Dawn and Karachi

The history of Dawn—from its establishment in Delhi as the printed voice of the Muslim League in 1941 to its hurried relocation to Karachi just prior to partition—meant that it was institutionally, and emotionally, invested in the identity politics that led to Pakistan's creation in 1947 and sustained it thereafter.Footnote ⁸ Dawn's mission throughout this uncertain period was not simply to inform its readership—rather, its purpose included inculcating emotional commitment to the cause that it propounded. By seeking to develop a shared sense of belonging—first to the ‘Pakistan movement’, then to Pakistan itself—it directly played on readers’ emotions both before and after independence.Footnote ⁹

In recent efforts to write emotion into the history of Islamicate South Asia, much of the focus has been directed towards nostalgia, linked especially to understanding how Indian Muslims came (or failed to come) to terms emotionally with the changed political and cultural (North Indian) milieu in the aftermath of 1857.Footnote ¹⁰ Following partition, however, a nostalgic approach was not appropriate as far as Dawn's priorities were concerned since any yearning for the past was effectively out of the question. Having attained a separate Muslim state (an outcome that arguably took most contemporaries by surprise), it was now important to look forward, rather than back. Yet, concentrating on the ‘here and now’ did not rule out the past completely since pre-August 1947 developments—whether former glories or more recent sacrifices—were firmly embedded in the ‘logic’ underpinning Pakistan's creation, as advocated by supporters of the new state. In practice, while nostalgia did not disappear completely, the cultivation of collective pride now took precedence, whether in relation to the past, the present, or even the future.

The fact that Dawn was an English-language publication meant that its readership was restricted to a very small proportion of Pakistan's linguistically diverse population. But there can be no doubt that its impact was disproportionately significant thanks to the fact that—to a great extent—it was not Urdu (the state's official preference as far as Pakistan's national language was concerned) but familiarity with English that linked the country's new elites. Karachi—from whence Dawn was now published—was transformed into Pakistan's capital city, housing large numbers of North Indian refugees who had arrived from the former United Provinces, heartland of support for the League. Dawn, as a staunch advocate of refugee interests, certainly backed the shift to a greater use of Urdu in Pakistani life but, all the same, it remained a firmly ‘English-medium’ space within which the case for Pakistan's existence was rehearsed and reinforced.

Emotion coursed through Dawn's pages, from what appeared in mundane news reporting to items of special interest, the subject matter of cartoons, letters to the editor, and editorials themselves. Altaf Husain, who had taken on the newspaper's editorship in 1945 (remaining in that post until 1965), had no qualms when it came to pulling on the heartstrings of Dawn's readers. Collective remembering, in the sense of reminding readers about the subcontinent's Muslim heritage that was now deemed to have been inherited by Pakistan, was frequently to be found in its content, alongside (whenever possible) palpable excitement at what lay ahead. Either way, feelings ran high. As Dawn reported in its coverage of Independence Day celebrations in August 1948, Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan assured his fellow citizens that, while ‘on this day of happiness, I do not want to call anyone our enemy […] we will shed our blood for every inch of our country’, and he promised ‘a martyrs’ memorial for those who fell for Pakistan’.Footnote ¹¹ Dawn's ratcheting up of emotional temperatures can be seen in its coverage of a Defence Day organised by the Karachi Provincial Muslim League in July 1951. On this occasion, Liaquat famously clenched his fist as he called on the nation not to sacrifice freedom for peace.Footnote ¹² A few weeks later, when Pakistanis celebrated that year's Independence Day, the symbol was duly explained:

The death from natural causes of Jinnah in 1948, and then the assassination of Liaquat in 1951—both of which shocked Pakistanis deeply—were intensely emotional events, particularly for an editorial team that had worked so closely with both men since the early 1940s. Subsequent anniversaries provided regular opportunities to mourn their passing and reinforce messages about their legacies. Take the following example: in September 1949, Dawn marked the first anniversary of Jinnah's demise with what became (and remains) an annual honouring of the Quaid-i Azam's myriad political achievements and personal qualities. Under banner headlines that read ‘Remembrance Day in Pakistan’, readers were reminded of ‘the personal loss sustained by all the people of the country’ and likewise urged to ‘inculcate the Quaid's values and shun the evils he warned against’.Footnote ¹⁴ A similarly emotive appeal was made in April 1950, when, in protest at the proposed appointment of a new set of Dawn trustees to be drawn from the Muslim League Parliamentary Party (Jinnah having been the newspaper's sole trustee at the time of his death), Altaf threatened to change Dawn's name to ‘The Herald’:

The emotional ‘blackmail’ swiftly paid off. Three days later ‘The Herald’ became Dawn again, and as Altaf proclaimed on the newspaper's front page: ‘DAWN ZINDABAD. The people want DAWN. I give them back their DAWN—no one is happier than I today […] DAWN rises again. May it dispel the gloom from people's hearts as it has dispelled the gloom from mine. DAWN was never dead. It was never intended to die. It shall never die.’Footnote ¹⁶

‘Love’—for Jinnah as well as the new country that his efforts were credited with securing—and ‘sorrow’ or ‘grief’ trigged by his death alongside the broader suffering that many of Pakistan's new citizens had so recently experienced—represented two sides of the emotional currency circulating in Karachi the late 1940s and early 1950s. The city remained an emotionally unsettled place during these years, with waves of new refugees reminding people now living there of the existential challenges that many had themselves encountered not so long before as they too crossed over from India. Expectations were high, and disappointment—when hopes were frustrated—was keenly felt. As testified by ‘Letters to the Editor’ in Dawn, adjusting to life posed many challenges—from seeking employment to finding suitable housing, to securing a reliable water supply, obtaining all-important rations, and safely navigating Karachi's chaotic bus system.Footnote ¹⁷ Newspaper reporting also highlighted the kinds of pressures under which many families lived, and the tragic consequences that could sometimes ensue. A spate of apparent suicides, for instance, found their way onto Dawn's city news pages throughout these years—sometimes involving men, but mostly women, whose deaths (whether self-inflicted or not) were usually linked to domestic arrangements, such as where a husband had more than one wife but not enough space in which to accommodate them harmoniously. Occasional custody cases fought by parents now living in separate counties similarly made their way into newsprint.

Children's wellbeing more generally represented a recurring source of anxiety, with ‘child-lifting’ as well as others going missing for different reasons a widely recognised concern at the time, arguably triggering painful memories of partition. From time to time, letters were printed in Dawn in which parents who had been separated from their children during the upheavals of 1947 called on the authorities to facilitate their recovery and return: likewise, parents took out advertisements when their child had disappeared more recently. As one 1951 editorial in Dawn put it: ‘Kidnapping of children makes children's lives insecure and that of their parents miserable.’Footnote ¹⁸ Earlier the same year, another Dawn editorial had made the following heartfelt plea:

Parents were plainly responsible for teaching their children appropriate ways of responding emotionally to success or failure, or, more generally, to the ups and downs of life. Indeed, the tone of this editorial matched closely that of Zeb-un-Nissa Hamidullah's own contributions to Dawn during the same period.

‘Between ourselves: a weekly feature for women’

Zeb-un-Nissa Hamidullah (1918–2000) grew up in Calcutta, with a Bengali father and English mother (though they divorced when she was quite young). She met, fell in love with, and married a Punjabi, Khalifa Muhammad (K. M.) Hamidullah, whose father was librarian of the Imperial Library in Calcutta, and moved to Lahore where her husband worked for the Bata Shoe Company. Prior to partition and relocating to Karachi, she had already published a couple of well-received books of poetry and written for the Illustrated Weekly of India. In many of her ‘Between ourselves’ columns she drew directly on a repertoire of domestic scenarios that she herself must have encountered as the mother of two young children, juggling her in-laws, and running a household staffed with servants.Footnote ²⁰

The very first piece by Hamidullah to be published in Dawn predated independence and was a poem in honour of Jinnah's seventieth birthday in 1946. Indeed, it was probably thanks to her subsequent close acquaintance with his sister Fatima Jinnah that she went on to write on a regular basis for the newspaper from 1948. Later, in September 1951, on the anniversary of his death, she penned a passionate reminiscence of her own first direct encounter with Jinnah back in 1946 when she and her husband—‘like lovesick people who if denied sight of the beloved will be content with but a glimpse of his residence’—had travelled from Lahore to Shimla to try to catch sight of ‘our beloved Quaid-i Azam’ who was attending the Cabinet Mission talks there:

In a similar fashion to her fellow Bengali Altaf Husain, Hamidullah's emotional association with Dawn was highly charged (even though her relationship with the editor himself was not an easy one thanks to his preference that she restrict her focus to ‘women's issues’). So, it was not surprising that Hamidullah's ‘Between ourselves’ columns followed Dawn's in-house emotional ‘script’ or style faithfully. In them (they ran from 1948 to 1951) she dispensed advice on how to respond constructively to the quotidian challenges faced by married women when juggling the demands of family or running a household. As the following examples illustrate, she rarely pulled her punches when it came to the best ways to deal with love, happiness, sadness, and grief.Footnote ²²

This love was often portrayed in patriotic terms: in 1948, marking the first anniversary of Pakistan's creation, Hamidullah argued that ‘The women of Pakistan have reason to be proud of the courage with which they set about creating new homes for themselves and their families.’ But she also demanded frankness, reminding her readers that

Later on, she qualified this advice by highlighting the need for patient fortitude:

All the same, love was an emotion that began at home, ideally between husband and wife, and between parents and their children. For instance, Hamidullah tackled the thorny question of where love fitted into marriage in an October 1949 column, stating very firmly that in her view ‘No marriage can possibly be successful unless it is a love marriage’, though it did not matter whether that love developed before or after the couple had wed. Hence, she had the following piece of advice for any young person hesitating between a love match or an arranged one: ‘The most important thing is to make your marriage a marriage of love [for] if you do this you need have no fear of the future for love gives us the courage, the strength and the faith to face all the vicissitudes of life without flinching.’Footnote ²⁵ Potentially fraught relationships between in-laws were also tackled head on. While a woman's in-laws were ‘of the utmost importance to the happiness of married life’, should relations sour, then blame had to be placed squarely on the husband's parents, even more so if, or when, they had ‘spoiled and coddled the lad in his youth and wish[ed] to continue to do so even after he [had] attained manhood […] Often parents are far too exacting. They demand both obedience and affection from their offspring.’Footnote ²⁶ Another equally unequivocal column called for women to be brave in all their dealings. A courageous heart was needed to navigate life's troubles and uncertainties, and so it was important to face up to worries, examine them critically, and accept them with firm courage:

Rather than block such feelings, she advised her readers to accept them so that they would pass.Footnote ²⁸

For Hamidullah, shedding tears could hold some positive value for women. In a February 1949 piece, for instance, she posed the following questions of her readers: ‘Have you had a good cry recently? Have you sobbed and sighed in a veritable emotional orgy and discovered surprisingly enough that in the process your grief has become dissipated, and you have already begun to feel more cheerful and hopeful of the future?’ Whether or not she regarded weeping as an elemental reaction that came more easily to women (and children), she claimed that

Occasionally Hamidullah directly confronted the emotional toll that dealing with their children's behaviour imposed on parents; here again, though, any blame was reserved for those bringing them up, rather than the children themselves, and patience was the order of the day. As she explained in one of her earliest columns,

Parents needed to lead by example: real love consisted of doing so with no thought of reward since ‘to know true happiness one must forget oneself as much as possible and to strive to do good deeds just for the pleasure of doing them with no thought of return’.Footnote ³¹ Accordingly, she took mothers to task for forgetting their own younger days and being unreasonably hard or unkind towards their children:

Appreciating others with a few gentle words was thus an emotional balm that, in Hamidullah's view, women were duty-bound to apply. Why, she asked, did women keep silent instead of providing encouragement when they knew how much happier doing so could make another person—kindness was a virtue that repaid itself a hundredfold:

Concluding thoughts

In March 1951 Hamidullah's column complained about what she regarded as the authorities’ misguided decision to prohibit children from attending the forthcoming Pakistan Day parade in Karachi:

Children represented Pakistan's future; its potential success or failure would depend on them. Shortly afterwards that year, following intense lobbying by Hamidullah, she was able to write on a wider range of topics, and ‘Between ourselves’ was replaced by ‘Thru a woman's eyes’.Footnote ³⁵ Though the byline still indicated her sex, this differently framed column allowed Hamidullah to address her readership in a non-gendered way as she responded to contemporary developments, political or otherwise. And now her words appeared on the main page of the newspaper, placed right next to Dawn's editorial (rather than being tucked away, as during the early days of ‘Between ourselves’, in its magazine section).

Emotion, however, remained a hallmark of her writing. This was very evident, for instance, in the piece that Hamidullah produced soon after the assassination of Liaquat Ali Khan in October 1951. Describing the mourners at his Karachi home, she focused on his widow, in effect presenting Begum Rana Liaquat Ali Khan's outward stifling of the grief that was surely ‘brimming over’ in her ‘lacerated heart’ as a positive emotional response, and, in the process, pointing to the virtue of exercising sabr even in such extreme circumstances. As Hamidullah went on, the begum's ‘red-rimmed eyes told a tragic tale of tears shed alone […] of a woman defenceless and lonely […] above all wounded to the very core of her being’.Footnote ³⁶

By this time, Hamidullah had become Pakistan's first female editor. Though described as glossy ‘society’ magazine (‘it was a matter of prestige for practically every educated household in the country to have a copy’Footnote ³⁷), her new publication The Mirror was not averse to taking a political stance. Its scathing editorial in defence of Prime Minister H. S. Suhrawardy when the country's President Iskander Mirza required him to resign in November 1957 led the central authorities to impose a ban on the magazine for six months. Hamidullah promptly challenged the order. Instead of writing a letter of apology that might have seen the ban lifted, she went to court, with leading lawyer A. K. Brohi pleading her case. The Supreme Court set aside the government's order and awarded her costs.Footnote ³⁸ Later it is said that she took an even more powerful opponent to task, informing Ayub Khan that she had turned his portrait—which she claimed to have previously regarded with great pride and reverence—upside down in response to his authoritarian style of rule, and The Mirror was duly banned again.Footnote ³⁹

As the advice volunteered in ‘Between ourselves’ repeatedly testified, we can see the signs of this boldness in Hamidullah's earlier writings in Dawn, most specifically perhaps in her spirited challenge to readers—female and male alike—that they acknowledge the crucial role that women, and particularly mothers, were playing in the emerging emotional wellbeing of the new state. By placing mothers, and the importance of sabr, at the heart of Pakistan's—and Pakistanis’—emotional development, she created valuable space wherein women's concerns could be aired (if not always heard) and their agency displayed, allowing us today to explore how emotion fitted into the rhetoric of early nation-building there.