In Lahore, a street is rarely only a street. Some roads still echo with the march of armies, others lead to shrines and courtyards of saints, and a few quietly sustain the life of the mind. Urdu Bazaar belongs to this last category. Here ideas, books and learning circulate as actively as goods and money. Situated just outside Mori Gate of the Walled City and stretching toward Anarkali, close to Government College University and the historic educational quarter of colonial Lahore, the bazaar today forms the greatest concentration of bookshops, publishers, printers, paper merchants and academic suppliers in Pakistan. Students preparing for matriculation examinations, university scholars searching for rare texts, madressah teachers buying religious books, candidates for competitive examinations and even poets carrying manuscripts all move through its narrow passages daily. One quickly realises that it is less a market than a community of readers, a living republic of letters.

Yet Urdu Bazaar is not ancient in the Mughal sense. Its history begins not with emperors but with printing presses. The origins lie in the later 19th century when Lahore was transformed into the publishing capital of northern India. At the heart of this early story stands Mohan Lal, son of Rai Har Sukh, whose family was connected with the emerging world of printing and publishing. Because his activities were associated with printers and booksellers clustered along this street, the locality became known as Mohan Lal Road, the name by which the place was remembered before the creation of Pakistan.

The transformation of Lahore explains how this came about. After the annexation of Punjab in 1849, the British developed the city into an administrative and educational centre. Government College was established in 1864, the University of the Punjab followed in 1882, and Oriental College along with missionary schools created a new class of educated students and officials. This class required textbooks, grammars, translations and reference works in large numbers. At the same time Persian was replaced by Urdu as the language of administration. The consequences were profound. Textbooks for schools, dictionaries for learners, newspapers for the reading public, religious tracts for reform movements and literary magazines for the educated middle class all had to be produced in vast quantities. Printing presses multiplied across Lahore.

Among the earliest and most influential establishments was the Koh-i-Noor Press, which became a central institution in shaping Urdu journalism and literature. Equally important was the Punjab PrintingPress, associated with Munshi Gulab Singh. Gulab Singh was one of the great publishing figures of the 19th century Lahore. His press printed religious works, classical literature and educational books in Urdu, Persian and Punjabi, making literature accessible to a wide readership. These presses did more than print books; they standardised orthography, circulated reformist thought, encouraged journalism and helped create a reading public throughout Punjab and northern India. The family of Rai Har Sukh and Mohan Lal operated within this same environment of printers, type-founders and booksellers. Because of their association with the trade, the road where presses gathered became identified with them. Thus the present Urdu Bazaar began not as a retail marketplace but as a quarter of printing workshops — a place of compositors, typesetters and bookbinders.

Before 1947, the street itself was modest. Only a few publishers and book dealers worked there, and the main book trade of Lahore was actually concentrated inside Delhi Gate at Kashmiri Bazaar. Around Mohan Lal Road lived a mixed population. Hindu and Sikh printers operated presses, Muslim writers brought manuscripts, bookbinders stitched volumes and paper merchants imported paper. Nearby stood temples, including the Hari Gayan Temple. The literary culture of Lahore was therefore shared across communities. A Muslim poet might publish through a Hindu printer and distribute through a Sikh bookseller. Urdu language and literature matured in this cooperative cultural space.

The Partition of 1947 changed everything. Hindu and Sikh residents migrated to India, leaving their houses and shops. At the same time Muslim publishers and booksellers migrated from Amritsar, Jalandhar, Ludhiana, Delhi and Simla to the new state of Pakistan. Many were allotted premises in this locality through settlement claims. Gradually publishing houses relocated to Mohan Lal Road, and within a few years the quiet printing lane became a full-fledged book market. Partition destroyed the earlier community but created a new literary economy. Lahore replaced Delhi as the principal centre of Urdu publishing in Pakistan.

Before Partition, Lahore had already been home to important publishing enterprises such as Munshi Gulab Singh’s Punjab Printing Press, the Koh-i-Noor Press, the Naval Kishore-related distribution networks operating in Punjab, and several Hindu-owned book firms dealing in educational literature and religious texts. After Partition, a new generation of Muslim publishers established themselves in the same area. Houses such as Star Book Depot, Khawja Book Depot, Haji Farman Ali & Sons, Pak Publishers, Sheikh Ghulam Ali & Sons, Maktaba-e-Jadeed, Maktaba-e-Danyal, Dar-ul-Isha‘at, Kitab Markaz, Ilmi Kitab Khana and numerous textbook publishers and religious presses turned Urdu Bazaar into the centre of Pakistan’s publishing industry. Many of these firms became nationally influential, printing school curricula, literary works, translations and scholarly research.

In the early 1950s, traders felt that the street required a new name reflecting the new state. After meetings among booksellers the name Urdu Bazaar was adopted, reportedly suggested by the bookseller Moeen ud Din Hazeen Kashmiri, the proprietor of Maktaba-i-Moeen al Adab, a bookshop, established in 1946. The change was symbolic as much as administrative. The previous name commemorated a figure of the pre-Partition era, while Pakistan was defining its identity around the Urdu language, which had been declared the ‘national’ language. The renaming, therefore, marked a cultural and ideological transition from colonial Punjab to a new nation.

The market expanded rapidly. What had once been a narrow lane grew into a dense network of hundreds of shops. Printers, publishers and binding workshops worked side by side, forming a complete publishing ecosystem. In effect, Urdu Bazaar became the educational supply chain of Pakistan. Every examination season, thousands of students filled the street, a ritual familiar to generations of Lahoris.

Its importance became tied to the functioning of the state. The growth of matriculation boards, intermediate examinations and civil service recruitment created enormous demand for solved papers, guess papers, notebooks and guidebooks. Teachers, clerks, madressah students and candidates for the Central Superior Services examinations depended upon the bazaar.

Urdu Bazaar was never only commercial. Poets regularly brought manuscripts to printers here, literary magazines were typeset in its presses and small publishers launched journals from its rooms. Political pamphlets and intellectual debates circulated from these printing houses. Numerous writers first saw their names printed in publications produced in these lanes. The bazaar thus functioned simultaneously as a publishing house, a meeting place and an informal academy — a public sphere of literary discussion.

Geographically the bazaar extends from Circular Road opposite Mori Gate to Chatterjee Road behind Government College University. Its success is explained by location: near major colleges, close to the dense population of the Walled City and easily accessible to students. Physically it connects traditional Lahore with colonial Lahore, symbolically linking the old city with modern education.

Urdu Bazaar Lahore, therefore, cannot be described merely as a book market. It is where Urdu literature found its publishers, where Pakistan’s educational system found its textbooks and where generations of students found their futures. Its earlier identity as Mohan Lal Road, associated with Mohan Lal, son of Rai Har Sukh, and connected with presses such as Koh-i-Noor and the Punjab Printing Press of Gulab Singh, reminds us that Lahore’s intellectual culture was built collaboratively across communities before Partition.

Today when a student purchases a textbook there, he unknowingly participates in a story more than a century old, a story that began with printers, publishers and reading societies and transformed a small printing lane into the literary artery of a nation. Urdu Bazaar is, therefore, not merely a street; it is Lahore’s memory preserved in print. (Writer is grateful to Mr. Talha Shafiq for providing him with factual details).

Published in Dawn, March 8th, 2026