There is a particular kind of memory that clings not to monuments but to movement—to departures more than arrivals. For this writer, that memory gathers itself in the dust and din of Badami Bagh when it was still a bus stand: a threshold rather than a destination. It was from here, amid the shouts of conductors and the smell of diesel and chai, that journeys began toward the ancestral village in Jhang. The buses, often overcrowded and impatient, seemed less like vehicles and more like threads stitching city to countryside. Badami Bagh, in that sense, was never just a place—it was a feeling of in-betweenness, of belonging both to Lahore and to somewhere beyond it.
To walk backward into its history is to peel away the noise and rediscover a quieter geography. This northern edge of Lahore, just outside the Walled City near Mori Gate and Delhi Gate, once belonged to a landscape of Bagha’at—orchards and cultivated tracts nourished by the then-closer waters of the Ravi. Mughal Lahore breathed through such peripheral gardens; they were not merely ornamental but productive, feeding the city and tempering its climate. One is reminded of how Abd al-Hamid Lahori described Lahore’s environs in the Badshahnama, noting the “pleasant gardens and cultivated grounds that stretch beyond the habitations,” a phrasing that captures precisely the liminal quality this area must have possessed.
It is not difficult to imagine that along these very stretches, shaded by trees and broken by cultivated plots, imperial movement once passed. The route from the city toward Jahangir’s Tomb in Shahdara lay in this general direction, and though no document pins the exact path, the possibility lingers that Nur Jahan herself traversed this belt when visiting the mausoleum of Jahangir. In such a vision, Badami Bagh ceases to be peripheral; it becomes part of a ceremonial geography, a passage between sovereignty and memory, between the living court and the resting emperor.
Yet history is rarely kind to the margins. By the time of Ranjit Singh, Lahore’s vitality had contracted inward. The fort, the Hazuri Bagh, and the dense life within the walls absorbed attention and resources. Beyond them, spaces like present-day Badami Bagh remained largely functional—fields, grazing patches, and scattered gardens (Bagha’at). If they existed in records, they did so faintly. As later colonial observers would remark, these outer tracts were “irregular expanses of cultivation and waste, interspersed with gardens,” neither fully claimed nor entirely neglected.
The transformation came with the British, whose ‘colonial’ cunning (or to some the genius) lay not only in conquest but in classification. After 1849, Lahore was surveyed, measured, and reorganised. The construction of the railway station nearby in the 1860s altered the gravitational pull of the city. What had been fringe suddenly became frontage. Roads converged, goods accumulated, and movement intensified. The old Mughal garden belt began to harden into something else—something louder, denser, more transactional.
The Punjab Gazetteer would later note with characteristic understatement that “the suburbs to the north of the city have become the site of depots and wholesale markets owing to their proximity to the railway and main roads.” Another guidebook from the late nineteenth century observed that “the traffic of grain and country produce finds its natural outlet beyond the gates, where space permits aggregation.” In these dry administrative lines lies the making of Badami Bagh: a place where space allowed congestion, and congestion created identity.
Its proximity to the Grand Trunk Road was no small matter. The Grand Trunk Road, the ancient artery of the subcontinent, ensured that anything positioned near it was drawn into wider circuits of exchange. Badami Bagh thus stood at a quiet but powerful intersection—between the old city and the expanding colonial infrastructure, between local cultivation and long-distance trade. It is here that the name begins to acquire resonance.
“Badam”—almond—remains a small mystery in the plains of Punjab. Almond trees do not flourish here, and yet the name persists, evocative and slightly out of place. Perhaps it followed the Mughal habit of naming gardens after fruits and flowers, an aesthetic gesture rather than a botanical one. But the more persuasive explanation lies in commerce. Almonds, pistachios, and other dry fruits travelled from Afghanistan, Kashmir, and Central Asia into Lahore, and
areas like Badami Bagh, with their access to transport routes, became natural points of wholesale exchange. It is easy to imagine sacks of badam (almonds) unloaded here, traded, weighed, and dispatched onward. A place need not grow almonds to be named after them; it needs only traffic in their abundance.
There is also the possibility, faint but persistent, that a garden once bore this name—perhaps linked to a patron, a landholder, or even a forgotten “Badam Khan.” Lahore is full of such ghosts, where names outlive the realities that produced them. Faqir Syed Qamaruddin revealed it to Syed Muhammad Latif, who recorded them in Tarikh-e-Lahore that the site later known as Badami Bagh was once associated with a princess called Gul-e-Badam (Almond Blossom). Her shrine, situated between Masti Gate and Khizri Gate (now Sheranwala Gate), contained a valuable marble stone. During the period of Lahore’s three Sikh rulers, the shrine and its adjoining garden fell into ruin. Yet the name endured, and the place became known as Badami Bagh.
During Ranjit Singh’s reign, the garden was restored and extensively planted with fruit trees—guava, pomegranate, orange, mandarin, pomelo, jamun, pear, mango, peach, and, most notably, abundant almond trees, giving the garden its name renewed meaning. Munshi Sohan Lal, in Umdat-ut-Tawarikh, frequently called it Bagh-e-Paeen-e-Deewar-e-Qila, or the Garden beneath the Fort Wall, and described its flowering beds, water channels, pavilions, and pleasure gardens.
The story of Gul-e-Badam, however, is uncertain. No Mughal-era record of a princess by that name has been found, and the sandy soil of the area suggests that a river may once have flowed there. The name may therefore be legendary, like Anarkali and Gul-e-Bakawali, or perhaps connected with one of Ranjit Singh’s queens, Gul Begum or Gul Bahar, whose tomb lay in the Miani cemetery.
By the twentieth century, especially after the rupture of 1947, Badami Bagh had shed whatever remained of its pastoral past. Refugees arrived, settlements thickened, and the logic of survival reshaped space. What had been a mandi became, quite naturally, a terminus. The bus stand emerged not by grand design but by accumulated necessity. From here, routes fanned out across Punjab, reaching towns and villages that the railway did not directly serve. Among them was Jhang, drawing the writer back again and again to this place of departure.
If one listens carefully, the older layers are not entirely silent. Beneath the honk of horns and the cries of vendors lies the echo of gardens, of caravans, of imperial passage. Even the colonial voice lingers, faintly, in its measured prose describing “suburban tracts adapted to the purposes of trade.” And above all, there remains the human rhythm—the endless leaving and returning that defined Badami Bagh in its bus stand days.
Today, it may be known for its markets and congestion, its utilitarian sprawl and relentless motion. Yet to reduce it to that is to miss its deeper continuity. Badami Bagh has always been about movement: from Mughal garden to Sikh periphery, from colonial depot to postcolonial transport hub. It has always stood at the edge of something—of the city, of memory, of belonging.
For the writer, it resolves into a single enduring image: a bus pulling away in a cloud of dust, Lahore receding, Jhang approaching, and Badami Bagh suspended between the two—forever a place not of arrival, but of leaving.
Published in Dawn, October 11th, 2026
