KARACHI: The story of Karachi’s Aiwan-i-Riffat is sad, to put it mildly, and has often been told by quite a few journalists over the years. Here it is one more time in a nutshell: Atiya Fyzee and her artist husband Samuel Fyzee Rahimin were a couple who enriched Karachi’s cultural life in the city’s early post-partition days like no one else. Atiya’s association with literary stalwarts Allama Iqbal and Shibili Nomani is no secret either. She and Samuel achieved many cultural feats, one of which was writing a book on Indian classical music. Both were writers of high merit and Samuel, who was a brilliant painter, was known to have penned a couple of stage plays as well.

After independence the pair shifted to Karachi where the two continued their good work. Here they brought together artistes at a place called the Aiwan-i-Riffat which, it is said, was patterned after Atiya’s Bombay (now Mumbai) house. But they soon fell victim to heartless bureaucratic practices and had to vacate the building. It created a bit of a commotion but, as it often happens, the Aiwan was never the same. Its possession became an issue.

On Sept 17, 1966 this newspaper carried a report on the rift between the Karachi Metropolitan Corporation (KMC) and the Archaeology Department — the latter had set up its offices at the Aiwan and the former had accused it of ‘usurping’ it. A department spokesman said the building was offered to them in 1959 and the whole place was renovated at a cost of Rs40,000, therefore the question of usurping it did not hold water and in fact the department had ‘saved the building from total destruction’. However, he said, the department had decided to leave the Aiwan when a notice was served on it and its staff was only waiting to find an alternative accommodation to move in.

This was rebutted by the KMC chairman claiming the Aiwan was never transferred to the Archaeology Department; it was only rented out to it. He said the department had ‘occupied’ the building on Oct 20, 1959 and since then had not paid municipal dues, including rent, conservancy and water taxes, totaling Rs231,196 on Sept 14.

That week, the Arts Council of Pakistan Karachi was also in the news vis-à-vis the KMC. On Sept 14, it was reported that documents related to the transfer of a certain part of Burnes Garden to the Arts Council of Pakistan (ACP) had gone missing from the KMC record stores. The search for the documents began following the reports that the ACP proposed to rent out the council’s open space to a company to set up a petrol station and its cafeteria for opening a bank branch. It would be interesting to note that the first time the documents went missing was in 1961, five years after the transfer of the land to the council. Back then, the KMC file was reconstructed with the help of copies provided by the Revenue Department. Under the conditions applied to the transfer of municipal land to any institution, the ACP could not give its open space on rent out or build areas for commercial purposes. Wow! The plots thicken.

Published in Dawn, September 12th, 2016