Karachi City of Dreams

Durriya Kazi

ADA Dialogue II Do you know your city?

Frere Hall Karachi May 4 2018

Karachi has been a bit like sand dunes that are constantly shifting and altering yet retaining their essence. It is difficult to define it visually by its built structures. There is no concept of the inner city spreading out to the suburbs in an orderly fashion.  There is no map book of Karachi, no history of the city for visitors, no calendar of events for its residents. It’s a city that is spread by word of mouth, a city to be experienced rather than viewed.

This may be what makes Karachi feel like home. Home for those whose ancestors lived here, for those who were born here, for those who escaped the violence of partition, for those who come here for work, this city envelops and accepts all. As a Pathan labourer said we can only work in Karachi because no one asks where you are from, only what you can do.

Architects and urban planners generally view a city as a built environment. Its layout, its planning of buildings, urban spaces, heritage sites, or new developments. But for me the buildings and streets are emblems of those who lived here once and those who live here today. The names of streets like Pedro D Silva Rd,  Diyaram Gidumal Rd, Moses Ibn Ezra Street , Nusserwanji Rd, Chagatai Rd  coexisting with Ali Budha St, Yasir Short Way, Noorani Masjid Rd and Mir Mohammad Baloch St. suggest past lives of the city whose only reality is the typed address on a utility bill.

Today’s Karachiwalas, having no resonance with street names, ignores them preferring  instead personal navigational maps based on landmarks like Disco Bakery, Nasir Jump, Aisha Manzil, mochi mor, 4 mint ki chowrangi and Mukha chowk.

Karachi becomes a collection of personal narratives, private aspirations, a city as big or as small as the routes taken by its residents. When accounts are published in sporadic newspaper columns by Anwar Mooraj or Nadeem Paracha or some  old newspaper clippings circulated on facebook or whatsapp, we feel the delight of  sharing experiences that we believed were only our own.

It has sent many of us in search of the collective history of our city - Farooq Soomro better known as Karachiwala, Rumana Hussain , Ajmal Kamal’s  compilation of Karachi narratives, or the more academic studies by Arif Hasan, Usman Damohi or Gul Hasan Kalmati.  However this collective history eludes us as Karachi becomes a contested city claimed by different political and ethnic groups or classes.

J  Forrest Brunton , the Chief Engineer of the Municipality of Karachi famously said in 1914, that “Karachi has practically no past other than what the British contributed  when they occupied in 1839 a small mud built town  of 12-14000 inhabitants.”    

He refers to the Karachi settlement mentioned in Seth Naomal Hotchand 19C account of the origins of Karachi. Hotchand suggests there was no Karachi until Kharak Bandar got silted up  and merchants in search of a new harbor came upon a small settlement of 25 huts called Darboo near a spring called Kolachi jo kun thus creating the city of Karachi in 1729.

However, as Arif Hasan has pointed out, the presence of the 1500 year old Shri Panchmukhi Hanuman Mandir, and the 8^th century shrine of Abdullah Ghazi suggests an older history lost to time as a pilgrimage site. The Mahadev Temple in Kothari Parade is said to be mentioned in the 9^th BC Mahabarata as Lord Shiva’s very first home and where Guru Nanak the founder of Sikhism meditated.  

It seems that each settler saw it as a terra nullius, a Latin expression meaning "nobody's land". Perhaps it would be better termed as terra omni or “land of all”.

In 1914, Brunton described Karachi as a cosmopolitan town:  “ almost every eastern nationality and caste is represented in its bazaar” “here may be seen Brahmins and Banyas from all parts of India; Hindu coolies from Cutch, Rajputana, Bombay. Madras, Punjab and the North West Provinces; Muhammadan coolies from Cutch, the Punjab, Sindh, and Baluchistan; Mohammedan traders of all kinds including Khojas Borah, Arabs, Persians and Afghans, and last but not least, the Parsee and the Amil of Sindh. In few towns can a more varied population be found”

Today the demographics of Karachi are if anything, even more varied not unlike that other City of Dreams, New York, of which historian Tyler Anbinder writes” At the southern tip of Manhattan, Dutch fur traders, English merchants’ sons, random fortune seekers from Spain or Norway, Welsh tavern keepers, Gaelic blacksmiths, religious dissidents and a smattering of Jews and freed slaves somehow managed to conduct business even while speaking 18 different languages.” Khudabux  Abro designed a T-shirt for Karachi which had “Karachi my city” written in all the languages spoken in Karachi – enough to cover the whole front panel.

Some dwellers of Karachi live in mixed localities, but many gravitate towards ethnically defined neighbourhoods: Marwaris live in Ranchore lines, Goanese in Cincinatus Town, Parsis in Parsi Colony,  Memons in Dhoraji. However they all work together, where their ethnic origins become irrelevant. For years I have been going to a metal caster in Liaqatabad who speaks exactly like a Liaqatabadi but, as I discovered, is actually Punjabi. Once you settle in Karachi, you become defined by this city.

Equally the city is made by its residents. At Partition, an economy in shambles as its Hindu dominated business community migrated, quickly picked up with new businessmen and philanthropists, who dared to establish the economy, the industry, the educational institutions, the hospitals. There were artists, poets musicians who established what is now the Pakistani culture. There were cricketers and film producers, journalists, architects and scientists. Government  was formed, and armies and police forces established. The municipality made a seamless transition. 

Historians with a mission will continue to mine the past, but in the mean time we can allow ourselves to imagine a Karachi where the superintendent of Police was E H Ingle, Civil Hospital was headed by Lt Gen R J Baker, and the Railway luggage inspector was W. Booth. Where Pir Muhammad Rashdi would put on his Sunday best in the hope that the lady in a red sari would notice him standing against a borrowed car as she took her daily constitutional on Lady Lloyd Pier. Directories were divided into European, Parsi, Hindu and Muslim sections. One could book a berth on an Ellerman ship to Liverpool stopping at Port Said and Marseilles. One could buy a Steinway piano from The Haydn  Co on Elphinstone Street, anything from cakes to arms and ammunition from Hajee Doosal & Sons, bid for furniture at the auction House  of J G Misquita,  jump onto an East India tram, hobnob with the British Military Elite at Mrs Woods’ Kilarney hotel, and buy  Oysters and wine from Nusserwanjee and Co. I can imagine my mother and her friend going to the first floor Abbas School of Dancing on Elphinstone Street to learn the waltz. 

I can imagine Tamancha Jan crooning from Radio Pakistan, immortalized in the Ahmed Rushdi’s song Bandar Road say Kemari, and the newly migrated Bundu Khan living on the edge of Bundar Road along with so many when evacuee property ran out.

I can imagine the Turkish Captain Sidi Ali Capudan in 1558 trying to avoid the treacherous Jakad whirlpools, deciding whether to turn into the port of Kurashi ( Karachi) or head down the Makran coast to Kawadar as advised by the Turkish Mohit navigational guide; and Admiral Nearchus sent by Alexander the Great in 326 BC turningwith relief into the harbor of Korakala

 I imagine a fierce Ameer of far away Kabul  accepting, in 1756, the gift of Karachi by the Mughal court in return for peace and the subsequent consternation of the British, beleaguered by losses in Afghanistan, instigating the final capture of Karachi in 1838, the troops alighting the HMS Wellesley to wade through marshes to set up camp in Karachi.

I can imagine the stories told by camel caravans from Khorasan, encamped where today the Sindh Madrasatul Islam stands.   

Did the Sidis or Sheedis of Bantu descent who came as soldiers or slaves with the Arabs and Turks, settle on the coast because it brought them closest to their lost homeland?

The Mayors of Karachi since 1911 were in turn Muslim, Parsi, Hindu and Christian.  Each gifted the city with beautiful public buildings, educational institutions, commerce, and high standards of living. Karachi was a city built with love and imagination. It was a city that was always intended to be modern and forward looking. It’s now bloodied streets were traversed by peaceful traders of many religions and many ethnicities.

One can only hope that like the waves crashing on the beach constantly smooth its sands, renewing the edges of this city, Karachi will heal and become peaceful once again.   

When the traders of Karak Bandar chose the port of Karachi, when the British called it the Star of the East, when 40 Jews migrated to Karachi from Bombay in 1881, when half a million refugees from the violence  of Partition chose Karachi as a shelter, when Jinnah chose it as the new country’s capital, when the traders  of Bombay moved their assets to Karachi, when in present Pakistan, 45,000 migrant workers come to the city every month from different parts of the country, when today politicians wrangle to gain control of Karachi, they all believed and continue to believe, this is a city that will change their fortunes, a city where they can realize their dreams.