The Lahore LitFest 2026 featured heroes, hieroglyphics,  and camel humps.

It opened on 6 February with a tribute to Alexander the Great (356-323 BCE). By the age of 25, Alexander was the acknowledged ruler over a million miles of territory - from Greece across Egypt to the banks of the Indus. He became richer than all his contemporaries. He conquered without threats or tariffs or trumpeting. He made his nation great again – preempting Donald Trump and Elon Musk.   

At LLF 2026, however, Alexander had to fight for attention against the Ptolemies, the emperor Aurangzeb, Vasco de Gama, Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Irish freedom fighters, and our own hero - the late Prof Dr. Bashir Ahmad, the pioneer of neurosurgery in Pakistan.

Back-to-back Litfests across Pakistan inevitably draw upon a table d'hôte of panellists. Some are tempted to recycle their speeches or presentations on the assumption that audiences in different cities do not watch YouTube or read press coverage.

This year’s LLF  featured popular writers like Mohsin Hamid and Kamila Shamsie and newcomers like Maha Phillips and Sam Dalrymple (son of William Dalrymple). The Dalrymples are to us in the subcontinent what the Trevelyan family was to British literary history.

Sam Dalrymple’s recent book on Five Partitions reminded us Lahoris of the lasting effect of Punjab’s partition in 1947. There were no invitees from India - our ‘distant neighbour’ which lies less than 25 kilometers to our east. True, the film director/screen writer Deepa Mehta came. Her films - Fire (1996), Earth (1998) and Water (2005) – have a ready audience on both sides of Wagah border. But Deepa is now a Canadian national; her India is at one remove.

Lyce Doucet, also a Canadian, is the BBC's Chief International Correspondent. She spoke about our other neighbour – Afghanistan. An accomplished presenter, she discussed her book The Finest Hotel in Kabul: A People's History of Afghanistan (2025).

It is an affectionate, foreshortened history of Afghanistan, using the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul as a setting. The once opulent hotel opened in 1969. Over years, it managed to survive U.S.S.R. occupation, the retaliatory U.S. invasion, bloody internecine coups, and finally the deadening impact of the Taliban.

Lyce draws upon the recollections and experiences of its long-suffering staff – among them the septuagenarian housekeeper Hazrat and Abida (the hotel’s first female chef).  Her book reminded many of the 1951 film Hotel Sahara, a farce set in World War II, when a hotel finds itself trapped between the warring Italian, British, French, German and finally the American armies. The hotel owner juggles his political allegiance according to whoever is in occupation.

Sessions on sports, theatre, women’s rights, muslin, nostalgia, and Cordoba leavened the three day menu. It would be unfair to identify those which held more appeal.  

Lahore has as many tombs as Egypt. Those with a classical bent of mind saw Dr. Salima Ikram resurrect Ancient Egyptology. Attracted to the subject from the age of eight (which of us wasn’t?), she is now professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo and an active archaeologist. She dazzled the audience with an oral reading of arcane hieroglyphics.

Her book Choice Cuts: Meat Production in Ancient Egypt (1995) might have been difficult for Lahoris to digest. A lively session on spices compensated. It dealt with the international trade in spices throughout history – as a condiment, a preservative, and all too often as a weapon between empires (especially the Portuguese and Spanish). Who knew, for instance, that the emperor of spices is black pepper or that queen of spices is the modest cardamom?    

Anissa Helou, an authority on Middle Eastern cuisine, regards Lahore as her second kitchen. She is a delight to listen to. She flavours her narration with appealing anecdotes. She will cook anything edible – even camel humps.

Her recipe calls for the hump of a young camel. (The meat of mature camels is too stringy.) As a marinade she recommends a mixture of ‘fragrant saffron, rosewater, and b’zar (Arabian spices like cumin, coriander, cloves, cardamom’. The camel hump needs to be slow-roasted until golden and crisp. The fat stored in the hump tenderises the underlying meat.

If roasted camel hump is on the far side of gluttony, read this description from one of A.R. Khatoon’s short stories, translated as The Three Princesses (2025). In it, the princess Mahrukh’s father is offered a beautiful white horse. It was perfect, except that instead of oats, it had to be fed ‘almonds, pistachios, walnuts, and raisins. Instead of grass, it eats only saffron and drinks only milk’. And like Alexander’s Bucephalus, it refused to be ridden.

The weekend saw also a revival of the kite-flying festival of Basant. Lahore has been reborn. 

F. S. AIJAZUDDIN

[DAWN, 12 Feb. 2026]