Place · port & commercial capital · Pakistan
Karachi
Also known as Karachi, Karāchī, Kolachi, Krokola
Capital of Pakistan from 1947 to 1958 and the country's commercial centre and largest city ever since. Karachi grew from a small Baloch fishing village (Kolachi) in the eighteenth century — Mir Nasir Khan's Talpur dynasty developed its port facilities in the 1770s — into Sindh's capital after the 1843 British conquest, when Charles Napier chose it for its deep-water harbour. The city absorbed the Sindhi-Hindu merchant community of pre-partition Karachi, the Muhajir migration from north India in 1947, and the Baloch and Pashtun economic migrants of the later twentieth century. Jinnah's Mazar-e-Quaid is at Karachi, and the Mohatta Palace, Frere Hall, St Patrick's Cathedral, Empress Market and Clifton beach are the city's defining colonial-era monuments.
- Date
- 1729–None
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Patron dynasty
- Talpur · British · Pakistan
- Tradition
- Standard reference; INTACH, ASI and municipal records; institutional histories.
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 24.861, 67.001
Connections (4)
- Site withinManora & Varun Dev Mandir
Manora Island and the Varun Dev Mandir — the oldest continuous Hindu temple of Karachi, on the harbour rock at the southern end of the city — sits within Karachi's municipal limits off the Clifton coast. The temple predates the British 1843 conquest by at least four centuries and continued through the eighteenth-century Talpur period as the Hindu seafaring community's main shrine.
- Site withinManghopir, Karachi
Manghopir — the crocodile-tank Sufi shrine on Karachi's northwest edge said to hold Baba Farid's disciples in retinue — sits within Karachi municipal limits and is one of the city's oldest continuous shrines. The thermal spring at the foot of the hill and the Sheedi Muslim community's annual Mela have continued through four centuries of Baloch, Talpur, British and Pakistani administration of the city.
- Site withinShivaharkaray
Shivaharkaray — the Shakti pitha where Sati's eyes are said to have fallen — sits within Karachi municipal limits at the city's eastern edge, as one of only two Shakti pithas in the Sindh region (the other being Hinglaj further west in Balochistan). The temple's continuous worship through the Talpur, British and Pakistani periods is unusual in Karachi where most of the Hindu community left at Partition.
- Site adjacencyBarbarikon / Banbhore
Barbarikon / Banbhore — the Roman-era Indus port that later became Debal, taken by Muhammad bin Qasim in 711 — sits 60 kilometres east of modern Karachi on the Indus delta. The port's silting and the Indus shifting course drove its abandonment around 1200; Karachi's harbour became the delta's working seaport only after this older port had died.