Larkana

The district's history begins far earlier than the town. Mohenjo-daro, about 25 kilometres to the south-west, was one of the largest settlements of the Indus Valley Civilisation around 2500 BC, a planned city of fired brick with streets on a grid, wells, bathing rooms and covered drains, abandoned by around 1700 BC and lost until excavations began in 1922 under the Archaeological Survey of India. The plain around it has been farmed continuously ever since, fed by the shifting channels of the Indus.

Larkana itself is a much later creation, a market town that grew where canals drawn from the river made the surrounding land unusually fertile; in the Kalhora and Talpur periods the surrounding land was prosperous farming country. Under British rule it became the headquarters of a district, gained a railway, a civil station and grain markets, and served as the collecting point for rice and wheat shipped downriver and north.

In the twentieth century the town's name became attached to a single family. The Bhuttos, landowners of the district, produced Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, prime minister from 1973 until he was removed in a military coup in 1977 and executed in 1979, and his daughter Benazir Bhutto, twice prime minister, who was assassinated in Rawalpindi in 2007. Both are buried in the family mausoleum at Garhi Khuda Bakhsh, which draws enormous crowds on their anniversaries, and their party's long dominance in Sindh has kept Larkana at the centre of provincial politics. Investment has not always followed the attention, and the town's services have struggled to keep pace with its growth.

This is rural Sindh, and the culture is Sindhi in a way Karachi is not. Sindhi is the language of the street, the school and the bazaar, and the poetry of Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai and Sachal Sarmast is quoted and sung at gatherings. Sufi devotion runs through religious life, with village shrines drawing offerings, drumming and annual urs celebrations that mix pilgrimage with fairground.

Dress is a statement of identity: the ajrak, a block-printed shawl in deep red, indigo and black, and the mirrored, embroidered Sindhi cap are worn by men at weddings and on Sindhi Cultural Day, the first Sunday of December, when the whole town turns out in them. Embroidery, rilli quilts stitched from patched cloth, and pottery are made in the surrounding villages.

Social life is organised around extended families, land and the clan, and political loyalties often follow the same lines. Hospitality is a serious obligation: a visitor is fed before anything is discussed, and refusing outright causes offence. Gatherings are male in public and female at home, and women in rural areas are largely secluded, so a foreign woman travelling here is treated as a guest apart from local convention. Conversation is unhurried, greetings are long, and the honorific 'sain' is used constantly in Sindhi speech.

About half a million people live in Larkana, making it one of the larger towns of upper Sindh, and the district around it holds well over a million more in villages and small settlements. Almost everything in the local economy comes back to irrigated farming: rice above all, along with wheat, sugarcane, cotton, dates and mangoes, with rice mills, grain markets and agricultural trade providing much of the town's work, alongside government offices, schools and the large public hospital that serves the whole district.

Land ownership is concentrated, and the relationship between landholding families and tenant farmers still shapes both daily life and politics. Many younger people leave for Karachi or the Gulf and send money home, and remittances are a significant part of household income.

Life follows the heat. Work starts soon after dawn, the middle of the day is spent indoors from April to September, and the bazaar is busiest in the evening. The persistent problems are the ones common to upper Sindh: unreliable electricity and water, poor sanitation and drainage, gaps in health provision — the district drew national attention in 2019 after an HIV outbreak at Ratodero, most of its cases children, traced by health officials to unhygienic medical practice — and the aftermath of the 2022 floods, which inundated farmland across the province.

Larkana eats the food of rural Sindh, built on the rice grown immediately around it. Biryani and pulao in the Sindhi style — rice layered with mutton or chicken, potato, dried plums, yoghurt and green chillies — are the dishes of weddings and guests. Sindhi kadhi, a sour gravy of gram flour with vegetables ladled over plain rice, is the everyday meal, often followed by rice pudding, and sai bhaji, spinach cooked down with lentils, greens and a little rice, is the other staple.

Bread means roti and, at breakfast, koki, a thick wheat flatbread kneaded with onion, chilli and coriander and eaten with yoghurt or tea. Meat is grilled as tikka over coals or fried as karahi with tomato and chilli; seyal preparations, cooked with onion and tomato and no heavy spice, are a local habit. From the Indus comes palla, the oily hilsa that runs upriver in the warm months and is prized across Sindh.

Sweets matter. Sweet shops sell halwa, gulab jamun and rabri, milk reduced slowly to a thick cream, and in summer the district's dates and mangoes appear by the crate. Drinks are doodh patti, boiled thick with milk and sugar, and green qehwa after heavy meals, with sugarcane juice and lassi sold from stalls through the hot months.