Charm of Karachi

A volume that brings home the barbarity of the curbs that the governments of India and Pakistan have imposed to keep apart two peoples.

IN the wake of Partition, most of those who left India for Pakistan preferred to settle in Karachi, then the new state's capital. Not only people from the Bombay of old, even Dehlavis and Lucknawis preferred Karachi. Lahore and its Punjabis gave a culture shock. So, interestingly, did a good many from southern India. Sultan Ahmad, who became editor of Dawn, a daily founded by Mohammad Ali Jinnah, was born in Kanyakumari. Former Foreign Minister Agha Shahi was educated at Presidency College, Madras (of old), and was moved, almost to tears, when he was served dosas at dinner in the home of India's High Commissioner.

Karachi acquired colonies housing Memons, Khojas, and Bohras; others housing Muslims from northern India and a significant number from the south. It still boasts of Gujarati papers and provides Goan, Parsi, Kerala and, but of course, Mughlai cuisine which is distinct from the fare Lahore provides. Burnes Road is host to restaurants that serve nihari and paya. Here you hear Urdu in impeccable accent untainted by Punjabi influence. To be sure, it is home also to Punjabis and to a powerful community from Khyber-Pakhtoonkhwa (the former North-West Frontier Province). It is truly a subcontinent within a city.

Rumana Husain is an institution within that subcontinent. Her interests range as far and wide as her social commitment is deep. Born in Karachi, she has had close interaction with the mosaic of communities that make Karachi the vibrant city it is. She has been an artist; an innovative school teacher and author/illustrator of over 40 children's books in English and Urdu; an art critic and a regular contributor to the English-language press. She co-founded The Book Group in 1988 and in 2005 the Nukta Art Magasine of which she is Senior Editor. The Children's Museum for Peace and Human Rights has also claimed her time and talent.

In this volume designed by her daughter, Asma Husain, who is widely travelled and accomplished, she has collected able essays of five eminent citizens Arif Hasan, an architect; Hamida Khuhro, a historian and politician; Luthfullah Khan, Collector; Akbar Zaidi, a noted economist; and the highly respected journalist Zubeida Mustafa. Add to them more than 600 rich illustrations, photographs, family trees, maps and foldouts, and you have a book that defies description. It is as attractive as a coffe-table book, and as erudite as any scholarly thesis with its personal stories of over 60 citizens from diverse walks of live and from the many communities, who enrich Karachi. It is a thousand pities that we can draw on that wealth of talent only through the print media and that too only infrequently. Karachi has more to it than the violence and the clashes between the mohajirs' (refugees, still) MQM and the Pathans. Asma Husain's graduate thesis Fatal Attractions focussed on the impact of recurring violence in city life.

The essays apart, the write-up that accompanies the illustrations of each group or facet of the city life is itself a work of careful study based on research. For instance, the Sheedis. You find them in Hyderabad, but no longer in Mumbai. They thrive in Karachi. They are an Indian ethnic group of black African descent who migrated from East Africa to South Asia. Of late, one has seen good accounts of the rise of Bombay and its transformation into Mumbai. But not one work exists to describe and illustrate the lives of its diverse communities as this book does. It provides studies of Goans, Iranian Balochs, Parsis, Chinese, Jews, Christians, Tamils, Marwaris, Hindus, Kutchi Memons and Bengalis, to mention a few. The life of each group is illustrated through the life of a single person and his family. Its festivities, customs and traditions are described in authentic detail. Mumbai once had prosperous Arab, Persian and Armenian communities. They have almost vanished.

At the end of the book is a section on Favourite Recipes. Karachi is a gourmet's paradise. The volume deserves wide readership in India, if only to bring home to us the barbarity of the curbs which the governments of India and Pakistan have imposed to keep apart two peoples who have a lot to learn from each other.