History has scarred South Asian cities in very concrete ways. The most well known of these have been carrying the burdens of colonisation and communalism, and, after independence, a rewriting of their histories that are governed by ideologies of nationalism. Lahore, in Pakistan, is one such city. In his book Disrupted City: Walking the Pathways of Memory and History in Lahore, historian Manan Ahmed Asif shows one evocative way to attempt urban history and narrative for South Asian cities. His philosophizing of Lahore involves an unpacking of “self-city-citizen triad caught in the vortex between memory and history”. Methodologically speaking, it involves walking the city but also putting together the city’s history through a rich archive of forgotten books that describe what the city was like at different points in time. In the process, Manan puts together images of what the city is along with what the city was and could have been. It’s an account as much of the forgotten as it is of the surviving.
The extent of Manan’s reading can be fathomed with a few examples and the moments they stand for in the city’s history and lived experience provide a glimpse. An early trace of the city’s existence is associated with the Ramayana, according to which, Rama’s son Lava founded Lahore. But in the post-Partition Lahore, this memory or origin myth came to be supplanted with another: Lahore was founded by outsider Muslim heroes such as Muhammed bin Qasim (who invaded Sindh around 711 CE, Mahmud Ghazni (who invaded India about three centuries later), Qutbuddin Aibak (the general of the Ghurid Empire who invaded the region again roughly a hundred years later and also went on to turn it into his own kingdom), Malik Ayaz (Governor of Lahore appointed by Ghazni). These new narratives were attempts “to create a new righteous past”, connecting the city (and Pakistan) with Arabia. Manan juxtaposes such stories to show the difference between the city that is now and the city that is forgotten but, more importantly, he shows that the task of reading, like walking, about the city involves paying attention to stories of survival. The point about the contrast between the two origin stories is that the “continued memory of this origin widens the narrow tunnel of history toward a Muslim Lahore.” The fact that it survives encourages one to keep looking.
Lahore was very dear to Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism. He was born just a few miles away. Some of his verses record Babur’s destruction of Lahore through images such as “a slaughter like a powerful tiger attacking a flock of sheep, being laid to waste and defiled by dogs, a land made so bereft that no one is left even to pay attention to the dead.” But this is not how the city and its citizens engage with Lahore’s ties with Sikhism. Sikh Emperor Raja Ranjit Singh’s conquest of the city in 1799 has been turned into an anti-Sikh narrative which shows Singh as a villain for laying waste to the city. But while Manan writes that not much of Nanak survives in Lahore, he also brings to light another way of paying attention to what is being forgotten: there still exists the spot where Nanak lived when he visited the city, wells and ponds associated with him, the Data Darbar, the structure called Pehli Patshahi (First Abode) of Guru Nanak built probably by Ranjit Singh:
There are no signs marking the site; the only visitors it draws come from the surrounding villages. The nearby tree branches are covered in threads and strips of fabric, the remnants of seekers and believers. A few other sites remain visibly attached to the history of Sikhism or Sikh rule: the birthplace of Guru Arjun, the fifth Guru, or the magnificent Samadhi of Ranjit Singh himself, next to the Badshahi Mosque in the heart of the city. Elsewhere in Lahore, Nanak is sometimes present in shop names, and there used to be a street named after him, but it too has vanished.
This is a way of remembering that is mindful of what is forgotten.Maulvi Nur Ahmad Chishti Lahori (1829–67) was among the native scholars conscripted by the British government for writing about the city. His Yadgar-e Chishti (Chishti’s Memorial) and Tahqiqat-e Chishti (Chisti’s Researches) provide glimpses of 19th-century Lahore that had different religious communities (Hindu, Jain, Sikh, Shia, Sunni and so on) living in the city, making it a sort of cosmopolis but also falling apart because of the British divide-and-conquer policy. His act of recording the story of Madho Lal Hussain, the Sufi saint who fell in love with a Brahmin boy (recently fictionalised by Sarbpreet Singh), and the ways in which Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim ethos and history in the city were connected are examples Manan draws attention to for showing different aspects of the changing narrative of Lahore. The post-Partition treatment of Chisti’s work has violated its integrity: the parts of his work dealing with Sikhism and Hinduism are gathered and clubbed as the “non-Muslim” parts of the book and his criticism of the religious group following Abdul Wahab, founder of the Wahabi movement, is censored. One of the other moments from the British phase of Lahore’s history Manan delves into is that of its publishing history. Lahore was the print capital of Urdu publishing, home to anti-colonial publishing but also to historical romances that narrated the lives of the “heroes” such as Muhammad bin Qasim into didactic stories that inform contemporary orthodoxy in the country in general.
But these are not merely archival sources for Manan. These are also experiences and memories that he keeps going back to throughout the book. Qasim, the hero, shows up in Manan’s life too through a serialized novel published in an Urdu magazine. The story has Salahuddin Ayubi, Mahmud Ghaznavi, and Muhammad bin Qasim, the “heroes of Islam” come back to the Earth to see what the Muslims were up to. They get sent to Lahore where they come across, among other things, the city’s “wayward youth”. The author satirizes the jeans-wearing generation as feminized; the book impacted Pakistani boys and informed the disciplining practices of parents. Manan recollects:
Inayatullah portrays the Muslim hero Qasim as left wondering if, had he had such a “feminized” youth in his army, he would have been able to win even a single battle. My request for money to buy blue jeans was rejected, and the resulting “conflict” left a series of lingering questions in my mind, foremost among them: Why was Muhammad bin Qasim, some Syrian from the eighth century, ruling my daily life in Lahore?
Thus, the “memory” in the subtitle of Manan’s book is about a personal memory as much as it is about the city’s memory. This is a scholarship that is rooted in experience, not detached or objective, but engaged and evocatively written. The book opens and closes with a dirge from a poem, one of the many literary sources Manan evokes in his story:
This was a city of red roses
a city of fertile gardens
a city of tall trees
a city like gold and silver
a city like diamonds and pearls
a city of red rubies
A city of shiny indigo
a city of beautiful indigo
in the burning noon of this city
in the sharp taste of this city
in the fast heat of this city
the blue of the eye has melted
the indigo of the city has dissolved
the eyes of the city are now at a boil.
The poem also captures an aspect of the title of the book: “Disrupted City” comes from the Persian genre shahr ashob of poetry, literally “city, disrupted”. Written in the form of a series of vignettes about the beauty of the city and its inhabitants, the form “disrupts the interiority of the poet.” Manan reinvents the form to speak of Lahore that is going to be a model for other postcolonial cities because these are the locations from which narratives of entire nations are being built:
I learned that the making of the nation-state of Pakistan was a process initiated and embedded in the landscape of Lahore. I learned that those who live in, and write about, Lahore hold disparate images of the city in their mind. It is as if the city exists simultaneously in parallel realities. I learned that Lahore is a city partitioned from its own past and the current inhabitants of Lahore are themselves partitioned from their own pasts … There are ghost Lahores in Amritsar and Delhi and Mumbai and Accra. There are ghosts from Amritsar, Delhi, Bombay, Lucknow, Hyderabad in Lahore. I learned that to write the postcolonized city, I need to hear the many different voices of those who live and struggle in the city.
The many voices Manan refers to are the countless books and archival materials that he refers to. While they are important for Lahore’s stories to emerge, they also mark a turn of some sorts in his own work as a historian. While his Chachnama book and the book on a history of Hindustan are a reading version of monogamy in that these two of his books are based on readings of one historical text each, Disrupted City is a universe of names, writers, and characters of innumerable books. One wishes for more of such creative disruptions to writers’ expression of city love.