH: One of the reasons the British Empire gave as justification for colonialism, or deferring any kind of apology for it, was by saying things like: "we gave them all this infrastructure.” But the reality is, things like the railways they built in the subcontinent were not for people. They were moving out natural resources. It's interesting that postindependence, these nation-building statements about infrastructure somehow echoed what came before in the colonial period.
SR: One of the earliest large-scale infrastructure projects that Pakistan takes on after its inception in 1947 is the building of Kotri Barrage, which has the aim of irrigating so-called wastelands. However, delta communities hold this barrage responsible for their destruction. It was not until the military regime of Ayub Khan in the 1960s that dams are widely promoted as symbols of nation-building and modernization. There was this idea that a unified irrigation system would provide natural unity and national cohesion to a fragmented Pakistan. But fisher communities across Pakistan have a strong and fierce tradition of resistance and activism against large water infrastructures. Presently, there is a big movement ongoing in Sindh against the 6 Canals Project, which is a new irrigation project designed to use the Indus River to irrigate military lands in the Cholistan Desert. In Sindh, especially amongst Indigenous communities, there is widespread public awareness that the promise of infrastructure is a farce, and that these kinds of projects are tricks and traps.
Mural painted by Ustad Abdul Aziz in the fisherfolk neighbourhood of Ibrahim Hyderi in Karachi. Photo: Shahana Rajani.
NA: I was really struck by what you said about how Burnes magically, after three attempts, drew a map of the Indus Delta, while the communities of people who live or lived in the Delta have this habitual practice of drawing maps. I’m thinking here of Harold Fisk’s famous drawing of the Mississippi River, which visualizes how impossible it is to fix the definition of a river into a single line. In that light, what are these maps that the people who live in the Delta are making? What do they show?
SR: For the communities of the delta, the act of drawing is not about fixity. It involves a different worldview, a different ethics of relating to land and water. These maps are intimate, tender gestures that enable connection to disappearing geographies. Drawing a map for someone is a gesture of hospitality and generosity. Within the fleeting line of a river, someone opens up their world, their knowledge, their memories. Four Acts of Recovery focuses on murals and paintings of the delta that displaced communities are making in Karachi. Sometimes simple, sometimes elaborate, they depict the river and sea, boats and fish, ancestral creeks, villages, shrines and graves. They are located in the old Indigenous fisher settlements of Ibrahim Hyderi and Rehri Goth. One of the murals that the film features was painted back in 2009. I met the family who commissioned it and the artist, Ustad Abdul Aziz, who painted it. The family explained that when they had to leave their village and came to Karachi, they were looking for ways to keep their connection alive. It just made sense to ask a painter to make a landscape mural of their homelands. While their ancestral village no longer exists, shrines continue to miraculously survive and persist across the delta, but because people are now living so far away, access is limited. The paintings then perform this really important public function of connecting and returning people to sacred, soaking ecologies of river and sea amidst the violence and separation of infrastructure. They become the medium through which people can re-enter these worlds. They depict sites of beauty and abundance amidst loss and catastrophe.
NA: Do these murals have any art historical or wider cultural traditions that you know of?
SR: Before learning about these murals, I would have assumed that the only reference for mural landscape painting came from the Western tradition, which of course is an incredibly secular practice of recording and framing landscapes. This connection felt more obvious because of the fact that after 9/11, US aid funded many mural projects in Karachi, marketed as “walls of peace.” However, mural-making is an old tradition in fisher communities that is rooted in spiritual practice and sacred tradition. Part of my own investment in this work is to challenge the misconception that visual expression is not a part of Islamic lineage. Visuality is actually central to the faith and devotional practices of mystical Islam. And there exists a long tradition of turning to image-making in times of crisis, to navigate loss and separation. It's not that fisher communities are inventing new visual traditions from scratch. Instead, they are drawing on and experimenting with a much longer history of visual practice. One of these histories is the art of talisman drawings.
NA: The film focuses on these talismans too, does it not?
SR: Yes. Talismans, or taweez, are very widespread and popular in Islamic culture. They often include drawings of the names of God and words from the Qu’ran. You can either wear it, hang it on a tree, or dissolve it in water, but the act of drawing imbues the talisman with divine protective qualities. It is seen as a sacred gesture where the divine spirit enters the boundaries of form. To me, the painting of these murals has a similar function to drawing talismans; where it is about invoking protection, keeping something alive and well. Much like the taweez, these landscape paintings are also about a remembrance of Allah and a submission to God.
NH: You collaborate a lot with people involved in resistance movements. In a project like this, how do you make those relationships and how do you develop them as part of a research project?
SR: The film emerges from long-term research and relationships. I have known the painter Ustad Abdul Aziz and the Dablo family who feature in it since 2020. The film is an attempt to center and honor the ways in which delta communities choose to represent their sacred worlds. It’s also an attempt to practice visual representation as acts and ethics of relation, connection, and solidarity. A lot of my research emerges from my collaborative pedagogical project Karachi LaJamia with Zahra Malkani. We organize public courses and research projects in collaboration with Indigenous activists and community organizations fighting to protect the city’s land and rivers. Research becomes the collective work of community building. As we spend time in these spaces, the camera is often an afterthought. Or, it's just not at the center of why we are there. It’s more about learning from those around us, learning from the custodians of the land and the river, learning from communities, and this sense of questioning all of the institutionalized forms of knowledges that we grow up learning and valuing. We try to situate art practice and pedagogy in the larger urban context by creating collective learning environments. In so many ways, the community murals do precisely that pedagogical work. Perhaps that is why I was so drawn to them.
NH: The process is pedagogical for you, but it can also become pedagogical for the public that experiences the work.
SR: Absolutely. In the process of this research, I have learned so much about ways of sharing and representing with care, sensitivity, and generosity; really thinking about how I can extend that same spirit in making and sharing my own work. The communities and artists of the delta keep showing and reminding me of the power and centrality of art in sustaining life, devotion, and belonging, even as material geographies continue to disappear.