by NADEEM F. PARACHA
Couples dancing the night away on the 1955 New Year’s Eve at Karachi’s Hotel Metropole. SOURCE/Dawn
Natives of a Sindhi village drench a European tourist with cold water from a well to beat the summer heat (1975).
Though the League governments occasionally experimented with the idea of using Islam to define Pakistan’s nationhood, it failed because its concept of such nationhood not only contradicted and undermined the cultural identities of the country’s various ethnic groups; it was also seen as being half-baked and elitist. SOURCE/Dawn
Legendary American jazz saxophonist and trumpeter, Dizzy Gillespie, visited Pakistan during his whirlwind tour of Asia and the Middle East in the early 1950s. Here, he is seen playing his sax with a Sindhi snake charmer at a public park in Karachi in 1954. SOURCE/Dawn
A young Pakistani Zoroastrian woman sitting on her motorbike in the Soldier Bazar area of Karachi (1969). SOURCE/Dawn
Politics in the 1950s in Pakistan was at best wobbly. It was largely dominated by a highly politicised bureaucracy and political intrigues and infighting between members of the ruling party (Muslim League).
On the other hand, the opposition that was made up of various progressive and socialist groups and ethnic nationalists on the left and certain conservative religious outfits on the right was largely kept outside and away from Pakistan’s transitional Constituent Assembly.
The Muslim League, whose precursor, the All India Muslim League, had risen to become a strong, assertive and moderate-progressive Muslim party in undivided India, mutated into becoming a fragile abode of self-serving pragmatists.
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