hose history is being recorded and whose is being erased? This question served as the central theme of a recent panel discussion at Karachi’s The Second Floor (T2F), where a group of academics, including Kamran Asdar Ali, Adeem Sohail, Zoya Sameen and others, explored contemporary debates on people’s history – a methodology that prioritises the lived experiences of ordinary individuals over the narratives of rulers and elites.

During the discussion, Sohail highlighted Ramazan Baloch’s work on Karachi as a significant contribution to this evolving discourse. He emphasised how such approaches are increasingly challenging the top-down historiographical traditions that have long shaped Pakistan’s historical narratives.

Baloch was born in Lyari, one of Karachi’s oldest working-class neighbourhoods, in 1944. Despite lacking formal training, he has dedicated his life to documenting the city’s overlooked stories. His intimate connection to Karachi, forged while witnessing its transformations first-hand, lends his work an authenticity that is difficult to replicate.

His previous works, Lyari Ki Unkahi Kahani (The Untold Story of Lyari), Lyari Ki Adhoori Kahani (The Half-Told Story of Lyari) and Baloch Roshan Chehray (Bright Baloch Faces), among others, all seek to reclaim histories that lie beyond the grand narratives of power.

His latest book, Aik Lapata Shehr Ka Suragh (In Search of a Lost City), published by the Institute of Historical and Social Research, Karachi, which is headed by academic Dr Syed Jaffer Ahmed, builds on this legacy but expands its scope. Rather than focusing solely on Lyari or the Baloch community, Baloch sets his sights on the entire city. In his recent work, he traces Karachi’s history from the Kalhora and Talpur dynasties through the British colonial period, into the turbulent post-Partition years and up to the present day.

Few cities in South Asia have undergone as many dramatic transformations as Karachi. From a modest fishing village to a sprawling metropolis of more than 24 million, its history is as layered as the voices that have shaped it. Yet much of that history, especially the lived experiences of its residents, remains absent from formal historical accounts.

Aik Lapata Shehr Ka Suragh is structured as a series of insightful essays, each exploring a different chapter in Karachi’s complex and layered history. The book opens with the city’s early days, detailing the reigns of the Kalhoras, the Khan of Kalat, the Talpurs and the British colonial administrators who helped shape the city’s physical and political landscape. Baloch also examines the role of Seth Bhojomal, the Hindu merchant often credited with founding Karachi, and the successive rulers who left their imprint on the city.

From there, Baloch guides readers through the political currents of the British Raj, the fraught Partition years and the post-independence migration that dramatically altered Karachi’s demographic makeup. He does not shy away from difficult questions, interrogating the erasure of Sindhi communities from the city and the socio-political upheavals that followed Karachi’s designation as Pakistan’s first capital.

The book’s later chapters chart the turbulence of the Ayub Khan era, the shifting of the capital to Islamabad, the rise of student movements and the populist ascent of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Baloch meticulously chronicles the city’s descent into violence during the 1990s, dedicating particular attention to the infamous Bushra Zaidi case – an event that sparked ethnic tensions and shaped Karachi’s modern history in ways still felt today.

His ability to balance historical rigor with compelling storytelling is evident throughout, as he reconstructs these moments through the voices and experiences of those who lived them.

The commitment to preserving people’s history places Baloch’s work in conversation with similar historiographical movements emerging across Pakistan. Researcher Sartaj Khan, whose recent book examines rural poor movements such as the Khudai Khidmatgar Tehreek and peasant uprisings in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, notes that a new wave of regional historians is offering alternative narratives to those of the state and ruling elite by publishing their own accounts. While these works may vary in academic rigor, they provide crucial, nuanced perspectives that both enrich and challenge official histories.

Baloch’s contribution stands as a testament to this shift, offering readers an intimate and deeply human portrait of Karachi.

Academic Adeem Sohail described Baloch’s work as instrumental in shaping his understanding of a form of storytelling that resists commodification. “At a time when journalists, scholars and TV pundits were eager to package Lyari as either a violent gangland or a site of exoticised liberalism – women’s boxing, mythical socialist worker-ism and the like – Baloch offered an account of a living, breathing community,” Sohail remarked, reflecting on Baloch’s earlier writings on Lyari.

“Flawed, imperfect, but with its own distinct character, his Lyari was never shaped to fit outsiders’ fantasies. That lesson – an organic humanism, a lyrical optimism and an insistence that Lyari owes nothing to the discourses of careerist outsiders – is one I have learnt from him and carry into my own work,” Sohail added.

He said the opening chapter of his upcoming book builds directly on a theme Baloch explores in Lyari Ki Adhoori Kahani: the metaphor of bus drivers as cosmonauts.

For researchers, journalists and literary enthusiasts alike, Baloch’s book is a treasure trove – both a resource and a narrative masterpiece. As Karachi continues to evolve, books like Aik Lapata Shehr Ka Suragh remind us that its history is never static. It lives in the memories of those who have walked its streets and in the words of those who refuse to let those memories fade.

Aik Lapata Shehr Ka Suraagh

Author: Ramazan Baloch

Publisher: Institute of Historical & Social Research, 2024

Pages. 326

Price: Rs 1,600

The reviewer is a journalist and a researcher