Many years ago, while working on a social history of sport, I came across some news reports of a Test match played in Lahore in 1955. The cricket itself was boring in the extreme. It was one of five draws in a five-match series between India and Pakistan, with runs scored at less than two an over. What was far more interesting was the social context. For this was the first time since 1947 that the city of Lahore had been allowed to recapture its multi-cultural past. As many as 10,000 tickets for the Test were set aside for citizens of India, who came across the Wagah border every morning and returned to Amritsar the same night. This constituted what one eyewitness termed “the biggest mass migration across the frontier since Partition”.

The Test began on January 29, 1955. The next day, the Dawn newspaper spoke of how, as the turnstiles opened, “Ladies, Sikhs, Hindus and the local population waited patiently and decently for their turn in the serpentine queue lines running two to three furlongs in length sometimes even more. The city itself was in a gay holiday mood. The early morning bustle was reminiscent of the Shalimar Mela, excepting that the composition of the crowd was of a higher order.”

The report continued: “Sikhs were particularly conspicuous and were the centre of attraction wherever they went. They were recipients of unsolicited greetings and unexpected welcome. Some of them even cried when they embraced their old friends in the city.”

The report published by Dawn was anonymous, yet the writer was evidently a Pakistani Muslim based in Lahore. His sentiments were echoed by a Hindu journalist from distant Madras, himself untouched by the horrors of Partition, who commented that “great fraternisation among the Pakistanis and the Indians was witnessed everywhere during the Test match days”.

I was reminded of those yellowing news reports when reading Manan Ahmed Asif’s recent book, Disrupted City: Walking the Pathways of Memory and History in Lahore. The author grew up in Lahore, leaving it 30 years ago to study and work overseas. However, he returns to his hometown often, and aims in this book “to tell the history of this city without being held hostage to the nation-state that inherits it”. In narrating this history, he combines personal memories with scholarly excavations of texts in Persian, Urdu, Punjabi and even Arabic.

Asif notes, early in the narrative, that “much of the diversity and multitude of the pre-1947 Lahore ended with the mass exodus of the city’s Hindu and Sikh inhabitants and the influx of [Muslim] refugees from the parts of Punjab now governed by India...” He adds: “After that moment of disruption, it became a city in exile from its own past.”

Cricket figures only fleetingly in Asif’s book, and that Lahore Test of 1955 not at all. Yet his book provides clues to that intriguing reference to the crowd at the cricket match resembling that of the Shalimar Mela, albeit of a “higher order”. The Shalimar Mela, also known as Mela Chiraghan, was once Lahore’s major festival. It celebrated the life and legacy of a 16th-century Sufi saint named Shah Hussain, who, writes Asif in his book, “decried those who were beholden to orthodoxy, consumed wine and intoxicants, sang, danced ecstatically, and often went unclothed”.

Shah Hussain’s closest companion, and probable lover, was a young Hindu man, and the shrine where they were both buried became “the site of pilgrimage for Hindus, Muslims, and Sikh as well as an annual festival of lights that would remain the most important public procession in Lahore for hundreds of years”. After Partition, the festival lost its pluralistic character, which observers nostalgically recalled when viewing the gathering at the Lahore Test of 1955.

Manan Asif’s book restores, to our understanding of his hometown, rich elements of its multi-layered, multi-religious, and multi-lingual past. He provides crisp portraits of characters associated with the city, such as the courtesan, Anarkali, the saint and mystic, Data Ganj Baksh, the warrior-chief, Ranjit Singh, and many others. The sketches are informative and nuanced, with one exception, that of Rudyard Kipling, whom the author portrays as a jaundiced imperialist. That Kipling undoubtedly became in later life; on the other hand, the descriptions of the Lahore of his youth, in his novel, Kim, especially, are vivid, empathetic, and deeply insightful about the lives and struggles of ordinary folk.

From Asif’s Disrupted City, we get a sharp sense of Lahore’s architectural heritage, with accounts of buildings large and social, famous as well as obscure, woven into the narrative. Now extinct or abandoned temples and gurdwaras figure alongside still active mosques, showing that, in a forgotten past, “how much Lahore’s skyline was shaped by Hindu and Sikh holy places”. In another chapter, Asif demonstrates that, before 1947, much of Lahore’s economic life was shaped by Hindu and Sikh enterprise.

In an evocative scene, Asif writes of how, growing up in the increasingly Islamicised Lahore of the 1970s and 1980s, on his walk home from school, he would often pass an old house on whose ledge were written some faded words in Devanagari characters. “For many months,” he recalls, “I passed the gate with only a cursory glance at the script. Though no one had said it, I knew that lingering in front of the gate was not a good idea. I could not read (nor learn how to read) Devanagari in Lahore. I knew that the Devanagari script was ‘Hindu’, and that a ‘Hindu’ was a person who was trying to stab me in the back (per my social science textbook).”

Reading these lines, I began thinking, and worrying, about Hindu children in a Hindutva raj being force-fed a distorted, perverted understanding of their past and their present. (Indeed, for some decades now, Urdu has been portrayed as an exclusively “Muslim” language, notwithstanding the great contributions to its literary canon by Hindu and Sikh (and atheistic) writers.)

The presentation of India as an essentially “Hindu” country has been furthered in history and social science textbooks prescribed by governments run by the BJP. This majoritarian worldview is amplified by Hindutva social media outlets, such that Hindus of all ages are urged to distrust Muslims of all kinds.

At another place in his book, Asif speaks of how once popular festivals such as Mela Chiraghan and Basant were banished from the collective life of Lahoris because they conflicted with the tenets of the Wahabi-ised Islam promoted by the military dictator, Zia-ul-Haq. In the Pakistan of the 1980s and beyond, “joy, spontaneity and collectiveness would become suspicious activities even as righteous, wounded anger, and bile would form the basis of commemorative acts”. It appears that a Hinduised India is closely emulating Pakistan’s example, by replacing collective joy and spontaneity with sectarian bile and vengeful anger.

The Islamic Republic of Pakistan has sought assiduously to erase signs of Hindu and Sikh influence from Lahore’s past. While Hindutvavadis profess to hate Pakistan, in their own efforts at historical erasure, they mimic their adversaries. They would like the cities and towns of northern India to be reshaped, culturally as well as architecturally, in ways that any Islamic influence is removed entirely.

They want us to forget that the past of northern India was not merely or even mostly about the political subjection of non-Muslims – rather, it was also about extraordinary and enduring contributions to society by writers, artists, musicians and artisans who happened to be Muslims by faith. This constituted an indispensable part of our shared, inclusive, pluralistic Indian heritage, which those who oppose Hindutva must avow and affirm.

Manan Ahmad Asif’s book will, one hopes, be widely read in Pakistan and be published in Urdu and Punjabi translation too. It is a fine history of a great if troubled city. In it might lie lessons for those of us who live on this side of the border as well.

This article first appeared in The Telegraph.

Ramachandra Guha’s new book, Speaking with Nature: The Origins of Indian Environmentalism, is now in stores. His email address is ramachandraguha@yahoo.in.