Pakistan: Where Malayalees once held sway

[Shinigami]

KARACHI: A long time ago people from Kerala, many with strong leftist roots, held sway in this bustling port city of Pakistan. Today, barely 6,000 remain, and most of them have lost their Malayalee identity. Even those still here are constantly on the lookout to migrate to the prosperous Gulf, to merge with the huge Malayalee population there.

The elderly ones dream of India, but it is not easy to travel to the country they left. They are eagerly looking forward to the reopening of the Indian consulate here, which was shut down after violent protests over the demolition in Ayodhya of the Babri mosque in 1992.

"It was the most compact community once upon a time," says Biyyathil Mohyuddin Kutty, who came to Karachi from Chennai (then Madras) in 1951 at age 20 with a spirit of adventure but ended up making Pakistan his home.

"There were some 50,000 Malayalees in Karachi then. Today, just 5,000 to 6,000 remain," Kutty, a man whose frail body hides the rebel that he has been since his early communist days, said.

Kutty, a frequent visitor to India, is one of Pakistan's most respected political and social activists. He is joint director of the Pakistan Institute of Labour Education and Research and will be one of the organisers of the World Social Forum here in January. The first wave of Malayalee Muslim migration to Karachi took place in 1921 when the British crushed a peasant rebellion in Kerala. The Malayalees immediately formed the Malabar Muslim Jamaat, a body that still exists.


Most early Keralite migrants started to make a living by brewing and selling tea to shopkeepers. The enterprising people they were, they had set up four or five hotels within about five years. They also did business in betel leaves.

Most of them lived alone in Karachi, travelling to India during the Islamic fasting month of Ramadan to meet their families in Kerala. Traffic between Karachi and Kerala continue uninterrupted until the 1965 India-Pakistan war.

That was when the Malayalees began moving to the Gulf. Once the Indian consulate here shut down, they lost hope of travelling to India.They also started marrying locally. Most of them today are into petty trade.

Kutty knew no word of Urdu when he came here. But he quickly learnt the language, and can now speak it better than his mother tongue: Malayalam. Of course, he is equally at home in English. Though he quickly lost faith in Pakistan, he stayed on, marrying a woman originally from Uttar Pradesh.

An activist of the communist student body in India, Kutty sailed easily into Pakistani politics. Astrong advocate of India-Pakistan friendship, he believes that President Pervez Musharraf is "better than other military dictators".

 

[Shinigami]

[/COLOR]

In his traditional cotton mundu and khadi kurta, 80-year-old Biyyathil Mohyuddin Kutty looks every inch a sprightly Malayalee from Kerala. The political activist who chose to make Pakistan his home 60 years ago believes that one ''cannot know the Pakistanis unless you live there''.

Kutty does not let his Kerala sensibility overshadow his Pakistani soul and nationality and likes to call himself a "dyed in the wool Pakistani national". Kutty, the general secretary of the Pakistan Peace Coalition and former political secretary to the governor of Balochistan, believes that ties between India and Pakistan are poised for a change.
"The recent serial blasts in Mumbai on the eve of the foreign ministers' meeting was a definite attempt to undermine the meeting. But the government of India spokesperson came out clearly that unsubstantiated allegations should not be made against Pakistan - and the talks continued. It was a turning point in the India-Pakistan relationship," Kutty told IANS in an interview here.

Kutty was in the capital to launch his book "Sixty Years in Self-Exile: No Regret - A Political Autobiography", last week. The book has been published by the Pakistan Study Centre (University of Karachi) and Pakistan Labour Trust. The launch was facilitated by the Policy and Planning Group, a social forum promoting cross-border friendship.

A committed socialist, Kutty arrived in Lahore to work as an assistant at the India Coffee House and then switched to a series of a multinational companies. But a jail term for alleged trade unionism changed his life. In 1966, Kutty joined the Trade and Industry Journal as managing editor and later chief editor of Finance and Industry, which later came to be known as the Pakistan Economist.

He rose to become a policymaker in the Balochistan government and later in the Pakistaann Peace Committee, where he is currently campaigning against terror and fundamentalist violence and rallying for convivial ties with India. A man of stringent principles, Kutty has been involved in drafting labour statutes and policies for the Pakistan government.

"You cannot know the Pakistanis unless you live there. What is important is that today's Pakistanis are as such not an enemy of Indians. They have all sorts of ideas which they have built up over the years - a particular mindset - which can change with more people meeting each other and communicating with each other.

"Bureaucratic and political meetings don't go down well with the common people of Pakistan because what the bureaucrats decide today they un-decide the next day. People of Pakistan want the exchanges to be lasting," Kutty said.

Pointing out a pattern in the way obstacles have been placed on the road to better understanding between India and Pakistan, Kutty said: "Before the 26/11 blasts in Mumbai, the newly elected president of Pakistan Asif Zardari said India was not our enemy."

"The 26/11 terror strikes took place in three months of Zardari's statement at a time when the government of Pakistan was trying to mend fences with India. The terrorists wanted to sabotage India so that talks between India and Pakistan could not be held," Kutty said.

A few months after the 26/11 Mumbai strikes, Kutty led a Pakistan Peace Coalition delegation to India. "We addressed the students of the universities because that was where we wanted to send the message that Pakistan is not at war with India," he said.
He says the "growth of fundamentalist terror can be linked to Zia-ul Haq's Islamisation of Pakistan".

Kutty's contribution to Pakistan's polity is woven into the story of ethnic Balochistan's development and integration into the Pakistani political mainstream -- a struggle for which he was jailed by former Pakistani president Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who was later assassinated for treason.

Kutty's daughter was expelled from the Balochistan Medical College."Balochistan is misunderstood by external western players. It is one of the richest regions of Pakistan with abundance of gas, gold, chrome and minerals. The region has 10 percent of the population and 48 percent territory. But there has been a sense of deprivation and denial of not being a part of the mainstream. More than four years of military action in 1973-1977 gave rise to extremist tendencies among youth," Kutty said.

"However, Pakistan for the first time made an attempt to bridge the trust deficit with Balochistan with a reform package, Aghaz-e-Huqooq-e-Balochistan. It was released in 2010," he said.

Kutty is loved across the rugged tribal terrain of Balochistan, especially among the tribal warlords.

"In Quetta, I can walk into any home at any time of the day and stay there. They are all my friends," he said.

But Kutty was reticent about Kashmir."The only solutions I can foresee are more trade between residents of ***************** and Indian Kashmir and more people-to-people contact between the two Kashmirs. You cannot come to any resolution of the Kashmir issue without involving people," Kutty said.

 

[praveen007]

nice little story .
But is it that bad for that community to leav karachi though they are muslim .

 

[yousaf goebbels]

if he goes to india he is probably looking at operation shudi karan 1984,gujjrat massacre of muslims,


he should have moved to india after 1947 if that place was so dear to him.....led a double identity-less life...now at 80 he wanna move to india...

 

[MadDog]

I didn't understand why did Malyalees leave India...i mean that too in 1951...btw i have heard Karachi is really diverse...my friend who visited there recently told me he saw a Somalian dude driving Chinkchee Rickshaw and he spoke Urdu fluently.

 

[Karachiite]

I didn't understand why did Malyalees leave India...i mean that too in 1951...btw i have heard Karachi is really diverse...my friend who visited there recently told me he saw a Somalian dude driving Chinkchee Rickshaw and he spoke Urdu fluently.

Lol I've seen a few Africans in Karachi. I think they were Nigerian. Also there's a temple I pass by in Karachi where there are many Tamils.

 

[IFB]

Lol I've seen a few Africans in Karachi. I think they were Nigerian. Also there's a temple I pass by in Karachi where there are many Tamils.

wait a min are you telling me that you saw tamils in pakistan?

 

[Karachiite]

wait a min are you telling me that you saw tamils in pakistan?

Well they looked Tamil. And I grew up around Tamils in Canada so I can tell.

 

[Areesh]

I didn't understand why did Malyalees leave India...i mean that too in 1951...btw i have heard Karachi is really diverse...my friend who visited there recently told me he saw a Somalian dude driving Chinkchee Rickshaw and he spoke Urdu fluently.

Well I know one or two Sudanese too here in Karachi.

 

[Bhairava]

Lol I've seen a few Africans in Karachi. I think they were Nigerian. Also there's a temple I pass by in Karachi where there are many Tamils.

They could have been those Malayalees :/

 

[Karachiite]

They could have been those Malayalees :/

Idk could have been. But some wore dhotis and had some white stuff on their foreheads. Also they were dark and I think they were speaking in Tamil. Apart from the swear words in Tamil I can understand some basic ones.

 

[Bhairava]

Idk could have been. But some wore dhotis and had some white stuff on their foreheads. Also they were dark and I think they were speaking in Tamil. Apart from the swear words in Tamil I can understand some basic ones.

Lol the dhotis and the sacred ash (white stuff on forehead) are used by Hindus all over India while praying in a Shiva temple. And being dark ? Seriously ? But then if you have heard them speak in Tamil then they could have been.

 

[walwal]

Revival of this age old thread ! Thought this topic must have surfaced sometime earlier since this gentleman in (Mr. Kutty) was in news sometime back.

Are there any Malayalee Pakistanis now on PDF ?

 

[Sinnerman108]

wait a min are you telling me that you saw tamils in pakistan?

There are SEVERAL in Pakistan; just that they will be called Madarasi not Tamil.

Actually anything south of AP, is Madarasi.

 

[somebozo]

I know many Malyalee's in Karachi and Pakistani Malyalee's in KSA. As unorthodox as it may sound but ISI has a strong presence in Kerala and for a long time, PIA flights from Gulf to India were routed via Karachi often carrying Malyalee intermediaries of ISI.