ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the overlapping geographies of Gwadar, a small harbor town on the Mekran Coast in Balochistan Province, Pakistan, with the larger Indian Ocean world to unsettle received ideas of imperial frontiers and national borderlands as isolated “savage spaces.” Gwadar is presently being developed by the Pakistani government, with Chinese assistance, as a major port city that would help the economic revival of the country. These development plans and the representation of Gwadar fishermen as illiterate tribesmen rub against the townspeople’s lived experiences and imagined geographies. Despite decades of Pakistani rule, fragments of these geographies trace an arc over the Indian Ocean through memory, nostalgia, and diasporic networks. The chapter follows the memories of the historical movement of Baloch and African-descent bodies across the ocean between Zanzibar, Muscat, Gwadar, and Karachi as well as their contemporary placemaking practices to show the layered social geography of the town. It concludes that this seaward perspective enables us to re-imagine and reframe Pakistan’s social and historical geography beyond the dominant nationalist and historiographical narratives centered around the Partition and offers a different frame for imagining the pasts (and perhaps the futures) of newly emerging port towns in the Indian Ocean.
