Kurrachee: Past, Present and Future.

• Author: ROCHER, LURO
• Position: Review

Kurrachee: Past, Present and Future. By ALEXANDER F. BAILLIE. Edited by YASMEEN LARI. Karachi: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1997. Pp. xxx + 269. Maps, plans, photographs. $45.

Baillie's Kurrachee was published by Thacker Spink in Calcutta in 1890: "The main objects that I have had in view in publishing a Treatise on Kurrachee are, in the first place, to submit to the Public a succinct collection of facts relating to that City and Port which, at a future period, it might be difficult to retrieve from the records of the Past; and secondly, to advocate the construction of a Railway system connecting the Gate of Central Asia and the Valley of the Indus, with the Native Capital of India" (p. xvii). It is now reprinted, in the series Oxford in Asia Historical Reprints, with an introduction by Yasmeen Lari, the author (with Mihail S. Lari) of The Dual city: Karachi During the Raj (Oxford Univ. Press).

On the one hand, Lari acknowledges that Baillie's views were those of an imperialist (p. v): he, like "those of our countrymen who cast their lot in the great Eastern empire" suffered from "the fact that the feeling of personal responsibility is never removed from the shoulders of anyone, holding a position of authority" (p. 167). On the other hand, "there is no denying his fondness for [Karachi]" (p. v), and his book "is indispensible for tracing the development of the city. It is the only account which provides an extensive and detailed description of how the city grew. The earliest survey map of the city was published by Baillie in his book, and for almost a century it remained the only known map of the period" (p. vii).

Baillie traces the history of Karachi...