Manora... truly forgotten or still present and repressed

My desire to leave the city… just like all the other passengers on the public boat who want to get some distance from the density of space and of life in this city. Manora must always have been this restful anchor to the turbulence of Karachi, something so needed now, a sheltered space that is fast loosing ground. (Journal 2nd April 2009)

Large-scale drawings and photographic works began after my first visits to Manora Island off the coast of Karachi. Over the last 18 months, I have been recording the transformation of this Island through photography, video, text and now painting. The ideas are still in progress and evolving as I accumulate the evidence of change.

Manora has a history as a defense fort facing the Arabian Sea. It consists of a series of old and new ruins…old myths and new histories in the making. Its approach by boat, first took me through a rusting graveyard of fishing trawlers. The island has various historical and religious sites such as the 17C Shri Varun Dev Mandir, at the edge of the sea. This is a Dariadal temple, devoted to the Hindu deity of the water, the Pani panchi community also believed in this deity. The Talpur Fort, stands at the entrance to the harbour on Manora, built by the Talpur Mirs in 1797. Also on the island are colonial stone buildings, St Pauls church, and an old lighthouse that is about ninety years old. The tomb of Yousaf Shah (brother of Ghazi Abdulla Shah) is also in Manora, as well as Manora Gurdwara.

The presence of different religious buildings points to a multi-religious social fabric that perhaps once existed on this island. Manora has been a site for both Hindu and Muslim pilgrimage.

The everydayness of this historic, yet non-elite space possesses a different texture from the modernizing urban metropolis of Karachi. Yet on a quieter scale, it evokes the same sense of history, urban decay and transformation that Karachi is undergoing.

Over the last 15 months, most of the residents have been given a golden handshake. What is left of the 3,000 or so civilian residents are crumbling playgrounds and homes marked for demolition.

I feel the collective memory of this community is hinged to the Manora blocks (built in the 1960s) which create a rootedness in this place and an affiliation with the locale and its community. They now lie empty and haunted and act as containers of meaning, memory and loss. As new ruins that are hardly two years old, they seem bleaker than the church or mandir nearby. However the complete demolition of these blocks is the result of the conscious neglect and apathy of the establishment which is resulting in a slow erasure of their communal narrative.

The photographs evoke the island as a body that has been gutted. This is literally what has happened, as the island is in the process of being transformed into a promise of newness, but with a foreboding erasure of its historical and social palimpsest.

"...In part we recognize our place in the world by an interaction with the built environment and by being informed of the experiences of others: the creation of social identity located in time and place…a continuity of successive experiences, setting down layers of meaning can result in an especially strong power of place – a pscho-geography, an awareness of the past that is dynamic, handed down by people rather than recorded on the very stones, and is specific to a particular historic and political context. The worth of such places increases where efforts to destroy them remind communities of their value…their hostile destruction is an amnesia forced upon the group as a group and on its individual constituent members."
Robert Bevan ‘The Destruction of Memory

Each visit to Manora reveals another strategy of accessing this space. Recently, my conversations with residents on the island have become a regular point of contact through which I gain a personal experience of their history and the rapid changes that are impacting their lives.

In different ways, each process addresses the dialectics of loss and transformation in separate, yet mutually illuminating ways. Manora serves as one metaphor for the kinds of wrenching transformations being enacted in much of the region. The postcolonial experience pitched against the forces of triumphalist globalism with its unfulfilled rhetoric of technological progress and promise of newness that threatens to erase its past and its existing social everydayness.