Aziz Patli Wala sits with his wife under a small tent of striped cloth and old tarps, on a charpoy in Chitral. The bright costumes of his puppets are smeared; their strings hang limp and lifeless, much like the puppeteer’s life after the floods. Even before, it wasn’t a big or fancy house, but it was home. Now it’s nothing more than muddy water, floating wrappers, crushed bottles, and torn bits of cloth. No washrooms. No food, surviving on communal langars. And no dowry he had built over the last two years for his daughter! This is just one house among thousands lost in the 2025 floods across Pakistan. Rivers have overflowed, monsoon rains have refused to stop. More than 900 people have died, over 6 million are affected, and over 2 million displaced since June 2025. In Punjab alone, about 2.5 million people were forced from their homes when the Ravi, Sutlej, and Chenab rivers burst their banks, submerging more than 1,400 villages. In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, landslides and flash floods killed over 320 people, wiped out thousands of homes, and left entire valleys stranded. Everywhere you look, families are waking up under a sky they can’t call shelter, trying to salvage some dignity from the wreckage. For Aziz, puppetry was never just a job — it was a legacy. History of puppetry Across Pakistan, the craft goes back centuries, with performances at fairs, religious gatherings, and festivals. Before Partition in 1947, puppeteers went from village to village, performing at harvest melas and roadside gatherings. Some chose for string puppets, or putli shows, others rod or glove puppets, and in some places even shadow puppets. Families passed the craft down, father to son, mother to daughter. Puppeteers were often a small community of their own, carving wooden faces, stitching clothes, giving voices to their characters, and building stages out of bamboo or cloth. Their stories were layered: tales of Mughal courts, romances like Heer Ranjha and Sassi Pannu, and playful satire about everyday life. Even television picked it up: in 1976, Farooq Qaiser created Uncle Sargam for the show Kaliyan, and he quickly became a household name. Whenever disaster strikes, artists are the first to be forgotten. It is as if our contribution to culture and society is meaningless Institutions like Rafi Peer Theatre Workshop, Thespianz Foundation, the Pakistan Arts Council, and the Lahore Arts Council have tried to keep puppetry alive. Rafi Peer even helped establish a Puppet Museum in Lahore. In 2016 and 2019, Thespianz Theatre organized a String Puppetry Festival in Karachi that staged over 300 performances, drawing tens of thousands of viewers across neighborhoods. The tradition is still alive, though no longer part of the country’s mainstream. In Lahore, Karachi, and Peshawar, streets are often abuzz with small puppet shows. The Pakistan National Council of the Arts (PNCA) even runs a National Puppet Theatre, staging weekly performances in Urdu and regional languages for families. On busy corners, vendors sell handmade puppets that catch the eyes of both locals and tourists. Yet under the shadow of this tradition, lies fragility and a struggle to survive. Long before the floods, the art was already under strain. Younger generations were drawn to television, mobile phones, and digital media. State support was thin. Most puppeteers earn just enough to keep food on the table, with little left to repair broken puppets or rent a stage – and some can’t even manage that. For example, a 63-year-old puppeteer, Mohammad Jamil, with his family has carried the art for nearly 300 years. “I earn little and I do not have resources to continue to hold puppet shows.“ he tells me. “Now, few people in the country are performing puppet shows due to lack of funds and government support“. “So when the waters came, they didn’t just sweep away houses and savings; they drowned stages, silenced instruments, and scattered audiences. What was fragile before is now on the brink of disappearing altogether.” Culture in crisis: what the floods took The story of Aziz Patli Wala is not his alone. Across flood-hit Pakistan, countless artists, musicians, and storytellers are facing the same silence. Where once there were sounds of drums and dholaks, there is now only the hum of mosquitoes over stagnant water. Rabab players from Mulababa and Shahidabad, Swat, Nazir Gul shared how those in the art community have lost everything in floods, with no help coming their way from NGOs or government. “We are part of this society, yet whenever disaster strikes, artists are the first to be forgotten. It is as if our contribution to culture and society is meaningless,” a well-known Tabla artist from Swat said. These losses are not just material. They are cultural wounds. Songs, performances, and rituals survive only when practiced; when interrupted, they fade quickly. A puppet may be salvaged, but if no one gathers to watch it dance, its meaning dies quietly. A drum can be repaired, but if no one sings along, the song disappears into memory. When a puppeteer in Multan loses his stage, or a singer in Sindh loses her sarangi, the whole world loses something. These traditions are not just Pakistan’s — they are part of a much larger human story. We have seen this before in the 2010 floods that displaced over 20 million people – entire forms of intangible heritage vanished without record. Local wedding songs specific to villages, small puppet traditions in Sindh, oral histories told in dialects that only a handful of elders knew — many were lost forever. Few were documented, fewer still revived. Relief reports counted houses and crops but not songs or stories. This year feels eerily similar. Pakistan is rightly recognized as a climate frontline state, but when the world counts losses, it counts bricks and roads, not rituals and memory. And yet these are the things that give a people their sense of self. The danger now is not just hunger or homelessness, but amnesia. When the floods retreat, they will leave behind more than mud. They will leave empty stages, silent instruments, and stories that may never be told again. Aid and the invisible artists When disaster strikes, relief comes in predictable forms: food packets, tents, mosquito nets. These are vital, but they only address one layer of survival. Almost no one thinks about the artists, performers, and craftspeople whose livelihoods — and identities — are tied to traditions that disasters quietly erase. In Chitral, Aziz Patli Wala can rebuild a wall with donated bricks, but who will help him rebuild his daughter’s dowry? In Sindh, folk singers may find a place to sleep in a relief camp, but who will replace a sarangi warped by water? In Balochistan, women may get flour rations, but who will protect the songs they once sang together in harvest fields? This silence reflects a deeper blind spot in disaster response. Relief agencies count homes, roads, and bridges lost, but rarely the cultural threads that bind communities. The tension is real: survival comes first, but cultural continuity is also survival of another kind. Without it, people lose not just roofs and food, but the sense of who they are. For Pakistan, a country already on the climate frontline, this neglect carries a double cost: a humanitarian crisis, and a quiet cultural extinction happening side by side. Why it matters globally Pakistan is often called a “climate frontline state.” Usually this means broken roads, lost crops, or people forced from their homes. But there is another loss that is harder to see — the loss of culture, memory, and identity. When a puppeteer in Multan loses his stage, or a singer in Sindh loses her sarangi, the whole world loses something. These traditions are not just Pakistan’s — they are part of a much larger human story. Folk puppetry here connects to performances in India and Indonesia. Wedding songs in Punjab carry echoes of centuries. When they fall silent, it is not only Pakistan that suffers, it is everyone. This is happening in many places. The 2004 tsunami in Sri Lanka washed away oral traditions along the coast. Cyclones in Bangladesh silenced fishing songs. Pakistan’s 2025 floods are part of the same pattern — showing how climate change destroys not only lives and land, but also identity. When culture dies, resilience dies with it. Songs, rituals, and performances are not luxuries. They are how people make sense of pain, how they rebuild trust, and how they carry hope forward. Protecting them is not charity. It is a form of climate justice. In Chitral, Aziz Patli Wala lays his puppets out in the sun, their once-bright clothes now dulled by mud and water. He turns them over carefully, as if drying them might also breathe life back into their stories. Floods don’t just drown homes. They drown entire ways of telling stories. The article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Business Recorder or its owners.