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IN the early 2000s, as a fresh MBA graduate from IBA, I began working at the HBL Corporate Centre on Mall Road, Lahore. The lush green road, lined with majestic trees and buildings, was a privilege to navigate.
A particular favourite of mine was the Lawrence and Montgomery Halls, then called the Quaid-i-Azam Library. Built in 1866 as a memorial hall, its interior was altered in the 1870s: the original curved roof was replaced, and a teak floor was installed for dancing. During lunch hour, its white, symmetrical, Victorian-colonnaded form, its balconies housing ageing books, and its garden setting would lull me away from the corporate banking environment for a while. I had a library membership and could take books out. I would often eat my lunch in the garden and explore every nook and cranny of the beautiful library.
A deep truth that this younger version of myself could not yet articulate but could feel at a very fundamental level was that identity lay in a clear awareness of a past full of names, places, narratives; of rise and fall. Indeed, our legitimacy requires a multiplicity of identities, which Lahore’s historical legacy provides us with. I was fortunate to witness this identity of the city emerging under Kamran Lashari’s watchful eyes at the Walled City Lahore Authority. The authority morphed into an institution undertaking remarkable work to convert Lahore’s old city area, and later major monuments, from neglected and encroached spaces into lovingly conserved and publicly accessible historical landscapes. The authority, now with a much wider remit as the Punjab Walled Cities and Heritage Areas Authority, developed an ecosystem based on collaboration with municipal authorities, artisans, the Aga Khan Trust for Culture and art historians such as my colleague Nadhra Shahbaz.
The Magnificent Punjab vision is yet another thing of beauty — restoring and rehabilitating, as it does, smaller, lesser-known heritage sites across Punjab. These initiatives represent a much-needed inclusive view of our history — of what it has always meant to be a Punjabi.
The Punjab government has recently proposed that the historical names of some Lahore roads, neighbourhoods and landmarks be restored under the Lahore Authority for Heritage Revival. Breathing life into names associated with the city’s pre-Partition Hindu, Sikh, Jain, colonial and Parsi heritage is a step towards the recovery of identity. The initiative is not just about signage. It connects directly to one’s earlier sense of a multifaceted identity, including non-Muslim traces in Lahore’s public memory.
Old names must stay because they offer a less curated slate of history.
However, even as the renaming exercise gathered momentum, there was news of expected backlash from what Dawn reported as “extremist vloggers”. Result: it has been held back.
We have seen decades of extremism — since the 1980s. If the voices of erasure are loud enough to halt a tribute to the past, then the voices of memory must be loud enough to defend it. A name is a reminder — sometimes of colonial exploitation but also of selfless contributions and local genius. We are big-hearted and logical enough to have room for both.
History is written and rewritten by the masters. Visiting Spain in the early 2010s, we realised that while the country had not erased its Muslim history, it had reframed it through the lens of the ‘reconquest of the Moors’ and the Catholic monarchy. Much like Spain’s repositioned history, Pakistan’s public history too often reframes its multi-faith and multi-regime past through the lens of Muslim rule, colonial tyranny and the creation of Pakistan. This makes Sikh, Hindu, British, Jain, Parsi and Christian histories appear peripheral to the ‘main’ story, even though they are central to our social, urban, architectural and cultural ethos.
More importantly, old names must stay because they offer our youth a less curated, more honest slate of history to work with. This way they will turn out to be better than us — a generation that too often felt ashamed of itself.
Even as we march into an uncertain future, our young should be enabled to build an identity for themselves — without history being shoved down their throats through edited texts, selectively recalibrated narratives or street names. Let’s have names from other religions dotting our streets. They were us — contributing and living here. These names only make us men and women who do not shy away from the failures of the past but embrace the burden of knowing with grace.
The Bard wrote: “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet.” This is very true. But what if the rose in question had many names — each unfurling its own delight, authenticity and meaning? And one could not completely replace the other. Then, we hang on to all the roses’ beautiful names.
The writer is an academic.
Published in Dawn, June 13th, 2026
