पुराना पाकिस्तान

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दोस्तों, आज जब भी पाकिस्तान की बात होती है तो हमारे जेहन में लाशें, बम विस्फोट, मुल्ले, बुरखा पहने हुए महिलाएं आदि की तस्वीर उभरती है. लेकिन ७० के दशक तक पाकिस्तान ऐसा नहीं था, वो कैसा था, और कैसे लोग वहां रहते थे आइये देखे इस चित्रों की मदद से.

अधिकतर चित्र dawn अखबार से लिए गए हैं.


It is an effort that with the help of painstakingly researched and collected images, tried to capture a Pakistan that now seems like a different planet compared to what it has been ever since the 1980s. A strange, alien place that was also called Pakistan.

Pictures and Notes by :: Nadeem F. Paracha, who is a cultural critic and senior columnist for Dawn Newspaper and Dawn.com

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Che in Karachi: Yes, that’s the great Marxist revolutionary and legend, Che Ernesto Guevara, standing along side Pakistan’s first military dictator, Ayub Khan.

Guevara stayed for a short while in Karachi during his whirlwind tour of Arab and third world countries (in 1959). He again visited Karachi in 1965 and that is when the above photograph was believed to have been taken (inside the VIP lounge of the Karachi Airport).

It is interesting to see Che standing with Ayub Khan whose military coup (in 1958) was not only backed by the US, but was also highly repressive of leftist forces in Pakistan.

The irony is that the widespread leftist uprising in Pakistan in the late 1960s that helped topple the Ayub dictatorship was mainly led by leftist students many of whose icon and hero was, yup, one named Che Ernesto Guevara!

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PIA press ad, 1965: This 1965 PIA ad (published in Dawn) bares claims that one can’t even imagine PIA to make in this day and age.

Pakistan’s national carrier has been crumbling for the last many years and today stands on the verge of bankruptcy. And yet, back in the 1960s and early 1970s, PIA stood strong and proud, awarded on multiple occasions and being a constant on the list of top ten airlines of the world!

When this ad appeared in print, PIA was enjoying rapid growth within and outside Pakistan. It had already been noted for having ‘the most stylishly dressed air hostesses’, great service, a widespread route and, ahem, ‘having a generous and tasteful selection of wines, whiskeys and beers’ on offer.’*

*Serving alcoholic drinks on PIA was banned in April 1977.

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PPP formation, 1967: It’s amazing how little is available by way of any visual documentation of what was perhaps one the most iconic events in the history of Pakistani politics – i.e. the formation of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) during a convention in Lahore in 1967.

The convention gave birth to a populist democratic party that for the next four decades would go onto become both passionately loved, as well as loathed by Pakistanis in equal measure.

Chaired by the suave and yet exuberant Z. A. Bhutto, the convention was attended by some of the country’s leading progressive and leftist intellectuals, journalists and radical student leaders.

This photo shows Bhutto seated among the men who would turn the PPP into a fervent progressive platform that not only accommodated committed Marxists, Maoists, ‘Islamic Socialists’ and liberals alike, but would also go on to sweep the 1970 general election (in former West Pakistan). The most endearing characteristic of the image is the way J. A. Rahim (an otherwise serious and sombre Marxist thinker and PPP’s leading ideologue) is actually sitting on Bhutto’s lap!

Rahim was one of the founders (along with Z. A. Bhutto) of the PPP and co-author of the party’s original socialist-democratic manifesto.
Unfortunately in 1975, Rahim had a falling out with Bhutto and was humiliatingly expelled from the party.

Bhutto, on the other hand, was hanged by the Ziaul Haq dictatorship in 1979 through a sham trial, taking with him what still remains to be one of the most populist, dynamic and yet, contradictory eras in Pakistani politics.

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House full: Pakistani film industry and cinemas began experiencing a creative and financial peak in the late 1960s; a high that would last till about 1979, before starting to patter out in the 1980s and hitting rock bottom a decade later.

There were a number of reasons for the rapid fall of the industry and the consequential closing down of numerous cinemas.

Two of the leading reasons were the brutal censorship policies of the reactionary Ziaul Haq dictatorship in the 1980s, and the arrival of the VCR.
As Zia’s so-called ‘Islamisation’ process began stuffing public space and collective socialising spots with moral policing and restrictions, the people took their entertainment indoors.

Cinemas were hit the worst by this as not only the ‘respectable’ audiences stopped frequenting cinemas; the Pakistani film industry too began to fall apart.

‘Illegal’ video shops renting Indian films and porn (allowed to openly operate after bribing the police) sprang up and cinemas began to be torn down by their owners and turned into gaudy shopping malls.

For example, in Sindh alone there were over 600 cinemas between 1969 and 1980, but only a few hundred remained by 1985.

Similarly, the Pakistani film industry used to generate an average of 20 Urdu films a year in the 1970s, but by the late 1980s, it was struggling to come out with even five a year.

The above photo was taken in 1969 outside Karachi’s famous Nishat Cinema. It was also one of the first cinemas to introduce in-house air-conditioning in cinemas in Pakistan. The picture shows a crowd of cine-goers gathered outside the already packed cinema waiting their turn to see the premiere of a Pakistani war flick, ‘Qasam uss waqt ki.’

Nishat survived the thorny Zia years, the VCR invasion and the local film industry’s collapse.

In fact Nishat still stands, reeking out a survival by running latest Indian and Hollywood films.

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Just before the fall: This is the front page of Dawn that appeared only days before Pakistani troops surrendered meekly to the Indian army in former East Pakistan (December, 1971).

It is easy to spot the haunting irony on the page that is splashed with disastrous reports about the Pakistani war effort and an impending sense of doom – and yet (on the bottom right) there is a quarter-page ad placed by a large trading company showing the emblems of the Pakistan army, air-force and navy and assuring us that ‘Inshallah (God willing), the victory would be ours.’

In hindsight, one can suggest that denial is not exactly so new a trait that Pakistanis have acquired, post-9/11; because the truth is that to most Pakistanis the stunning 1971 surrender actually came as a rude and shocking surprise.

State-owned media and the armed forces had continued to claim that Pakistani forces were on the verge of a glorious victory right till (or just before) the final fall.

In fact, in the bulletin read out on Radio Pakistan only hours before the final defeat, the newscaster had reported that the Pakistan military was ‘continuing to deliver numerous setbacks and losses to the Indian army’. And we lapped it all up, like a kid smilingly licking an imaginary popsicle.

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Taliban, who? No, this is not an image from a bygone hippie flick. It is a picture of real hippies enjoying a few puffs of hashish on the roof of a cheap hotel in Peshawar in 1972. Yes, Peshawar.

Pakistan was an important destination that lay on what was called the ‘hippie trail’ – an overland route taken by young western and American bag-packers between 1967 and 1979 and that ran from Turkey, across Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, usually ending in Nepal.

Numerous low-budget hotels and a thriving tourist industry sprang up (in Peshawar, Lahore and Karachi) to accommodate these travellers.

The hippie trail began eroding after the 1977 military coup in Pakistan, the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran and the beginning of the Afghan civil war (in 1979).

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Tequila twist! One of the rare photographs available of Karachi’s famous nightclub scene of the late 1960s and 1970s.

Live music, great food, lots of booze and dancing were the hallmarks of the scene. Shown here is a club band playing to a happy audience at a ‘mid-range’ nightclub in Karachi (in 1972).

According to former nightclub owner and entrepreneur, Tony Tufail, ‘Karachi would have gone on to become what Dubai later became if not for the ban.’*

*Nightclubs were closed down in April 1977.

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Moonwalkers in Karachi, 1973: How many of you know or remember that the entire crew of NASA’s Apollo 17 flight to the moon visited Pakistan? In July 1973, astronauts of the United State’s last mission to the moon arrived in Karachi.

Their visit was widely covered by the press and Pakistan Television (PTV). The astronauts were also honoured by a ‘welcome motorcade procession’ that travelled from Clifton Road till Tower area.

The photograph shows the motorcade reaching the Saddar area that was decorated with Pakistani, American and PPP flags and colourful banners.
Some of the astronauts travelled in an open truck (see picture). The truck also carries a banner that reads (in Urdu): ‘Welcome to the Apollo 17 astronauts.’

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Safer days, shorter walls: This is a 1974 picture of Karachi’s iconic Pearl Continental Hotel (then called theIntercontinental). Notice the short walls of the hotel, hardly 3 and a half feet tall!

Now compare them with the tall, thick walls and the chaotic barbed wire that surround the same hotel today and what with all the concrete barriers and dozens of armed security personnel that one has to go through.