Many did come due to unrest in their hometowns but most came for opportunities in a new nation. Immigrants who came to Karachi, however, were different. As a result, homogeneity of language and culture in Lahore or Dhaka was maintained.įrom the 1950s to 1970s, Nazimabad was the hub of intellectual and cultural activity in Karachi Partly this has to do with the way history unfolded: most refugees to Punjab or Bengal, who fled persecution, moved from the Indian part of the province to the Pakistani. This isn’t surprising as from the 1950s to 1970s Nazimabad was the centre of India’s Muslim culture and an inheritor of Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb. Some well-known former Nazimabad residents include artists Sadequain and Iqbal Mehdi, Justice Lari, actor Shakeel, film-maker Saeed Rizvi, actress Sangeeta, writers Mukhtar Zaman and Ibn-i-Insha, scholar Alia Imam, poet Ahmad Siddiq aka Majnun Gorakhpuri, journalist Mujahid Barelvi, columnist Nasrullah Khan, singer Salman Alvi (then known on radio as Salman Mian the banjo player), plastic surgeon Dr Mohammad Jawad (of Saving Face fame), and Aale Raza, brother of Hashim Raza. Talking about it invariably turns into a litany of famous names who resided there. It is a universally acknowledged truth that an overwhelming majority of Karachi’s immigrant intellectuals once lived in Nazimabad.
Sadequain’s house, Sibtain Manzil, in Nazimabad.
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