PAKISTAN: Better Off in a Home

A crimson carpet spilled down the steps of the yellow sandstone Sind Provincial Legislative Assembly Building in Karachi. A turbaned, barefoot Moslem carefully dusted it off, pressed it with an enormous flatiron. All was now ready for the Pooh-Bah of Pakistan, in whose austere person are combined the offices of Governor General, President of the Constituent Assembly and President of the Moslem League. With proper crustiness, Mohamed Ali Jinnah strode up the steps with his sister Fatima. He was wearing a white achkan (long coat), grey fur “Jinnah cap” and a monocle. The small crowd (5,000) shouted “Quaid-e-Azam Zindabad” (Long Live the Great Leader).

Partly Friendly. Then Viscount Mountbatten, clad in a dazzling white naval uniform, arrived with Lady Mountbatten. The crowd cheered him too, and a Scottish band, in kilts and Glengarry bonnets, piped a greeting. Shortly before their arrival, an Indian band, celebrating the separation of India’s wandering child, had tooted somewhat tactlessly, “You’d Be Far Better Off in a Home.”* Inside the Assembly Building, the Briton and the Moslem got down to the business of transferring power from the British Crown to the new dominion of Pakistan. It was a formal, cut-&-dried affair. Although Pakistan is frankly a Moslem state (the most populous in the world), and set up to satisfy Moslem demands, there was none of the atmosphere of religious dedication that marked Delhi ceremonies.

Jinnah and Mountbatten spoke to the Pakistan Constituent Assembly. “This is a parting between friends,” said Mountbatten. “It is not an absolute parting, I rejoice to think, and not an end of comradeship.”

“I sincerely hope that we shall remain friends,” replied Jinnah with frosty politeness. There was a touch of doubt in his voice. He blamed the British for what he considered unfavorable Pakistan-India boundaries.

Then together the two men toured the streets of Jinnah’s new capital, decked with green flags (with a white stripe to symbolize non-Moslem minorities) bearing a white star and crescent.

Mostly Mud. It was not much of a capital. Karachi was a little trading village until the British seized it in 1843. Shortly thereafter, Scholar-Adventurer Richard Burton described it in Scinde or the Unhappy Village as a “mass of low mud hovels and tall mud houses with flat mud roofs, windowless mud walls, and numerous mud ventilators, surrounded by a tumbledown parapet of mud, built upon a platform of mud-covered rock.”

Karachi had changed and grown since then, but it was still dirty, noisy and in all respects unlovely. Americans got to know the town during the war when it was a main air transport point.

Little Enthusiasm. One wartime U.S. visitor was impressed by the prevalence of sexy books in Karachi. “In one dismal hotel,” he recalled, “the hall porter was reading Jurgen. The night clerk was reading Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the manager was reading Elinor Glyn’s Three Weeks. The food was bad, too, but I never found out what the chef had on his mind.” A Karachi professor asked another U.S. visitor to send him Forever Amber. “I’m interested,” he said, “because I have a beautiful young daughter.”

In spite of its sprawling unloveliness, Karachi is a bustling port (third biggest in India) and a center of the leather trade. The population swelled to almost 600,000 in recent years.

Last week Jinnah surveyed the city in which he was born. There is a plan afoot to rename it Jinnahabad. Karachans, however, did not welcome Pakistan with the wild enthusiasm that swept the new dominion of India (see above). After all, Pakistan was the creation of one clever man, Jinnah; the difference between a slick political trick and a mass movement was apparent in the contrast between Karachi and New Delhi.

*British soldiers chant the words to the tune El Abanico, a Spanish march.