PART ONE

Lahore and Lahories

Lahore  then and Now 

To continue with our reading of A Brief Account of the History and Antiquities of Lahore  written by an unknown English man in 1860, let us have two pictures of the city, one drawn by Abul Fazal and the other by a British army officer.

          What sort of a city was Lahore in the heyday of the Mughal Empire? Abul Fazal describes the city (during Akbar's reign) thus:

Lahore is a very large and Populous City. The fort and palace are of brick and lime and when this city was for some time the seat of Government, many other capital buildings were erected and gardens laid out in taste and elegance; it became a grand resort of people of all nations and their manufacturers were brought to the highest pitch of perfection. Through His Majesty's encouragement, gardeners were brought from Iran and Turan who cultivated the vine and various kinds of melons. The manufacturers of silk and woollen carpets were introduced, together with that of brocade. Here could be obtained the choicest productions of Iran, Turan, and Hindustan.

This was the Lahore in the middle of the 16th century. In the first decade of the 19th century, this is how a British Army officer describes it in his diary. The entry is dated May 29, 1809. It reads:

I visited the ruins of Lahore, which afforded a melancholy picture of fallen splendour. Here the lofty dwellings and musjids which not fifty years ago raised their tops to the skies and were the pride of a busy and active population, are now crumbling into dust, and in less than half a century more will be levelled with the ground. In going over these ruins, I saw not a human being; all was silence, solitude, and gloom. This city in the days of its glory must have been most splendid.

The Sikhs apparently destroyed most of Mughal Lahore. The British retrieved and restored as many Mughal monuments as they could and built some of their own. The most splendid remnant of the Raj is the Montgomery Hall, which now houses the Quaid-i-Azam Library on The Mall. The Assembly Chambers aren't bad either, nor in fact, the High Court buildings or the Government and Atchison Colleges. And who can ignore the spacious GOR?

          Sadly, though, most private houses built during the British era have been brought down to be replaced by more ostentatious but less comfortable homes. At one end of the line, houses built after partition are small with little or no ventilation in which one cannot live during the long, hot summer without air-conditioning. They appear to have been built on the pattern in vogue in India in 1526, which was denounced most roundly by Emperor Babur in his Tozk . And the standards of cleanliness are not very much better than they were 468 years ago. In fact, they may've been better than they are now because in Babur's day, India must have been a sparsely populated country with a handful of small urban settlements and the rest scattered in tiny hamlets all over the sub-continent.

          When the British were about to leave, Lahore was a reasonably neat and clean city, especially in those areas where the British and their important local lackeys lived themselves. It was a somnolent capital city of a somnolent province where people of all communities lived in great harmony. The British attended to the law and order situation in real earnest and the locals loved them for that. I'll say this even if I am accused of being an Anglophile. The last 60 years of the Raj must be rated as the most peaceful the city had known since the disintegration of the Mughal Empire.

          Schools and Colleges were built and we had the Punjab  University. Mayo Hospital and the King Edward Medical College are two of the most precious parts of our British inheritance. They built roads and bridges and they provided the city with a sewerage system, telephones and telegraphs and drinking water. Above all, introduced the game of cricket to Lahore as indeed to the rest of the sub-continent.

          Excuse me for so saying but we have a lot to be thankful for to the British. The most important being the English Language which as I keep saying, is the language of the sub-continent's freedom movement. Like the Mughals, they were also fond of parks and gardens and we owe two of the finest in Lahore-Bagh-i-Jinnah and Manto Park to the Brits.

          British Lahore was beautiful and orderly while the Old City was romantic and disorderly. Apart from Shah Alam Gate, most of the Old City was Muslim while most of the British Lahore was non-Muslim from McLeod Road to Model Town and in between.

          As Independence Day drew nearer, something began to happen to the city of Lahore. Communal tolerance for which the city was famous and in which "people of all nations" lived in great harmony, gave way to intolerance and mistrust, which finally erupted into the kind of violence it had not seen even during the Sikh period.

          Muslims butchered Hindus and Sikhs while the latter put the Muslims to the sword. Houses and shops were put to the torch. The worst to suffer was the Shah Alam Gate, the Hindu-dominated part of the Old City. Not a single house was left standing. The Muslims did to the locality what the Allies had done to German cities during World War-II. It did not look like arson but as if the place had been subjected to saturation bombing.

          The two major communities killed the spirit of Lahore. Instead of a city of peace, there grew a soulless city where the first thing the Muslim did was to raise a temple to Greed to Mendacity to Mammon.

          Most real estate of any consequence at all belonged to the non-Muslims who had fled to India. Now this evacuee property was up for grabs and much corruption there was in seeking allotments. This was the genesis of our social and moral decline.

          As refugees poured in from all directions, the city began to grow. From a sleepy little town of a little over half a million people, it had now a population of four, some say, five million. It has been declared the world's dirtiest city (I wonder why Calcutta has been spared this indignity). New housing colonies have come up everywhere. They have been ill planned, ill placed.

          Every inch of land is being grabbed. All building laws and byelaws are being flouted. There is increasing pressure on social services. Indeed, the social fabric is being torn apart, slowly, but surely. The rich and the powerful live in islands of affluence. So, they are not bothered how the poor live and the poor constitute the majority in Lahore  as indeed elsewhere in the country. And now the Chief Minister says there will be five more housing schemes for 35,000 families. Gracious me! It appears we are refusing to learn from Karachi  which, had it been kept at manageable proportions would not have become the violent city it is today.

Friday, April 29, 1994