'In the eighteenth century, Karachi was a small walled city with a population of a thousand inhabitants living in an area of 0.12 sq km,' starts the brief preface to this new coffee-table book by Rumana Husain (innovatively designed by the writer's daughter, Asma). From there, Husain takes readers (or viewers, in case one does not feel like reading) into the family lives and homes of some of the diverse inhabitants of Karachi.
Husain, a 'Karachiwali' herself, is a prominent figure in the city's art and activist circles. Her extensive research and interviews about the city's various communities provide valuable anthropological insights and nuggets of information about this once-sleepy little British-built seaport, which has since swallowed up the fishing villages that used to surround it. The area of the city nearly doubled in just the decade following 1961, from 368 to 640 sq km. Today, it sprawls over a vast 3500 sq km, from the sandy seafront to barren hilly outskirts and beyond. Karachi's over 18 million-strong population lives in housing ranging from makeshift tents and shantytowns to cramped high-rise apartments, modest townhouses and palatial bungalows.
This is not just a book about how the city grew uncontrollably after 1947, with the influx of a million or so refugees seeking economic opportunity as much as refuge. Rather, this is very much the human story of a city that is a microcosm of Pakistan, where locals were long ago outnumbered by migrants or their descendents – not just from across the border, but from all over the country. As the author delves into the homes and lives of some 80 of these families, it is apparent that they have retained much of their distinct cultures – although, with the younger generations growing up in this 'melting pot', borders and boundaries have started to blur. Interestingly, some among the youths have embraced features of their religious identity that their parents had shrugged off. There is, for instance, the young Sikh who proudly sports a turban and beard that his father had cast aside; or the young Bohra woman who, after getting married, prevailed upon her husband and his parents to adopt a more religiously conservative lifestyle, even getting her mother-in-law to shed the sari in favour of the rida, the Bohri burqa.
In all of these interviews, fascinating details emerge about each community's rituals of birth, death and marriage. Husain manages to accommodate just about every community in Karachi, from the unlettered to the highly erudite, from the desperately poor to the fabulously wealthy, from jogis (the nomadic snake charmers) to the singing, dancing khwaja sira (transvestite) community. For those who want a more scholarly, historical or sociological reading, the contributions by five prominent Karachiwalas are an invaluable addition: the architect and town planner (and, really, Karachi expert) Arif Hasan, historian Hamida Khuhro, musicologist and archivist Luthfullah Khan, economist S Akbar Zaidi and women's-rights activist and journalist Zubeida Mustafa.