Bittersweet Waters
How British dam engineering policies created food scarcity, and submerged cuisines and lives in Sindh, Pakistan. Words and photographs by Zuhaib Ahmed Pirzada.
Good morning and welcome to Vittles Season 7: Food and Policy. Each essay in this season investigates how policy intersects with eating, cooking, and life. If you wish to receive the Monday newsletter for free each week, or to also receive Vittles Recipes on Wednesday and Vittles Restaurants on Friday for £5 a month or £45 a year, then please subscribe below.
For our nineteenth piece in this season, Zuhaib Ahmed Pirzada writes about how nineteenth- and twentieth-century British dam-engineering policies on the Indus Delta have led to scarcities of food and livelihood for fisherfolk of the region. Zuhaib’s essay contrasts memories of an old-world that was flush with food, festivals, and song, and the present consequences of imperial systems of productivity, that neglect indigenous knowledge and redesign societies for their profit.
Bittersweet Waters
How British dam engineering created food scarcity and submerged lives in Sindh, Pakistan. Words and photographs by Zuhaib Ahmed Pirzada.
چه آسان مینمود اول غمِ دریا به بوی سود
غلط کردم که این طوفان به صد گوهر نمیارزد
I thought I would profit when I sold the river,
But a single wave of the river was worth thousands of pearls
The Divān of Hafez (Persian: دیوان حافظ)
Chapter 1: Babu’s Lament
On a humid day in June last year, I boarded a small horho (wooden boat) in Keti Bunder – a historical port in Pakistan’s Sindh province – to go to Khobar Creek. Keti Bunder and Khobar are both on the Indus Delta, which is formed at the spot where the Arabian Sea intersects the Sindhu River (or the Indus River, as it’s more commonly known). The horho travelled fast in the wind, the heat escalating when it crossed mangrove-crowded nooks. These were the same waters upon which, three centuries ago, large Arab dhows laden with timber, charcoal, livestock, rice, and camels set sail for ports in the Persian Gulf.
I was headed to Khobar Creek to meet Babu Jat, a fisherman who lives there with his wife and three children, in a wooden hut on the river’s shores. Babu, who is in his late thirties, makes a living by ‘trash fishing’ – catching and drying juvenile fish that are then sold, through middlemen, as poultry feed to factories around Pakistan. Most of the Indus Delta’s 300,000 people depend on fishing for their income, but the majority of their nets and boats are owned by wealthy landowners on Pakistan’s coastal belt. Babu fishes using nets whose fine mesh prevents small fish from escaping. These have been banned in Pakistan since 2019, and Babu is aware that they are harmful for marine and riverine life. ‘But we have no alternative for our survival. If we can’t fish, we have nothing to eat,’ he says.
Just a century ago, the Indus delta consisted of lands that were productive for agriculture and cattle farming, its ‘mithru paani’ – literally ‘sweet water’ or freshwater – produced fish and crops in such abundance that there are accounts of the region sending food to the rest of the Indian subcontinent. As in many riverine ecosystems of South Asia, sweet water is integral for cultivating crops and fishing, it feeds fertile soil that grow nutritional, indigenous varieties of grains, fruit, and vegetables suited to the land. In the Indus Delta, crops such as red rice, and fruits like mangoes and bananas were cultivated, sustaining local populations and supporting thriving trade networks. But now the water is mostly salty, except in the times of Sawan (monsoon), reducing agricultural practices, and riverine fish on the delta have declined towards extinction, forcing fishermen like Babu into systems of feudal hierarchy.
The contemporary influx of saline water and feudal system both have their roots in the policies of British India, of which Sindh was then a part. Under the vast British dam-engineering project in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (which remains the largest irrigation system in the world), dams and diversions were made, and colonial intervention to the Indus’ ecosystem caused disruption to the flow of the river, as well as the surrounding aquatic and human habitats.
The deltas of South Asia have historically been associated with abundance and cultural exchange – consider the Sundarbans of Bengal, which were once places of bustling markets and agricultural prowess (before the region was starved by British governance under Churchill). The old tales of the Indus delta’s similarly feature bustling ports, rice mills, and festivals, a huge contrast to the its present state of barren lands that function at the mercies of landlordism, and food scarcities. Today, Babu’s lament can be traced back centuries – to this British architecture of empire, and imperial systems that treat rivers not as members of the community but as commodities.
Chapter 2: Ruling the Indus
There was once an abundance of industry in the Indus Delta, as Sindhi poet Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai noted when he visited the region in the 1740s. He witnessed the life of the people and prosperity of the province:
Beginning their voyage with salty deep, by sweet water they returned
big businessmen trade not with gold but ocean’s pearls.
Much wealth from Sri Lanka they are able to bring.
Sur Samodi, Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai (translated into English by Amina Khamisani)
There are also nineteenth-century colonial accounts that describe the bounty of the delta. James MacMurdo, a political agent of the East India Company in the early 1800s, described the lands fed by the Indus and their crops as ‘beyond anything luxuriant’. Such accounts by company officials and the crown’s agents were part of the large colonial mission of translation and empirical production in Sindh; the project of cartographic demarcation and surveillance in the province was the largest ever undertaken by the British crown. As Manan Ahmed Asif writes, this ‘created a knowledge economy within which India’s peoples, histories, and land were shrivelled, archived, summarised, and operationalized’.
In 1843, Sindh was annexed as a water resource by the British colonial government in order to feed the newly colonised agricultural land. This was followed by the Irrigation Act of 1879 and the Canal and Drainage Act of 1873. These aimed to enhance agricultural productivity by providing a legal framework for canal construction and maintenance of drainage systems on the Indus. The motivation for the policies was twofold: firstly, the British regime wanted to increase revenue through agricultural exports by harnessing the river’s water – using its canals and transforming arid lands into cultivable zones. Secondly, the introduction of irrigation systems allowed colonial authorities to mark and tax land, thereby solidifying their grip on the local population and reinforcing colonial hierarchy. British use of the delta’s land was undertaken without contributions from the people who had lived there for centuries – characteristic of the way that colonial rulers operate. ‘Colonial governance also declared areas where cattle grazed and water was scarce “wastelands” – forcibly displacing the local population, distributing lands, and resettling outsiders,’ Hassan Abbas, a Lahore-based hydrologist and water expert, told me.
These policies not only reshaped the Indus River region’s physical landscape, but also had an enduring impact on its social, economic, ecological and culinary fabric, too. The colonial disruption destroyed the mangroves that controlled the river’s salinity, resulting in the encroachment of the sea and subsequently rendering four million acres of agricultural land unusable. Eventually, the use of dams and barrages for water storage and diversion meant only a fraction of the original volume of the river’s water was able to reach the lands. Furthermore, these policies established ownership over water resources. In this way, smaller farmers and traditional practices were marginalised and pushed to the peripheries, away from the river’s resources, foregrounding the inequalities that exist in the delta today.
Even after the British left the Indian subcontinent in 1947, their water policies stuck around. Several additional reservoirs – such as Mangla on the Jhelum River and Tarbela and Chashma on the Indus River – were constructed after the creation of Pakistan. Alongside these reservoirs, Pakistan now hosts six barrages on the Indus, plus three major dams, twenty-three barrages, twelve inter-river canals, and forty-eight perennial canals. Today, this extensive water management system forms part of the Indus Basin Irrigation System (IBIS), which irrigates – at the expense of the delta’s people and ecosystems - more than forty-five million acres of farmland across China, India, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Chapter 3: The Disappearance of Food, Pleasure and Shared Histories
Each time I visited the delta last year, the lack of mithru paani was the cause of many troubles and complaints. Sindh’s famous palla fish, which swims from marine to riverine water, was a gift of the freshwater, but many residents of the delta told me that palla, and other similar fish like ‘dhangri’, ‘do not swim to us now’. According to Babu, fishermen used to catch enough palla for their families to eat and sell the leftover produce at bazaars: ‘I could catch three–four kilos of fish in a day, easily. Now I struggle to even catch one kilogram’, he said. Abdullah Murgar, a seventy-year-old man who lives across the water from Babu, emphasised what Babu told me, adding how people need to buy fish from the markets bordering cities. ‘But of course, we cannot afford to buy delicious marine fish. People often have to scrounge what they can from the salty waters around them’, he said. Since a plate of fish and rice still form the basis of the delta’s cuisine (I was told that these two things constitute ‘a full stomach’), people must now turn to less nutritional alternatives: they eat fish like shodi and goli, which are small but expensive (shodi is priced at 350 PKR per kilogram, where goli is around 730 PKR per kilogram). For fishermen like Babu, whose families earn around 20,000 PKR a month, these prices mean that they often cannot buy fish at all.
Because of the decline in freshwater fish, fishermen increasingly depend on fishing in the sea for their livelihood. But fishing in deep-sea waters is not a possibility for everyone, as it is dangerous and it requires stamina: fishermen have to stay for days to catch enough fish to make the trip worthwhile. In this struggle for survival, many have also become dependent on dangerous and precarious jobs, like catching mud crabs and selling them to merchants for low prices they cannot establish or control. The partition of the subcontinent also led to arbitrary and unclear borders on the delta, which create precarity for fisherfolk on both sides who still subsist on these shared waters of the Indian subcontinent. The delta’s fishermen are frequently arrested by the Indian navy for mistakenly crossing the borders of Pakistan and India in the Arabian Sea, and Indian fishermen from Gujarat often land up in Pakistan’s jails for this reason, too. There are currently 266 Indian fishermen in Malir jail in Karachi, and 68 Pakistani fishermen in various jails across Gujarat.
Abdullah also referred to the 1960 Indus Water Treaty between India and Pakistan, which divided up the six rivers that flow between the two nations. The treaty, which was signed under the watchful eye of the World Bank, allowed hydroelectric power plants to be built, as well as further dams and barrages which divert the waters of subsistence, creating a scarcity for fisherfolk to fish for sustenance. ‘Our water was stopped for decades, rivers diverted, and our beautiful lands turned into a desert.’ Abdullah told me of the various post-partition legalities that determine life for people of the Indus. ‘Asaan jo doh kehro ah?’ he asked. ‘What is our fault in all this?’
In this world of scarcity, former dairy-based staples like milk, ghee, and butter are barely available in the delta, as there is little for cattle to feed on, and they therefore struggle to produce milk. (For context, this is the region where the act of selling milk was once deemed a moral transgression, for it flowed abundantly and was therefore expected to be freely shared.)
Meanwhile, red rice, which is more nutritional than industrially produced varieties of white rice, used to be ‘cultivated almost without ploughing, as the river deposited large quantities of silt on the seeds that the farmers scattered on the mud flats between the delta channels’, Arif Hasan writes. But since the dams have reduced annual silt deposits from eight millimetres to just one millimetre, the crop can hardly be grown anymore, and whenever a little is grown, it is sent to the market and sold. Saiyaan, a woman in her late nineties who lives in Baghan, told me that, ‘For dinner, we used to have red rice and milk; now both those things do not exist.’ She remembered the past, and lamented these present days of scarcity and enmity. ‘Sokhi main Duniya vee Dunya, per Darya Khaee wayu’, she said. ‘My world was in Sokhi, but the sea swallowed it.’
Chapter 4: Submerged Futures
Today the Indus Delta and its cities live in poverty’s shadow. Life on it is a daily act of survival for people like Babu, Saiyaan, and Abdullah. More than 88% of the coastal belt’s population lives below the poverty line, and 50% of children are malnourished. Many in the deltaic region must now buy bottled water, often spending more than three thousand rupees per month. Displacement due to sea erosion is a routine occurrence, and climatic changes have only exacerbated these tragedies: it is predicted that rising temperatures will cause water deficits and erratic floods in the region, leading to more displacement and disruption of agricultural production. Saiyaan’s husband used to have hundreds of acres of agricultural land, but this is now underwater. Babu lost his home and lands in floods in 1999 and was displaced again in 2022, during the Biporjoy cyclone that affected India and Pakistan. In the last fifty years, more than 1.2 million people have migrated from the Indus Delta to cities in Pakistan due to climatic shifts and lack of work, where they pursue jobs like construction.
In 2022, more than fifty million people – including those living in Sindh – were affected by floods in Pakistan, as lands were inundated by water that was diverted irregularly by the canals. As Daanish Mustafa writes, the floods were ‘equally a function of the infrastructural and engineering choices driven by certain developmental imaginaries, which are certainly not indigenous to Pakistan.’ Today, witnessing the harrowing aftermath of unchecked greed, the delta teeters on the brink of ecological collapse, and its people suffer losses of livelihood, customs and cuisine. When I think about this, I think of Saiyaan’s stories, Ashraf’s fields, Babu’s lament.
After many days in the delta, I made my way to Sakro town in Thatta district. When I arrived, I found myself amid wheatgrass mounds, accompanied by cows and buffalos. It was there I met Ashraf Kalmati, a forty-year-old graduate in agricultural sciences who has chosen his familial profession of farming over a city-based path. Ashraf’s family are guardians of two-hundred-year-old red-rice seeds and culinary traditions; their lands, which still get some rainwater and freshwater from the river, grow a variety of crops. With them, I ate a meal of red rice, milk, and fish – the way it must have been before. Despite Ashraf and his family’s efforts, these lands also hang by a thread. It is estimated that, by 2050, fresh water will not reach these lands or other cities on the coastal belt. As it stands, Ashraf’s family’s land, and along with it these culinary histories, are at risk of being entirely submerged. ‘Our lands too [will] be destroyed if the Indus river doesn’t get the water from the dams,’ he told me.
The morning after meeting Ashraf, I sat under a neem tree in Sakro, watching two men who were from the same village in Kharochan (an island on the delta) reunite after years. As they reminisced about their lives in the island, one mentioned a giant ‘jamui’ – or jamun tree – in their village. (Jamun, as it is known in other parts of South Asia, is a beloved small, purple, sweet-and-sour fruit. Across the subcontinent, it forms stories of childhood summers spent under the shade of its tree.) The other man responded, telling his companion how the Jamui tree, once thriving with sweet water, had dried up – like many others across the delta. Sadly, he told his friend the news: ‘Just last week, they cut its wood.’
Credits
Zuhaib Ahmed Pirzada researches and writes on climate justice, politics, fascism and capitalism. He tweets and tells stories @zuhaib_pirzada.
Vittles is edited by Sharanya Deepak, Rebecca May Johnson, Jonathan Nunn, and Odhran O’Donoghue, and is copyedited by Sophie Whitehead.
Great work of Zuhaib Ahmed Pirzada
Brilliant work comrade. Such work is a need of the hour.