The Nine Lives of Pakistan: Dispatches from a Precarious State

by Declan Walsh

A century ago, Karachi was a sleepy backwater, a Raj-era port of stout bungalows, art deco cinemas and neat streets that were hosed clean every morning. The city fathers were midshipmen of empire: Hindu gold merchants, British bureaucrats, Parsi shipping magnates and a handful of Jews. In 1919, Abraham Reuben was elected to the Karachi City Council; still today a Star of David adorns the Merewether Clock Tower, named after a British officer who fought in Abyssinia. Partition changed everything. Hindus fled by train to India; Jews boarded steamships for Palestine, where Israel would be founded a year later; and Muslims flooded in from northern India – United Provinces, Bihar and New Delhi, mostly – all drawn by Jinnah’s splendid promises. Language changed. Previously people spoke Sindhi, Gujarati and English, but the newly arrived migrants from India, known as mohajirs, spoke Urdu. In the space of a few frantic months, the population doubled to one million people. That was just the start. In the decades that followed, successive waves of migrants crashed on Karachi’s shores: refugees from China’s civil war in the 1940s; Bengalis seeking economic opportunity in the 1960s; Iranians after the fall of the Shah in 1979; Afghans throughout the 1980s. Mostly, though, they hailed from small-town Pakistan, hopeful newcomers laden with cheap suitcases and modest dreams. Still today they come at a rate of 350,000 a year, propelling Karachi into the ranks of global megacities such as L...