An Indian Ocean Library: Muslim Cosmopolitanism, World War II, and Public History

What does the history of a library in an Indian Ocean port city, its transregional readership, and the circulation of its books reveal about public history beyond local and national frameworks? To answer this question, this paper follows the making and unmaking of a leading Urdu library in the port city of Karachi in the 1940s as World War II transformed Karachi into an important British military hub due to its strategic location in between the theaters of the war in Asia and the Middle East. In 1941, Mahmooda Rizvia established an Urdu library in Karachi for merchants who moved between British India and the Middle East and for Indian soldiers stationed in Karachi on their way to fight for the British Empire. Rizvia was an Urdu author with revolutionary inclinations who was part of an Indian Muslim merchant family with ties to Iraq. Drawing both on Indian Ocean trade networks and Karachi’s growing geopolitical prominence during the war, she promoted the city as a center both for Muslim cosmopolitanism and revolutionary connections that linked India and the Middle East through the collection of books for her library. As seen from this library, the mobility of merchants and soldiers was a crucial factor in developing pan-Islamic imaginaries and political ambitions that influenced Karachi’s subsequent trajectory as Pakistan’s first national capital after the end of British colonial rule in 1947. However, the new national borders and dislocations of the partition of India and Pakistan that accompanied independence in 1947 also led to the closure of the library and the dispersal of its texts. This paper proposes that the history of libraries can address important public history questions related to memory and transregional connections during the transition from colonial rule to independence.