Songs from a burning harmonium: Sonic archives of survival

Nayma Ahmed Ali

A painting of an Afghan rubab on a wall in a music room in Karachi. Photo courtesy of the author, Nayma Ahmed Ali, 2025

In late March 2026, while travelling through the dense roads of Karachi toward Garden, I passed the junction between Clayton Road and Aga Khan III Road. A new presence had emerged at the intersection. Across two poles positioned on a small traffic island, a banner screamed in blood-red lettering, “REPORT ILLEGAL REFUGEES”, followed by a police helpline number.

I knew immediately who the state wanted me to help it police - the race, the ethnicity, the language. Yet, the message seemed absurd in a city built by migrants. Karachi is often celebrated as a city of muhajirs (migrants), shaped by the massive influx of people after Pakistan’s independence in 1947. But while those initial migrants are remembered as foundational to the city’s story, those who came later - particularly Afghan refugees - remain perpetually temporary. 

I began working with Afghan refugees as an English language tutor. Upon learning that I was a musician, my students invited me to a small music room near Al-Asif Square and Sohrab Goth, where many refugee encampments are located. These encampments were in the process of being torn down during my visits to the music room, and many of the students had moved further into the city where they were better protected from the regular crackdowns initiated by Pakistani police. As a result, they travelled over an hour to reach the music room. It closed down in March 2026, owing to rising tensions between Afghanistan and Pakistan. 

The existence of the room had reflected a resistance against the dual-pronged effort of both the Afghan and the Pakistani governments to extinguish the Afghan peoples’ voice and their sonic cultures - a double-memoricide that normalises memory and culture erasure as mundane practice through physical, social, and discursive strategies. This piece explores the silences left behind in the wake of Pakistan’s forceful repatriation of Afghan refugees, emerging from a series of conversations with Afghan migrants in Karachi. Through the oral histories of three interviewees - Faizan, Zohraan, and Isfahan* - I examine how memory is held, interrupted, and re-sounded in a Karachi that does not always make space for it. 

The music room was located at the end of a broken street with no visible signage. Inside, heavy security contended with the geopolitical realities right outside its doors. Inside, however, the atmosphere shifted into something more vibrant: sitting across from a beautiful mural of a rubab, students engaged with harmoniums, guitars, darbukas, and tablas. As intercultural instruments played across the subcontinent, they marked a sonic familiarity for the students in a mostly hostile city, allowing them to enjoy Sufi qawwalis more common to Pakistan, such as ‘Mast Qalandar’, alongside contemporary Afghan songs like ‘Zan Astam’. 

For my interviewees, these instruments were tethered to home, even as across the border in Afghanistan, these instruments are under attack. The current ban on music by the Taliban and their persecution of artists includes forcing musicians to destroy their instruments with their own hands. Zohraan, recalling this visceral violence, spoke of how harmoniums were once a staple of every household on his street in Kabul. ‘The Taliban took them away’, he recalled. ‘They went into people’s homes, broke the instruments in the street, and set them on fire’. Similarly, Faizan spoke of his childhood infatuation with the guitar, saving up for years to buy his first instruments, only to have them smashed. ‘The Taliban came to my house and broke all my instruments in front of me’, he told me. ‘They burnt them outside, and told me I was a kaafir (disbeliever)’. Faizan spoke of the dilemma he faced afterwards: ‘I stopped playing then. Were they right? Was I wrong to play instruments? I only played music again when I came to Pakistan’.

The physical destruction of these instruments fundamentally ruptured the musicians’ relationship with their own memories and sense of home, forcing them to carry that silence across the border. Yet in Karachi, their refuge is incredibly fragile as a similar cultural suppression materialises in the state-sanctioned removal of Afghan refugees from the public sphere. Often, their sanctuary in the music room would close without warning due to security threats emerging from ongoing Pakistan-Afghanistan border clashes. This is where the double-memoricide materialises: as musicians, Zohraan and Faizan underwent cultural erasure at the hands of their own state, and now face a physical, bureaucratic erasure by the Pakistani state.

This marks a stark historical shift. While Pakistan’s state policy during the 1970s viewed Afghans as muhajireen (a term for migrants that has religious connotations), contemporary discourse has shifted heavily towards surveillance and forced repatriation. Media coverage frequently frames refugees as a national security threat, excluding millions born in Pakistan from formal citizenship and relegating them to a zone of quasi-belonging.

This administrative erasure has devastating human consequences. Isfahan, a young Pashto-speaking Afghan who regularly visited the music room to sing, had fled to Pakistan after the 2021 Taliban takeover to secure medical care for his sister who suffered from thalassemia. He promised to take me on a soundwalk of his neighbourhood, but when I arrived at the music room for our meeting, I was informed that Isfahan and his family had been abruptly deported. His disappearance was absorbed silently by the city, even the members of the music room, normalising this extraordinary violence. The disappearance of a neighbour becomes routine, normalised through the quiet acceptance that certain lives can vanish without consequence.

Yet, these actions cannot silence a community completely. For these refugees, the act of making music in exile becomes a vital act of survival, which is why an hour-long commute did not deter them from the music room. A physical harmonium can be burned to ash, but the repertoire held within the muscle memory of the musician remains un-burnable. A state can hang hostile banners, but it cannot easily erase the grain of voices that have already permeated the city’s atmosphere. Moving between the extreme destruction of Afghanistan and the everyday barriers of Karachi, sound remains a sonorous resistance asserting the enduring right to be remembered.

*Pseudonyms have been used to protect the identity of the interviewees.

Nayma Ahmed Ali 

Nayma is an incoming MA candidate and the inaugural Ruth Landes Fellow, Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. Her research focuses on migration, sound, identity, and language across South Asian and diasporic contexts, examining how memory and cultural production are reshaped through movement.