FICTION
Ghuttan: A Sociocultural Illness
by Muhammad Khuzaima Nizami – Photography courtesy of the author
“Karachi kinno shehr aa,” proclaims Pritam Jee, my primary interlocutor in the Cholistan desert. My partner, a Sindhi, has managed to teach me the word “kinni.” It wasn’t far-fetched to assume that Pritam Jee was calling Karachi a disgusting and repulsive city. Just to be sure, I thought I should confirm with him if that’s what he meant. He did, in fact, mean that very thing. Pritam Jee’s sentence is precisely why I undertook ethnography in Southern Punjab during peak summer: to understand what makes Karachi a disgusting city.
I became obsessed with understanding bridges and flyovers, one of the primary architectural elements of a modern city, after reading Krishan Chander’s Mahalakshmi ka Pul (1932). Chander’s short story paints a painful image of the socioeconomic and sociocultural divisions that produce bridges that then reinforce the same hegemonic structures of class divide and spatial exclusion. It shows a slum on the left side of the bridge and an economically prosperous and industrial city on the right. It ends with an important question:
د“دیکھئے! میں آپ سے اشتراکی بننے کے لیے نہیں کہہ رہا ہوں۔ میں آپ کو جماعتی جنگ کی تلقین بھی نہیں کررہا ہوں۔ میں صرف یہ جاننا چاہتا ہوں کہ آپ مہا لکشمی پل کے دائیں طرف ہیں یا بائیں طرف؟”؟
“Look! I’m not asking you to become a communist. Neither am I preaching you to engage in class struggle. I only want to know if you’re on the right or left side of the bridge?” (translation: my own).
This question strikes a particularly complex chord within me. It brings about an array of other questions regarding the architectures we occupy and the designs that shape us. The answers are often available by categorizing the city into narrow groups of social relations, economics, urban planning and architecture, and religious divide. However, as I have learned from Pritam Jee and other Cholistani friends, imagining the city in those categories fails to grasp the production of the city within a chain of networks of materials, knowledge, time, ethics, values, and aesthetics that uphold those divisions and images of it. The urban space is where modernization is processed, and that is what makes Karachi, in Pritam Jee’s words, kinno. He argues that it brings on Ghuttan.
The Urdu word “ghuttan” means suffocation. It refers to an inability to breathe normally. I feel ghuttan when my asthma acts up. My mother felt ghuttan in the small and stuffy rooms at a cancer hospital. She would say, “Dil ghutt raha hai.” My heart feels suffocated. This feeling of ghuttan is often discussed in relation to physical suffocation, making its use predominantly biomedical. However, Pritam Jee meant something more current. He meant social, cultural, economical, and technological factors. Karachi can be seen through many lenses, all correct in their own rights but to me, Ghuttan is the most important one. Ghuttan and the processes that induce it is best understood amidst the ethics and values of the Rohi-wasi – people of the desert.
The desert stands antithetical to a city and its modern promise of a “Bourgeoisie regularity of life,” as Amitav Ghosh writes in his book The Great Derangement. He explains how modern existence – a category I use synonymously with city existence – is built on the premise of bourgeoisie regularity. We imagine radical events of nature as fantastical. We aim for a thermal monotony. We build our environments in ways that assist stability and predictability. Our cities, and in extension, our houses, and, therefore, our lives are built in a way that perpetuates a routine existence necessary to uphold capitalistic values. The desert ruptures such values. There is little to no infrastructure there that allows for routine travel. Cemented houses or pakkay ghar are frowned upon. Personal spaces are public spaces. Heat cannot be escaped. Nuclear family systems break apart. The desert holds the values of nomadism dearly, a category furthest from city existence, thus making it fertile grounds to understanding Ghuttan – an illness caused by the values of the city.
Within the desert’s cultural world, there is an understanding of how modernity has fundamentally changed life for the worse
To imagine Ghuttan, one cannot look at a singular, specific, zoomed-in image alone. The Rohi-wasi, across the Cholistan desert, comment on Ghuttan using examples of irrigation, heat, ACs, cars, relationships, economic prosperity, and other modern values. They weave together dispersed elements into a single image of this modern suffocation. They do so by primarily understanding that a neat separation of those elements is one of the characteristics of the past that is no longer possible in our times.
We live in a fundamentally altered world where the desert blends into the city. Thus, it becomes crucial to remember what the desert is, so that we can track how the hegemonic Ghuttan-inducing values haunt it.
Cholistan was created by the West and its hegemonies in ways that have been consistently destructive. Cholistan’s inclusion in colonial documents can be traced back to 1854. However, it wasn’t until 1901 that the Sutlej River Scheme was proposed. Later, following the economic collapse of Europe after World War 1, the British Raj, along with the Nawab of Bahawalpur, reimagined Cholistan under modern and colonial irrigation practices. This not only weakened one of the most powerful princely states of India but also set the benchmark for what a desert is – a land with no name but a number: Chak 1, 2, 3…200 – waiting to be irrigated.
The Partition of Pakistan and India severed it into two: Cholistan on one side and Rajasthan on the other, further impacting the social lives of the Rohi-wasi and primarily nomadism. Then, Ayub Khan, the Field Marshal and the President of Pakistan from 1958 to 1962, in his “Decade of Development,” promised a Green Revolution. Pritam Jee claims that seeds of the keekar tree were thrown from helicopters in attempts to make the desert “green.” He recounted:
“All this land used to be clear. Just sand. The old nomads did not walk around with shoes. There were no thorns in the desert. In the 60s, Ayub had the bright idea of importing these keekar trees. They literally dropped seeds from the sky, and now it grows everywhere.”
The keekar tree has many benefits – increased firewood supply, for one – as do the irrigated lands in all the chaks. The marvel of human engineering means that people can grow sugarcane and cotton in a place where nothing used to grow. It’s called “zameen abad karna.” And, yet, there is the problematic issue of the desert. That land, which supposedly never produced anything for anyone, has housed many nomads who, after all, know how to use it productively. In the one-directional arrow of modern time, on land that used to be the desert, there are now farmlands. Ironically, the desert that provided food to the Rohi-wasi and its cattle now produces janthar – a plant to feed cows – to feed herds that produce milk, which is then sold to Nestle’s shining collection centers that gulp down the milk produced in village after village. Pritam Jee insists that the milk that came out of the cow that only ate what grew on God’s earth all by itself could cure broken bones and broken hearts. This milk is nothing, he protests.
Now, the desert is blotted with white patches of saim – salinity – that often look beautiful, but signify the dying of the desert. There is a layer of whiteness all over large areas of the desert land, and nothing grows there. There are some dried bushes, but nothing more. The saim-laden land can be seen plaguing almost every chak we visited. However, at the same time, deep green sugarcane and cotton fields joyously sway to and fro. Even with its dense farmlands, Cholistan is still a desert. It is part of the chak system. And the Cholistani sensibility means that all the land there, even parts that are no longer desert, is still called desert. But the lush green farms have created cognitive dissonance between what they present as “desert” and what we imagine as the desert – barren, empty land. Although those fields do provide much-needed economic stability for people to survive in the modern cash economy, at the same time they pose serious sociocultural and environmental concerns. They’ve created a feeling of impending doom, a fear of the entire desert becoming like Chak 117/D.B., a heavily developed and bustling neighborhood in the heart of Rahim Yar Khan city. A fear not of elements messily overlapping, but of that messiness being tidied up under the accepted categories of the modern world of “City,” “Productive,” “Development” etc.
Lastly, in the late 1970s, when all was lost and changed beyond recognition, the Arabs came. There is a road that runs from Rahim Yar Khan to the desert, and then cuts through the desert all the way to its other end. The road is called Sheikh Zayed Road, named after the same Emirati sheikh that the Sheikh Zayed Airport in Rahim Yar Khan is named after. The State of Pakistan allowed the sheikhs to develop roads, airports, palaces, and hunting reserves. The little of the desert that was left after the British Raj, afer Partition, and after Ayub’s Regime had its share is now mostly owned by the sheikhs, with military check posts frequently placed throughout to safeguard the “priceless” properties of the sheikhs from the Rohi-wasi to whom the desert used to belong. There is a fabricated entrance to the desert where a state official sits behind a barrier, letting you through only after an identification check. If those with a gun at their hip are feeling kind that day and you are let through, you will find yourself traveling on an endless road through a beautiful desert punctuated by other check posts and sometimes signs that will say things like “Colonel Khabib Ahmed Khan Chowk.” “Cholistaniyoun ka naam bhi khatam kar rahay hain hamari zameen aur hamari shanakht tou khatam kar he chukay hain,” Pritam Jee complains. “They are erasing even the name of the Cholistani people. Our land and our identity have already been destroyed.” With the new “Green Pakistan” canal project, perhaps the epilogue to this saga of destruction, whatever area of the desert is left is under threat of being co-opted by the military and corporate farming. The modernizing process sees the desert, the Rohi-wasi’s productivity, their ways of being and ethics as antithetical and “other” to itself. It sees it as primitive and in need of modernization.
…the Rohi-wasi have numerous names for heat
The Rohi-Wasi also divide time on the basis of having a sensibility of the urooj and zawal – the high and low times – of the day, the season, the year, and life as a whole, whereas the city dweller strives for regularity. The Rohi-wasi are intimately aware of the rhythms of urooj and zawal. This intimate knowledge is one of those understood and unsaid codes that, to them, requires no commentary. They discuss the flux of urooj and zawal as a core tenet of human existence. Urooj, literally translating to zenith or peak, and zawal referring to times of lows. For the Rohi-wasi, the periods of zawal in themselves are not a problem. Nobody is bothered when it doesn’t rain when it’s not supposed to rain. However, a prolonged dry spell during the monsoon, or a destructively heavy monsoon, is a different kind of zawal. Then, it’s outside the rhythms of urooj and zawal.
The unprecedented rise in disastrous climate events over the last few years provides fertile ground for explaining why Ghuttan has proliferated to a large extent, and why it is essential to understand the systems that make it sit in the lungs of the modern human. Across the globe, almost every year, from Europe to America to Asia, we see tens and thousands of deaths during the summer season caused by heatwaves. Ordinary heat and the summer season are naturally occurring entities – a part of the urooj and zawal. Thus, deaths caused by them should be counted as naturally occurring deaths. But these heatwaves are a result of social practices that have, and continue to cause global warming – and there is significant literature proving this – the deaths cannot be counted as due to a regular summer. By that accord, these deaths are socially occurring, and should be dealt with changes in social structures, rather than ACs.
Heat dictates how you do life in Cholistan. The mehmankhana I was housed in has big windows and open doors, so I could shift indoors during the day because of the heat. There is a chabootra next to the mehmankhana where a neem tree gives shade. At night, you shift to the chabootra because of the heat. My hosts, as an extension of the larger sociocultural understanding of how to use the very scarce water, intentionally throw bucket after bucket on the chabootra in the evening to create coolness. They remember the movement of the shadows in relation to when it will start cooling due to the heat. We slept from 11 am to 4 pm because of the heat. We wore a patka – a handkerchief used as a headscarf – in different ways on our heads because of the heat.
The Rohi-wasi live differently when the heat in question is looh – a scorching, arid heat – and differently when it is habs – a highly humid heat. They would ask me to do something slightly differently because of tapish – heat characterized by its capacity to burn the skin. Or they’ll remark on how the garmi – a neutral heat – is less today. Like the Inuit, as recorded by Franz Boas and John Steckley in Handbook of American Indian Languages and White Lies About the Inuit respectively, who hold multiple names for snow, the Rohi-wasi have numerous names for heat. Habs is when my host makes a screen of date leaves and soaks it with water to cool the air passing through. It is also the entity that occupies an empty room when you open it at night, and Pritam Jee asks that we must give it its passage before entering. Tapish is when I had to learn to separate my toes from time to time, or else the skin between them would start to burn. Zyada garmi is when the elderly have their shirt off when it’s become too hot, and kam garmi is when they have a banyaan on. Looh is when you feel sick and must drink namkeen lassi.
The work of heat is constant. Where you sleep, how you sleep, how long you sleep, how and when you shower, and even when you eat are dictated by heat management. The Rohi-wasi pay remarkable attention to how they treat their bodies, regulating the minutest details to ensure the best results vis-à-vis heat. Chaarpais are moved around throughout the day, sometimes a few yards per hour, to get the coolest spot in which to sit or lie down. I was told by Aadu to not be horizontal to the wind channel, as it would lead to one side of my body blocking access to wind on the other side. “Lie down with your feet and head aligning with the wind channel so that the wind gets to pass over your entire body.”
The timing of food is itself one of the most significant factors in regulating heat. As a guest, I was given three meals a day. But I was frequently reminded that Cholistanis themselves often skip the midday meal. “We have a big breakfast early in the morning and maybe biscuits or tea during the day, then we have dinner in the evening,” my host said. The avoidance of the day meal works for both – those who consume meals and those who prepare them. During the heat of the day, heading to an often open fire kitchen is nearly impossible. It is also nearly impossible to properly digest the day’s meal. “Khanay ko hazam karnai sai garmi hoti hai” – The body feels hot from the process of digestion. Now, the truth of this common Ayurvedic knowledge is not something I’m aware of on a biological level; however, it does show how heat actively occupies the Cholistani consciousness. People understand that digesting food and cooling down are inversely related. They will often shower just before their meals, ensuring that the body is in a cool state as they start to eat. While it is generally frowned upon to shower after a meal on really hot days, an exception can be made to prevent the body from overheating after eating.
In this regard, the Rohi-wasi occupy the day through a totally different temporal understanding, one that does not rely on regularities of producing thermal monotony through ACs, individual rooms, corporate jobs, etc. Modern time, by its dictum of prioritizing productivity-maximization, cannot understand the necessity of a “low” or of slowing down. It is inherently opposed to the urooj and zawal understanding of time held by the Rohi-wasi, who imagine days not merely as chunks of time in which to be productive, but as opportunities to be used in ways that the natural world allows. Waking up at first light and sleeping between 11 am and 4 pm as cultural practices are not simply byproducts of the region’s material realities. They are also a preferred way of living, and that often comes from a conscious decision to reject modern modes of existence that aim to establish regularity.
There’s a well-established link between the modern uniformity and the modern house. The modern house and the city bifurcate parts of the day and life into neat categories: office and home; workplace and recreational spaces; public and private. This creates a cycle in which you work in liminal spaces and then resort to individualized or individually curated spaces. I, too, am largely comfortable with these categories. I, like most of us, am also comfortable with Ghuttan-inducing regularities, and uncomfortable with the counter. When I first started visiting Cholistan, the thing that bothered me the most was the lack of privacy. I was almost always living with someone else. Even when I showered, I was with someone else. I was perpetually occupying some kind of public space.
But Ghuttan is the byproduct of the hyper individualistic world that modernity creates where each family, each individual, each person must have their own resources, their own room, their own house, their own bed. Our sense of what is our “right” is tainted by patterns of consumption. We think having one’s own room is critical. Arguably, it is. But what needs to be critiqued is the sort of social system where individuality is prevalent to such an extent that we can no longer share resources. The default expectation that everyone must have a thing of their own is precisely what drives capitalism. The Ghuttan produced by this capitalist uniformity, that perpetuates an individual-centric or a unit-centric existence, works on multiple sociocultural nodes. Uniformity is essential to regularity, and it can take the form of religious uniformity leading to discrimination, unchangeable structures of nuclear families leading to sexual frustration, and a singular definition for a productive member of society leading to depression.
Within the desert’s cultural world, there is an understanding of how modernity has fundamentally changed life for the worse. When pakkay ghar were first introduced into the area, elders resisted and denounced those innovations, insisting that people continue to live in kachay kai ghar – mud houses – as they had for centuries. Eventually, the winds of progress won, and pakkay ghar became the dominant architectural form. Over time, the wisdom of that caution has become apparent: pakkay ghar are abandoned during the summer because they are too hot, and older mud houses are used as respite.
The pakka ghar makes the human body nidhaal, as Pritam Jee argues. This state of being lethargic on an existential level is symptomatic of the crux of all problems with a pakka ghar. And, by extension, it’s symptomatic of the problem of the city – Ghuttan. Pritam Jee made it clear that the lack of chabootray is central to the city’s nidhaal curse. A chabootra stands for an open communal space; the modern house is neither open nor communal. The chabootra is anti-air conditioning; the modern house comfortably allows for air conditioning. The chabootra stands for not isolating yourself from the natural hours of daylight and the community around you. Pritam Jee says that the modern house creates a state of being nidhaal because we place our bodies in opposition to their primal needs. This points towards a much larger failure of cities across the globe, a failure that the tools given to us by modernism cannot explain.
The desert holds the values of nomadism dearly, a category furthest from city existence, thus making it fertile grounds to understanding Ghuttan
The Modern Human wants the idea of the city to be limited to fantastical dream cities of the West, mechanical tools of progress. Because of what the Modern Human wants to keep visible, contemporary spaces are produced as singular units, barring the Other from entry to maintain sameness. These unvaried places are designed for the efficient operation of capitalist machinery. An imagination beyond these frameworks threatens an alternative understanding of space – an understanding of a deserted city. In a deserted city, architecture is not forced upon its inhabitants. Instead, it is informed by the professional and cultural practices of those for whom it’s intended.
It is then important for us to radically revolt against the hegemonic imaginations of the city, and to imagine deserted ones. We should imagine cities where sharing, mehmannawazi, natural acclimatization, liminal spaces, and architecture with the ability to transform spaces are present. To imagine deserted cities is not to advocate for anti-modernity or a reversal of time to a pastoral dream, but to advocate for places that are not rooted in capitalistic values that isolate, regulate, entrap, limit, and categorize us into boxes. It is an advocacy for cities without Ghuttan.
Muhammad Khuzaima Nizami can be found on the borders of a vast array of professional fields. He completed his undergraduate degree in Social Development and Policy from Habib University, with a concentration in Anthropology. He also studied Environmental Design and Archeology over a summer semester at UC Berkeley. Bringing together his love for anthropology and an intellectual commitment towards designing sustainable spaces, he conducted ethnography in the Cholistan Desert to understand the ethics with which non-urban communities live.
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