ABSTRACT
In Pakistan’s southern province of Balochistan, students targeted in extraordinary acts of state violence – harassment, disappearances, kill-and-dumps, extra-judicial killings, and army operations – repeatedly invoked the figure of the musāfir. In 2013, a caravan of families and friends of the missing traversed 3,000 kilometres to force a public conversation on disappearances; a young female student in Karachi recounted her dreams of travelling her imagined nation of Balochistan; and on the grounds of the University of Balochistan in Quetta, a student said that to live and to know, he had to be a musāfir. This essay investigates the concept of the musāfir as a mode being-in-the-world and knowing-the-world in Balochistan and beyond. Taking its point of departure in all that which musāfir indexes among those who invoked it in Balochistan – among other, collective, and transgressive movement countering the induced anti-nomadic fragmentation of the state to encounter others at a time of separation – I move to the rich invocations of musāfir across South Asia and the Middle East and engage similar fugitive figures, like runaway slaves and maroons, from around the world.
