January 5, 2002

The annual conference of the Tarikh Institute of Historical Research offered fascinating insights into architecture and social history, writes Naurin Ahmad-Zaki

It is often argued that city life corrupts a person as opposed to life in the village, which is characterized by simplicity and purity. “The city’s magic can captivate an individual to the extent that once a newcomer comes and lives here, he would rather die on a footpath than go back to the village,” maintained Dr Mubarak Ali of the Tarikh Institute of Historical Research, which recently held its annual conference on history and culture in Lahore.

In his presentation titled City: History, Culture and Economy, Dr Mubarak Ali argued that there existed a historical conflict between the city and the village. “Cities foster civilization, they nourish it and at times decline with it. Cities like Delhi and Lahore, for instance, have witnessed the rise and fall of civilizations and managed to withstand the vicissitudes of time,’ he said.

In Islamic history, after the conquest of Syria and Iraq, Muslims transformed the Byzantine cityscapes socially, politically and economically. They converted churches into mosques and built new buildings, which represented the power structure, namely, the Jamia mosque, the khanqah and the fort, as symbols of shariah, mysticism and political power, respectively.

In India, the sultans and Mughal rulers changed the social fabric of the cities completely by allowing the untouchables and lower castes to reside within the city walls. This is known as the ‘urban revolution’ in Indian history.

This was followed by a presentation titled Lahore through the Centuries. Written by G D Golati, it was translated and presented by Saudul Hasan Khan, and gave a detailed account of the various rulers and invaders of Lahore.

Architect Sajjad Kausar, in his paperKashikari in Lahore (17-18th centuries), maintained that Lahore re- emerged as one of the important cities of the subcontinent starting with Mughal rule (1526-1707). The art of decorating buildings with enamel and glazed tiles, known as kashi or chini, according to historian S. M Latif came to Lahore from China via Persia. The tomb of Shah Musa in Lahore was built in 1519 during Ibrahim Lodhi’s period and is the earliest example of glazed tiles used for external decoration. But it was during the Mughal period that the art flourished, specially during Shah Jahan’s time when it became a popular architectural form of ornamentation.

In Lahore, where quality marble and stone were not as easily available as in Delhi and Agra, bricks were used extensively with kashi work as ornamentation. Some fine examples of this work are the mosque of Wazir Khan, Chauburji, the gateway of the Rose Garden, Ali Mardan Khan’s tomb and the tomb of Shahun Nisa Begum.

Ghafir Shahzad enlightened the audience with his presentation, Lahore: Building houses in changing social conditions. The history of housing in Lahore is traced back to over one thousand years. In 1959, the Archeology Department dug 63 feet under the Lahore Fort. In the first four feet they found building material from the British and Sikh period and at 14 to 35 feet, material dating back to the Mughal period was unearthed. The first brick walls were constructed on top of the mud walls between 1584 and 1598. Surprisingly, the tharas (raised platforms over open drains that lined the front of the houses in the walled city streets) of the houses and the hamams (public baths) became the first open schools for children, and the streets were the place where people gathered to share gossip and news.

Later, the ground floors of the houses were converted into shops, with narrow staircases leading to the upper residential floors. During the Raj, due to growing prosperity in certain quarters, people began to move out of the walled city. However, the areas of residence for Muslims became segregated from those of Hindus and Sikhs. Colonial influences also began to dominate the way houses were built; houses became bigger, with large gardens, bigger windows and higher ceilings.

A survey conducted in 1988 for Pepac entitled The Walled City of Lahore, in which 17,512 houses were surveyed, showed that 16.63 per cent of the houses in the walled city were more than a hundred years old and 38.19 per cent between 40 and 100 years old. 27.20 per cent of the houses were built during the last twenty years and 52.15 per cent were safe for living.

Pervaiz Vandal, in his paper, Establishment of the Lahore Cantonment and its Repercussions on the City of Lahore briefly outlined the process of the British impact on the physical features of the city. When the British troops entered Lahore, they used whatever infrastructure was available to them in the initial stages. Existing barracks of the defeated Sikhs, tombs, baradaris, mosques and other monuments were put to rather incongruent use.

But the overall British strategy was to keep the Indian cities unarmed and the British forces distant from the local populace. Thus the building of the Lahore Cantonment was initiated in 1852. Covering an area greater than 35 square kilometres, the construction of the cantonment forever changed the concept of town layout, street patterns and housing design, specially residential architecture, and gave a new living style to the city’s elite. Physicist Dr Anis Alam’s paper examined in detail the system of higher education in the 19th century Punjab.

Nadeem Omar, the last speaker at the conference, in his paper titled From karkhana to school: Visual art education in the Punjab and the Mayo School of Arts, presented a comparative study of the modern art school and the traditional karkhana. He argued that there were two different models of art instruction: one representing the British or South Kensington model and the other the Indian or indigenous model. The South Kensington model was based on the concept of visual literacy which required the visual and logical understanding of exact drawing. In contrast, the karkhana model of art instruction was oral, empirical and tactile.

Nadeem Omar based his argument in the context of the art policies and institutions of the Raj in the Punjab of the last quarter of the 19th century. The policies and practices of the British art educators as well as bureaucrats resulted in setting up the Mayo School of Arts (now the National College of Arts) in Lahore in 1875, and organizing of exhibitions and trade museums all over Punjab.

Nadeem Omar also described the indigenous model of visual art education in Punjab prior to the arrival of the British. He then went on to analyze the British policies of art education on the basis of the South Kensington model. In the final part of his paper, he drew heavily on studies of the teaching methods and the curriculum of the Mayo School of Arts under Lockwood Kipling — father of Rudyard Kipling — who was the founder principal of the art school. The conference concluded by providing a historical overview of the development of cityscapes, evolution of the structural architecture in our cities, and debating the socio-economic conditions that have gone into the making of our present-day cities.