‘The motorcycle and mobile phone have destroyed Karachi’

“The purana daur symbolised simplicity and affordability,” says researcher Faisal Shams Khan.

Faisal Shams Khan, a development researcher based in Karachi, brought to light the views of the elders of the fishing community on how they had seen the world around them change over the last few decades.

In his presentation titled ‘Oral History on Social Change by Community Elders of a Fishing Village in Karachi’, Khan accounted for those who lived and experienced the change in society first hand - an account, he claims, is missing from the current narratives. In his quest to find answers ‘from the horse’s mouth’, Khan interviewed community elders of Ibrahim Hyderi and Rehri Goth villages in Karachi to understand their perception of how the fishermen’s lives have changed between the poorana daur (old times) and the naya daur (new times).



Admittedly, segmenting time on the basis of naya and purana gives a vague representation of the dimension, said Khan. It did, however, provide a unique insight into the personal accounts of changing societal values and how they had come to determine the structure of the communities today.

In the purana daur, the community’s economy was based purely subsistence-based - with the members using a barter system to fulfil their needs. The elders lamented that the younger generation had destroyed the fabric of their economics by what they said was their greed for unnecessary comforts. “The purana daur symbolised simplicity and affordability,” Khan quoted the elders as saying, adding that though they earned less, they were satisfied with their simple, yet comfortable lives. Over-taxation by the government on fishing and taxation by the landlords on sea waters had further put a strain on the community. In addition to the taxes, the fishermen had also been barred from free access to traditional fishing waters.

These problems, combined with the overall shift in the mindset, had given rise to familial problems which plagued almost every household in the community. This has resulted in the loss of social status the elders of the community once enjoyed.

“The mobile phone and the motorcycle are two inventions of modern society that are the root cause of all evil,” the elders had told Khan. They believe that the two, combined together, were responsible for most of the crime in the city. Khan ended his presentation by saying that personal narratives gave the evolution of Karachi a new insight. The elders proved to be the indigenous modes of analysis - those who could analyse what had gone wrong and where.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 4^th,2013.