In the heart of Karachi stands a 19th-century Gothic building that now houses a bustling spice and produce bazaar. A weathered plaque says it was built to mark Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, hence its name: Empress Market. No marker records what happened on this ground before the market rose over it.

During the 1857 uprising, which the British called the Mutiny and many in the subcontinent call the First War of Independence, rebel sepoys were publicly executed on the parade ground where the market now stands, colonial military records show. Some were tied to the mouths of cannons and blown apart. Local historians say the market was built partly to keep the site from becoming a memorial to them. A place of martyrdom was replaced with a monument to empire.

After independence, Pakistan kept the sanitized version. Nothing at the bazaar commemorates the executed men. The executions were carried out on the authority of Bartle Frere, the British commissioner in Sindh.

A short walk away, at the elite Karachi Grammar School, students still cheer for Frere, because one of the school’s four houses bears his name. Another is named for General Charles Napier, who led the British conquest of Sindh in 1843.

Nearby stand the colonial-era social clubs that once projected British authority and groomed an Anglicized native aristocracy to help govern the empire. After independence, they became exclusive networking hubs with hereditary memberships and long waiting lists. There, a new ruling elite modeled itself on British high society.

This romance with the colonial past is not merely an elite lifestyle choice. It is coded into the judiciary, the bureaucracy, the army and the........

© Arab News Pakistan