Karachi was a sweet Bombay

Ajmal Kamal

In his inspiring essay, The City and Death, Bogdan Bogdanovic, the renowned architect  and teacher from former Yugoslavia, suggests that the only way out of the mess we have turned our cities into is that each citizen — man, woman and child — should be taught the lost art of reading the city all over again. Only then, he says, we can hope to be able to proceed to the next stage in human progress, i.e. the restoration of the art of writing the city, a precious art and human right which we have long lost.

Karachi ki Kahani, first published in 1996 as a two-volume, 800-page special issue of the Urdu journal Aaj, was an attempt to ‘read’ the city of Karachi. It is being reproduced with a few additions and a special section of photographs of Karachi, and would hopefully be followed by its English version in the first quarter of 2007. The fate that befell Karachi in 1947 was not shared by any other city in the subcontinent; almost the entire middle-class intelligentsia, the keepers of the city’s memory, the overwhelming majority of them being Hindus, left. The influx of refugees from East Punjab, UP, CP and Bihar added about six hundred thousand souls to the city which was just above 4,00,000 on the eve of partition. The Parsis, Goan Christians and the miniscule number of Sindhi Muslims, who had shared the city’s life with the departed Hindus, were lost in the great wave of migration into their city. There was thus a clear break in the history of Karachi which prevented its continuity to be shared by the newcomers. This is a misfortune that cities like Delhi, Lahore and Calcutta did not have to suffer.

The new citizens of Karachi hardly had a clue to what had been happening in the city before they came here in hordes. Most of them were unaware of the past of the houses and business premises that the craftier of them occupied and the buildings and open spaces where the helpless majority of them was forced to live in jhuggis to begin the struggle in the capital of the new state.

Crisis of communication

This ignorance bordering on indifference was to create a wide gulf between the two main linguistic communities of Sindh. In the absence of any common perception about the city’s past, it was hardly possible to create the common ground to negotiate and resolve the crisis of today’s Karachi and its hinterland, the province of Sindh. This crisis of communication led to a painful era of ethnic strife which took a great toll on the citizens during the entire decade of 1990s.

Number of narrators

In order to rediscover the city’s story, I decided to begin at the beginning of the modern Karachi, that is the eighteenth century when a small group of Hindu traders decided to move to the shores of Karachi after the river port of Kharak Bunder was silted up. This tale has been told by Seth Naomal Hotchand Bhojwani, who later helped the British to invade and occupy Karachi and Sindh, in 1839 and 1843 respectively. The story of Karachi, collected in the two volumes, is told by a number of narrators — how can the entire story of a city be narrated by a single person? — each speaking in his own voice, looking at event and people from his own individual point of view.

The next in the line of narrators is John Brunton, Engineer, East India Railway Company, who arrived in the city just after the uprising of 1857 had been put down. Brunton, who describes the revolt of the Native Bengal Regiment in Karachi, built the railway line which linked the city with the rest of Sindh and Punjab and in a few decades turned it into one of the biggest ports exporting wheat and cotton out of the subcontinent.

Social Awakening

The growth of this commercial city provided space for the expression of the social awakening among the Sindhi Hindus who were directly imbibing the influence of Shantiniketan, Brhamo Samaj and other movements of change in Bengal and other parts of India. The narrator of this part of Karachi’s story is KR Malkani, who joined RSS in Karachi and grew into a BJP leader after migrating to India. The Muslims of Sindh, for historical and social reasons, were late to join this journey towards progress, a fact which had long-term consequences for the city, the province and the whole of the subcontinent. Some of these aspects have been highlighted by Pir Ali Mohammad Rashdi, who was active in the Sindh Muslim League before and after partition and whose two-volume memoir is considered a masterpiece in Sindhi literature.

The story is taken further by an interesting array of narrators, who expressed themselves in English, Sindhi or Urdu — Nagendranath Gupta and Sardar Diwan Singh Maftoon tell the story of one of the greatest citizens of Karachi, Rishi Dayaram Gidumal.

Pre-partition Karachi

Lokram Dodeja, Sohrab Kavasji Hormuzji Katrak and Anita Ghulam Ali reminisce about the pre-partition Karachi from their unique Hindu, Parsi and Muslim perspectives. Dr Feroz Ahmed traces the history of the African slaves who were the ancestors of the Shidis or Makranis of the Lyari area of today’s Karachi. Raffat Khan Haward tells the story of the Goan Catholic community of Karachi who discovered after 1947 that they had become a religious minority. The Sindhi writers, Mohan Kalpana, Shaikh Ayaz and Sobho Gyanchandani, and Urdu writers, Hasan Manzar, Asad Mohammad Khan and Fahmida Riaz, recall the life in the city at its significant moments, shaping the lives of its citizens. Akhtar Hameed Khan, the renowned social worker, thinker and writer describes his work in Comilla, East Bengal, and the huge slum of Orangi in the western district of Karachi.

Six residents of Essa Nagri, a katchi abadi inhabited by the Punjabi Christian migrants to the city in 1950s outline the oral history of the settlement, and describe through the story of their lives how the city gradually slid into religious intolerance and ethnic strife.

Ajmal Kamal is a writer and publisher based in Karachi