We all praise Akbar and Shah Jehan for building the walls of Lahore, and the Lahore Fort and the Shalimar Gardens, as also the Taj Mahal, what we are blind to are the conditions of the poor people when these monuments came up.

While going through the works of Abdul Hamid Lahori, the 17th century writer of ‘Badshahnama’, one comes across several events that are frightening to say the least. This made me refer to the works of Mushtaq A. Kaw as also of Atul Singh. There are then the letters of Lady Beatty Balfour which point to such deeds. Surely Lahore is a great and beautiful city, but we must never forget that it was built on the blood, tears and the very lives of the people of the city and the land.

Let me go over a few events and remind that the walls of the city and the fort were built by starving people in the famines of 1584-87. There is a description of people falling in the streets of old Lahore, with neighbours eating their flesh. The ruler would send carts to pick up corpses which were thrown on the river banks that is today Mahmood Booti. Till this day local farmers find bones when they dig deep.

So, the Emperor set up a programme to feed 25,000 persons provided they work as labourers in rebuilding the walls of old Lahore and the Lahore Fort. The peasant uprising of Punjab led by Abdullah, better known as Dullah Bhatti, was the direct result of these famines, and the emperor blind to such suffering imposing huge agricultural taxes. Ultimately he arrested Dullah, skinned him alive and hung his body from the gate of the fort. Yet Akbar is today described as a kind ruler.

But then he was followed by Shah Jehan, whose love for his wife Mumtaz Mahal and the Taj Mahal he built for her stands out. But what is never mentioned is that in the years 1630 to 1733 a series of terrible famines broke out in the entire strip from the Deccan, Gujarat, north of Sindh and the Punjab. Abdul Hamid Lahori writes: Life was offered for a loaf, and no one was interested. Dog food sold as goat meat. Dead bodies blocked roads and the flesh of a son was preferred over his love”.

In all these times the Mughals ruled with splendour, and the plight of the poor was never a consideration. There is one mention in Lahori’s book about courtiers not daring to mention the starvation around the court’s splendour. The very scale of these famines just cannot be imagined in today’s world, even though the happenings in the Middle East by the white European colonialists are beginning to match such atrocities.

Let us digress a bit and mention other famines in history. Probably the greatest ever was the 1959-1961 Chinese Famine instigated by the ‘Great Leap Forward’ policy of Mao Tse-Tung. The record tells us that up to 55 million Chinese starved to death. One analyst says that this was the greatest famine in human history.

In 1770 the Great Bengal Famine took the lives of 11 million persons as the East India Company removed all grains to Britain to set off the Industrial Revolution. But nearer home we see that as the Sikh Empire began to disintegrate, in 1837 a total of 800,000 persons died of starvation in Punjab and today’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. As the Sikh Empire shrunk so did its problems increase. The Afghan problem then is almost the same as today.

By 1860 right up to 1867, the East India Company was removing all the grains and cotton of Punjab and other Indian States. To manually spin cotton yarn was banned and those who tried had their hands cut. Foreign invaders, be they Turkic, Afghan, Mughal or British, all are blind to human suffering. The growth of the UK and Europe came first. In this period two million starved. In the 1876-78 famines over 4.3 million starved to death.

Nobel laureate Amartya Sen’s work on ‘Welfare economics and problems of the poor’ very clearly shows how imperialism and exploitation of the poor in unimaginably cruel ways led to these famines.

His conclusion being that famines are brought about by inhumanity stands out. Just for the reader the work of the Nobel prize winner Abhijit Banerjee on ‘eliminating global poverty’ is worth considering.

As one studies the letters of Lady Beatty Balfour, one can see how deeply she feels about the poor who serve the British rulers, and how starved they really are. Her description of her own household ‘servants’ are heart wrenching.

It is true that history is written to please the rich and the rulers. All we must do is look around and see that the real rulers, directly and though indirect business investment ways, consume almost 53 per cent of our national budget. The civil side barely pay bureaucrats their massive pay cheques.

The combined budget of health and education is 1.9 per cent. No one cares that Mr Jinnah in 1947 made clear that “20 per cent of our national budget must be set aside to educate the poor … or else we will collapse as a nation.”

In the election campaigns that our country has experienced, we see politicians, almost entirely of dubious origins, promising an end to poverty and food being plentiful. Once in power only the ‘paying project’ like motorways are preferred. That is the way things stand.

So, every time one goes to see the Lahore Fort, or the other amazing sights of old and ancient Lahore, we must keep in mind that these marvels came up because the poor starved and famines came our way. Famines did come because of the weather, but more so because of the ways of our rulers ... past and present.

Published in Dawn, February 11th, 2024