Karachi’s Colonial History

Karachi’s Colonial History: Between rows of ramshackled houses and shops, on a drive through the city, I spotted old colonial-era buildings. They are scattered throughout the city, some better maintained than others. It’s jarring: modern, heat-worn plazas slumped beside wrought-iron balconies. Once warm sandstone, now faded and crumbling, indistinct from the buildings around it. Electric wires draped over facades, poles planted in front — perhaps a quiet act of reclaiming what was once imposed. 

I decided to dig into history.

Karachi’s Colonial History

Karachi doesn’t forget. The city pretends to evolve, covering its infrastructure with cables and high-rises, allowing malls to mushroom where generals once marched, and enabling glass façades to reflect a sky that was once thick with cannon smoke. But it doesn’t forget. Beneath the engine oil gloss and hurried chai, the city remembers its conquerors. You can hear it in the stone. You can feel it in the light.

If you walk through Saddar at the wrong hour (between the first call to prayer and the first traffic horn), you might catch it: the hush between centuries, the breath Karachi holds when its ghosts stir.

The Commercial Ghosts: Saddar and Empress Market

At the city’s restless heart stands Empress Market — all turrets and teeth, carved in stone by hands not our own. Raised in 1889 and named for Queen Victoria, the so-called Empress of India, it was meant to remind us who ruled. That a building so brazenly foreign would come to define something so stubbornly local — that’s the joke, isn’t it?

But even its foundations are dark.

Few speak of what lay beneath the market when it was first built: the British executed several soldiers of the 1857 War of Independence right there, and their bodies, some say, were buried where the market now stands. The message was clear: Karachi was not just to be ruled but owned. The market’s construction was not just about commerce; it was conquest cast in stone.

Today, it’s a tangle of sweat and smoke — stalls bursting with fake perfume, bootleg cigarettes, and wilted vegetables. But look up, past the crows and the clutter, and the clock tower still stands, silent and stubborn, caught between memory and ruin. Red sandstone. Gothic arches. Imported cement. A foreign relic chokes on local dust.

Saddar as a whole was once the colonial elite’s playground. Elphinstone Street, now Zaib-un-Nisa Street, was lined with bookshops, bakeries, and piano parlours; a world of afternoon teas and strict drawing-room etiquette. Now? It sells mobile chargers and imitation perfume. But the bones remain, stubborn under the surface.

The Lodge That Stares: Freemasonry in Karachi

Tucked behind the Arts Council sits a building that many Karachiites pass without noticing, and that’s exactly how it likes it. Built in 1914, the Freemason Lodge is a building of symmetry, secrecy, and silence.

Freemasonry — that mysterious fraternal order with origins in mediaeval stone guilds — found fertile ground in British India. The Karachi Lodge served as a quiet hub for British officials and select local elites. It wasn’t just a society; it was a surveillance system dressed in mystique. Their rituals, steeped in symbolism and secrecy, earned them the local nickname ‘jadoo ghar’, the house of sorcery.

Locals whispered of candles that never went out, of rooms that stayed cold in June. Even after Zulfikar Ali Bhutto banned Freemasonry in 1972, declaring it ‘anti-Islamic’, the building refuses to forget. Its symbols remain carved deep: the square and compass and the All-Seeing Eye, as if the stone itself refused erasure.

Now home to the Sindh Wildlife Department, the building is oddly mismatched, with bureaucratic files stacked atop ancient altars. But the air inside still crackles, and the pigeons never nest on the roof. They know.

Some say there’s a tunnel beneath the building that leads directly to Frere Hall, another colonial landmark, where the British once hosted soirées, and where secrets likely passed in shadowed carriages.

Frere Hall and the Art of Empire

The Frere Hall, completed in 1865, was named after Sir Bartle Frere, the man who aggressively pushed for the Anglicisation of Sindh. The architecture is Venetian-Gothic, incongruous against Karachi’s dust and heat; pointed arches and lofty ceilings meant for cooler climates and colder politics.

Back then, it served as a city hall, library, and venue for colonial exhibitions — a cultural front for occupation. The British knew that rule wasn’t just through gunpowder but through gallery walls and published pamphlets. They printed maps, displayed tribal ‘curiosities’, and hosted readings on ‘native psychology’. Karachi was being studied, dissected, and presented, all under Frere’s roof.

But like all haunted buildings, Frere Hall found new life. In the 1990s, the walls inside were transformed by Sadequain, Pakistan’s own mystic-artist-rebel. He filled the ceilings with Quranic calligraphy and defiant poetry, the very opposite of colonial restraint. It’s said he painted until his fingers bled. His unfinished mural, still smeared across the ceiling like a storm paused mid-breath, is a fitting interruption, a local hand reclaiming foreign ceilings.

Now, NAPA (National Academy of Performing Arts) operates from the grounds, training musicians and actors in the shadows of imperial ghosts. You can still feel the dissonance: sarangi strains echoing down hallways once filled with stiff British recitals.

Bones Beneath the City

Karachi isn’t just dotted with colonial buildings. It’s layered with colonial intent. The Cantt Station (established 1886), Victoria Museum (now the Supreme Court Registry), and countless old clubs, banks, and cathedrals all speak of a city designed to serve the empire.

Even the trees tell tales. Many of Saddar’s oldest ficus trees were planted by the British not for beauty, but for strategic shade — a way to keep the streets cool for marching troops. Some still bear the faded markings of regiments long gone.

Local tales float in and out of these structures: a woman seen weeping from the top of Empress Market, a man disappearing into the underground tunnel below the Lodge, and the sound of violins in Frere Hall at night, though no event was booked.

They may be stories. But then again — this is Karachi. It remembers what others forget.

And Still, the City Watches

The thing about colonial ghosts is they don’t wail. They whisper. In policy. In architecture. In what’s preserved and what’s neglected.

Karachi remains a palimpsest — a city where conquest is carved into sandstone and painted over in resistance. British columns now serve as studios for art students. The jadoo ghars now serve as wildlife offices. 

You just have to look closely enough to see it.

And maybe, if the tide’s right and the hour strange, you’ll hear the city sigh.