Sardar Hussain

SARDAR HUSSAIN, then a graduate student at University of Texas, Austin, Texas, received funding in April 2018 to aid research on ‘Museumifying a Walled City: An Ethnography of Everyday Life in the Historic District of Lahore, Pakistan,’ supervised by Dr. Kamran Ali. This research examines how the ongoing cultural gentrification of the Old City of Lahore, Pakistan, has affected the sense of place and the rhythm and flow of everyday life for its long-term residents. The ethnographic study entails attention to: 1) how the long-term residents respond to — experience and relate to or not — the heritage management policies; 2) what everyday tactics the residents use to protect, preserve and alter their means and ways of life, to have their informal but ethical claims heard; 3) how the residents come to terms with new actors in the area and the bureaucratic and other state apparatus authorized to implement the heritage program; and 4), finally, how the local communities, backed by their ethical and/or religiopolitical claims, come together as social groupings to exercise their right to the place they call home? This research foregrounds and privileges the heritage of the ordinary; focusing on the shifting lifeworlds of the stigmatized and marginalized subjects, such as Mirasis (hereditary musicians), tawaifs (dancing women and sex workers) and hijra (a derogatory term for ‘third gender’). A deep ethnography, it will (potentially) contribute to interventions in the ‘always already’ known maps of the city in the Global South.