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Elphinstone
Street: the art and culture cradle of yesteryear
By Shahid Husain
Karachi:
Elphinstone Street (now Zaibunnisa
Street) in Saddar, the heart of Karachi, evokes fond memories among
citizens since it has not only been a fashion street in the
megapolis but also a place where many bookshops flourished in
yesteryear. “There were several bookshops on this street in the days
gone by. Almost all are gone,” said noted short story writer and
columnist Zahida Hina. “It had Pak-American Bookshop, Hameed
Kashmiri’s bookshop, Kitab Mahal and Writers’ Guild Bookshop,” she
said.
“You found famous actor and hero of
the famous pre-Partition film, Pukaar, Sadiq Ali, popularly known as
Prince of Minerva, sitting on a stool near a bookshop at Capital
Cinema and writers and poets at Kitab Mahal,” she said. “All that is
gone!” she remarked in a tone of nostalgia. “Book selling is no more
a lucrative business. Even SASSI Bookshop on Elphinstone Street that
was owned by a big time builder could not sustain itself,” said
Hoori Noorani, managing director of “Maktaba-e-Danyal,” one of the
finest publishers in town.
“When Agha Sarkhosh, the owner of
Kitab Mahal was forced to wind up Kitab Mahal, several newspaper
columnists including Jamiluddin Aali wrote columns in newspapers
against the decision,” recalled Abbas Rizvi, a short story writer
and a former banker. The bookshops have been replaced by shops
vending jewellery, shoes, and garments. One now finds Maria Jewelers
where there was Pak-American Bookshop and the place in front of
Chotani Jewelers where one would find Hameed Kashmiri’s bookshop is
now deserted.
Naseem Ahmed, partner at the famous
shop, Mobin’s, on Elphinstone Street recalls how the street
underwent changes over the last 62 years. “We are here for the last
four generations. Our grandfather was an army contractor and we had
businesses all over India,” he said. “I started lending a helping
hand to my father when I was a student at St. Patrick’s College in
the early 1960s. I started working full-time from 1968 onwards,” he
said.
“People used to feel proud when they
entered Elphinstone Street. There were embassies here and the class
was entirely different,” he said. “In the 1960s there was the
Greenwich Bookshop on Elphinstone Street and former Prime Minister
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto used to visit it to buy books,” he reminisced.
“The 1970s was a boom period business-wise. Even people who were
previously reluctant to visit Elphinstone Street started coming here
in large numbers.
We witnessed another boom when
Russians and folks from Central Asian Republics started frequenting
Elphinstone Street in the 1990s,” he said. “Before 1985 family
shopping dominated the scene. Now there is specialisation. People
prefer to shop near their homes because of the rising tide of
crime,” he said.
As one passed the traffic signal on
Elphinstone Street there was famous Marina Hotel and Bar that also
housed Standard Publishers that exclusively sold Russian books and
one would find works of great writers such as Tolstoy, Chekhov,
Herzen, Lermentov, Pushkin,
Dostoevsky, Gorky besides works of
Marx, Lenin and Plekhanov at affordable prices. Inside the compound
of Marina Hotel and Bar was Mehran Book Depot where one could find
books from Cuba, Vietnam, German Democratic Republic, and classics
of American Marxist writers at affordable prices. The Place has been
replaced by Pizza Hut.
“Within a few years after
Independence, Saddar Bazaar emerged as the city’s intellectual and
entertainment hub. By the mid-Sixties, it contained over twenty
bookshops, sixteen cinemas, thirty-eight bars and billiard rooms,
six libraries, four classical music and dance schools, and seven
night clubs,” according to noted architect and town planner Arif
Hasan. “Kitab Mahal claimed it had every Urdu publication, ever
printed, in stock.”
The News: Thursday, May 21, 2009 |
