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| 01/08/2002 |
| LAHORE – WHERE FOOD IS KING |
UNPUBLISHED. Written for BELOVED CITY: Writings on Lahore, edited by Bapsi Sidhwa, (OUP,2005), but not published. Replaced by the Introduction to Lahore Illustrated Views of 19th century.]
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| Lahore is a city in which a Mughal emperor was born, another died, a third built a magnificent mosque and a fourth made his capital. The latter - the Mughal emperor Akbar – declared it the centre of his nascent empire in 1586 and ruled from it for twelve years until 1598; his son Jahangir willed to be buried there and was interred in a garden at Shahdara on the west bank of the River Ravi; Akbar’s grandson Prince Khurram (later Shah Jahan) was born in its Citadel in 1592; and his great-grandson Aurangzeb commissioned the magnificent mosque that was completed for him by his Master of Ordnance in 1674. Despite these imperial connections, though, Lahore has always remained a city of provincial proportions, compressed physically by the walls of its old city. |
| Within those constricting walls, for centuries the citizens of Lahore continued to be born, live their lives, worship their own gods, and die, after which they would be carried out of the city, through one of its twelve gates, and either buried or cremated in the open plains beyond. Until the eighteenth century, whatever expansion took place within the old city necessarily had to be vertical. Upper storeys would be added to the roofs of havelis, stacked higher and higher, leaning against their neighbours for support, until the dwellings resembled a man-made honeycomb stood upright, and the city an industrious hive inhabited by humans, each performing a function needed by society. |
| Gradually, as the level of security in the areas surrounding Lahore improved, particularly during the reign of the Sikh maharaja Ranjit Singh who ruled from 1799 to 1839, and the period of British control after the annexation of the Punjab in 1849 until 1947, its citizens ventured tentatively beyond the protective walls of the old city in the direction of Shalimar Gardens on the eastern road to Delhi or southwards towards Multan. They built more commodious houses on sites that had once been pleasure gardens of Mughal nobles or in the ample grounds surrounding derelict tombs. ‘Lahore is a great graveyard,’ the Canadian cleric Alfred William Stratton wrote in December 1899. ‘The house in which I live is one of the few beneath which none lie buried. One might also say that every self-respecting resident has a tomb in his garden.’ |
| Nowhere was this irreverence more obvious than during the period of Sikh governance of Lahore and British rule. Aurangzeb’s majestic mosque capable of accommodating tens of thousands of worshippers at least five times a day saw duty as a military ammunition dump; the regal Diwan-i-Am or Hall of Public Audience in the Lahore Fort was walled in and used as an armoury and subsequently as a hospital; the octagonal tomb of Jahangir’s favourite, Anarkali, who had been entombed alive by Akbar was forcibly converted into St James’s Church, the enameled Gulabi Bagh gateway denigrated into a police outpost, and the sombre tomb of Muhammad Qasim Khan (a noble of Akbar’s reign) was reincarnated as the vaulted dining room of the province’s social epicenter, the new Government House. |
| Once having broken out of its ancient mould, Lahore spread rapidly, swallowing gardens and tombs, hamlets and hunting preserves, digesting them and assimilating them into its urban mass. The broad Mall (now the Shahrah-i-Quaid-e-Azam) could be seen as a spinal cord, connecting the nerve endings of the city. At one extremity, closer to the Fort, the Lower Mall contained the civilian administrative hub of Lahore – the Secretariat offices of the provincial government; the Town Hall, the seat of mayoral authority; the Lower Magistrates Court, the bench of judicial authority – while at the other the Upper Mall connected with the military Cantonment. The shift from the unhealthy grounds in Anarkali (later the Lower Mall) to what was then the outskirts of Lahore (now its Cantonment) may or may not have occurred as tradition narrates, but legend has it that the site for the Cantonment was chosen arbitrarily by Sir Charles Napier, who, on being asked where the new Cantonment should be, spurred his horse and rode until where the horse stopped, exhausted, at which Napier declared: This shall be the site. Town planners have never stopped wishing they had such flair or such courage or such a horse. |
| Even as late as the 1860s, one can trace in a survey map of that time stretches of open land on either side of the Mall, These were later occupied by Aitchison College which received an allotment of over 170 acres for an initial enrolment of 22 schoolboys, and directly opposite to it, an equally large area of 192 acres for the Gazetted Officers Residences (now known as GOR I). The Naulakha, a colony inhabited by primarily Christian railway employees, near the Railway Station commandeered a substantial coverage of prime land. Apart from having one of the largest railway manufacturing complexes in the region, it boasted also of having more churches and chapels per square mile than the Vatican. |
| The fertile land on Jail Road cultivated by the Salvation Army Dairy Farm became the Kinnaird College for Women; ten empty acres christened Donaldtown and then renamed Charing Cross became a grassy quadrangle containing a bronze statue of an enthroned Queen Victoria seated under a marble cupola (the cupola remains, the statue has been relegated to the Lahore Museum, and Charing Cross has been renamed Faisal Square). Looking up to the queen were the complimentary façades of the Freemason’s Hall and opposite the ShahDin building (now a bank), built in the first year of the Great War. Open fields were shaped oval into Lahore’s Racecourse, within screaming distance of the Jail and the Mental Hospital. (When racing was banished to the outskirts of Lahore, the new track was relocated perhaps subconsciously next to the Kot Lakhpat Jail). And along the canal, that originates in India and now irrigates a Pakistani Punjab, the mango orchards have since become housing colonies for the outwardly mobile. Within reach but a half-hour ride away from the main city, stands Model Town – a showpiece as its name implied of urban, inter-religious communal living established in the 1920s with its own mosque, temple and gurdwara. It has recently experienced a revival that has attracted the unwelcome interest of property vivisectionists. |
| The post-Independence expansion of Lahore has witnessed the creation of new areas like Gulberg, Allama Iqbal Town, Johar Town, and most recently the Defence Housing Authority off Walton Road. Families that once lived in the old city, as a sign of their new affluence, shifted to more modern houses in these areas. These migrants included, as one society lady discovered about her neighbours, enterprising dancing girls one of whom claimed archly that she while she resided now in Gulberg, her office was still in Hira Mandi – the red-light area of Lahore. |
| In the last decade or so, as if to demonstrate an even higher step up the slippery ladder of prosperity, some Lahoris have begun to reverse the exodus, by acquiring worn-down havelis in the old city at exorbitant prices, as venues for the annual basant parties that are held in Lahore to herald the advent of spring. For the average Lahori, though, the avenues for entertainment are narrow and the options limited. Perhaps inevitably, if the Punjab is the granary of the country, Lahore must be its dining table. An Italian proverb contends that the bed is the poor man’s opera. To any Lahori, rich or poor, food is akin to a symphony concert. In the evenings, Lahore becomes one gigantic Food Street, host to any of its 6 million or so citizens. The pre-1947 communities of Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Parsees, Roman Catholics, Scottish Presbyterians and Seventh Day Adventists have been completely outnumbered if not replaced by Muslims, and in this uni-theistic world, the new religion is Food. Shrines to it can be found in almost every street and at every roundabout or corner, thronged by devotees in various attitudes of supplication. |
| Restaurants now find it profitable to run a number of shifts where once they closed their shutters by 9.00 p.m. as no self-respecting Lahori stayed out after that time. An increasingly popular innovation that bridges the empty hours between lunch and dinner is High Afternoon Tea, in reality a full three course meal, with the difference that all the courses are served simultaneously, just as a Lahori breakfast is now at par – pound for pound, a pound gained for every pound eaten - with a siesta-inducing lunch or a stupor-inviting dinner. Watching ravenous Lahoris in a crowded restaurant once, a gastronome prophesied that although the heart transplant was done in Johannesburg, Lahore would be the place where the first successful transplant of a human stomach would be perfected. |
| The public sector and the private sector are the two shoulders upon which the populace of Lahore depends, with its weight gradually shifting from the former to the latter. Its future citizens born in Government hospitals and in cleaner private maternity clinic; they are taught sparingly in Government schools, strictly in convent schools, speedily in private schools, monotonously in madrassahs, in spare time at home or in the streets by experience itself. They vie for places in colleges and universities, of which now privately managed ones outnumber government owned ones. And when they step into overcrowded market to look for jobs, they are confronted by the reality that Lahore has still not shaken off its provincial subservience. In the twenty-first century, as it did five hundred years earlier, Lahore still plays second fiddle to somewhere else. Then it was imperial Delhi. Today it is Pakistan’s commercial capital – Karachi, or its political capital Islamabad. |
| In Lahore, the living and the dead continue to coexist as neighbours. While few citizens have the clout anymore to be buried in their family havelis or in their front or back lawns or to commission mausoleums, graveyards can still be found in residential areas, silent unobtrusive pockets of open, occupied space. The largest and certainly the most densely populated is the necropolis of Miani Sahib, Lahore’s parallel to Cairo’s City of the Dead, where the living, having the advantage of being alive, can encroach with impunity and therefore encroach inch their way over hastily-levelled ground. The hazards of such indiscriminate, insensitive encroachment were illustrated dramatically one year when a water main that run through the Miani sahib graveyard burst, its gushing water forcing the corpses out of their graves in an untimely resurrection. |
| Despite such occasional traumas, Lahoris continue like the Mughals to enjoy the distinction of being born in Lahore. Each year more of them build their homes in Lahore, live and work in Lahore, worship in their local mosques or on Eid day cross the city to congregate en masse for a communal thanksgiving in Aurangzeb’s mosque, and in time to die in Lahore. To them, it is more than the law of nature; it is a manifestation of divine will. It must be God’s will, for had God intended otherwise and wanted Lahoris to have a better place to be born in, to live in or to die in, he would never have created Lahore. |
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| 01 August 2002 |
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