[Reader-list] Karachi ki Kahani

[Shivam Vij]

Karachi was a sweet Bombay

Ajmal Kamal
DNA, Saturday, December 02, 2006  21:17 IST
http://www.dnaindia.com/report.asp?NewsID=1067410

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


On 12/5/06, yasir ~ <yasir.media at gmail.com> wrote:
> thanks for this gouri. its a nice introduction/summary,
>
> xcept that DNA has an extremely asinine interface that doesnt even
> work in firefox, and the lengths dna has gone to protect its easily
> copyable data results in remarkable unreadabilility
>
> bad design, bad usability. given that this is the web that leaves nothing else.
> all hail ascii people !