In post-Independence South Asia, the spotlight often fell on land reform, such as the zamindari abolition that took place in parts of India after 1947. In Pakistan, the issue of land redistribution also surfaced periodically in the decades following independence. But, as the case of Sindh in the late 1940 and early 1950s reveals, the focus was on how to ‘modernize’ tenancy arrangements rather than achieving more equitable land reallocation, since—for some contemporaries—left unchanged these represented a major impediment to increasing agricultural productivity, and hence Pakistan’s overall development. This article explores the context in which Sindh’s 1947-48 Hari Committee of Enquiry was set up and its various recommendations that proved controversial, together with responses to the legislation (1950 Sind Tenancy Act) that followed, highlighting the role of officials and peasant representatives, and shedding light on this important but largely overlooked episode of development-related policy-making in Pakistan’s early years.

This article explores how the Pakistan television drama industry mediates collective notions of piety through visual registers. Explicit religious discourse is tightly regulated in the industry, and producers themselves often disavow producing religious content. However, the leakiness of production practices generates religious visual idioms that are transparently circulated and taken up by audiences. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in Karachi with production teams in this culture industry, I argue that dramas are a central yet overlooked feature of religious publics’ formations in the digitalizing Pakistani mediascape. Focus on religious media in the anthropology of Islam has treated publics as mostly engaged with traditional sources of authority. Attending to scenes from three popular dramas—Meri Zaat Zarra-e-Benishan (2009), Shehr-e-Zaat (2012), and Khaani (2017)—elucidates how visuality is a central facet of how cross-media interactions enregister piety. Observations of cinematographic negotiations and reflections by creators on the ambiguity and efficacy of pious visuality contextualize how religious scenes in these productions come together. While the visuality of prayer scenes across these dramas emphasizes private personal piety, tracing how these images are scripted, depicted, and circulated online offers insights into how religious digital publics are shaped in contemporary Pakistan.

Recent scholarship on Pakistani Shi‘ism draws on a historical archive that it primarily textual: books, journal articles, pamphlets, etc. authored by Shi‘i ‘ulama and notables. However, as the field of oral history rightly asserts, the textual archive can never capture those historical facts that are only accessible through oral sources. This article at times challenges and at other points supplements and reinforces the textual archive through the creation of a new archive: an oral history archive based on multiple interviews with two leading Shi‘i ‘ulama in contemporary Pakistan. At the heart of these interviews lies the question of how these ‘ulama conceptualize and remember their country’s political past and assess their present, considering their minority status and sectarianism. Through undertaking the above-mentioned examination, this article inaugurates the use of oral history as central to scholarship on Shi‘i ‘ulama and underscores the importance of the study of this overlooked primary source.

World War I (1914–1918) was a defining moment in world history. The Great War came just at the end of the golden age of picture postcards, the Instagram of its time, when humans first shared pictures with each other at a volume and breadth never realized before. This article examines postcards of the war of Indian soldiers and prisoners by French, German, British, and Indian soldiers and associated Europeans to reveal how prejudices and identities were affected by warfare. Postcards also reflected the rise of the Independence struggle as one of its consequences toward the end of the war. As visual media and social extensions of print capitalism, they are a rich source of how complex and contradictory this formative phase of nationalism was for all involved, and the way these humble new media objects were able to play an important role in the psychological conflicts that ensued.

The commemoration of Husain’s martyrdom named “Muharram” implies for the Shi’ite community that it publicly expresses its grief. This emotion is central to its definition, as Muharram is referred to as the “month of mourning” and the Shi’ite as a “community of mourners.” However, Muharram would not be equivalent across Pakistan, as a young Shi’ite fakir, who will serve as our guide, in this comparative study, points out. According to him, the sadness would be greater in Lahore (Punjab) than in Sehwan (Sindh), and for this reason Muharram would be better celebrated there. The comparison of the ritual process in these two cities, drawn from the experiences of this fakir and the ethnographer, will show how the production and expression of sadness are subject to contrasting experiences on the one hand, and divergent aims on the other, depending on the position of the actors in the social context in which they are lived.

Urdu-speaking Shiʿa khatibs (orators) in Karachi regularly speak on the origins of Pakistan, seeking to recuperate Shiʿi contributions to the foundation of the nation-state. In this article, I argue that such claims do not resist, subvert, or undermine statist historical narratives. Instead, the claims mimic, in structure and teleology, the very statist historical narratives that they attempt to challenge. I draw upon twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork in Karachi and demonstrate how thoroughly circumscribed such claims are. I read this minority rhetoric as an attempt to appropriate the majoritarian discourse, rather than as an attempt to challenge the dominant historiography of the origins of Pakistan. I turn to the domain of Shiʿi khitabat (oratory), a ubiquitous and public performance, and identify the important role played by such mass and physical gatherings in the articulation of historical claims. My works emerges from, and contributes back to, scholarship on South Asian Shiʿism, oratory, and the public sphere.

Sinf-e-Aahan (2021) and Ehd-e-Wafa (2019) are two scripted television shows produced by Inter Services Public Relations (ISPR), the public relations wing of the Pakistan Armed Forces. Both shows merge the national, military spheres with domestic, civil spheres within its narrative universe, albeit in contrasting ways. This is a departure from military-sponsored scripted television made under the monopolistic state control of television. How do military-sponsored shows maintain the domestic and military spheres in their visual landscape? With attention to visual representation in the serials and using secondary data available on the production team’s choices, I argue that the conventions of domestic serial content force military characters to engage in issues of domesticity, such as marital conflict and reputation scandals. Military and familial logics meld together in instances where the military inserts itself into the domestic sphere within these shows, without embracing the messiness and moral ambiguity of such spaces.