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In this talk, I will look at the untenable project of growing cotton in the Sindh desert (now in Pakistan) started by the British colonial government in the late nineteenth century. Entire villages (my family’s amongst them) were transplanted from the north to the desert along new canals to not only grow new crops but also to undercut the political power of local pirs (saints) by displacing their followers. As rebellions ensued over half a century, brutally suppressed each time, we see competing ways of giving meaning to land emerge. In charting different claims of settlement and displacement, I would argue that in theaters of belonging and displacement, it is not just the regimes of surface and visibility—maps, property, systems of taxation and water distribution—that determine legitimacy, but modes of giving meaning to depth. Depth figures as an epistemology of the hidden, enabling invisible continuities between land and the various selves that seek to inhabit it.

Ijlal Muzaffar is Professor of Architectural History at the Rhode Island School of Design, in Providence, Rhode Island, USA. He is the author of Modernism's Magic Hat: Architecture and the Illusion of Development without Capital (University of Texas Press, 2024) and the co-editor of the volume Architecture in Development Systems and the Emergence of the Global South (Routledge, 2022). His work has been published widely in academic journals, museum and biennale catalogues and edited volumes.

This lecture is co-sponsored by the Dartmouth Society of Fellows and by the Bodas Family Endowment for South Asian Studies at Dartmouth College.