When a neighborhood becomes its own historian

Rap, recognition, and the young voices of Karachi’s Gizri from an Indian perspective

By day, they serve other people. By night, they narrate themselves. In the alleys and on the rooftops of Gizri, Karachi, three young men turn precarious work, neighborhood challenges, friendship, humiliation, and hope into rhythm. The city may know them as restaurant workers; before the microphone, they become witnesses to the city.  

The recently produced documentary W.R.A.P. (We Really Are Pakistan) follows MC Affo, MC Bablay, and MC Shobi, three part-time rappers from a working-class neighborhood whose difficult circumstances forced them to leave school early. In hip-hop culture, “MC,” short for “Master of Ceremonies,” or “Mic Controller” commonly refers to a rapper who performs rhythmic lyrics. 

It was watching Indian filmmaker Zoya Akhtar Gully Boy (2019) that catalysed the filmmaker Saba Karim Khan, a writer, editor and social scientist who teaches at NYU Abu Dhabi to search for Pakistan’s own underground Urdu-rap scene, she told Global Southasia over a video call after she shared a review link with us.

It was Gully Boy that got her thinking that “there must be an underground rap scene in Pakistan too, but one with its own echoes, subtext and preoccupations. That’s how the hunt began.”

W.R.A.P. has reached international audiences through screenings and selections at film festivals across the United States, Canada, and Europe, as well as at the Jaipur International Film Festival in India–a particularly notable achievement given the significant visa challenges often faced by filmmakers of Pakistani origin, including Khan, when travelling to India. The trailer can be viewed here:

A global music form

What she found in Gizri was not simply a Pakistani counterpart to an Indian film, however. She found young people using a global musical form to document an intensely local reality. 

The title We Really Are Pakistan contains an argument in a single word. “Really” challenges the narrow images through which nations present themselves: presidents and generals, cricket stars and celebrities, affluent neighborhoods, patriotic spectacles, and scenes of crisis selected for international television. The title insists that Pakistan is also its restaurant workers, informal laborers, neglected streets, and young men creating music after exhausting shifts.

When Saba Karim Khan asks MC Affo about rap in Pakistan, he replies in Urdu, “Some call it ‘real artist power,’ while others say it means ‘rhythm and poetry.’ But for me, it is simply power.” 

Poverty does not deprive people only of material security but also of narrative authority.

Marginalized neighborhoods are routinely explained by journalists, police reports, government statistics, NGOs, academics, and middle-class filmmakers. Residents enter these accounts as victims, beneficiaries, threats, or data. 

“The artistic voices we hear come from privilege, opening a certain window into Pakistan,” reflects Khan. “These three rappers, among many more, are harnessing the power of hip-hop to make-meaning, to subvert their circumstance and the stereotypes they battle almost daily. They’re showing us that victim isn’t the only label they embrace and that no change is too small.” 

Rap reverses the direction of observation. Those who are usually explained or ‘described’ have now taken on the agency of describing the city as they see it. This act of describing or bearing witness gives them something inequality ordinarily denies them: control over the sentence in which they appear.

A rapper with a phone and an internet connection can, at least in principle, carry the vocabulary of one neighborhood beyond its physical boundaries. The barriers have not disappeared, but the gate is no longer controlled by a single institution. 

For an Indian viewer, Gizri is simultaneously across the border and disturbingly close to home. Its streets may evoke low income areas like Dharavi in Mumbai, Seelampur in Delhi, or any basti pushed outside the polished image of a “world-class” Indian city. Change the street signs, accents, and flags, and the structural realities of precarious employment, inadequate public services, and the search for dignity would remain recognizable. 

A shared colonial order

Pakistani and Indian societies both emerged from a shared colonial order and continue to produce cities that depend upon working people while excluding these communities from their public self-image. A rhyme born in Gizri can be understood in Delhi not because the border is unreal, but because the social wound it names exists on both sides. 

Yet recognition across the border need not arise only from shared suffering. It can also emerge from shared aspiration. MC Affo says at the end of the documentary, “Always remember, destiny takes you beyond your wildest dreams.”

A hope born in a Karachi neighborhood can be felt in a Mumbai neighborhood because it speaks to aspirations that transcend national borders.

Indian and Pakistani citizens frequently encounter one another through war, diplomacy, cricket, terrorism, and patriotic spectacle. W.R.A.P. proposes another encounter: an Indian listener attending to the inner life of a Pakistani neighborhood. 

This is not the dramatic friendship of states. It is the quieter recognition of one ordinary life by another. 

For an Indian audience, the most meaningful response to W.R.A.P. is not the comforting declaration that Indians and Pakistanis are identical. Such a claim can erase real histories and differences as readily as nationalism exaggerates them. The documentary asks for a more demanding form of recognition: young people on both sides inhabit societies marked by related exclusions, and they are inventing languages with which to resist invisibility. 

The three rappers of Gizri featured in the documentary demand this recognition clearly by naming their group KG STANS – short for Karachi-Gizri Stans – rather than choosing a name centered on their individual identities.

These three rappers may never speak for all of Pakistan, and that should not be expected of them. Their achievement is both smaller and more profound. They make a neglected locality audible on its own terms. They transform the neighborhood from a backdrop of crime or poverty into a place that thinks, remembers, jokes, suffers, and creates. Their music does not dissolve the India-Pakistan border. It crosses it as sound and makes us hear the human realities that the border too often turns into abstractions. 

When these young men rap, a neighborhood becomes its own witness, its own archive, and, for a few vital minutes, its own historian.

Sachin Gupta is a physicist, educator, and writer from India who recently completed his PhD in Physics at the University of Massachusetts Boston, specializing in quantum physics. He currently teaches physics at University of Massachusetts Boston.

This is a Global Southasia (formerly Sapan News) syndicated feature available for republication with due credit to sapannews.com. 

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