Old pictures of Pakistani Cities

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Famous historian Toynbee in Peshawar Saddar.
Date: 1954.
Courtesy: Wajid Ali Kakakhal

1900 - 1910 - Peshawar

 

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Karachi in the 1980s: A Nostalgic Look at the City’s Golden Era!​

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The Africans of Karachi​

Lyari is one of the oldest areas of Karachi. The area grew from a community of fishing villages and began to expand in the 18th century CE. Lyari has always had a large community of Sheedis or Sidis. They are also known as Afro-Indians and/or Afro-Pakistanis.

The Sheedis were first brought from Africa to South Asia as slaves by Portuguese traders in the 16th century CE. After they gained their freedom during the start of British rule here, most Afro-Indians settled in Gujarat (in present-day India) and in the Makran area of Balochistan, and in Sindh in present-day Pakistan.

Sheedis who have lived for generations in Lyari were brought from Central and Southern Africa. According to some recent DNA tests of Lyari’s residents, scientists suggest that a majority of Sheedis once belonged to the Bantu-speaking tribes of Africa. Most of them converted to Islam.

Lyari has always been a working-class area. It started to become a slum in the 1940s. Crime and drug addiction began to increase in the area from the late 1960s. Lyari then became a hotbed of anti-government activism during the Ziaul Haq dictatorship in the 1980s. In the 1990s, violent gang warfare erupted here which lasted until 2015.

 

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Unlike the rest of the country where sports such as cricket, hockey and squash have been popular, Lyari has produced some of the best Pakistani boxers and footballers.

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The first cinema, Karachi​

One of the first cinemas in India was built in Karachi, Star, which was erected in 1917. It lasted until the 1940s before being pulled down.

In the 1970s, another Star cinema was built on the site where the original one had stood. The new Star cinema stood adjacent to Bambino cinema.

 

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Cleaner days​

In the late 19th century when a plague struck Karachi, British colonialists (who had annexed the city in 1839), devised a hectic plan to cleanse the city. By developing the city’s creaky infrastructure and building a complex sewerage and garbage-disposal system, the British were successful. By the 1920s, Karachi was being described as ‘the Paris of Asia’ and it became one of the cleanest cities in South Asia. The roads were regularly scrubbed with water.

Even after Karachi became part of Pakistan in 1947, the practice of cleaning the streets and roads of the city with water continued. The practice stopped sometime in the mid-1960s.

Overcrowding in the 1970s created larger slums and by the mid-1980s, the city’s old infrastructure (which had not been improved) began to break down. The city fell into a crime-infested, frenzied mass of chaos.

 

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Angry wives​

When the 1956 Constitution declared Pakistan an ‘Islamic Republic’, many newspapers reported that the wives of most parliamentarians accused their husbands of hypocrisy. Cartoons began to appear in the papers satirising the situation.

In 1958, when military chief Ayub Khan and President Iskandar Mirza imposed the country’s first Martial Law, they suspended the Constitution, claiming that it had been used by cynical politicians ‘to peddle Islam for political gains'. The country’s name was changed to Republic of Pakistan.

The name was changed back to Islamic Republic of Pakistan in the 1973 Constitution.

 

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A Little Israel in Karachi​

Jewish girls at a reception in Karachi in the 1950s.

Jews in South Asia first arrived in the 19th century. Most of them came to cities such as Karachi, Peshawar and Rawalpindi to escape persecution in Persia. By the 1940s, Karachi had the largest concentration of Jews, with most of them living in the city’s Saddar and Soldier Bazar areas.

Most Jews living in Rawalpindi and Peshawar began to leave after the creation of Israel in 1948. The last Jewish family to leave Pakistan was in the late 1960s. It had been living in Karachi for decades and its members were all registered Pakistanis who had supported Mr Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan.

 

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The tikka inventors​

Most Pakistanis when they order a chicken tikka outside Pakistan get small boneless barbecued pieces of chicken. In Pakistan, a chicken tikka means either a whole barbecued leg piece (with thigh) or a chunky chest piece of a chicken.

Very few know that this version of the chicken tikka is available in Pakistan alone. In fact, it was invented by the chefs of the once famous Cafe de Khan in Karachi in 1960. The cafe offered this unique version of the chicken tikka which it then encouraged to be had with a paratha and a chilled Coke or a pint of beer.

People loved it and ever since 1960, this version of the chicken tikka has been popular all across Pakistan - and, for decades, only in Pakistan.

 

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The casino​

On the site where Pakistan’s largest shopping mall stands today (in Karachi’s Sea View area), there was once a stylish building erected between 1975-76. It was a widespread structure which was supposed to be the country’s first major casino.

The land for it was allotted by the Z.A. Bhutto regime to an entertainment business tycoon, Tufail Sheikh, who already owned a hotel and a nightclub in the city. The idea was to construct a giant casino to attract rich Arab sheikhs to Karachi after a civil war had broken out in Beirut. Beirut, before the war, had been a favourite haunt of rich Arabs and Americans frequenting its casinos.

The casino was completed in April 1977. It was an impressive and imposing structure with a huge hall where gambling tables and machines were placed. The casino also had bars, restaurants, guest rooms and a nightclub. The Bhutto regime was expecting a windfall of foreign exchange and a booming entertainment and hoteling industry to emerge around the casino.

In March 1977, the Bhutto regime got cornered by a violent protest movement by a right-wing alliance of opposition parties. In April, he agreed to their demand of closing down nightclubs, gambling at horse racing and the sale of alcoholic beverages (to Muslims). Ironically, these sudden bans were imposed on the day the casino was to be inaugurated.

 

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Karachi already had the most number of luxurious hotels in Pakistan. Anticipating a flood of visitors from oil-rich Arab countries, Europe and the United States after the emergence of the casino, a huge hotel too began to go up in the city’s Club Road area. It was to be the Hyatt Regency and was one of the biggest in the region.

There were already two 5-star hotels on Club Road (Intercontinental and Palace) and two nightclubs (Playboy and Oasis). But as the casino’s inauguration was halted, the construction of the hotel too stopped.

 

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Birth of a trading post... and ‘Paris of Asia’​

Karachi

Karachi is not an ancient city. It was a small fishing village that became a medium-sized trading post in the 18th century. British Colonialists further developed this area as a place of business and trade.

‘Paris of Asia?’ – Karachi (in 1910). Karachi was always a city of migrants. Hindus and Muslims alike came here from various parts of India to do business and many of them settled here along with some British. In the early 1900s, encouraged by the city’s booming economy and political stability, the British authorities and the then mayor of Karachi, Seth Harchandari (a Hindu businessman), began a ‘beautification project’ that saw the development of brand new roads, parks and residential and recreational areas. One British author described Karachi as being ‘the Paris of Asia.’

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A group of British, Muslim and Hindu female students at a school in Karachi in 1910: Till the creation of Pakistan in 1947, about 50 per cent of the population of the city was Hindu, approximately 40 per cent was Muslim, and the rest was Christian (both British and local), Zoroastrian, Buddhist and (some) Jews.

 

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Members of Muslim, Hindu and Zoroastrian families pose for a photograph before heading towards one of Karachi’s many beaches for a picnic in 1925: Karachi continued to perform well as a robust centre of commerce and remained remarkably peaceful and tolerant even at the height of tensions between the British, the Hindus and the Muslims of India between the 1920s and 1940s.

A British couple soon after getting married at a church in Karachi in 1927.

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A group of traders standing near the Karachi Municipal Corporation (KMC) building in the 1930s.

Karachi Airport in 1943. It was one of the largest in the region.

 

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Karachi’s Frere Hall and Garden with Queen Victoria’s statue in 1942.

A 1940 board laying out the Karachi city government’s policy towards racism.

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Lyari in 1930 - Karachi’s oldest area (and first slum): Even though Karachi emerged as a bastion of economic prosperity (with a strategically located sea port); and of religious harmony in the first half of the 20th century, with the prosperity also came certain disparities that were mainly centred in areas populated by the city’s growing daily-wage workers. By the 1930s, Lyari had already become a congested area with dwindling resources and a degrading infrastructure.

 

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Karachi becomes part of Pakistan​

Karachiites celebrate the creation of Pakistan (August 14, 1947) at the city’s Kakri Ground: The demography and political disposition of the city was turned on its head when the city became part of the newly created Pakistan. Though much of India was being torn apart by vicious communal clashes between the Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs at the time, Karachi remained largely peaceful.

A train carrying Muslim refugees from India arrives at Karachi’s Cantt Station (via Lahore) in 1948.

Hindus prepare to board a ship from Karachi’s main seaport for Bombay in 1948. To the bitter disappointment of Pakistan’s founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah (a resident of Karachi), the city witnessed an exodus of its Hindu majority. Jinnah was banking on the Hindu business community of the city to remain in Karachi and help shape the new country’s economy.

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Commuters board a tram in Karachi’s Saddar area in 1951: As if overnight, the 50-40 ratio of the city’s population (50 Hindu, 40 Muslim) drastically changed after 1947. Now over 90 per cent of the city’s population was made up of Muslims with more than 70 per cent of these being new arrivals. A majority of the new arrivals were Urdu-speaking Muslims (Mohajirs) from various North Indian cities and towns. Since many of them had roots in urban and semi-urban areas of India and were also educated, they quickly adapted to the urbanism of Karachi and became vital clogs in the city’s emerging bureaucracy and economy.

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Karachi’s rebirth as the ‘City of Lights’​

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Karachi’s Burns Road in 1963: It grew into a major Mohajir-dominated area. By the late 1950s, Karachi began to regenerate itself as a busy and vigorous centre of commerce and trade. It was also Pakistan’s first federal capital. It was the only port city of Pakistan and by the 1960s it had risen to become the country’s economic hub.