The Little Maharashtra of Karachi

For the past two years or so, I have been intending to make a documentary, or any other fitting tribute to my great-grandfather, Shri. Appasaheb Marathe. Born into a poor Chitpavan Brahmin household in the village of Vengurla in the Konkan, he rose to great heights in his life and is today known by many as one of the first big businessmen of Bombay of Marathi origin. I shall dedicate several posts in this blog to him. Now getting to the point. While I was gathering data about the great man, I learned that he spent the most prosperous years of his life in Karachi, Pakistan’s economic hub today, and erstwhile capital of the Sind province of British India. In the course of gathering information about the documentary, I interviewed several people who had been in contact with Appasaheb. Now most of these people had lived in Karachi. What they told me about Appasaheb was resourceful, no doubt, but what really caught my eye was the passion with which they spoke about their life in Karachi. Karachi, that beautiful, clean, prosperous city, a Maharashtra away from Maharashtra.

Before the 1930s, the current Sindh province of Pakistan, the Indian state of Gujarat, and western part of the Indian state of Maharashtra, together formed a gigantic administrative unit called the Bombay Presidency. The two big cities of this province were the provincial capital of Bombay and the excellent port city of Karachi. Now poor as we have always been, the trend of migration to the cities from the rural countryside is an old one in India. Konkan, one of the poorest regions of Maharashtra back then and even today, was one of the big contributors of skilled and unskilled labor within the Presidency to Bombay and Karachi. Those who cleared the Grade 11 Matriculation Exam, or ‘Matric’, were labelled skilled and those who did not unskilled. The ‘skilled’ were able to secure Government or private jobs in the two cities in the range of Rs. 25 a month, a princely sum back in the day. The ‘unskilled’ secured labor intensive jobs, notably the mills of Central Bombay or ‘Girangav’, and similar physically demanding jobs in Karachi.

In 1936, a manifestation of regional consciousness among the Sindh region’s largely Muslim masses led to foundation of the Sind Province of the British Raj. Now while this development had a profound influence on the history of India, such as the idea for the creation of Pakistan, it made very little difference to the rural poor of the Konkan. They continued to swarm towards Karachi as they always had along with Bombay. And the city accepted them with open arms.

Mrs. Nalini Devdhar, a Karachi resident at that time, now aged 96, describes the city as a rich, clean and green metropolis with cosmopolitanism in its DNA. Lands owned by prosperous Sindhi Hindu zamindaars, businesses run by astute Gujaratis and Marwaris, staffed by loyal and dutiful Marathis, and served by the Sindhi Muslims and Pathans, formed the social fabric of the city.

The large Marathi population, with numbers upwards of 50,000, had its own neighborhood. The region between the Narayan Jagannath Vaidya High School (still bears the same name) on Bunder Road (today called the MA Jinnah Road) and the Maratha High School a few blocks away formed the neighborhood the Marathis considered their own. An example: my great-grandfather's own address in Karachi. Mr. S.P. Marathe, Second Floor, Advani Chambers, Opposite P. Shah & Co., Vishwanath Patil lane, Bunder Road, Karachi. If one were to hide the word ‘Karachi’, everybody would guess this place to be in Bombay or Poona. There were municipal schools run by the cash rich Karachi Municipal Corporation that offered instruction in Marathi, such as the NJ Vaidya School, the Shivaji school, and the Maratha school to name a few.  Charitable organizations such as the Mitra Mandal, the Maharashtra Mandal, Ogaley Ashram and the Brahmin Sabha worked for the welfare of the Marathi people. The communal polarization of North India had little impact on the city, as people of all faiths and beliefs lived in the city without fear.

And then came Partition. Most Marathis perceived it as one among many other political gimmicks of the time, like the creation of the Sind province back in 1936. It made little difference to them back then, and only a few worried in 1947. According to Mrs. Devdhar, the Sindhi Muslims were a calm and friendly lot, just like the Kokni Muslims of the Konkan, hardly influenced by the Urdu Pakistani propaganda of the Muslim League which several among the Muslim populace of North India’s United Provinces (today’s Uttar Pradesh), Central Provinces (today’s Madhya Pradesh) and Bihar bought into. There were no recorded incidents of communal violence between the Sindhi Muslims and the remaining heterogeneous Hindu population in Karachi ever before. Things changed dramatically only when trains full of UP, CP, and Bihari Muslims began arriving from North India. These displaced families, many if not all targets of communal violence in North India, were in no mood to be reasoned with. Communal violence of the kind Karachi had never seen before unfolded on to the streets. Mrs. Devdhar’s own house in Karachi was forcibly occupied by refugees. It is at that point when the Marathis, with a heavy heart, decided to leave the city for good. Jinnah too, made repeated requests to the Hindu population to stay on as citizens of a secular Pakistan that he had founded. But things really went out of control towards the end of 1947. My own great-grandfather, Appasaheb, did not leave the city before 1948, and boarded a ship back to India only when a death squad of refugees arrived at his doorstep.

A cosmopolitan and vibrant city was forever eroded by violence that never ceased. First the targeting of Hindus, then the Shias and Ahmadis after 1947, the arrival of the Afghan refugees during the Taliban war, and the political battleground and drug haven it is today, Karachi is one of the most dangerous cities in the world.

In her calm suburban house in Nashik, Mrs. Devdhar fondly remembers Karachi as her first home, a city like none other.

Mrs. Nalini Devdhar (age 97), Karachi resident who now lives in Nashik, Maharashtra.