We have just three cities in the country -- Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad. Lahore has been urban centre for thousands of years. Karachi, the largest city of Pakistan, began to take on urban contours in the late nineteenth century. After the Partition it experienced exponential growth, horizontal and vertical, for the two simple reasons: it was declared the capital city of the new state and it was the only port the country had that could facilitate international trade and imports and exports.

Lahore grew at a bit accelerated pace due to myriad factors in the aftermath of division of India accompanied by unprecedented mass migration across the newly-demarcated borders of India and Pakistan which witnessed nothing less than macabre scenes of mass killings and social cleansing that deeply affected the Muslim, Hindu and Sikh communities. Lahore and Karachi received more hapless and battered people from India than the ones forced to leave for India from their ancestral homes.

Islamabad is really a modern city (it doesn’t have history of organic human settlement though across the Margalla Hills we have ruins of ancient Taxila) that literally grew out of nowhere as its very foundations rested on an administrative decision to shift the capital from Karachi to cooler climes in the lush green vicinity of Punjab’s Cantonment town of Rawalpindi. The plant began to sprout with the passage of time on a soil manured by political establishment, military elite, bureaucracy, foreign missions and diplomatic corps.

All three cities are deficient in capacity to evolve forward-looking stable urban culture worth the name. The reasons are not unfathomable if we don’t make a mystique of the phenomenon. One of the main factors responsible for the fast receding traditional norms and non-emergence of new urban social code is the massive influx of people from the countryside to urban spaces. The net result is uncontrolled and unplanned urban expansion with all the ensuing consequences which show in a frightening way what not to do while administering cities.

Advertisement

Look at Karachi; it has grown bigger than many a country in terms of population. It has turned into one of the biggest urban sprawls in the world. It has become, it seems, a place where ever pregnant viviparous beings hover in the air delivering babies incessantly. Karachi is not just an egregious example of lack of urban planning, bad governance and miserable failure of civic institutions. The more serious problem the city is beset with is of cultural and anthropological nature that erupts in the form of social chaos and cultural clash between diverse urban and non-urban identities of its old and new residents. We see simmering conflict between the old residents, the Sindhis and the new residents, the Mujahirs who migrated to the city from India after the Partition. The former are different from the latter in their language, cultural practices, dress code and social mannerism. They have a distinct historical identity that is generally agrarian and feudalistic. The Muhajirs on the other hand are more urbanised and their identity is language and faith based and has little to do with ethnicity.

The cultural conflict between rural and urban communities in Karachi was further ginned up by predominance of Muhajirs in the civil bureaucracy in the early decades of the country’s history. So despite all the socioeconomic compulsions that forced Karachi to become cosmopolitan in its outlook, the city offered islands of rural and urban cultures oddly trying to co-exist in an uneasy relationship.

Another factor further complicated the already tense situation. The need of cheap labour for menial and tough jobs attracted and still attracts cash-starved unskilled and semi-skilled Pathan workers, thought to be interlopers, from the impoverished tribal areas. The phrase ‘tribal areas’ says it all. Millions of tribal people forced by economic factors find themselves in a sprawling metropolitan city which knows little about them and about which they know little. They are as unacquainted with the mores of modern living and urban culture as urbanites are with the centuries-old customs and norms (Riwaj) of tribal society. They are found unknowingly grating the cultural sensitivities of each other.

Sindhis though ancient people epitomise agrarian and feudal culture. Muhajirs though urbanised suffer from a misplaced sense of cultural superiority merely by virtue of being residents of urban centre. They want their group identity with little justification to be doled out to other groups as national identity. And Pathans though hardworking are prisoners of the tribal traditions, the high point of which is their anachronistic tribal code. They are limpets to the past and take modern and liberal way of life as an affront and resent the fast-changing urban society that, in their opinion, is being ruled by entropy. Sindhis with their feudal habits seem alien in Karachi’s urban setting while Pathans with their tribal habits appear to be relics of the bygone ages. For both the groups urbanism is not an organic development. It’s rather a necessary evil they have to deal with. They do not make effort to gel with more urbanised groups. The result is social disharmony and war of identities.

Sindhis and Pathans have to be a part of a transformative process that helps them assimilate the essential elements of urban society. As for Muhajirs, a reverse process has affected their interaction with other groups and status as the vanguard of urbanism. Falling a victim to ‘the older the better’ their political leadership has already begun to ape the local feudal lords, vaderas and tribal chieftains who are an embodiment of ancient but vanishing glory of moribund age. The way their political project has evolved negates with its fascist streak their cultural project aimed at urbanely creating prospect of urban life in Karachi.