Palimpsests Past and Present

Established in the late fourteenth century in what is now Sindh Province, Pakistan, the Makli necropolis grew over three centuries to a site of more than seventy monumental tombs and mosques, and hundreds, if not thousands, of graves. Makli’s distinctive architecture sheds light on the intersection of transregional artistic styles through its accretional building practices by generations of craftspeople. Over its long history, Makli became a site layered with multiple meanings as regional elites and everyday Sufi devotees sought to be buried in the shadow of saints—and as the living visited the necropolis to enact devotions and duty.

Here, Fatima Quraishi uses rarely consulted archives in Pakistan alongside close analysis of Makli’s built environment to understand the site as an artistic and architectural palimpsest, mutually established by elite patronage and humble devotions. At Makli, the passage of time merges with changes in religion and society to reveal the vibrant lives and afterlives of tombs integral to the communal life of surrounding areas. By studying what has long been treated as an interstitial space between Central Asia and India, Quraishi’s work speaks to wider explorations of borderlands of the premodern past.