Growing up in Pakistan, introducing myself always required a disclaimer.

Because my surname is Khan, people instantly assume I speak Pashto and either hail from the north or belong to a specific tribal culture. Instead, I grew up in an Urdu-speaking household, shaped by the cultural traditions of Uttar Pradesh (UP) in undivided India. For my entire life, I have found myself having to justify my own surname.

In Islamabad, a bureaucratic city where almost everyone hails from somewhere else, two questions governed my 1990s school playground experience: “Tum loag kaun ho?” [Who are you people?] and “Tumhara gao’n kaun sa hai?” [Which village do you hail from?].

My classmates mapped their lives to specific ancestral villages across Punjab, Sindh or Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa. When they looked at me, a kid with the surname Khan who spoke meticulous and formal Urdu, the equation did not add up.

To the first question, I usually replied, “Urdu-speaking”. To the second, I offered a familiar routine: I pointed to Haripur, where my mother was born and which my father still considers his hometown, to account for my surname. Or I cited Karachi, where both my parents’ families later settled, to explain the way I spoke Urdu.

What happens when a family retains its ancestry but loses the language associated with it? For an Urdu-speaking Pakhtun family in Pakistan, the answer has meant generations explaining a surname that no longer fits neatly into the country’s ethnic categories

What happens when a family retains its ancestry but loses the language associated with it? For an Urdu-speaking Pakhtun family in Pakistan, the answer has meant generations explaining a surname that no longer fits neatly into the country’s ethnic categories

When I finally offered the truth, UP, it satisfied no one. For native Pakhtuns, a Khan without Pashto was an imposter. For Muhajirs — Urdu-speaking migrants and their descendants — my surname belonged to an entirely different ethnic universe.

I was trapped in a........

© Dawn (Magazines)