Perambulatory Visions: Recasting History in the Makli Necropolis

In 1761, Mir Ali Shir Qani, a Persian poet from Thatta, penned a poem in praise of the Makli Hills. The narrator of the poem walked through the necropolis stopping intermittently to praise the funerary monuments, marvel at its natural beauty, and describe pilgrims and picnickers. Two centuries later, Pir Hussamuddin Rashdi, a historian, archivist, and editor of many crucial sources on Sindh’s history, discovered Qani’s poem. He edited and printed the text in 1967, following up the seventy-page poem with six hundred pages of additional material. In these appendices, Rashdi meticulously documented the history of Makli and mapped the numerous graves of the necropolis. This paper examines the transformation in the framing of Makli across these two texts, charting the shifting relationship between material heritage, ecology, and history writing. The perambulatory viewing practices encoded in the eighteenth-century poem, I argue, authorized a new form of vision for the twentieth-century historian, who recast the site as cultural heritage and a material and visual archive of the region’s history.