Zaid Akhtar | Summer Internship - Kitab Ghar (Lahore & Karachi, Pakistan)
This summer, I worked at Kitab Ghar—a public library with locations in Lahore and Karachi, Pakistan—as a programming and technical fellow. I spent the summer designing and implementing a website for Kitab Ghar (https://kitabghar.co/), programming various events, and working on an array of projects for the library. The History Department Grant allowed me to travel back to Pakistan, my home country, for the summer to work in-person at both Kitab Ghar locations, and to cover some of the library’s expenses related to the website and events that I put on.
Before delving into the specifics of my internship, a bit of context. Kitab Ghar, which means “House of Books” in Urdu, was founded in 2021 by four women as a space for ‘re-education,’ a space for the productive ‘unmaking’ of the citizen. In this way, Kitab Ghar was imagined not just as a physical library but also as a liminal space, a third space of sorts to revive the tradition of the South Asian mehfil (“gathering”), which played an enormous role in shaping revolutionary postcolonial thought post Partition.
Consequently, I wanted the website to reflect Kitab Ghar’s culturally anchored, unapologetically political, and collaborative core as much as possible. I began imagining and mock-designing the website before I reached Lahore. This entailed many drafts and redrafts of possible versions. I was heavily inspired by Mughal aesthetics, reimagining some of its classic pre-colonial design to decorate a new wave of youth politics in Pakistan, in which technological dialogue and metaphor coexists and grows with evolving conceptions of cultural heritage. The final website invites visitors to join Kitab Ghar’s growing network: to propose new events, become patrons, or simply visit the library and participate in its reimagined public life.
This internship helped me bridge my interests in both Computer Science and History. Kitab Ghar’s aesthetic is essentially tied to South Asian culture and aesthetics, a massive, ever-evolving repository of symbols and meanings that reflects the region’s layered history. Thus, any thoughtful approach to translating Kitab Ghar’s aesthetics into a digital vocabulary would involve much consideration of the rich and complicated history of South Asian culture and its relevance to youth movements, paired with the implications of representing this .I learned that design doesn’t have to be “neutral” or sterile to be effective; it can be affective, political, and alive, just as the archive it represents. My time at Kitab Ghar ultimately strengthened my belief that technology, when shaped through historical consciousness, can become a tool for cultural immersion, production, and reclamation rather than erasure.
