‘Disrupted City’: Reading a Lahore of the imagination, flesh and blood, a city exiled from itself

Lahore, Manan Ahmed Asif tells us in Disrupted City, his magnificent account of the city, has always been kind to him. In this book, he repays that debt through an achingly beautiful rendition, at once celebratory and wistful, of the many lives of Lahore. Asif’s Lahore is conjured from walking the city for countless hours and from reading a staggering number of literary, historical, administrative, and theological texts, in English, Arabic, Persian, Punjabi, and Urdu, in which the city finds mention, whether as protagonist or spectral presence. The city of ten or 11 million people has “no official archive” nor a museum that preserves a record of its long history. Lahore is also “a city in exile from itself”, in which a monocultural identity forced on it by the Pakistani nation-state sits agonistically with its richly diverse, multi-layered and palimpsested reality.

It is into this vast, ungraspable world, which he left more than 30 years ago, that Asif immerses himself. In a tour de force that combines history, memoir, and literary rumination, he explores how Lahore has been made and remade through violence, migration, politics, its diverse communities, and the ebbs and flows of time. Asif writes with a gorgeous immediacy, inviting the reader to walk the city with him, to delve into its archives, to wander back and forth across time in his meditations on its past and present, to revel in its poetic and literary invocations as well as its prosaic manifestations of everyday life.

Glimpses of Lahore

A professor of History at Columbia University, Asif is an acclaimed scholar and author of two seminal monographs, including the field-redefining The Loss of Hindustan: The Invention of India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020). Earlier this year, on a crisp winter morning in New York’s West Village, he spoke to me over coffee about the genesis of Disrupted City. Asif began writing the book some 15 years ago in Berlin, where he lived and taught for a while. “Distance,” he observed, “is the condition for the expression of memory.” One of the many perspectives through which Asif approaches Lahore is that of the émigré, but one who knows the city intimately, as he walks Lahore’s streets and neighbourhoods, visits its monuments, speaks to its inhabitants, and scours its literary and historical accounts. Asif finds glimpses of Lahore in a sea of texts, including Kalidasa’s Meghaduta but most evocatively in the shahr ashob, a Persian poetic form that Asif translates as “city disrupted”, from which the book gets its title.

He takes us to Rang Mahal, the neighbourhood his family considers its home within the city, where they were “from” even though they did not reside there. We visit the bazaar of Anarkali and Anarkali’s tomb, though the identity of the person buried there remains a mystery; the Data Darbar, abiding since the early 12th century, named for Data Ganj Baksh, the patron saint of Lahore; the shrine of Miyan Mir, the Sufi whose life is detailed in Dara Shikoh’s Sakinat ul Ailiya; and the glorious Shalimar Mughal gardens built by Shah Jahan. The secular and sacral architecture of the city is also a testament to survival, of a city that has endured through violence. Rang Mahal is ground zero for Lahore itself, persisting through the capture of the city at the hands of Mahmud Ghaznavi and flourishing during its subsequent resurrection under Ayaz, Mahmud’s lover. Asif here also recounts the destruction of Lahore by Babur as chronicled by Guru Nanak, the Sikh guru’s love for the city smothered in memory by the ravages wrought upon Lahore in the course of the 40-year rule of Ranjit Singh.

As a historian, Asif seeks to write an account of Lahore that does not take the colonial gaze – “the jaundiced eye of Kipling seeing corpses of Lahoris everywhere” – as its point of departure but has to inevitably negotiate the forms of colonial knowledge that still dictate historical inquiry in our present. Delving into texts written over a millennium, Asif paints a series of vignettes about the city by drawing on a wide range of sources, including brief references about Lahore from the 11th century, visions of the city in Persian and Arabic treatises, histories of the cities of Hindustan, works commissioned by colonial authorities, and the Tahiqat-e-Chishti, an encyclopedic work on Lahore published in 1924, which detail the lives of its many communities.

A changing Lahore

Between 1849 and 1947, Lahore was radically refashioned under British rule, transformed into a site of pedagogical and modernising initiatives informed by the civilising mission of colonialism. After 1947, the city was also central to the official nationalist project of defining Pakistani identity by writing the history of Pakistan as harmoniously aligned with the history and spirit of Islam. Asif digs up traces of the city’s Hindu pasts that have barely survived this state-mandated erasure: the space once inhabited by a pond or temple, a few remaining letters from signs in Devnagari scrubbed from the surfaces of the city, memories of a well-known shop once owned by a Hindu that only a few elderly inhabitants of a neighborhood can recall. He juxtaposes nationalistic historical accounts of bureaucrats of the independent nation-state with the oeuvre of fiercely independent contrarian voices like Dr Mubarak Ali, a redoubtable self-published historian whose work represents a damning critique of the militarist authoritarianism of the Pakistani state.

In the realms of memory, Asif finds many Lahores. There is a Lahore named after Lava, the son of Ram and Sita. There is the city of diverse caste groups, such as the Jats and the Ara’in. There is the Lahore of Qurratulain Haider, which, as Asif notes, constitutes a “counter-history” to the narrative proffered by the Pakistani state. Lahore, after all, is the centre of “commemorative remembering”, a statist initiative that is simultaneously an exercise of amnesia, responsible for obliterating the syncretic, composite cultural past of the city. He writes movingly of the devastation and brutality of Partition, its toll on the city’s inhabitants, its destruction of the collective memory of shared communal life, and its unresolved trauma that haunts Lahore as much as it does so many places and people in India.

Asif’s travels on the streets of Lahore and the bylanes of memory are an alternate rendering of all that has been ignored, stifled, and lost in the nationalist chokehold on the city’s past. “Walking in Lahore is a transgressive act if you are not from the working class, the poor, or the unhoused”, he notes. That elemental act of defiance provides the basis for Asif’s subversive wielding of his historical and scholarly imagination. Countering anachronistic claims such as the idea of Muhammad bin Qasim as the “first citizen” of Pakistan, a theme drummed into schoolchildren and echoed endlessly in Pakistan, he peels back layer after layer of the city. We are guided through Sultan Qutb-ud-Din Aibak’s Lahore. We find how Muhammad bin Qasim makes his way into popular stories set in everyday Lahore that promote edifying messages such as the deleterious moral effects of jeans, causing a young Asif who dreams of his first pair of American-made denims to wonder: “Why was Muhammad bin Qasim, some Syrian from the 8th century, ruling my daily life in Lahore?”. He brings to life Lahore’s vibrancy as a centre of publishing, crucible of the Urdu historical novel and home of numerous Arya Samaj presses.

Asif’s reflections are interspersed with personal anecdotes and the serendipitous discoveries of the flâneur: visiting a Christian classmate, playing cricket on a hallowed ground, spending hours at a bench outside a library, or chancing upon a cemetery about which no one seems to know anything. Through intellectual voyages and physical peregrinations, Asif brings to light an astonishing number of little-known or forgotten facts about Lahore. At the turn of the twentieth, for instance, the city was the center of a global anti-colonial struggle. The Hindustan Gadar Party, which would later launch a movement for Indian independence from San Francisco in the early twentieth century, had its beginnings in Lahore.

The postcolonial incarnation

In its postcolonial incarnation, Lahore is, among other things, a city of violence, expressed in many forms that will be familiar to those who live in India too. Its Hindu, Sikh, and Ahmadi minorities live in abjection and fear, and its political life is infused with the permanent threat of violence. Asif argues that the assassination of the Governor of Punjab, Salman Taseer, in 2011, represents an especially significant turning point in the history of Pakistan. Taseer was murdered for questioning Pakistan’s blasphemy laws in the context of a case against Asiya Noreen, a Christian woman who was charged with blasphemy against the Prophet. Taseer’s killing was emblematic of the increasingly powerful grip of the idea of blasphemy in Pakistani society.

Asif points out that the violence meted out against those who can be accused of blasphemy in Pakistan is enabled by the civil laws of the state itself. Lahore, as it turns out, has played a crucial role in the emergence and establishment of this state of affairs. For it is Lahore that was the location for the emergence of the figure of the “good Muslim subject” and of the idea of Prophetic Pakistan, that is, a land whose existence has been willed by the Prophet. Both themes are tightly woven into the discourse of blasphemy in Pakistan. Asif presents a devastatingly incisive reading of the poetry of Faiz, not as a romantic poet but as a voice who bore witness to Lahore’s compact with violence in the aftermath of independence. In a similar vein, Asif writes compellingly of the prescience of Sadat Hasan Manto in foretelling the violence that would continue to bedevil Lahore and Pakistan well after the bloodshed of Partition.

Lahore, as with Delhi or Bombay, is also a site of a history of resistance, of stories of people joining forces against violence and sectarianism, and of leftist and feminist movements. Asif gives this neglected and insufficiently appreciated history its due in the book. The legacies of these social and political movements and the forms in which they survive in the present too have shaped, and continue to shape, the city. In them, Asif finds hope for the future, as Lahore, like so many other great cities across the world, faces the triple threat of aggressive nationalism, untrammelled capitalism, and climate disasters. Disrupted City concludes with a poignant afterword which includes a tribute to the many Lahores, “not in this book”, the infinite and invisible cities within a city that always exceed any story about it. Lahore, the city that he always lives in, the city that he always dreams of, the city that is always with him and within him, Asif says, may be suffused with melancholy but is by no means exhausted by it; it remains still a city also of resilience, joy, and possibility. In Disrupted City, Manan Ahmed Asif has given us a thing of beauty. For that gift, we remain in his debt, as he remains indebted to Lahore.

Rohit Chopra is Professor of Communication at Santa Clara University. He is currently writing two books: one, on the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992, and the other a history of disability.

Disrupted City: Walking the Pathways of Memory and History in Lahore, Manan Ahmed Asif, The New Press.