LAHORE: The Lahore Sangat on Sunday celebrated Lahore icons and installed two plaques at different places in the city. At Dyal Singh Library, Nisbat Road, they installed philanthropist Sardar Dyal Singh Majithia and at the office of Zamindar on McLeod Road, of writer poet journalist Maulana Zafar Ali Khan.

Among the prominent ones who took part in the installations on Sunday included Qudsia Rahim, Fauzia Qureshi, Fiza Rehman, Rameeza Yazdani and a number of National College of Art students.

They initiated with the plaque of Sardar Dyal Singh Majithia, a grand patron of many causes, a successful businessman and philanthropist who made several key contributions in Punjab. Dyal Singh Majithia was the founder of ‘The Tribune’ newspaper (Post-partition the offices of Pakistan Times was established at the same premises of The Tribune) and Punjab National Bank. He established numerous trusts under which Dyal Singh College, Dyal Singh Library, Dyal Singh Majithia Hall, Dyal Singh Mansions apart from numerous other institutions in East Punjab still stand in Lahore.

The next plaque was installed to honor Maulana Zafar Ali, a writer, poet, journalist and founder of the Zamindar newspaper. Two more plaques would be installed next week in the Walled City for Agha Hashar Kashmiri (a poet, playwright and dramatist famous for his adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays in Urdu) at Bhatti Gate near the original Bombay Talkies Theatre. The plaque for Bade Ghulam Ali (a maestro of the Indian subcontinent classical music, the Tansen of the 20th Century) will also be installed at Mochi Gate where he lived for some time with his family of the Kasur Patiala Gharana.

The Lahore Sangat is an informal association of people who work to remember the extraordinary women and men by mapping where they lived and worked by putting up distinctive blue enamel plaques in their memory.

Published in Dawn, October 18th, 2021