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Karachi tries to revive cultural heritage ravaged by extremism

KARACHI: Karachi is alone among its mega-city peers to have no significant public artworks, victim of decades of religious fanaticism likened to the Taliban destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, but artists here are beginning to turn the tide.

“What the Taliban did to the ancient Buddha’s statue in Bamiyan a few years ago, fanatics and ruthless government functionaries did to Karachi’s statues long ago,” says Shahid Rassam, lamenting the dearth of public artworks here.

Rassam is one of a handful of local artists working to revive Karachi’s public art, which flourished under the British Raj in India but crumbled under Zia, as culture became an early casualty of a regime that nurtured religious fanaticism. The rot had set in under Zia’s predecessor, Ayub Khan, the first in a long line of military rulers, who held power from 1958-1969.

“The religious extremists launched the first campaign against beautiful statues in Karachi during Ayub Khan’s rule when the city was stripped of most of its street artifacts,” says former city official Saifur Rehman Grami. Art enthusiast Grami says old Karachi had been dotted with huge statues.

The monuments survived sporadically until Zia seized power in a military coup in 1977 as Pakistan reverted to military rule. His 11-year tenure encouraged sectarian Islam and religious extremism prospered as he imposed curbs on cultural activities.

In the process, he gave extremists the freedom to ruin the remnants of Karachi’s glorious statuary, says Rassam.

“General Ziaul Haq’s period remains a nightmare for art and culture during which Karachi suffered the most, because this city was the cultural hub of Pakistan,” Rassam says. “Even many years after the creation of Pakistan most of these statues were erected at various gardens and public places but since the late 1970s the wave of extremism uprooted all these monuments,” Grami says. Scores of sculptures depicting British rule are now little more than a folk memory after being uprooted and destroyed.

Mohammad Ahsan, a resident of Karachi’s Old Town, says he witnessed the destruction of his locality’s history. “Khori Garden was one of the most beautiful parks of old Karachi. There were many statues of those who played a great role in making Karachi the cleanest city in the world, including a huge statue of Queen Victoria. All these monuments were either destroyed or displaced in the 1970s and 80s and the old fountains and water troughs were completely ruined,” he said.

A large number of old statues and monuments were discovered heaped in a municipal storeroom in the mid-1990s. Most were extensively damaged with what Grami says is a mixture of official apathy and nature’s ravages.

Grami says although some old statues were recovered and restored by the authorities, most were either destroyed or stolen.

“We had found some broken pieces like limbs and busts lying neglected under the debris of the municipality’s stores, but found it impossible to put them together,” Grami says. What could be salvaged and restored has been placed at the city’s Mohatta Palace Museum, but their absence from their original sites around the city has created an artistic vacuum.

However, municipal officials say that, politically, now is not “the appropriate time” to re-install the statues. “We can not restore them because of possible reaction from religious fanatics and indoctrination against cultural entities in the general mindset of society,” says a municipal official. In a country once again under military rule and wracked by political and religious turmoil, Karachi’s mayor Mustafa Kamal has made a bold stand to “invest” in culture as a buffer against rising extremism. “We have started investing in culture, encouraging cultural activities, as it is the only way to combat extremism and terrorism,” Kamal says.

City hall has commissioned two statues from Rassam to be erected in the heart of city — a Whirling Dervish and a woman in chains symbolising earth’s vulnerability in the universe.Anjum Ayaz, another internationally recognised sculptor, is busy erecting his latest monumental work in the city’s Korangi area.

His 30-tonne, 67-foot high monument depicts sea, birds, animals, people, rituals, holy verses and galaxies. “What I’ve tried to depict is the universe,” Ayaz says.

Ayaz, whose works stands in Tokyo, Beijing and Dubai, has voluntarily created and installed a dozen mini-sculptures at the city’s busy Seaview beach in what he
says is a bid to bring art into the public domain.

A Karachi city hall official says those who ruined Karachi’s sculptures did so on the pretext that the art of sculpture was “un-Islamic”.

Talat Hussain, a Pakistani artist who teaches at the National Academy of Performing Arts in Karachi, says these works are part of the heritage of fine art and of Karachi itself, and one cannot erase the colonial period however much one tries. “Nothing in history should be destroyed, not even the statues of despotic English rulers. They should remind us of our past of being slaves and goad us to protect our freedom.” afp

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