KARACHI: Legacies of Empires serves as an alternate introduction to Karachi. It gives a glimpse of several historic monuments scattered across the old city area, some of which have been adapted to contemporary needs. The author strings together fragments from memory and imagination, and sometimes it becomes difficult to separate one from another — but does it matter anyway? Imagination and memory are intertwined and juxtaposed herein, not unlike the montage of the city of Karachi itself. Peerzada Salman is one of the primary references for writings on the history, culture and heritage of Karachi. This book is a systematic compilation of his essays and articles written for Dawn from 2009-2013, and has been published by the Endowment Fund Trust for the Preservation of the Heritage of Sindh, a cultural institution that works to conserve the tangible assets and cultural heritage of the province.

Some accounts are nostalgic musings, others are inventive recreations of the same scenes in a historic frame of time and space. Salman talks of a time when “elegant architecture was deemed just as important for city life as peaceful coexistence for its citizens”. Like Rudyard Kipling’s descriptions of buildings, spaces and ceremonies under the Raj that make you dive into his world and interact with his characters, the text here pulls you in deeper, enticing you to keep exploring, and to imagine and create a reality beyond what the author has already documented.

The essays in the book are categorically arranged into several thematic sections. The first section explores glorified buildings that have now become cultural icons of the city — landmarks popular in every Karachiite’s mind and memory. These include, of course, the omnipresent Merewether Tower (“tower”, as popularised by the annoyingly mesmerising yodels of our bus conductors), and the Empress Market, an image that cannot possibly escape you if your daily grind involves a circumambulation of the Saddar area by bus, car, or on foot. The second section discusses roads and neighbourhoods, and is much more captivating. The author talks of the “feel” of individual buildings located within communities, and offers a first-person perspective of areas and their environs while giving a walk-through amongst a cluster of buildings, much like a guided tour: turn around when you see this balcony, glance into the narrow opening to that alley, smell the enticing aroma emanating from the little pakoray wala nestled between two larger buildings, feel the texture of the pilasters jutting out from a wall, listen to the ambient soundscape as the wind spreads an indistinct confetti of chatter all around. The description of streetscapes is no less alluring: like an Islamabad-Skardu flight, or a ferry cruise on Istanbul’s Bosporus, where the captain guides you along the journey, giving trivial yet delightful little details of the places you see en route.

The last sections categorise specific buildings according to their various functions: health, educational, and religious. While talking of the religious, social, or philanthropic aspect of buildings, Salman also sheds light on Karachi’s once multi-ethnic population, and its varied pool of patrons, including Jews and Parsis. The book talks of individual personalities and organisations that have donated finances and design ideas to the city — for example, the Karachi Parsi institute, the Supariwala family, and Nadirshaw Eduljee Dinshaw. Though rarely mentioned explicitly within the text and demonstrated rather through rudimentary examples (e.g. the mention of a Jewish architect designing a community facility for the Portuguese Goans), the richness of the heterogeneous urban population of pre-Partition Karachi becomes immediately apparent to the attentive reader. It is a testament to tolerant and harmonious co-existence within a colonial city at a time of strictly homogenous, class-based European societies back home.

Colonial Karachi is in every way comparable to, and transcends, in my opinion, Dickensian London with its industrial town-planning issues and working-class problems. The rich webs of interaction amongst the citizens of that Karachi led to indigenous spaces being crafted, which broke free of strictly European or starkly Oriental tradition. This fusion of values and functions introduced new building typologies to the region, like the Empress Market: the functionality of a quintessential Arabesque souk housed within a strikingly Victorian structure. Of course, there are many overlaps within the sections, and the reader will sometimes find two or more articles talking about the same building but under varying circumstantial contexts.

Salman writes in a friendly, conversational style. Rather than providing mechanical, matter-of-fact accounts of the buildings and localities, he indulges and engages the audience, throwing quirky questions at the unsuspecting reader, questions camouflaged in the midst of an interesting anecdote: “Have you ever fallen in love with a building ... One look at Bristol Hotel will make you go wonky in the knees.” He narrates local jokes, quotes communal folklore about mystical temples (which sometimes contradicts documented history), and stirs up provocative dialogues with buildings — here the reader recedes to the passive position of a silent observer, an unacknowledged audience, and the performance is based not on his appreciation of it but rather by the actual interaction between the writer and his subject. From time to time, Salman also injects analogies from modern fairy tales and classic novels into the subject being discussed. He comments on the dwarfing of heritage by glitzy modern-day plazas and residential tower blocks: “Lilliputians are getting taller. Gulliver is a wee bit worried. Let’s see what happens.”

The author also cites interesting nomenclature for the local architectural styles. Despite being an architect myself, I was unfamiliar with many of these terminologies — besides the more common Romanesque, Anglo-Oriental, and Neo­classical. English Renaissance, Italian­ate, Mughal Revivalist, neo-Gothic, pseudoRenaissance, and Anglo-Mughal are all architectural styles that one can find specifically within the context of colonial Indian cities, created by the rich fusion of common foreign typologies with local aesthetics. They are especially prevalent in Karachi.

Salman interviews noteworthy architects, planners and restoration experts based in Karachi, and presents their professional opinions within the text. These professionals all stress upon the need to integrate the standalone historic structures into contemporary city life, rather than subjecting them to superficial repair processes that require extended funding and maintenance cycles. For example, as suggested by some architects, cultural events could be held around Merewether Tower so that it is not merely a point of visual focus, but also a centre of social activity that utilises the edifice as a background against which civic life unfolds.

This is how these structures can be kept alive as part of the social life of the city, rather than being extravagantly renovated and cordoned off as visual delights, as mere cosmetic punctures in today’s otherwise bland urban fabric. The monuments should be preserved not merely to “fossilise the city”, but because they serve as storytellers in the city’s timeline of development — past, as well as the future. Some descriptions are quite straightforward and give technical details: names of the architects of certain buildings and complexes, construction dates, and which architect made multiple buildings. You start seeing similarities in the vocabulary, scale, and placement of individual architectural elements and features, and start relating the intrinsic influences on the specific architects’ thought processes of designing.

The photography in the book is no less a delight. There are a variety of styles that Fahim Siddiqi employs to complement the vibrant text. Wide panoramic establishing shots of neighbourhoods set the scene, similar to the beginning of a city-based film. Building facades with the visible context help familiarise the reader with the general ambience of the area, and zoom-ins on the details of architectural elements bring to attention the features of each individual structure. The photos highlight recurring elements, and the play of light and shadow on the varying textures of stone walls: raw versus polished stone, rough cut versus lime-plastered columns, craggy, yellowed surfaces accented with creepers and vines.

The book has a few shortcomings, though. It contains just one location plan, in the beginning, where individual buildings are represented by black dots on a blank map of Karachi (without a scale). Though this map does give a rough idea of buildings in relation to one another, it would be difficult for a reader unfamiliar to the basic layout of Karachi to accurately locate the buildings in the city. The map could also have been used to indicate the zones or neighbourhoods of a city, to help identify the perimeter of the old city area, and to isolate building clusters from one another. Additionally, there could have been a graphic analysis of routes, or maybe a dated timeline, linking the individual buildings together, to string together a story of the history of the city. The book can also serve as an alternate travelogue if some routes are identified between various closely scattered places in custom-made itineraries: a day in the residential areas, or an evening in the old city centre.

Although not written originally with the intention of being compiled into a book, the articles in Karachi: Legacies of Empires represent a brilliant collective effort at documenting and presenting the historical physical assets of Karachi in a subjective, romanticised style that a common Karachiite can relate to. The book is another step in the direction of realising the heritage value of the city and relating to it on an individual, personal level. It is in line with the many recent civil society movements and activities that began with the Caravan Karachi initiative, one of the very first programmes designed to raise awareness about the physical heritage of the city. The recent academic and artistic manifestations of this concept include the My Karachi Festival, the annual Karachi Literature Festivals, the Kara Film Festival, and the more recent I am Karachi initiative. The Super Karachi Express and the wall murals at MT Khan Road are other smaller scale examples of practical work being done to enhance the image of the city. I believe such activities and publications create a continuity of intellectual tradition that builds upon past and present values, and paves the way for the city’s collective future aspirations.

Salman likens some buildings to “a beautiful picture in an art gallery that you don’t want to lose sight of. Even when you have left the gallery.” And we could say the same about this engrossing assemblage of essays on Karachi. 

Karachi: Legacies of Empires

(ARCHITECTURE)

By Peerzada Salman

Photography by Fahim Siddiqi

Endowment Fund Trust, Karachi

ISBN 978-9699860041

576pp.