A Pakistani Hindu is not content but is Content

A Muslim artist in Karachi painted a Ganesh idol this month at the Ganesh Math Mandir, and Amar Parkash put it online. The clip went round the world before Ganesh Chaturthi.

P’s Kitchen, describes itself as “Pakistani Hindu Food” with Fifty-five posts & 8,356 followers. The bio says “Vegetarian Pakistani & Sindhi-inspired recipes” and “One bite of home“, then “DM for Collaboration“. The recipes are Sindhi vegetarian.

Rarity is value on the feed. A Hindu in Pakistan is rare, and a Jew in Iran is rarer. People want to see how they live and what they cook, because they cannot see it anywhere else. Nearly all of Pakistan’s Hindus live in Sindh, most of them rural, many of them Dalit, and they are not on the feed. However the Marathi Karachi family with a five-foot Ganpati is. Pakistani Hindus seem to present as Pakistanis in accent and appearance, a Marathi in Karachi codes very differently to a Marathi in Bombay.

The exotic Persian Jew

About 9,000 Jews remain in Iran. They keep synagogues in Tehran and a reserved seat in the Majles, and they carry an identity in permanent tension with the state, which is why they are so fascinating? More than 200,000 Israelis are of Iranian Jewish descent, most of them born in Israel. There they are counted as Mizrahim, a word that also covers the Iraqi Jew and the Moroccan Jew.

Leave the Motherland (Iran) and you become an assimilated category in the Fatherland (Israel) or across the Ocean (US). Stay back in Fars and you remain a story that people will be compelled to watch.

The Hindus of Indus

The same rule holds in the Subcontinent. The Sindhi Hindu who crosses to India becomes a Sindhi; India wrote a citizenship law in 2019 partly for them. In Karachi they stay a Pakistani Hindu, and the feed delicately teases out the difference. The tension in the identity is what draws eyeballs in this attention economy.

What is the tension? Pakistani Hindus are likely Sindhi before they are anything else. Their language is the one the state kept provincial while it made Urdu national (presumably Pakistani Hindus are now the most Urdu-fluent Hindus in the world).

The constitution gives the state a religion, and it is not theirs, in the same document that promises them equal rights. They go to Sehwan for Lal Shahbaz Qalandar and to Hinglaj for the goddess, and their Muslim neighbours call her Nani Pir and the walk to her Nani ka Hajj. They live inside a contradiction that a camera can see. Cross the border and the contradiction becomes a fossilised heritage.

In a globalised world

The whole world is buying one Western product. Everyone uses the same app and writes the same captions (which is why BP, a blog, is a holdover from a very different age of the Internet). The feed is free without limit, and freedom without limit ends in sameness, because everyone on it wants the exact same thing. They want to feel something, and they want to be loved (from living creatures not artificial). The technology runs on that and on nothing else. When anyone can be an author, the only scarce good is what is genuinely novel.

Maslow put need at the bottom of his pyramid and left the top drawer open for status acquisition. The viewer scrolling a Karachi Ganpati at midnight has climbed past need. What rules them now is want, and the paradox of the human condition is that want is never met. Modernity promised that freedom began where need ended. It found deep appetite and hunger there instead (will we find God through technology?). The Pakistani Hindu, for as long as they stay a troubling paradox, is one of the things the internet wants to consume, package and present to a hungry audience (a half Jamaican half Sri Lankan presents Jamaican curry goat biryani).