Lahore, Karachi

Time and real estate have hacked away at the traces of the Hindus and Sikhs who dominated Lahore’s demographics before Partition. That does not mean, however, that Muslim architecture was held sacrosanct. Fifty-five years on, Ranjit Singh’s gurdwara, Kamran’s baradari, Dara Shikoh’s tomb and the Civil and Military Gazette’s office where Rudyard Kipling used to write have become nothing more than ghosts of buildings past.

It could be said that Lahore is merrily spinning in a time warp and can’t locate the closest transporter out. And it shares this condition with other post-colonial cities with First-World aspirations. Unfortunately, these yearnings have only manifested themselves in the grafting of the symbols of modernity onto the cityscape. ‘‘In Karachi, the colonial buildings don’t define its character because it was built entirely after Partition,’’ says architect Kamil Khan Mumtaz. ‘‘In Lahore, the conflict between its past and present is far more acute because its past is not so far away in history.’’

Globalisation, however, does not seem to have encroached much on the insular lifestyles of Lahore’s inhabitants. According to F.S. Aijazuddin, author of The White House & Pakistan: Secret Declassified Documents, 1969-1974, ‘‘Lahore is an aggregation of villages where one derives identity from one’s family.’’ Obviously, it becomes all the harder for strangers to be accepted. ‘‘Lahore is still very clannish and cliquish,’’ says lawyer Shireen Khaddarposh. ‘‘People need to be able to place you in their picture before they’ll bother to get to know you.’’

Since the family system endures, so does the support system that goes with it. ‘‘Organisations such as Human Rights Commission of Pakistan flourish in Lahore because of the old boys’ network,’’ comments software house CEO Zaheer Alam Kidwai. And so the story goes with business as well. Multinationals often have to resort to establishing local partnerships with influential industrialists in order to set up shop. This is clearly the urban version of the age-old custom of negotiating marriages (read: strategic alliances) on the basis of landed interest.

Indeed, many of Lahore’s curious inconsistencies can be explained by its symbiotic relationship with the rest of the Punjab. The city has historically been the provincial seat. Travel through time from the 1960s to the 21st century and one realises how Punjab’s industrialisation has added another dimension to the relationship between the city and the hinterland.

As the most fertile region in the country, agriculture continued to be the Punjab’s raison d’etre post-independence, and governments made little effort to change the status quo. ‘‘In 1956, we tried to set up industry in Lahore but were discouraged by the government because it was too close to the border,’’ recounts industrialist Syed Babar Ali. Then came industry-friendly Ayub Khan and the Kala Shah Kaku complex was established in the city’s outskirts. ‘‘The emergence of the dry ports reduced Karachi’s importance and provided an impetus to the development of industry in Lahore,’’ says industrialist Iqbal Z. Ahmed. ‘‘Moreover, politically motivated economic incentives led to the setting up of Chuniyan and other industrial estates.’’

As employment opportunities multiplied, so did the traffic between city and province. Meanwhile, the rural population was also settling along the major roads between the urban centre and the satellite industrial areas, giving birth to what urban planner Reza Ali calls ‘‘ribbons of development’’.

Take a trip to Lahore’s Badami Bagh and you will see hundreds of thousands of workers who enter and leave the city every day. They throng Lahore primarily for work but they also shop, eat and tow along their families on the weekend. This kind of non-resident commerce is completely alien to Karachi and serves to underscore its isolation from Sindh.

In the 30-add years since industry and infrastructure connected the Punjab like never before, Lahore’s composite Punjabi identity has only been reinforced. Indeed, one could even contend that Lahore and its surrounding hinterland are fast becoming a rural metropolis. This then is Lahore’s paradox. It has grown more prosperous (credit cards, incidentally, sell far more in Lahore than Karachi), it looks more developed and yet it has become increasingly ruralised.

Fly some 800 miles south to Karachi and the identity issues are inverted. Having grown practically overnight, the metropolis’s problem is not really knowing where it came from. As Hamid Akhund, former secretary culture Sindh, puts it, ‘‘Karachi moves with the wind, Lahore has roots.’’ Since it was never a centre of power until Partition, Karachi’s documented past does not go back more than a few hundred years. The little evidence of a Singhi legacy was swamped by the steady influx of a potpourri of ethnic communities who flocked to the fishing-hamlet-turned-port. The British did not even consider Sindh a viable political entity and consequently merged it with the Bombay Presidency. Once can identify the beginnings of Karachi’s dislocation from Sindh from this point as Bombay’s cosmopolitan port culture was transferred to the growing city.

(Tomorrow: Post-modern Karachi, multi-cultural Karachi; fragmented Karachi)

—Courtesy Herald