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feature
feature Once the thriving heart of Karachi, Saddar today is one of the most polluted and congested areas of the city, marked by traffic congestion, ramshackle buildings and dirty bazaars. Few people know that this was once an area full of places of entertainment as well as a literary hub. The proud history of Karachi and the glorious era Saddar once lived through is incomplete without a mention of more than the two dozen bookshops that once enriched the area. Unfortunately, most of them
have now fallen prey to the vagaries of time, being cruelly replaced by shops
selling clothes, clocks, electronics and jewellery. Proud names such as
Paramount, Pak-American, Greenwich, Sassi, Union, Writer’s Guild Bookshop,
O.K, Hameed Kashmiri, Kitab Mahal, Standard Publishers and Mehran Book depot
at The Marina Club, Arya Mehr (renamed as Almas),
Maktab-e-Daniyal , Thomas and Thomas and Tit Bit still conjure up fond
memories for people of a certain age. The first two have relocated to other
neighbourhoods and the last three are still weathering the storm by existing
in their original places. The rest have all died a forgotten death. Tit Bit Tit Bit is a pre-partition store that has managed to survive Karachi’s metamorphosis. Clustered in a tiny space on the congested Daudpota Road, the shop stands one building away from the Zoroastrian Fire temple. Established in 1944 by S.M Khalil, who moved to Karachi from India, Tit Bit has a rich history. From TV personalities, such as the late Rizwan Wasti, to journalists, reporters and editors, and even the Bhuttos, Tit Bit has long been a melting pot for Karachi’s diverse communities and has been a delight to many Parsi, Christian, Hindu and Muslim customers. Tit Bit was famous in the past for its collection of magazines such as National Geographic, Reader’s Digest, Sadabahar, Cosmopolitan and many film and sports magazines. The shop also sold classic comics and fairy tales in the past. These were all very affordable once, further fuelling people’s keen interest in reading them. Today, the shop just focuses on popular fiction. However, colouring books, cookbooks and exchanged books also adorn the shelf of the tiny shop. Because of its relative proximity to foreign missions and once-peaceful location, many diplomats came to this bustling landmark without any fear. “This area used to be clean and beautiful, now it is just a trash can”, mourns S.M Salim, the current owner of the bookshop. The nearby Bohri Bazaar and many convent schools in the vicinity also help in bringing customers. Although among the students who flock here, it is mainly girls who buy books these days. Thomas and Thomas Thomas and Thomas is also a pre-partition bookshop lost in the congestion around the former Regal Chowk. Its founders left the country soon after partition. The family that bought the small shop still runs it. It too boasts of a proud history. Customers have included people as diverse as Mumtaz Daultana, Ziaul Haq, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Sherry Rehman, Quratulain Haider and Sahar Ansari. The bookstore has a very few pieces of fiction. The most popular books deal with literature, philosophy and biographies. The philosophy collection comprises every author from Bertrand Russell to Kant and from Plato to Nietzsche. A good collection of Sindhi books is also available, with Amar Jaleel and Altaf Sheikh being the most notable. Urdu books of all kinds as well as textbooks are also sold here. Maktaba-e-Daniyal Another hang-out of the literati in Karachi used to be the Maktaba-e-Daniyal which still thankfully survives on Abdullah Haroon road, opposite Hotel Jabees. Starting as Pak Publishing after the current owner Hoori Noorani’s parents moved to Karachi from Mumbai in 1949, the company started publishing Urdu books in 1964. The publisher did not run a bookshop in its infancy but their office has displayed the books they published and interested buyers made purchases from there. Their collection includes Asif Farukkhi’s books on Karachi, Zahida Hina, Fehmida Riaz, Raza Ali Abidi, Shaikh Ayaz, Qurat-ul Ain Haider, Sibte Hasan, Mushtaq Ahmed Yousufi, Iftikhar Arif and even the Indian lyricist Javed Akhtar. Only Urdu books are sold here. Maktaba-e-Daniyal sets up stalls at all book fairs taking place nowadays in the city. It also supplies books to other bookstores. Pak American Another once-famous bookstore, The Pak American, was the talk of the town in the past. The bookshop, located on what was once known as Elphinstone Sreet, was founded by Agha Mohsin Jafferi in 1949, after the owner moved from Delhi. In Delhi, Jafferi had also established a bookstore in Connaught Place in 1947. He was the pioneer in introducing paperback to the Indian subcontinent. Sadly, a bank has replaced that bookshop. Back in its heyday, Pak American saw notable readers coming to purchase books here such as Mumtaz Daultana, former Governor of Punjab and a close ally of Quaid-e-Azam, Nawab Akbar Bugti, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Hafiz Peerzada, Zahida Hina, Hameed Kashmiri, who had his own bookstore nearby, Yusuf Haroon and former Governor of Sindh, Mahmood Abdullah Haroon of the well-known Haroon family, actors and directors Sahira and Rahat Kazmi, and Talat Hussain. One of the customers, lawyer Khalid Ishaq, even housed a huge personal library. A large number of students also once frequented the shop. Once when the owners went to submit their income tax returns (there was a time when people paid taxes and tax officers had a stern image), they presented an argument on why they should reduce the amount of tax to be paid. The income tax officer laughed and stated that he was forever in debt to Mr Jafferi because the officer, during his student years, used to sit on a sofa at the Pak American store and read books. A few times he even stole them because of his inability to pay! Similarly, once the bookstore received a cheque from a Dubai-based Pakistani, who like the income tax officer, stole a few books from Pak American. Books at Pak American were mostly imported. ‘Ten percent of the books must have been local’, says Ahsan Jafferi, who currently runs a new outlet in Bahadurabad. Books ranged from the Encyclopaedia Britannica to children’s books. The bookstore was also a distributor for many imported books. Topics such as social sciences, psychology, science, technical and medical were stocked here. Fiction and non-fiction books were also sold. The new shop still has many books on social sciences. It also publishes children’s illustrations and books. Jafferi claims that the number of serious booklovers has fallen. Most of the old customers have died. At the recent Karachi Literature Festival, Jafferi ran into an old acquaintances, who complained about his shop’s relocation. The shop shifted in 1998 to Bahadurabad from Zaibunnisa street (formerly Elphinstone Street). There are now severe parking problems and books are not doing enough business. The shop has been renamed as Say Publishers. Even the shop in Bahadurabad has been receiving offers to be replaced by a shoe or jewellery shop. ‘I refuse to sell it because I enjoy the book business but my children will probably sell it’, laments Ahsan Jafferi. ‘Arya Mehr’ Very close to Alpha restaurant, which has now closed, there was a bookstore by the name of ‘Arya Mehr’. The Farsi name was the title of the Pahlavi dynasty in Iran. After the 1979 revolution, supporters of Khomeini attacked the shop, forcing it to change its name to Almas book depot. The owner was an Iranian
gentleman, Ali Asghar Farzaneh, who is no longer in this world. Books were
sold in English, Urdu and Farsi languages. Works of Masters such as Ghalib,
Mir and Altaf Hali were a regular feature. The bookstore saw its demise in
2007. In Saddar, there was also a Marina club, in whose vicinity there were two bookstores. Standard publishers sold exclusively Russian works translated in English. Mehran book depot entertained the customers with books on Communism and Socialism from Cuba, Vietnam and the German Democratic Republic. It also had technical books on engineering, oil industries, geophysics. Young children were treated to a large collection of books on wildlife. Writers Guild Bookshop Another bookstore that served as a progressive intellectual space was the Writers Guild Bookshop, founded in 1959 in a convention of 212 writers from both wings of the country. The main contributors included Kavi Jasimuddin, Maulvi Abdul Haque, Shahid Ahmed Delhvi and Muhammed Saeed. Adding to the list of lost gems, Kitab Mahal sold a large collection of Urdu books only. It was next to the Capital cinema on Zaibunnisa street. It too attracted the crème de la crème of the city. Many of the books sold were unique, such as the Urdu translation of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat, along with classic literature. It shut down in the 1980s. There was also the Karachi bookstall, which was close to the Eduljee Dinshaw dispensary and sold very old books, sometimes covered in dust. One such avid book-lover and customer of yesteryears, Salman Shanul Haq claims that the bookstores were very crucial in shaping the literary culture of the city. He even narrates that a large number of makeshift stalls of books were set up at Regal Chowk that continue to survive on a far more modest scale. He once came across a collection of 30-40 rare books on chess. The seller had bought the book from a family, whose ancestors were very passionate about chess but the preceding generations lost interest in the game and gave away all the books. Sadly, those times have gone and the city has changed. With rising inflation, books are the first to be sacrificed by the cash-pinched middle classes. Piracy and the internet have also hurt the book business. Besides online bookstores such as Kitabain.com have sprung up, where the customers don’t have to leave the comfort of their homes, threatening the existence of the the surviving bookstores even more. With Saddar in decline and its bookstores gradually shutting down or moving to more affluent areas it seems that those brave booksellers that soldier on will also soon get eaten up by crass commercialism.
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