Afterlives of karachi’s ango-imperial vernacular architecture

Postcolonial experiences of urban decay of the colonial built environment

Mirra Saigol

This paper examines the changing semiotic values of Karachi’s colonial Anglo-Imperial Vernacular (AIV) architecture in light of urban decay and their enduring materiality. Urban decay offers complex opportunities to redefine new and hopeful urban futures. The need for examining this heritage is defined by the urgency of its ongoing destruction. 

Through this architectural study, the paper complicates simple urban heritage dichotomies of coloniser and colonised, government and the governed, and elite versus mundane social functions. After presenting a brief history of these structures, the discussion addresses post-colonial negotiations of value, such as economies of decay, acts of erasure and colonial nostalgia, that affect experiences of Karachi’s colonial built environment. By collating and synthesising the works of local experts, the paper considers the motives and success of proposed and implemented urban renewal initiatives for grappling with decaying AIV heritage. 

The paper concludes that the visual aesthetics and materiality of the AIV structures become a canvas for the social functions, values, identities and hopes of local and citywide communities, thereby defining the city’s history. Their erasure represents an exclusive ethos of forget and begin again in face of Karachi’s unpleasant and at times hopeless urban realities, while preservation efforts with a focus on local needs and new functions act as salve toward building inclusive urban identities and futures. 

Part I: Photo Essay

Materiality of Karachi’s Built Environment

Abandonment

Urban Decay
of the
Colonial Built Environment

Architectural Variety

Hindu Influence

Ownership, Personalisation, Adaptation

Part II: Essay 

Introduction 

On an early Sunday morning in December 2019, I joined the Pakistan Chowk Community Centre’s (PCCC) ‘Heritage  Walk Karachi’ around the Pakistan Chowk neighbourhood in Karachi’s historic inner city, Saddar. Walking toward an  intersection we saw an ornate building, its radiant jewel-toned windows and lucent yellow Gizri sandstone luminous in  the morning sun. The Kanji Munji building (1868) is an enduring relic of Karachi’s 19th and 20th century colonial  heritage, built by a Hindu merchant in the emergent Anglo-Imperial Vernacular (AIV) style (Lari & Lari 2001). As we  approached it, our guide was quick to inform us that the building was in fact no more than a façade. Over two months  in 2018, the listed building’s interiors had been illegally demolished before a local architect and heritage consultant  Marvi Mazhar intervened (Masood 2018). Despite its listing as a heritage building in 1995, its fate continues to remain  uncertain as no further actions to consider its future have been undertaken. The building’s plight is indicative of a  wider pattern of decay and destruction facing the colonial built heritage of the historic urban core through poverty,  neglect, shortcomings of government, commercialisation, loose building codes and intentional demolition. The survival  and flourishing of a building requires continual adaption through an investment of time, resources, and respect for  what came before (Brand 1994). But what happens when the people, ideologies and meanings that sustain a building  fade away?  

In this paper, I examine the changing semiotic values of the visual aesthetics of AIV structures and their enduring  materiality, which forces us to confront them. I do this by addressing the negotiations of value that affect experiences  of Karachi’s colonial built environment in light of postcolonial urban decay and urban renewal initiatives. There are  several limitations to undertaking such a complex study, particularly inabilities to engage in fieldwork and lack of direct  access to raw data, in particular local community perspectives towards heritage structures. To counter this, evidence is  drawn from local academic sources, personal understandings of Karachi’s built heritage and the material evidence of  remaining structures. These buildings are vast in number and performed a wide array of functions through time and  space. In order to ground this discussion, arguments of style and function, authenticity and loss, urban decay, and ways  of remembering are used to address the materiality of remaining Anglo-Imperial Vernacular built forms. 

Debates around the value of the colonial built form - couched in terms of conservation, preservation, gentrification  and urban renewal - are influenced by the semiotic values of both visual aesthetic, or style, and the changing  functionality of the material object. The Anglo-Imperial Vernacular as visual style represented the ‘modern’ (read: pro British) sensibilities of their patrons, just as Karachi’s urban geography was born from British colonial modalities of  urban planning (Lari & Lari 2001; Anwar & Viqar 2014; Hasan 2015). They were created by a multicultural and  multiethnic elite who formed part of an oppressed class, and used this architecture to signal urban values and  identities in step with colonial societal norms. Changing urban demographics in the era post Pakistan’s independence  in 1947 disassociated the material object from these social groups, leaving the historic core’s new lower income inhabitants and political urban elites to redefine its value. This has occurred on a local scale, through personal,  individual communal engagement, and an official one that seeks to recreate Karachi’s history by co-opting, sanitising  and securing the colonial built fabric (Anwar & Viqar 2014). 

Dobraszczyk (2017) has argued that the ‘spectacle’ of decay creates a complex opportunity and canvas for the  reinvention of a city’s identity and future. This is done by rewriting its history or removing old assumptions to allow  radical change. As Pakistan’s commercial capital and an emerging megacity of the Global South, Karachi is engaged in a  process of redefining its urban identity through neoliberal agendas of urban regeneration (Hasan 2015). As decay  makes the question of experiencing a building and its value particularly relevant, documenting the pasts and futures of  Anglo-Imperial Vernacular buildings situates postcolonial identities in wider paradigms of place and time. Decay  encourages us to ask complex questions, such as whether to conserve or restore them, how to adapt to the decay,  and in doing so it forces us to re-examine their historical values to envision new and inclusive urban futures.  

Understanding Change | Contextualising Decay 

In 1843, the British conquered Sindh. In a small walled town of simple mud-brick, they saw a future port of immense  strategic value and economic potential. Having already established a military Cantonment to its east (1839), they set  about a radical urban transformation of harbour and landscape. By the 1890s, Karachi had become the third most  important port in British India and of paramount importance to their colonisation was a continual agenda of harbour  improvement. Lari and Lari (2001) speak of Karachi as the ‘dual city’ for the colonial attitudes that led to its  development. The aloof British ‘secure in their feelings of cultural and military superiority’ created an urban template  that reflected their ambitions for India (Lari & Lari 2001: 58). The organic forms of the ‘backwater’ native settlement -  narrow winding roads and courtyards, interweaving public and semi-private spaces and intermingled functions and  uses - were contrasted, surrounded and expanded by British urban planners who ordered their new districts on linear  grids and wide open spaces. This spatial segregation was accompanied by an ethnic one designed to impress upon  natives the technological and ideological prowess of British power. Notably, Karachi’s Parsi & Hindu merchant capitalists  co-invested in this new landscape (Anwar & Viqar 2014: 329) and rose to cultural and economic prominence from  collaboration with their new rulers. While the colonial administration constructed administrative, religious and military  structures, Saddar came to house wealthy merchant and trading native communities of Hindus, Parsis, Goans and  more, who built elegant religious, civic and domestic architecture using local stone-carving craftsmanship and local  materials like Gizri stone (Hasan 2015: 182).  

With Independence and Partition in 1947 came staggering migration and rapid change. According to Stewart Brand  (1994), while all buildings change with time, those that improve are adapted by successive owners who respect what  came before. Brand describes the opposite of this kind of adaptation as ‘graceless turnover’:  

“a rapid succession of tenants, each scooping out all trace of the former tenants and leaving nothing that successors  can use. Finally no tenant replaces the last one, vandals do their quick work, and broken windows beg for  demolition.” (Brand 1994: 23) 

In Karachi, the traumatic explosion of the city’s population occurred suddenly and accelerated exponentially. What  proceeded was graceless turnover on a rapid and massive scale that led to severe degradation of the urban landscape.  Wealthy Hindu families emptied inner Karachi and even larger numbers of poor Muslim refugees poured in to replace  them. In 1947, the city population was approximately 450,000 of which 51% were Hindus. 600,000 refugees arrived  from across India and many were settled into these newly vacated districts (Cheema 2007). What was once a  privileged district saw the departure of its elite (to other parts of the city and abroad) and replacement with lower  income groups who could scarcely afford to upkeep their lavish new surroundings. From the 1950s onward, the city’s  population grew rapidly from high birth rates and the arrival of migrant workers from other parts of Pakistan. Due to  its proximity to the port, railway lines and cargo terminals, Saddar and other areas of the historic core saw further  numbers of working-class populations moving into previously upscale neighbourhoods (Hasan 2015).  

This massive expansion meant unchecked alterations to historic buildings and outright demolitions. Most single and  double story homes were torn down to build high-rise housing, expanding wholesale markets, small-scale  manufacturing outfits and their assorted warehouses (Cheema 2007; Hasan 2015). To house more people, additional  floors were built in concrete upon many beautiful stone buildings, and most community buildings were occupied and  converted into homes. Changing functionalities trumped style and visual aesthetic. Where it does survive, this  architectural heritage is in a state of inhabited ruin. Many are haphazardly integrated with modern constructions that  fail to consider the character of their neighbours or predecessors. Yet perhaps counterintuitively, the old city is  booming economically thanks to its concentration of industries, workers and links to the port that increase its land  value far above other modern elite neighbourhoods in Karachi (Hasan 2015). 

Since 1947, the local government has made small steps - few and far between - to prioritise conservation and  preservation of this historic district. Interest in conserving the historic core began in the 1980s and gained pace in the  90s. In particular, the passing of the 1994 Sindh Cultural Heritage (Preservation) Act [SCH(P) Act] created an  Advisory and a Technical Committee to assist the Sindh Culture Department. Together they created and expanded a  listing of heritage buildings in the city (Hasan 2015; Hassan 2018). In recent years, the initiatives of private individuals,  activists and NGOs have worked to raise awareness and occasionally restore old buildings within the district to  varying degrees of success. Negotiating the value of the decaying colonial built environment in postcolonial Karachi is  an active process played out in the tug of war between economic, political, personal and cultural motives of local  communities, government, developers and other elites.

Economies of Decay 

Reframing a view articulated by ethnographer Maureen MacKenzie, Conkey’s (2006: 365) analysis of function states  that the social value and function of an object are not inherent but are ‘mulitvalent and variously realised’ (MacKenzie  1991: 27). While material objects give value to social relations, the value of objects are socially constructed (2006:  366). Therefore, while an AIV building (as material culture) gave social value (signalling wealth and a relationship with a  dominant power) to its patron in the colonial era, the building’s value evolved over time through its sociocultural and  economic worth to subsequent users. The functionality of a building to Saddar’s new low income users was of  paramount importance. For some buildings there is continuity: the Mohammad Ali Building on Zaibunnisa (formerly  Elphinstone) Street was once a department store and is still used today by a variety of small local businesses who  occupy the ground floor despite the collapse of the building’s upper roof. But what happens when economic value  outweighs all others? Quoting a carpenter friend, Brand (1994: 72) has said, “people want to get rich quick. That’s at  the bottom of every problem I’ve seen with buildings”. 

Pure economics often determines the fate of an AIV structure. In the 2000s, the Committees created under the 1994  SCH(P) Act undertook a large documentation and categorisation of Karachi’s built heritage. They were often  challenged by owners of listed buildings in court against such listings (Hasan 2015). The example of Mohammed  Siddiqui who owned a British era warehouse in Saddar exemplifies these concerns (Shackle 2014). Describing himself  as ‘not a wealthy man’, he would have much preferred to knock down the derelict structure and sell the land, or build  something more profitable to secure his children’s future. Heritage buildings in the historic core are expensive to  maintain and restoration is a costly laborious process. Many buildings are owned by middle income groups who are  economically disinclined or simply unable to afford upkeep of elaborate architectural elements, and tenants are low  income, working class groups who can scarcely afford to spare limited funds on architectural frivolities. Stewart Brand  (1994) suggests three competing and contradicting modalities in the life of a building: its role as (I) habitat, (II)  property and (III) component of its surroundings. Saddar’s transformation from an elite neighbourhood to site of low  income housing, warehousing, wholesaling and manufacturing have changed land-use as well as priorities of function,  privileging the economic value of property to the exclusion of all else. 

Architecture is inextricably linked to utility (Cairns & Jacobs 2014) and yet countless buildings across the historic core  stand derelict in the interest of preserving their visual aesthetic without considering alternative functionalities. In an  effort to counter this concerning trend, the SCH(P)A’s Technical Committee offers alternative solutions that provide  similar economic benefits while preserving the structures. Arif Hasan (2015: 187-188) has demonstrated that when  these efforts are successful, they support a potential shift to higher-end land use (or gentrification) in Saddar. But is  gentrification the answer? Hasan (2015) has argued that gentrification is an essential component of any revitalisation  scheme for Saddar. Gentrification is not an inherently negative process (De Cesari & Dimova 2019) but it must centre  local functions and local values to successfully transform this heritage. In Shanghai, small neighbourhoods of colonial  era lilong houses that escaped demolition in the 1990s survive today thanks to their cultural capital (Arkaraprasertkul 2019). Citing the example of a traditional Chinese teahouse set up in a lilong house, Arkaraprasertkul has shown that  the economic benefits of selling heritage experiences to the middle-class enabled landlords and former working-class residents to combat economic precariousness, gentrifying the neighbourhood in the process. The visual and stylistic  value of a heritage building is reformulated to a new value of functionality. A similar process is possible in Saddar; in  2018, an esteemed local architect Shahid Sayeed Khan worked tirelessly to petition the government to allow him to restore the collapsing ILACo Building (see Photo Essay, Fig 5-7) on Zaibunnisa Street with an aim to create studio  spaces on upper floors while simultaneously protecting the livelihood (and lives) of its ground floor shop owners.  While restoration has yet to begin, the building’s visual aesthetic and high ceiling interiors are an increasingly rare  marketable feature of a bygone style useable for an array of diverse social functions. 

Many locals continue to live in colonial-era structures. Externally, one can see how ownership has adapted the heritage  buildings’ forms (see Photo Essay, Fig 17-19). Sections of façades are vividly painted to the inhabitants’ colour of  preference. In other cases, features like balconies have been expanded, removed or adapted irregularly across facades  as inhabitants repair and modify on a case by case basis. An extra floor can rise on one side and not the other.  Ultimately, these patchwork repairs cannot hold back the inevitable. When a roof is lost, the building will come down  floor by floor. Occasionally this occurs while occupants wander the space, causing tragic loss of life. 

Postcolonial Values 

Across Saddar, the heritage value of colonial architecture has not always been appreciated. Architect Yasmeen Lari has said:  

“[In the 1970s/80s] Cities like Karachi were not considered to be historic because they were largely built by the  British, with whom there has been a love-hate relationship. Traditionally, people thought British buildings were of no  value, and it was better to demolish them and be done” (Shackle 2014) 

Many postcolonial states have engaged in “marginalising and suppressing formerly dominant European heritage values  and properties” through renaming practices, demolition or simply allowing colonial heritage to crumble (Leung 2007:  24). In Karachi, the latter frequently occurs through government inactivity, ineptitude or disinterest toward land-use  changes in the historic core. But conscious acts of erasure are acts of forgetting. Economies of forgetting are  dangerous strategies of cultural amnesia. It is vital to acknowledge that the colonial built environment was not a  singularly white British process.  

Saddar’s heritage evolved from a fusion of local traditions and craftsmanship with imported western styles. Karachi  was populated by many native South Asian groups that worked across all social strata in the port, commerce, and  related services that relied on the functions of Empire (Lari & Lari 2000: 86-87). While many of Karachi’s monumental  structures were completed in the 19th century by British engineers - in various Neo-Gothic styles - it was in the  beginning of the twentieth century that wealthy native merchants constructed the majority of Saddar’s buildings in the  Anglo-Imperial Vernacular style. The abundance of these buildings across all quarters of the historic core are a testament to local design and craftsmanship as well as the acquired wealth of indigenous groups in the city (Lari & Lari  2000: 300-304). Lari and Lari’s critique of these structures justifiably takes aim at their foreign origins in western  Italianate styles that represented the influence of an Imperial culture on a colonised people. The ‘ingredients’ of the  Imperial Vernacular style “were few but permutations unlimited” (Lari & Lari 2000: 301). Symmetry is key with most  two to four stories high. Facades consist of long arcades of Roman arches built in locally sourced yellow Gizri stone.  Windows and openings were embellished with rusticated masonry or pilasters with capitals in a variety of European  styles and roofs ended in carved balusters. Many had ornate balconies in wood or metal. They were designed to  impress and to display the ‘modern’ (British) sensibilities of their patrons. Brand (1994: 2) has said ‘buildings contain our  lives and all civilisation’. What would it mean for postcolonial Karachi’s urban identity if these buildings are no more?  Regardless of intentionality, the decay and destruction of the historic built environment can be read as an act of  forgetting the traumas of Karachi’s colonial past. 

Acts of erasure come in many forms. Across the road from the Kanji Building is the Meghraj Building. On one floor,  what was once an open courtyard is now covered by a concrete roof and partitioned into rooms of irregular shape  and size. Once housing a Hindu hostel, the walls still hold the remains of a stone frieze depicting Hindu deities.  Modern Karachiites would find such a tableau surprising. The crumbling stone is a passive erasure of local Hindu  culture that was vital in the formation of Karachi’s early identity, yet countless examples survive. Wrought iron  balconies display original Hindu names of buildings, sacred symbols such as ‘Om’ or sometimes more fanciful elements  like gramophones. Heedless of personal ideology, the materiality of the colonial built environment demands attention.  It asserts itself through its durability. The intricacy and beauty of the stone carvings evoke a lost craftsmanship and  locals form immense personal connections to these buildings. The destruction of the Kanji Munji building was urgently  documented by a neighbour who had lived there for 50 years (Masood 2018). Members of the close-knit community  affectionately termed it the sheesh mahal (glass palace). When we look upon the buildings of our ancestors, they  situate us in time and place and regale us with the achievements, experiences and values of the past. Heritage is a  social process (Mydland & Grahn 2012): these buildings make up a living breathing urban fabric used and negotiated  by people from a variety of contexts. How do we conceptualise, create and celebrate complex histories when the  material remains of the past are not cared for? Who is best served by institutional forgetting? 

Economies of forgetting inhabit a space diametrically opposite to the reinvention of colonial history. Anwar and Viqar  (2014: 330) ask a vital question: when modern Pakistanis express nostalgia for the colonial past, how do we endeavour  to understand these sentiments? At the heart of Saddar lies Empress Market, an elegant colonial-era structure around  which a complex and diverse network of informal shops and stalls had organically formed in the years since Pakistan’s  1947 independence. In 2018 the informal market was shockingly bulldozed to - according to Mayor Akhtar - ‘return  [Empress Market] to its former glory’ (Ahmed 2019). Anwar and Viqar (2014) have shown how new urban  redevelopment schemes in the historic core reinvent Karachi’s history through the notion of colonial nostalgia but are  designed to serve an insecure metro elite that wish to sanitise and secure public space, often at the expense of local  communities. Anwar and Viqar (2014) have additionally demonstrated how these urban renewal initiatives expose a  continuity with colonial modalities of urban intervention while Hasan (2015) has shown how these actions amount to  an extraction of value from real estate by replacing poorer residents with richer ones. When city officials speak of a  return to ‘former glory’, it is a safe assumption that they are referring to the perceived order and security of a  simplified re-imagined colonial past. Parkinson et al (2015) have demonstrated how the revalorisation and  ‘neutralisation’ of Ireland’s contentious colonial built heritage by Irish heritage elites aimed to win support for elite  values and preferences. The Empress Market episode can similarly be reframed through this lens as a marshalling of a  vague and ill-defined colonial nostalgia as motive to gentrify valuable public space in the city historic core (Hasan  2018).  

Bissell (2005) has argued that while nostalgia is fundamentally an act of remembering in response to problems and  challenges of the present, this understanding does not take into account the multiplicity of forms of memory.  According to him, anthropological understandings of nostalgia must account for specific spatial and cultural contexts as  well as recognising that nostalgia as a form of social memory emphasises ‘distance and disjuncture’ rather than  ‘commonality and community’ (Bissell 2005: 216). At the start of his article, Bissell highlights conversations in which a  variety of Zanzibaris express a colonial nostalgic desire for a return of Zanzibar’s urban fabric to its state during the  British colonial era, as a critique of its present state. At numerous points in my research and personal experience,  recollections of Karachi’s past by older generations follow these patterns. Memories and connections with colonial  heritage are often treasured for the order, cleanliness and beauty they represent when contrasted with the deplorable,  chaotic and hopeless present.  

Underlying all this are concerns of authenticity and loss. The urban built fabric facilitates identity formation through its  physicality as well as the rituals of activity that take place in and around them. In the case of Empress Market, the  colonial built environment was subsumed into the ordered chaos of an informal market creating a new postcolonial  heritage. The economic value of gentrification of the historic core to elites outweighed the heritage value of Karachi’s  built heritage to disastrous effect. Empress Market’s role as habitat and component of it’s surroundings are lost - the  vicinities of the market are devoid of activity; the economic damage from loss of jobs and disruption of industries and  supply chains is probably incalculable. Meanwhile its property value has immensely grown - the building and  surrounding block stands empty at the heart of downtown Karachi (Hasan 2018; Hasan 2019). Here, neoliberal  government gentrification policies toward ‘preserving’ a material colonial structure through destruction of the  postcolonial problematises postcolonial relationships between the present and past. In Karachi, it seems the colonial  and postcolonial suffer alike. 

Conclusions 

Urban decay offers complex opportunities to redefine new, hopeful futures. Karachi today is a gritty and unglamorous  megacity of the Global South, snarled with traffic, plagued by poverty, pollution, poor governance, lousy infrastructure and urban degradation. Physically manoeuvring through the urban colonial built environment can be hazardous for the  toxic fumes spewed by cars, streets piled with rubbish, or worse. The pursuit of hopeful futures can be bitter. Yet  within this chaos, many people endure with love and care for their local community and buildings. Some revel in their  personal histories with buildings and are sad to see them go; news of the Kanji building’s demolition was shared by a  disturbed neighbour who actively sought public attention to control these actions. Karachi governance is notorious for  choosing to forget, restart, rebuild elsewhere (Naeem & Ahmed 2019). The neglect paid to colonial pasts is a rejection  of this complex heritage, and framing discussions on Karachi’s colonial built environment around the building as  material object is reductive, artificially severing them from the lives that live within them. When these buildings are left  to die, it is an active choice to forget the past. Issues of economics make these choices harder. When decay feels  inevitable and unchangeable, it brings loss and sadness. Nostalgia is a desire to reconnect to a timeless and hopeful  past in light of unpleasant realities as means of coping with ‘a palpable and painful’ sense of loss (Bissell 2015: 224). In  Karachi, when hopelessness is a poison, forgetting is an easy cure.  

Buildings are not neutral, they carry the weight of our collective pasts, present and futures. They tell stories about the  decisions we make as individuals and as a society. They embody values in unusual and unintentional ways. The built  environment is thus a canvas for identity formation. It can economically, sensorially, emotionally, and temporally define  our place in the world. Decay is the end of a cycle of life whose next natural step is rebirth. As demonstrated, it  becomes necessary to reckon with the histories of the colonial built environment because the materiality of the past  demands our attention in order to shape new and inclusive urban futures.

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