Lumma! In Your Name

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Notes

1 Brahui is one of several languages that are spoken by Baloch communities around the world. The other major language is Balochi, yet even Balochi has several variations that are sometimes mutually unintelligible. Interestingly, Brahui-speakers and Balochi-speakers do not understand one another, but the Baloch nationalist identity traverses several languages.

2 The story of how they were politicised is often told as a reaction to intensified violence, yet it is far broader than that. Remittances from Baloch diasporas in the Gulf fuelled the emergence of a lower middle class that began sending girls to school and university, and a secular and progressive section of a broader Baloch nationalist movement mobilised students, especially girls, through study circles and political organising.

3 Recently, as abductions and killings once concentrated in the peripheries travelled to the centre – violently targeting supporters of the ruling party of the deposed prime minister Imran Khan – even members of an otherwise military-supporting middle class and urban elite started criticising the army’s violence.

4 Who constitutes this progressive international is the matter of some debate within Baloch nationalist circles. Mahrang largely addresses the English-speaking western world, in particular a set of institutions and governments (in particular the US) understood as strategic and tactical allies if not ideological ones, that can invoke legal and discursive indictments of human rights abuses in Pakistan. Others within the Baloch nationalist movement feel it is necessary to solidify stronger relations with anti-racist and anti-colonial, left movements, and consider the former set of actors largely antithetical to the politics of what they understand as a left-wing, national liberation movement. I have little space to get into the details of this debate here, but suffice it to say that it often finds itself stuck between questions related to tactics, strategy, and ideology.

5 Mahrang is referring to the Baloch nationalist struggle against militarised and racialised violence, which her father was a part of, and the attack on the Baloch nasl, which can be translated into race, generations, or family tree, and which I have translated into ‘generations’.

6 Sabeen Mahmud was a human rights activist and social worker who ran a community space and café called The Second Floor in Karachi. In 2015, she hosted a panel on Baloch disappearances, that had earlier been cancelled at a private university in Lahore, in defiance of attempts to censor the conversation. She was shot dead after leaving the event. Authorities later arrested Saad Aziz, who they also said was behind an attack on a school bus carrying members of the Ismaili Shia community, but Baloch nationalists and other organisers, as well as other parts of the human rights community, continue to suspect Pakistani intelligence.

7 Here, Mahrang begins to refer to her father as Murid and her mother as Hanel and Hani. There are two ways to understand her naming of her father, Murid. One is to think of him as a murid, a disciple, who is wedded to the dream of the Baloch nation. Her father, Dr Ghaffar Lango, was also a follower of Khair Bakhsh Marri, the head of the Marris known as a prominent Baloch nationalist and Marxist, and often people call themselves the murid of Khair Bakhsh Marri. Another way to read her naming of her father as Murid is as an invocation of the figure of Sheh Murid, a tragic character in a much-beloved epic ballad famous in Balochi folklore. Sheh Murid loses his one love and Hani, to Mir Chakar Rind, a tribal chief, one evening, after promising that he will give up anything on the night of his wedding and is then asked for Hani’s hand in marriage. Sheh Murid abandons his life, and spends his nights in worship, writing poetry in his beloved Hani’s name, and eventually leaves and travels the world. One day, upon his return, he meets Hani again looking like a beggar. Mir Chakar divorces Hani but at this point, Sheh Murid says he lives on another level of existence and cannot be with her. Hani is left bereft, and Sheh Murid becomes an immortal saint of the Baloch. Meanwhile, the reference to her mother as Hani is likely an invocation of Hani’s lifelong commitment to her Sheh Murid. Throughout the time that Hani is married to Mir Chakar Rind, she refuses to consummate the marriage, freezing whenever approached. She ends up returning to her Murid, only to find him gone, living on another realm of existence.