Due to a mechanical issue, when Ahmed Ali’s plane landed in Delhi, he refused to get off. He was on his way to Australia from Karachi when this mishap took place. “I am not getting out,” he said. “You call your damned Chairman. But I’m not putting my foot on that soil which was sacred to me and which was desecrated… They got the entire staff of the airport there to get me out, but I didn’t move… How could I revisit that which was once mine and which was now no longer mine?” The fiasco ended with him reciting Mir Taqi Mir’s verses to the staff: “What matters it, O breeze/ If now has come the spring/ When I have lost them both/ The garden and my nest?”.
During the Partition of British India, Ali was a Visiting Professor in China and was refused entry into India by the Indian ambassador there. He had to fly to Hong Kong, and from there to some friends in Karachi. He never returned to Delhi, dying in Karachi in 1994. “I never opted for Pakistan… The civilisation I belong to – the civilisation of Delhi – came into being through the mingling of two different cultures, Hindu and Muslim. That civilisation flourished for one thousand years until certain people came along and denied that that great mingling had taken place.”
Manan Ahmed Asif’s Disrupted City is a longue durée history of the other city-cum-civilisation that was torn asunder following the Partition. “Lahore,” he writes, “is a city partitioned from its own past and the current inhabitants of Lahore are themselves partitioned from their own pasts.” Through walking, memory and oral histories, he writes a history of Lahore that oozes with people – their stories, narratives, migration, and itinerancy. Time and time again, through anecdotes of what he sees, hears and witnesses every day, he reminds us that this is as much a history of Lahore’s past, as it is of its present. He attempts, in this, to speak of a Lahore before Pakistan, but also of a Lahore in Pakistan. A Lahore that, following 1947, was made into a bastion of Pakistani national identity. But this, he recalls, was a process underpinned by violence and the violent fissures of memory. An erasure that was not simply of the physical landscape of Lahore – the renaming of junctions, demolitions of religious sites, literal erasures off the map of minority presences – but of its people.
The many Lahores of Asif
Central to Asif’s book are Lahore’s denizens – its labourers, women, writers, dissidents, historians, minorities. They are his entry point and his subjects into knowing and walking Lahore. From the banks of the Ravi, where he follows an Afghani refugee chasing djinns, he takes us to Anarkali Bazaar, Qutubuddin Aibak’s purported tomb, Rang Mahal, Christian cemeteries (now in disrepair), Data Darbar, Miyan Mir’s shrine, Shalimar Gardens. In taking us on this walk, he defies chronology – you are, like the walker, left wandering. Reading two chapters back to back, you may wonder how you leapt a hundred years. But as you read on, you come to understand that that is what it is like to walk in Lahore.
The Lahore of Asif is a palimpsest. It defies easy categorisation. Take for instance the shrine of Madho Lal Hussain. It marks the site where Shah Hussain, a sufi, was buried with Madho Lal, a Brahmin boy who he fell in love with. For centuries, it served as a pilgrimage site for Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs. It was also the place where Mela Chiraghan, Lahore’s most important public procession would begin. In another chapter, he recounts how this site is now heavily policed. The place which was earlier one of transcendence, where people, despite their gender, age or religion, would come together, was now segregated and subject to curfews. But to know this, you would have to read back and across. His book, to that end, is not one where you start reading a chapter and come out with absolute knowledge on the subject, but that often gives a teaser, coming back to its fuller history later.
It is a circular Lahore. Both temporally and spatially, he moves across its many places on foot. Knowingly or unknowingly, he follows in the footsteps (literally) of Maulvi Nur Ahmed Chishti Lahori’s history, where the history of Lahore begins with the shrine of Madho Lal Hussain (1599). The “spiral” of Lahore cuts across conventional tellings of the city, which invariably begin at the earliest reference to it. Both Lahori and Asif break away from this pattern by making a pattern of their own, which is how the city is known and narrated. In academic texts, this is a rather unique way of knowing a place and introduces its readers to vectors – social, political, intellectual, cultural – which have shaped the city of now. But it is also not just the now which is a focus of Asif, it is also the civilisation of Lahore and what it contains. Somehow, he is able to narrate these histories of Lahore’s pasts without romanticising it or the marginalised masses that have made it.
Yet these pasts are also connected to its present – the policing, the state’s crackdowns on anything un-Islamic and the making of a nation. Across chapters, in great detail, he highlights the political exigencies that have made the post-1947 Lahore into what it is. He writes of the suicide bombings, the Finality of Prophethood laws, the dictatorship of Zia ul-Haq, the Jamaat-i-Islami. He associates these laws with the literary output of the city post-Partition. The works of Abdul Hameed, Muhammad Baqir, Muhammad Tufail, Fazlur Rahman, IH Qureshi, SM Ikram and Syed Rais Ahmad Jafri rewrote Pakistan, and Lahore’s history. From a composite culture defined by syncretism, Lahore is remade into a city of Islam. This is linked to attacks on minorities – Ahmadis, Hindus, Sikhs. Their histories and lives are written out of Lahore’s into having alien origins, of people who were outside the nation.
He contrasts this with writers like Saadat Hasan Manto, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Ismat Chughtai, and Qurratulain Hyder who wrestled with this national identity that was written over the blood of Partition. Resistance, he comes to realise, is not unknown to Lahore. It existed in historical figures who were now erased – Bhagat Singh, Har Dayal and the Ghadar Movement. It existed in the progressive reading circles, feminist and communist movements, pulp fiction, and most of all, in the people.
Walking in a postcolonialised city
The first time I travelled to London, I was deeply underwhelmed. Why was everything so proper, so regulated? This is not the idea of a city I had ever encountered. Cities are rowdy, unseemly creatures, where children play cricket on random streets, hawkers sell items, and shoppers bargain on the streets. It was only when I travelled to and walked in Tangier, that I felt a sense of belonging. The streets have life here, I thought to myself.
Reading Disrupted City, I came to realise that this was a feature of the postcolonised city, and I felt respite in the feeling of alienation that Asif also felt. As he saw Lahore in Cairo, Mexico City and Kampala, I came to see Delhi in Tangier. What an odd sense of belonging in a context that was by no means mine; yet it was. The distinct elements of life around colonial-era architecture had to do with this. As did the reclamation of institutions that were meant to dominate. The Moroccan coffee shop was another site – seeing their pervasiveness on every corner and street, dominated by men, I was reminded of Sa’adat Hassan Manto’s Jao Hanif Jao, where the tea house is a site to discuss Kashmir’s condition. I also thought of the Indian Coffee Houses in Delhi, Kolkata and Lahore, which were hotspots for anticolonial intellectuals and revolutionaries, no less than Manto and Faiz themselves. These counter-histories and legacies animated me as I walked through Morocco.
By outlining these anticolonial histories, as well as the longer histories that predated colonialism, while tying these into the present of Lahore, Asif deftly reclaims the postcolonised city. The space of the postcolonised city, especially those like Delhi, Tangier, Lahore, Cairo, Kolkata, Damascus, are populated by these complexities. He makes clear that to know the city, one must be aware of all these dynamics that have shaped it. This stands in contrast to the violence of erasure and forgetting that postcolonised states have often undertaken to make these cities in the image of the nation. Disrupted City is then an ode to a city knowable but not known, but in whose knowing lies the possibility of unmaking the exclusionary project of modern nationalism.
Disrupted City: Walking the Pathways of Memory and History in Lahore, Manan Ahmed Asif, The New Press.
