KARACHI: Ghaffar Bhai arrives at his rice shop near the City Courts looking slightly bewildered and lost. His assistant has already unlocked the shop and pushed up its shutters. To save a parking spot for his boss’s car, he has also placed a wooden bench at a place in front of the pavement. The bench is, of course, removed the moment he sees the car arrive. Then the first thing he does after Ghaffar Bhai comes out of the car is hand him the morning newspaper.

It is no ordinary newspaper. Its script, to anyone who doesn’t know the language, may resemble henna patterns. But it is a Gujarati newspaper, one of the only two surviving in Karachi.

As Ghaffar turns the pages of his thin newspaper, the creases on his forehead begin to smoothen. There is a slight smile developing on his lips. Soon he is in the mood to do some work. Folding the newspaper before gripping it under his arm, he turns around to his shop and takes his place on his desk looking forward to a busy day in the market.

“It is a four-page newspaper on weekdays with two Urdu inside pages and two Gujarati outer pages. This way when the elder in a family enjoys their paper in their language, their family can also have something in there in the same edition which they can also read and enjoy,” says Usman Arab Saati, group editor of Daily Vatan, which besides bringing out a 12-page Sunday edition of the paper also publishes English supplements, a monthly Vatan Mag, the fortnightly Kachhi Samaj, the monthly Memon News, and several other periodicals under the banner of Vatan Gujarati Group of Publications.

“We realise our shrinking Gujarati readership, hence so many publications in both Urdu and English, too,” Usman sahib’s son and editor of Vatan Mag Shahid Saati smiles while nodding. “Gujarati, the language may be the tongue of the business community here but after it stopped being part of the school curriculum, from a compulsory subject in 1992 to optional to simply just not there, there had to be a drop in the readership as the current generation doesn’t read Gujarati. It was only a matter of time for it to happen,” he says.

“Of course the Bohra community teach their children the language. Ismailis, Parsis or Zoroastrians, Memon, etc, who are all a part of the active business community of Karachi, speak Gujarati, too, but they don’t write Gujarati. They write in Dawati, which is writing Gujarati using the Arabic or Urdu script. Therefore the Gujarati script is dying,” Shahid says.

The father then cuts in. “Earlier, there used to be three Gujarati newspapers in the city — Dawn Gujarati, a morning newspaper, Vatan, which was an eveninger also published by the Dawn Group of Newspapers, and Millat, an independent Gujarati newspaper founded by Fakhre Matri in 1948,” he says. “Since Dawn the English newspaper was founded by the Quaid-i-Azam so was its Gujarati edition. Gujarati was the Father of the Nation’s mother tongue,” Usman sahib points out.

“I used to work in the Gujarati papers marketing section of the Dawn Group of Newspapers. I started there on Sept 16, 1966,” he says.

About the other Gujarati newspaper, Millat, which is also still being published, it was said that after the passing away of its founder it was managed and published by his son Inquilab Matri. But now after he too has passed away, his daughter Shumaila is keeping it alive with their small staff of Gujarati sub-editors.

When asked if knowing that the language was dying bringing out the paper was more of a sentimental decision than a wise one on their part, Usman sahib quickly shakes his head. “We may have a small readership for our print editions, but there is a very vast readership for our web edition. Gujarati may not be taught in schools in Pakistan now, but we have a huge following in neighbouring India, the United Kingdom, United States, Canada and so many other countries. We get feedback from there, too. People also tell us that we are doing a service to the language by bringing out the paper,” he says.

Published in Dawn, July 1st, 2018