At the Midlands Arts Centre (MAC) in Birmingham, ‘Riverless Water’, London-based Pakistani artist Saba Khan’s debut solo exhibition in the United Kingdom (UK), explores the human and environmental legacies of the Mangla Dam in Azad Kashmir. Built in the 1960s on the Jhelum River, its construction submerged large parts of the Mirpur hamlets and triggered one of the largest migrations from Pakistan to the UK, significantly shaping the cultural landscape of England’s north and midlands.

Through a curated sequence of 12 paintings, drawings, archival material and video interviews with Birmingham elders, Khan traces a journey from the political spectacle of the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) to the lived realities of Mirpuri migrants in post-industrial Britain, highlighting histories of loss, trauma and marginalisation often absent from official narratives. The curator, Roma Piotrowska, emphasises the exhibition’s importance for local communities with Pakistani roots, viewing it as a reflection on technological ‘progress’, climate justice and postcolonial identity.

Khan explains she did not go directly to Mangla Dam. Her interest and investigation started during her time in France, where she studied water bodies as part of her research and drew some drawings of French dams in the Alps. It was there that she first saw the enormous scale of human-made structures designed to contain millions of tonnes of water — monumental interventions transforming entire landscapes.

Furthermore, she was inspired by Beijing-based artist Liu Chuang, who documented the socio-technical impacts of big dams in China, and Khan shifted her focus to her homeland. Her research led her to the Water and Power Development Authority (Wapda) archives, where she found a 1951 article by the David E Lilienthal, an American public administrator, titled ‘Another ‘Korea’ in the Making?’

Saba Khan’s deeply poignant exhibition in Birmingham explores how the Mangla Dam’s construction triggered one of the largest migrations from Pakistan to the UK

Lilienthal, former head of the Tennessee Valley Authority, visited the subcontinent in 1951 and warned that India and Pakistan were on the brink of war over Kashmir. He proposed that joint, technocratic development of the Indus Basin was the only route to peace and prosperity. This approach directly influenced the World Bank-led mediations that culminated in the 1960 IWT. Some hydropower experts note that the treaty, negotiated in a Cold War climate partly to curb Soviet influence, controversially allocated the west-flowing rivers to Pakistan as the lower riparian.

Pakistan’s water access was not inherently at risk even without the treaty. The agreement, signed by Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and Pakistani President Field Marshal Ayub Khan, effectively partitioned the Indus system. Pakistan received the western rivers — the Indus, Chenab and Jhelum — and, to compensate for the loss of the eastern rivers, embarked on the Indus Basin Project, supervised by the British firm Binnie & Partners.

Although hailed as a triumph, the treaty has remained a flashpoint ever since. In 2025, following militant attacks in Kashmir, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi unilaterally suspended the treaty, asserting India’s right to its water, triggering a potential war scenario. International mediation secured a ceasefire soon after, preventing escalation between the nuclear-armed neighbours.

Correspondingly, in the 1960s, Britain experienced significant labour shortages in its industrial centres. By chance, many displaced by the dam were granted work permits to migrate to the UK, transporting an entire social fabric from Mirpur’s submerged valleys to the foundries and mills of the West Midlands and northern England.

Cities such as Birmingham, Bradford and Manchester, key hubs of the steel and textile industries, became new homes for this community. As factories and mills declined in the 1980s, the Kashmiri labouring class adapted itself.

In the latter part of the exhibition, Khan highlights the sociological framework of the Indian-British sociologist Virinder S. Kalra’s book From Textile Mills to Taxi Ranks. Khan’s paintings shift focus to contemporary urban life and economic activities: from car manufacturing plants to neon-lit halal restaurants, independent small shops and beyond.

Khan’s new body of work acts as a ghostly chronicle in neon greys, greens and blues. She depicts the transcendence of technocratic brutality with the metallic lines of maps and bulldozers physically erasing the intimate cartography of Mirpur’s hamlets, transforming ancestral homes into sites of mechanical intervention. For the Mirpur diaspora, urban progress has been built on their homelessness, on the many graveyards where their forebears are buried, and these sites can no longer be visited.

‘Riverless Water’ is on display at the Midlands Arts Centre (MAC) in Birmingham, England from January 10-April 6, 2026

The writer is an art critic who spends his time in Birmingham and Lahore. He can be reached at aarish.sardar@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, EOS, March 29th, 2026

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On the screen, horrific images of World War II flicker, showing the skeletal figures of Jewish men, women and children in Nazi concentration camps being marched into the horrors of the “Final Solution.”

It is a sombre cinematic and television ritual we have come to expect. Yet, if one observes the scheduling of these screened tragedies, a pattern emerges.

Whenever the state of Israel faces widespread condemnation for its brutal excursions in the Middle East, the Western entertainment industry develops a sudden, renewed obsession with Jewish victimhood during the last world war.

This is what media scholars call “affective management”, a term describing how our emotional responses are curated by those who control the narrative. In 1988, academics Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky examined this as an attempt to mitigate the public relations (PR) disaster of the present with the trauma of the past.

By re-running the tragedy faced by the Jewish people at the hands of the Nazis, the Western entertainment industry provides a moral counterweight that often dilutes contemporary criticism of Israeli state violence. The criticism becomes ‘antisemitism’.

In the 1970s and 1980s, as Israel’s image gradually mutated from the ‘underdog’ of 1948 to a regional leviathan, especially following its 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Western airwaves were hit with a wave of Holocaust dramas. The 1978 NBC miniseries Holocaust did not just win Emmys. It reached hundreds of millions of viewers precisely as the international community began to grapple with Israel’s diplomatic isolation at the United Nations (UN).

From acclaimed Holocaust dramas to nationalist blockbusters, the strategic revival of past trauma can influence public perception, shifting attention from present-day violence to the moral weight of historical suffering

When the First Intifada broke out in the occupied territories of Palestine in the late 1980s, during which young Palestinians fought Israeli troops with slingshots, the American broadcasting network ABC responded with the expensive multi-part epic War and Remembrance.

As the world watched nightly news footage of Israeli soldiers using violent tactics against Palestinian stone-throwers, War and Remembrance provided an emotional diversion. It ensured that the image of the Jew as the eternal victim remained the dominant cultural framework, even as the Israeli state was acting as the primary aggressor.

In 1997, media scholar Yosefa Loshitzky noted that the “sacralisation of the Holocaust” provides a moral shield, creating a binary where the memory of a past genocide is used to silence discourse on Israel’s contemporary human rights violations.

Films such as The Zone of Interest (2023), which depicts a troubled German commandant of a concentration camp during World War II, do not simply appear by chance. They are launched with massive fanfare at film festivals, precisely when discourse on apartheid or genocide in the Middle East reaches a boiling point.

In the age of Netflix and streaming, this reflex has become even more frequent. During the recent ‘Gaza War’, in which Israeli forces killed tens — if not hundreds — of thousands of Palestinian men, women and children, and during Israel’s recent attacks on Lebanon and Iran, streaming platforms seemed to have gone into overdrive.

Suddenly, films such as Schindler’s List (1993) and The Pianist (2002), meditations on the horrors of the Holocaust, were pushed to the top of ‘recommended’ lists, while old and new documentaries on World War II appeared to tell the same story repeatedly.

This is what the American literature professor Michael Rothberg, in his book Multidirectional Memory, identifies as “screen memory.” The term describes a historical trauma brought forward specifically to obscure a problematic contemporary reality. Viewers become so preoccupied weeping for the victims of the 1940s that they find themselves with very little emotional bandwidth left for the families currently being pulled from the rubble in Gaza and Iran.

However, this is not exclusively a Western speciality. Bollywood has also mastered this art of cultural deflection. Whenever the Modi government in India faces international heat over its increasingly exclusionary treatment of minorities, the Mumbai dream factory starts to churn out ‘epics’ about internal enemies whose ancestors supposedly sought to destroy Hinduism.

This is the Indian version of “competitive victimhood”, or the act of shouting about the past sufferings of the ‘self’ so loudly that the current suffering of ‘the other’ becomes mere background noise.

For example, 2020’s Tanhaji: The Unsung Warrior reimagined India’s historical Muslim rulers as monstrous invaders while elevating Hindu warriors as the ultimate defenders of Hinduism. Similarly, films such as The Kashmir Files (2022) or Article 370 (2024) framed the Indian state’s military presence in Kashmir not as an occupation but as a moral necessity, to prevent a return of past tragedies that befell Hindus.

In this narrative, the ‘other’ (largely Muslim) is cast as the eternal aggressor. This shift has been described by the US-based academic Nilanjana Bhattacharjya as the “new Bollywood”, where the screen memory of past conflicts is used to displace the immediate reality of contemporary state-led violence.

This trend went into overdrive after the Indian air force suffered major losses against Pakistan in May 2025. This time, instead of resurfacing a past trauma, a past victory from the 1971 Indo-Pakistan war was brought forward to displace the reality of a recent defeat. This year’s Border 2 is an example.

The Turks, under the banner of ‘Neo-Ottomanism’, have followed a similar script. While Ankara’s regional ambitions draw Western criticism, Turkish television has been dominated by historical fantasies such as Dirili: Erturul. Such shows re-imagine the Ottoman past as a period of heroic resistance against the West and internal traitors. As the Germany-based transcultural studies scholar Josh Carney points out, these dramas function as a “moral reset” for the modern state, priming the audience to view Turkiye as a beleaguered fortress defending its sacred heritage.

The early 20th century Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci wrote that dominant groups shape “cultural common sense”, making their version of history the absolute moral benchmark. When the Western entertainment industry consistently rewinds material on the violence against Jews, it establishes a framework where the security of the Jewish state is an ethical necessity that transcends international law.

By flooding the public sphere with historical trauma, the industry effectively moves the focus from the present to the past. The result is a self-reinforcing loop, where the market for historical tragedy becomes most active exactly when that tragedy serves a political purpose.

Across the board, from Hollywood to Mumbai, the industry’s reflex turns complex contemporary human rights issues into a binary struggle of survivors versus villains. It is a potent form of cultural hegemony, ensuring that the ghosts of the past remain more real to us than the dying children of the present.

Published in Dawn, EOS, March 29th, 2026

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When Shah Abbas I ascended the throne of the Safavid Empire in 1588, the political geography of Western and South Asia was undergoing a profound transformation. Sixteenth-century colonial expansionism was one of several realignments in the region, and maritime trade through the Arabian Sea was fast gaining new importance.

For more than a century, the Portuguese Empire exercised formidable control over this coastline. In 1515, they captured Hormuz from Shah Ismail I, and their hold stretched all the way to their colonial capital at Goa, which they had seized in 1510.

Through Vasco da Gama’s voyage at the close of the 15th century, the Portuguese had reached the Indian Ocean via the Cape of Good Hope. By the 1600s, however, this dominance was beginning to weaken. New European rivals, such as the East India Company (EIC), were entering Asian waters, determined to claim a share of the lucrative trade.

The turning point came in 1612, when English ships defeated a Portuguese fleet in the Battle of Swally, fought off the coast of Gujarat. The Mughal emperor Jahangir, impressed by this naval victory, soon granted the EIC permission to establish a trading factory at Surat in 1613. Later, a British-Safavid operation regained control of Hormuz in 1622. These encounters significantly altered the balance of power in the region.

In 1613, the East India Company established its first major trading base in the Arabian Sea at Surat in Indian Gujarat. Another contender was Gwadar…

Decades prior, the Portuguese had already lost favour across the Makran coast with Baloch groups. In Asia Portuguesa, the Portuguese historian Manuel de Faria e Sousa writes that Gwadar was destroyed in 1581, along with Pasni.

Almost coincidental then, that our protagonist, Robert Sherley, was born that same year.

The Brothers Sherley

Born in Sussex, Sherley belonged to a family of English gentry whose fortunes had declined. At the end of the 16th century, he travelled east with his elder brother Anthony, arriving at the court of Shah Abbas in Isfahan.

Their arrival in Persia would prove transformative. The Sherley brothers presented themselves as useful intermediaries between the Safavids and Europe, and Shah Abbas found their services valuable. Robert was kept by the Shah to take part in the Safavid-Ottoman Wars and later became an envoy of the Shah.

Over the following years, the younger Sherley travelled widely across Europe, representing Safavid interests before various courts. Dressed in Persian robes and presenting himself as the Shah’s ambassador, he became a fascinating diplomatic figure of the age. An Englishman stood serving a Persian monarch while negotiating with European rulers.

The Expedition

It was during one of his journeys to Persia that Robert found himself aboard the English ship, Expedition, in 1613. The vessel sailed under the command of Christopher Newport, bound for the Indian Ocean.

The ship reached the Makran coast and anchored off Gwadar on September 17, 1613. After its destruction, the port was on the margins of both the Mughals who had conquered Sindh, and the Safavids. Nazerbeg, a Persian accompanying Sherley, went on land and brought back a message that, while Makran was not formally under the authority of Shah Abbas, he would be welcomed and provided with safe passage inland.

The offer was appealing. Preparations began for the overland journey towards Isfahan. Sherley’s baggage and gifts were sent ashore, while arrangements were made for the caravan that would escort him. According to Walter Payton, as reproduced in Purchas’ Pilgrims — a nearly fantastical 17th century travel collection by Englishmen and others, which merit the need to vet multiple sources — things did not go exactly as planned.

By chance, a sailor aboard the Expedition overheard a conversation, in which Payton writes “…they had consulted and concluded upon the Massacre of us all.” Instead of escorting Sherley safely across Makran, they intended to lure members of the ship ashore, kill them and seize their property.

The discovery forced a rapid change of plans. Several locals who had boarded the ship were detained as hostages until Sherley’s goods were returned. Only after his possessions had been safely recovered did the Expedition raise anchor and depart Gwadar, now sailing towards Sindh.

Sherley’s reaction to the encounter, however, was somewhat unexpected.

A Factory that Never Was

Despite a narrow escape, Robert lay convinced that Gwadar possessed considerable commercial potential. According to British anthropologist Brian Spooner, Sherley wrote to the EIC, suggesting that the port could serve as a base for English trade with Persia.

Its location offered several advantages, wrote Sherley. It provided autonomy, close passage to the Safavids and “the richest traffic in the world.” From such a base, Sherley argued, English merchants could develop profitable commerce in Persian silk and other goods.

According to US-based historian Daniel Razzari, it was partly at his insistence that the British helped the Safavid’s recapture Hormuz. Therefore, instead of Surat as the site of the first English factory, it could have very nearly been at Gwadar. However, Persia was seen as a trading backwater and an Ottoman-Safavid truce reduced the need for maritime trade. The EIC’s attention was also already fixed on the opportunities presented by Mughal India.

Moreover, Sherley himself had become a somewhat ambiguous figure for the EIC. England had become Protestant, yet Robert cultivated close relationships with Catholic Europe during his diplomatic missions, promising them access to Persia if the British refused. Company officials, such as Thomas Roe, were wary of allowing an independent adventurer to shape their commercial strategy, particularly since the EIC held exclusive shipping rights for the English court in the Indian Ocean.

The proposal faded from consideration.

Gwadar Onwards

Gwadar’s later history followed a more regional path. The port remained a modest settlement along the Makran coast for much of the early modern period. In the late 18th century, it briefly assumed greater importance when the Khan of Kalat, Mir Nasir Khan I Ahmedzai, gave refuge to Sultan bin Ahmad Al Busaidi, who had fled a power struggle in Oman.

Mir Nasir Khan’s initial intentions were to help Sultan take over Oman, but then later offered him refuge at Gwadar, to rule as a fiefdom. Sultan then used the port as a base to regain his throne in Muscat, linking Gwadar to the political fortunes of the Omani dynasty. He kept Gwadar and, under Omani patronage, Gwadar and Chahbahar outstripped similar ports such as Jiwani and Pasni.

Meanwhile, Sultan was in no hurry to return it to the Khan of Kalat, who by now had to resist insurrections from feudatory states, later on spurred by the British Raj. Omani hold over the Makran developed further.

In the long narrative of imperial expansion in the Indian Ocean, the episode of Robert Sherley’s visit to Gwadar might appear little more than a historical curiosity, yet it offers a small reminder of how contingent such histories can be. The establishment of the EIC at Surat in 1613 can be seen as an inevitable development. Sherley’s brief encounter with Gwadar suggests otherwise. The possibility remains an intriguing footnote to the early encounters between Europe and the shores of the Arabian Sea.

From being the very first territories that could have fallen into British hands, Balochistan ended up amongst the very last, under Robert Sandeman and the creation of the Balochistan Agency in 1871. When Prince Karim Aga Khan IV funded the purchase of Gwadar in 1958, it also became amongst the last territories to be brought into Pakistan.

The writer is Managing Editor, Folio Books

Published in Dawn, EOS, March 29th, 2026

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