Within the context of the modern world, the term “progress” is frequently interpreted through a limited perspective, such as the language of speed, productivity, and profit; modern technology; Western education; and the rise of capitalism. “Progress” has long been framed as a linear movement toward modernity. In this culture, knowledge that is not contained in books, published in journals, or endorsed by institutions is considered to be marginalised and regarded as anecdotal, folkloric, or even worse, “backward.” But what happens when this idea of progress forgets us? When it erases the wisdom of our mothers, our grandmothers, and our ancestors who carried knowledge in their hands, voices, and everyday rituals? This dismissal is not neutral. It is deeply political. When the world measures advancement only through what can be industrialized or monetized, it erases entire ways of knowing that have allowed communities to survive for centuries. For us, as Baloch, it erases the wisdom of our mothers, grandmothers, and ancestors – women who embroidered history into fabric, sang songs to remember, told stories by the light of the fire, cured with herbs, and performed rituals that connected people to the land and to each other.
It is possible that these forms of knowledge may not appear in classrooms or scholarly texts as such, but they are not less rigorous, and are equally as vital. They are intellectual traditions rooted in survival, belonging, and resistance. However, the contemporary concept of progress has taught us to discount them, even within our own educational cirlces and communities. There are still instances in which people talk about oral traditions, poetry, and folklore as if they were nothing more than “cultural add-ons” rather than archives of identity and history. We have only recently started to come to the realisation that in order for knowledge to be valuable, it does not need to be written down. Since the beginning of time, it has been preserved in remembrance, in practice, and in gestures that have been passed down in a manner that is both silent and powerful.
As someone rooted in Balochistan, I have often reflected on how even within academic circles and student communities, there is a quiet hierarchy of knowledge. Written, published, and Western-validated ideas are considered “serious” contributions, while oral traditions, embroidery, midwifery, or rituals are deemed peripheral. Yet, our mothers and grandmothers have carried libraries on their tongues in forms of proverbs and in idioms, stitched histories into cloth, and created survival strategies into the rhythm of their daily lives. This knowledge is not necessarily less, it is simply different.
Let’s take embroidery as an example. To an outsider, it might seem like nothing more than “women’s work,” a pastime, or decorative craft. But for Baloch women, every motif carries history, memory, and survival. A single line can recall migration; a pattern may embody resilience in the face of loss. In my final semester’s research on Balochi embroidery, I came to understand that these choices are never arbitrary, they form a kind of syntax, a language of meaning. The dual-thread technique, seyah o ispeet (black and white), is not only a technical method but a reflection of cosmic themes in art. Even the names of the doch (stitches) themselves carry memory and honor – Banuk Karima (an embroidery named after Lumma-e-watan), Dood o Rabedag (emphasizing culture and traditions) or let’s say Noor Khan e Wahag,(an embroidery named after the Baloch music maestro), each preserving the stories and lives that the Baloch hold dear.
Embroidery, in this sense, is not simply art but what Michel Foucault would call a “subjugated knowledge” forms of wisdom marginalized by dominant discourses but deeply political in their ability to preserve truths outside state archives. Each motif stitched into a dress is a story: of migration, survival, love, grief, or resistance. A diamond pattern might recall tribal routes across deserts; floral designs may represent fertility, community, or the memory of a season. What looks to an outsider like “women’s work” is in fact a form of archival knowledge, a way of recording history without pen or paper. These are not inferior ways of knowing; they are simply different epistemologies, different ways of seeing and surviving in the world.
Feminist theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak once asked in her famous essay, “Can the subaltern speak?” When we turn our gaze toward indigenous women’s cultural practices, the answer is complex. They do speak, through stitches, through songs, through everyday rituals, but the structures of modernity, patriarchy, and coloniality often refuse to listen. This refusal creates an illusion of silence, when in fact these voices are present everywhere, echoing in forms of expression that are deeply embedded in women’s daily lives.
Among the Baloch, oral traditions are one of the most powerful ways women have preserved memory, emotion, and identity. These are not mere “songs,” but archives of lived experience carried through generations. Genres like sipat, sung after childbirth, are blessings for the newborn and the mother, weaving prayers for prosperity and survival into melody. Nazaink, performed for brides and grooms, transforms weddings into spaces of collective celebration where women’s voices set the rhythm of community joy. Halo, the wedding song, and motk, the mourning song, mark the life cycle; holding within them the joy and grief that structure communal life. Most poignantly, zahirok, perhaps the most renowned of Baloch women’s compositions, speaks of longing, separation, and loss. These songs often carried the voices of women whose husbands, brothers, and sons were away: at war, in trade, or searching for pasture lands. In his writings on zahirok, Professor Sabir Badal Khan highlights that these songs were not only laments but also emotional geographies, mapping the rupture of absence and the strength of endurance.
In this way, Baloch women’s oral traditions offer a powerful answer to Spivak’s question. The subaltern does speak – sometimes in whispers, sometimes in cries, sometimes in lullabies. What remains at stake is whether the world chooses to hear them.
Baloch women are often remembered in cultural memory as the bearers of tradition; embroiderers, singers, and storytellers. Yet, to see them only as custodians of culture risks reducing their agency to a symbolic role. As feminist scholars remind us, women’s cultural practices are neither passive nor apolitical; rather, they are intellectual and political acts in their own right. As Lila Abu-Lughod suggests, everyday practices often contain “hidden transcripts” of resistance: a lullaby may carry grief for the disappeared, while an embroidered motif may recall dispossession and longing for homeland. Similarly, Baloch poets such as Atta Shad, Gul Khan Naseer, and Mubarak Qazi infused their verse with cultural memory and dissent, demonstrating that art whether sung, stitched, or written has long been a political language of survival in Balochistan. Among them, one name Balochi literature will always remember is Bibi Banul Dashtyari, whose poetry champions the love of humanity and insists that it is love that conquers hearts. Her verses embody both the intimate feelings of a woman and a fierce defiance against cruelty and injustice, marking her not merely as a poetess, but as a poet of truth and reality. These cultural forms are not simply ornaments of tradition but repositories of resilience, passed from mother to daughter in contexts where official histories erase women altogether. By reframing embroidery, song, and oral storytelling as sites of political resistance, we recognize that Baloch women are not limited to culture but instead they transform it into a living archive of survival. This continuum of resistance can be seen today in the voices of women leading contemporary movements in Balochistan whether in street protests, sit-ins, or digital campaigns who draw strength from the same cultural reservoirs their foremothers preserved. Their struggle shows that culture is not static tradition but an evolving language of defiance.
This transformation of culture into resistance unsettles dominant narratives of progress that equate modernity with Western models of knowledge and development. Postcolonial thinkers such as Walter Mignolo urge us to move beyond a single universal idea of modernity, toward what he calls pluriversality, the recognition that many worlds of knowledge coexist. For Baloch people, progress does not require abandoning indigenous knowledge and healing and the oral storytelling traditions; rather, it means affirming these practices as intellectual labor, equal to books, theories, and technologies. The erasure of such practices is tied to what Arturo Escobar critiques as ‘development discourse,’ where non-Western ways of living are framed as obstacles to overcome rather than alternative visions of life and progress. In the case of Baloch people, embroidery, oral storytelling, and even communal forms of knowledge-sharing such as haal ehwal have often been stereotyped within Pakistan’s mainstream discourse as ‘backward,’ ‘tribal,’ or ‘unproductive.’ Such framings strip these practices of their intellectual and political depth, reducing them to folklore or poverty markers rather than recognizing them as legitimate modes of knowing, resisting, and imagining futures outside state-centric narratives of development. They are practices of resilience that have carried families through poverty, migration, and political violence. Seen through this lens, Baloch women are not limited to culture but instead transform culture into a living archive of resistance and decolonial knowledge. To call these practices “backward” is to erase not only women’s creativity but also the very strategies that kept communities alive through colonization, displacement, and war.
This erasure extends even to language and literature. Academia often measures intellectual worth through what is written, peer-reviewed, and indexed. But Baloch poetry – oral, musical, recited, has existed for centuries, shaping identity and memory. It is only recently, even within our own communities, that we have begun to acknowledge that knowledge that isn’t written can still be significant, even transformative. When we fail to recognize this, we reproduce the same hierarchies that marginalize us.
In times like these, when Balochistan is facing layered crises, state violence, climate catastrophe, and multiple forms of structural neglect, the urgency to return to our roots becomes undeniable. Sustainability cannot only come from “imported solutions.” Our ancestors practiced forms of living that were deeply attuned to ecology and survival: water management through karezes, food sovereignty through localized farming, solidarity through oral traditions. Yes, these practices may need to be adapted and reimagined in dialogue with new knowledge systems, but they cannot be abandoned. To do so would be to sever ourselves from our deepest sources of resilience.
As Baloch students and young people, we must ask ourselves: when we dream of progress, whose knowledge do we carry forward? Do we unknowingly internalize the idea that our mothers’ and grandmothers’ knowledge is lesser? Or can we, instead, see their practices as intellectual, cultural, and political resources, mediums of wisdom in a world that desperately needs alternative futures? To honor indigenous women’s knowledge is not to remain in the past. It is to recognize that progress can take many forms, and that survival itself is a form of innovation. Our embroidery, our oral traditions, our rituals – these are not barriers to progress; they are the roots of a different kind of progress, one that does not forget us.
As Baloch youth, we carry a responsibility: to rethink progress in ways that do not forget us. To see our indigenous knowledge not as shame but as strength. To ensure that when we write, research, and imagine the future, we do not forget the stories, songs, and stitches that made survival possible in the first place. The path forward is not either/or. It is not modernity versus tradition. It is an integration, a recognition that our futures will only be sustainable if they include the wisdom of our past. We must resist the temptation to measure our worth only through external standards of modernity. Instead, let us see indigenous knowledge system as a strength, a way of knowing that grounds us, heals us, and connects us to histories larger than ourselves.
References
Al-Shwillay, Dhiffaf Ibrahim. Folklore as Resistance in Postcolonial Narratives and Cultural Practices: Hawaiian, African American, and Iraqi. PhD diss., University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, 2019.
Aslam, Ourangzeb. “Balochi Embroidery Needle Work.” Balochistaniyat Annual Research Journal 6 (2017): 1–13. Quetta: Balochi Academy.
Badalkhan, Sabir. “Balochi Folklore and Literature.” In The Baloch and Others: Linguistic, Historical and Socio-Political Perspectives, edited by Carina Jahani and Agnes Korn, 71–92. Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag, 2003.
Escobar, Arturo. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.
Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. Edited by Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon Books, 1980.
Mignolo, Walter D. The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–313. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988.
