For Indigenous fishers, the Indus Delta is a sacred place where Khawja Khizer, the omnipotent and omnipresent saint, who is king of waters resides and guides those who are lost in the river and the sea. He travels on Pallo (Indus shad - Tenuolas ilisha), his companion specie. Pallo is a migratory fish, travels from the sea into the Indus River to spawn. However, for local fishers Pallo migration is an annual pilgrimage to the shrine of saint Khizer located in Bukkur, almost 400-500 km from the sea. The return Pallo is known as Haji, gharo, ghot, peer, and with numerous other names that connotes the transformed status of Pallo, the one completes the pilgrimage and become saint himself. The fishers would dare not to catch the Peer Pallo. However, over the last more than four decades, the upstream irrigation infrastructures have reduced the Indus River flows into the delta, interrupting Pallo migration/pilgrimage. For local fishers, no Pallo migration means Khizer is no more traveling to the delta. This changes their ethical relations with the Pallo specifically and with the delta generally. In this paper, following the lead from the conference, I ask and answer what new meanings Pallo, Khawaja Khizer, and the Indus Delta acquire in times of environmental crisis. And how this, in turn has changed the fishers’ lifeways. Building on one year of ethnographic fieldwork with and in the Indus Delta and the Indus River, I bring in conversation theories of multispecies ethnography and ontological anthropology to ask and answer these questions.

Keywords: Indus River and delta, multispecies(beings) relationality, ecological change, ethics.  

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Suneel Kumar is an Anthropology and Integrative Conservation PhD candidate at the Department of Anthropology, University of Georgia, USA. His research works at the intersection of geological anthropology, multispecies(beings) relationality, and ontological anthropology exploring how the physical changes due to anthropogenic activities transforms the multispecies(beings) relations in the Indus Delta of Pakistan. More specifically, while considering the delta an ethnographic subject, he explores the ways ecological transformations, changes the ethical relationality of humans and other-than-humans.