|
|
|
May 4, 2003
Excerpts: Reflecting the impulses
Lahore is a fascinating city with a rich history. F.S. Aijazuddin , who is a Lahori, captures some of the excitement of the Punjab capital
HAD Lahore been accepted by the rest of the world as the epicentre of the universe — which native born Lahoris are convinced it is anyway — it would have conformed to the Big Bang theory, for from the moment of its first creation before recorded time, it has continued to explode, scattering its parts in every direction. The mohallas of its inner core — the Black Hole of the ancient walled city — have replicated themselves into one contiguous constellation of sprawling urban suburbs.
Over the same period of its evolution, its population too has multiplied, from 128,000 in 1871 to 2.2 million in 1972 and to an estimated 7.2 million in 2002, a human swarm spreading over and ravaging the surrounding countryside. Housing colonies and factories have replaced agricultural fields, streets without pavements have dehydrated nourishing watercourses, and houses have been grouted in the cavities left by uprooted nesting trees. A forest covering 1963 acres of woodland became a Model Town.
Lahore is now home to over seven million people spread over a physical area of 1770 square kilometres. They live as they have done for centuries, an aggregation of loosely connected communities, coexisting within a generic amorphous identity. Since the earliest of times, that pattern has remained unchanged.
“Lahore is a city that perhaps can be described more appropriately as a federation of neighbourhoods, markets and special districts, each highly individual in character. Functionally as well as architecturally, these neighbourhoods reflect consecutive historical stages of the city’s growth,” Mohammad Qadeer, a modern author on Lahore has written. The walled city was shaped by the Mughal social system. It evolved as a mosaic of socially cohesive and functionally specialized neighbourhoods.
He has compared the military-social order under the Mughals with its modern social counterpart, suggesting that while the former ‘resembled European feudalism’, the latter was based on territorial communal principles...
Those insular concentrations continue even today, as will be borne out by anyone who wants to buy, for example, an electrical appliance. The customer will be referred first and instinctively to Hall Road. Similarly for kitchen utensils, one is directed towards Bhanda Bazar within the congested Shahalami Market, for bamboo ladders to Bansa bazar, for woollen shawls to Kashmiri bazar, for old clothes to Landa bazar, and for paper to Kaghzi bazar. The concept of ‘stop and shop’ under one roof has yet to develop into the norm. A mediaeval trader-controlled market is transforming but only very gradually into one that is more consumer-responsive. Meanwhile, until the customer finally becomes king, the trader continues to behave like a robber-baron.
At the macro level, the development of Lahore as a metropolis has necessarily always reflected the impulses and whims of its rulers. Under the Mughals, it functioned as a fortified outpost. Lahoris benefiting from imperial patronage, lived within the safety of the congested walled city. For want of space, they built their recreational gardens outside the city walls, and their mausoleums in the open scrub-land that surrounded the city.
The successors to the Mughals, often local governors liberated from the onerous control from a distant and unsympathetic Delhi — reduced the city once however briefly an imperial capital — to their own provincial level. At the end of the 18th century, the rapacious Bhangi sardars who periodically scoured the countryside and shared their spoils in unequal portions, divided the city, and it was only in the gnarled hands of a diminutive political entrepreneur Ranjit Singh that Lahore became once again the capital of a kingdom.
Taking control of it in 1809, the Sukerehakia misl leader who became a Raja and from that a Maharaja, used Lahore as the platform from which to launch his predatory ambitions and flaunted it as his prize, a monumental symbol of his success.
The defeat of the Sikhs in 1849, a decade after the death of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, and the subsequent annexation by the British altered both the pattern of governance and the geography of Lahore. Development of the city was no longer the elliptical consequence of an arbitrary or individual decision; it became a formalized responsibility, executed within the framework of a linear imperial plan. The rhythm of Lahore’s life as a colonial governorship was calibrated for the next century or so to the pulsations emanating from the imperial capital of Calcutta (now Kolkata), and after 1911 from Delhi.
It could be argued that Lahore to a great extent still continues to live in the nineteenth century. It does so physically in the sense that it still uses buildings such as the Secretariat, the GPO, and Lawrence Hall built by far-sighted 19th century British administrators, town planners and architects, but it does so also subconsciously by using that ninety-eight year period of British rule as a reference point in its search for a modern identity. It has erased from its collective memory any trace of a period of inter-communal coexistence between Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Christians and Parsis. Any residual reminders from buildings such as Dyal Singh or Lakshmi mansions, or beneficences such as the Dyal Singh Library or the Sir Ganga Ram or Gulab Devi hospitals have lost any acknowledgment of their founders. It is not accidental perhaps that each of these buildings mentioned is protected by an indestructible legal trust.
Those which were not, like the Jain mandir in Old Anarkali or the Hindu temple near Shahalmi market or the samadhi of Maharaja Sher Singh near Shah Bilawal behind the University of Engineering and Technology, became derelict and were finally destroyed, ostensibly in retaliation for desecration in 1992 of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya.
A second generation of Pakistanis and even more so its successor — the third generation — does not remember a time when the Muslim population of the Punjab was an economic minority. According to the census of 1941, out of a total population of Punjabi Muslims, almost one-third comprised artisans, craftsmen and agricultural labour. The Hindus dominated the non-agricultural commercial occupations such as trading and money-lending, and the Sikhs agriculture.
Dr M.S. Randhawa, who served as the Resettlement Commissioner on the Indian side after the partition of the Punjab in the crimson autumn of 1947, has provided a firsthand account of the trauma involved for the departing Hindus and Sikhs. “Hindus were the owners of nearly all commercial buildings of any importance in Lahore, and banking, insurance and industry owed their progress to their enterprise. The educational institutions of the Hindus, the D.A.V. College, Sanatan Dharam College, and a Medical College were all at Lahore.”
As a Punjabi Sikh himself, he felt the impact of partition even more deeply: “Central Punjab is the cradle of Sikhism. The founder of the Sikh faith, Guru Nanak, was born in Talwandi, now called Nankana Sahib, in Sheikhupura District. Nankana Sahib... is as sacred to them as Rome is to the Roman Catholics.” The departing Sikhs left behind not only the very crucible of their religion but also the product of their industriousness the fertile agricultural colonies of Lyallpur (Faisalabad), Montgomery (Sahiwal) and Sargodha, in which the non-Muslim population in each (a major component of whom were Sikhs) was never less than 30 per cent.
Probably the most telling statistic of that period of communal exchange, when entire villages migrated and had to be relocated on opposite sides of the fresh, still bleeding border, was that the total non-Muslim population of West Punjab in 1941 was 4.351 million, outnumbering but only marginally the total Muslim population of East Punjab of 4.286 million. Their migration was an exodus of Biblical proportions, with the twist that in this 20th century Exodus both the Israelites and the Egyptians left their homes and crossed a Red Sea of blood in the hope of the Promised Land.
Excerpted with permission from
Lahore Recollected: An Album
By F.S. Aijazuddin
Sang-e-Meel Publications, 20 Shahrah-i-Pakistan, Lahore Tel: 042-7220100.
Email: smp@sang-e-meel.com
ISBN 969-35-1453-X
236pp. Rs1500
|
|
|
|
