Introduction

The

Zenana

Revisited

e stood in the dimly lit hallway, my husband Sheheryar,son Faizan, and I. Our downstairs neighbor, Ruhi, hadsaid to come at 9

, and we were late. “Oh, you people have come!”she exclaimed, throwing open the screen door and ushering us inside. As we turned toward the drawing room, Ruhi admonished, “Brother, this isthe

zenana

(the women’s space); the

mardana

(men’s space) is over there.”Reluctantly, Sheheryar and I separated. Faizan joined the other pre-schoolers shouting and playing in the corridor, and I stepped throughthe curtains to join Ruhi, her female relatives, neighbors, and friends.For days, Ruhi had been reminding me to come to her dinner party:“If you want to learn about Karachi people, then you must come.” Theresidents of the Shipyard were well aware of my interest in Karachi’sethnic “troubles.” Ruhi’s husband had been involved in Sindhi national-ism during his university days and was certain to have some interestingstories. As the evening progressed, conversation in the

zenana

moved frommarriage, to mother-in-law problems, to children, to sex, to hair removal.Eschewing their various native languages (Sindhi, Punjabi, Memoni), the women conversed comfortably in Urdu, the national language. They pumped me for information: Where were Sheheryar’s parents from?How did I get along with my

sas

(mother-in-law)? Why didn’t we have

2 / Zenana

a second child? Had I converted to Islam? Did I prefer waxing or shav-ing?From the

mardana,

I could hear snippets of conversation—somethingabout migration, feudalism, roots, language. Casually, I attempted toelicit comments from the women on ethnic identity, on what it meant tobe Sindhi, Muhajir, and so on, but to no avail. Time and again, I foundmyself glancing wistfully at the gap in the curtains, toward the

mardana

—imagining the political repartee, the debates, the arguments—as if some-how the truth about ethnic difference, conﬂict, the “troubles,” could befound there in the men’s room, but not here in the

zenana.

Ethnic Conﬂict in the

Zenana

In most scholarly accounts, this moment represents a stoppingpoint. Those who write about ethnic violence often introduce womeninto the narrative, only to leave them stranded at the well, discussing“domestic” and “family” matters (e.g., Kakar 1996). Women are conﬂict’s“victims”; they are “innocent bystanders”; they are, in the last analysis,incidental to the drama (if not the tragedy) of ethnic violence. Feministcritics of this position continue to present counternarratives of womenstepping out into public, political life, protesting in the streets, rioting,aiding and abetting “insurgents” (or, if you prefer, “terrorists”) (Aretxaga1997; Jayawardena 1986; Stree Shakti Sanghatana 1989). But what of the women who, in fact, do stay home? What of the women at the well? Although it was not immediately apparent to me at the time, we in the

zenana

were equally involved in Karachi’s “troubles” in signiﬁcant andtransformative ways. As my example makes clear, there are many ways in which we haveimplicitly accepted the tenets of Western liberal ideology, which casts“home” as a private, feminine realm, cut off from the world of the po-litical, uninvolved with matters of state. This “private sphere” is idealizedby some as a realm of freedom of expression, love, and fulﬁllment; otherssee it as “women’s incarceration” and “restrictive domesticity.” But oneserious consequence of our tacit acceptance of these tenets is that wehave failed to adequately explore the spaces and the social relations of dwelling—of household, apartment building, neighborhood, backyard,

Introduction / 3

balcony—as sites of political processes, not just of gendered and gener-ational conﬂict but of class, ethnic, racial, and national struggles. The considerable literature on domesticity in colonial India has es-tablished the centrality of “home” in Indian and Indian Muslim nation-alist and reform discourses (Chatterjee 1993; Devji 1991; Metcalf 1990; Minault 1998). By appropriating and reconﬁguring the “public” and “private” dichotomies of liberalism, anticolonial movements crafted visionsof the home (

ghar

) or the

zenana

as sites of cultural authenticity, un-touched by the emasculating and corrupting inﬂuence of colonial power. The home and the

zenana

would nurture not colonial subjects but na-tional citizens. Such scholarship has indeed unsettled and complicatedany easy understanding of these terms—public, private, masculine, fem-inine, home, nation—and has forced us to locate their emergence withinspeciﬁc cultural and historical practices. But despite this important in-tervention, the

content

of domesticity (if we choose to call it this)—thelived spaces, relations, and boundaries of dwelling—remains largely unexamined.Still, one may ask, what do marriage, mother-in-law problems, chil-dren, sex, and hair removal have to do with ethnic conﬂict? Why look to the

zenana,

the apartment building, the dinner party for insight intoKarachi’s “troubles”? Because the everyday, intimate negotiation of “eth-nicity” and “nationalism”—within gendered cultural and historical dis-courses and practices of home and outside, neighborhood and commu-nity, anger and honor, piety and civility—is deeply implicated in thebroader conditions of possibility of ethnic violence in the city, as well asthe possibility of peaceful coexistence.Despite a wealth of information on ethnic violence, we actually know very little about the micromechanics of coexistence—about the neigh-borhoods and colonies that achieved and maintained intergroup peace inthe midst of civic strife. There is a pressing need for scholarly analysisof the day-to-day poetics of intergroup cooperation. But even morepointedly, we cannot view this everyday life, this peaceful coexistence, asthe static context or backdrop against which “things” (like riots, violence,or “breakdown”) happen. Rather, peace itself is the product of a relentlesscreative labor. Coexistence, as much as conﬂict, needs to be explained.It is this notion that underpins my interest in the routine rituals and