Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [180]
The Kalhoras and Talpurs represented traditions which remain of central importance in much of Sindh today. The Kalhoras represented the hereditary descendants of the saints and of the Prophet (highly improbably in this as in most cases, since they are generally thought to have been descended from converted Hindus). The Talpurs represented the tribes of Baloch origin, which had always been present in Sindh but which increased their numbers greatly in the disorders which followed the end of Mughal rule.
These two groups provide many of the great landowner-politicians who continue to dominate the politics of ‘interior Sindh’. Both the Kalhoras and the Talpurs also illustrate the vagueness of religious distinctions among the Sindhis, since the Kalhora saints were worshipped by both Sunnis and Shia, while the Talpurs include both Shia and Sunni branches. The shrines of the saints, large and small, extend across the Sindhi countryside. As Sarah Ansari writes: ‘By the end of the eighteenth century, it had become virtually impossible to travel more than a few miles in Sindh without coming across the shrine of one saint or another.’4
Like the Seraiki belt of southern Punjab described in the last chapter, Sindh is the area of Muslim South Asia most dominated by the worship of pirs. As to the Baloch tribes, their migration from the deserts and semi-deserts to the west has contributed to the extreme conservatism of Sindhi rural society, its violent obsession with honour, and its tendency to cattle-lifting, banditry and tribal feuds.
In previous centuries, these Baloch tribes of Sindh, like the Mazaris, could field hundreds or even thousands of armed men each. The fortlike appearance of Sindhi villages, with their thorn fences and blank exterior walls with holes that do duty both for ventilation and as loopholes, attest to the traditional insecurity of Sindhi rural life, and the long lineage of Sindhi dacoity (banditry). In previous centuries, all the settled populations and traders were at risk from tribal raiders, but especially at risk were the Hindu merchants, bankers and moneylenders who dominated Sindh’s commercial economy.
Under British rule, the Sindhi Hindu commercial classes profited greatly from increased law and order, an end to tribal raids, the development of a modern civil code governing commercial transactions, and the overcoming of Sindh’s traditional isolation through the construction of railways and the great port of Karachi – which, when the British arrived, had been a small town of 14,000 people, dependent chiefly on fishing. Especially in Karachi, the Hindus were joined by Muslim immigrants from Gujarat and elsewhere in India, chiefly from ethnic and religious groups with strong commercial traditions such as the Memons, Khojas and Bohras, as well as Parsis.
By the later British period, these came to make up the bulk of the middle classes in Sindh. This movement was facilitated by the fact that until 1936 Sindh was not a separate province, but was part of the Bombay Presidency, ruled from the great commercial metropolis of that name. The father of Pakistani independence, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, came from a Khoja family of Gujarat, which settled in Karachi, and which contained Ismaili and orthodox (‘Twelver’) Shia branches.
As a result of this influx, Karachi emerged as a city which even before independence had a very different culture and ethnic character from that of the rest of Sindh, of which it (and not the Talpurs’ Hyderabad) became the capital. In 1947, a majority of Karachi’s inhabitants were Hindu. Karachi grew partly as a result of the enormously increased agricultural exports first of Punjab (from the 1890s) and then Sindh (from the 1930s) as a result of British irrigation projects.
Its greatest single boost under the Raj, however, came from the First World War, when it became one of the greatest points of transit