Karachi is alone among its mega-city peers to have no significant public artworks, victim of decades of religious fanaticism likened to the Taliban destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, but artists here are beginning to turn the tide. “What the Taliban did to the ancient Buddha’s statue in Bamiyan a few years ago, fanatics and ruthless government functionaries did to Karachi’s statues long ago,” says Shahid Rassam, lamenting the dearth of public artworks here.Rassam is one of a handful of local artists working to revive Karachi’s public art, which flourished under the British Raj in India but crumbled under Zia, as culture became an early casualty of a regime that nurtured religious fanaticism. The rot had set in under Zia’s predecessor, Ayub Khan, the first in a long line of military rulers, who held power from 1958-1969.
“The religious extremists launched the first campaign against beautiful statues in Karachi during Ayub Khan’s rule when the city was stripped of most of its street artifacts,” says former city official Saifur Rehman Grami. Art enthusiast Grami says old Karachi had been dotted with huge statues.
The monuments survived sporadically until Zia seized power in a military coup in 1977 as Pakistan reverted to military rule. His 11-year tenure encouraged sectarian Islam and religious extremism prospered as he imposed curbs on cultural activities.
In the process, he gave extremists the freedom to ruin the remnants of KarachiÂ’s glorious statuary, says Rassam.
“General Ziaul Haq’s period remains a nightmare for art and culture during which Karachi suffered the most, because this city was the cultural hub of Pakistan,” Rassam says. “Even many years after the creation of Pakistan most of these statues were erected at various gardens and public places but since the late 1970s the wave of extremism uprooted all these monuments,” Grami says. Scores of sculptures depicting British rule are now little more than a folk memory after being uprooted and destroyed.