2022

Immediately after independence, the government of Pakistan began the long process that would, over the next few decades, modify street names, discard memorials, reshape cultural markers, revise school textbooks, weekends, architecture, law and language. To heal the deep wounds of partition, and in a hurry to distance itself from anything un-Islamic, centuries of syncretic cultural and religious rituals were slowly stripped away and transformed into collective memory. The military government of 1962, dismantled the Victoria memorial in Karachi, dispersing the many components of the statue across the city. Raat Ki Rani draws on the many erasures, and the city’s ability to absorb multiple entanglements.