Daily Times

Nostalgia is a sentimental yearning for people, events and places. Most human beings tend to romanticise and idealise their past, because reminiscing on bygone days and the associations they evoke furnish them with a personal history and identity markers with which they construct their distinctive profiles. The relationship between people is organic and ruptures between them are most of the time painful. Even nomadic peoples and tribes who follow seasonal cycles tend to move within specific regions. Thus even when they do not adopt sedentary lifestyles the space in which they roam becomes their homeland, so to speak. In the animal world it is quite common to find many species jealously defending their exclusive domains against intruders. Human beings it seems are not very different. I have the fullest respect for life in the rural areas and have no reason to depreciate the importance and centrality of particular villages in the lives of their dwellers; only life in a large city with all its complexities is the one I know best and therefore can write more confidently about.

Historical cities tend to acquire an aura and mystique because a higher level of civilisation and culture is possible in them. City dwellers can add many more dimensions to their life stories as they weave the memory of famous monuments and buildings, history and folklore, culture, social practices and festivals, schools, colleges and universities, and cinemas and parks into their personal narratives. As a result cities become larger-than-life entities; they are phantasmagorias that are reified by their lovers who can embed their past in them, filling them with as many colours and hues as their imagination can conjure. Quite simply, the canvas for plotting the past expands greatly in cities, thus creating a romance between them and their dwellers. Within cities, neighbourhoods and localities hold their own charm and their residents usually take pride in making a special mention of them. Ultimately, the house, or rather the home, becomes the exclusive identity of individuals. However, cities are not autonomous or sovereign units of political organisation. We live in the era of so-called nation-states, which are in fact territorial states whose most conspicuous characteristic is their right to exercise exclusive power and authority over their populations and territories. Such power and authority is enforced through border controls, passports and other related paraphernalia. In the past too populations in general and those of cities in particular were subjected to forced expulsions as wars took place between local rulers and invaders or between competing rajas in the same region. However, once the battle was over it was not uncommon for people to return to their homes and continue as before.

This was especially true of South Asia where the popular fiction that the ruler was the protector of all communities prevailed from the ancient period onwards and continued even under the British. However, the partition of India was attended by genocidal killing and ethnic cleansing in the Punjab and that profoundly altered the relationship between cities and their populations. On both sides of the old Punjab, unwanted religious minorities were terrorised into fleeing after power was transferred to the Indian and Pakistani governments. In the new dispensation of territorial states the notion of frontiers was supplanted by international borders that overruled the right of return.

However, the politics of the nation-state cannot defeat love or devotion. And for Lahore’s devotees, as long as memory serves, that city will always be their first love. In the forthcoming edition of my Punjab book (January 2015), seven new stories have been added and of these four are about pre-partition citizens of Lahore. One of them, Professor Upendra Pandit, now lives in Amsterdam. He studied at St Anthony’s High School, the same school where I had my formative education, but before partition. He wrote two emails on his relationship to Lahore: “Dear Ishtiaq, firstly, I want to say that as a ‘Lahori’ from way, way, way back, I was very interested in the thoughts you have expressed in your most recent contribution to Daily Times. My memory of Lahore remains that of a prominent centre of cultural, educational, political and business life. In those days, it even had a reasonably stimulating cosmopolitan character. The early morning or evening walks along the Mall to the Governor’s Mansion and (after a right turn from there) to the Lawrence Gardens were a favourite activity during my youthful years. (We lived quite close to the Beadon Road — Mall crossing). I also recall that as children we on occasions turned off earlier from the Mall to pass through the zoo (which had a free entry) and then come out at the base of the Lawrence Garden Hills — as the situation was at the time. Reading your article caused an inflow of long-forgotten memories of Lahore to the surface of the mind…I wish to add that after the 1947 journey out of Lahore, the trauma of the experience necessitated that the whole of the ‘Lahore period’ be deliberately buried in a deep recess of one’s mind — otherwise it would have cruelly distorted further future progress. Doing that, however, took conscious effort and of course, time. After I moved to the US in 1952 and in the years that followed — amongst what I personally know of and shall qualify as a very kind and friendly society — that the dark horses which dominated ‘the life in Lahore’ were gradually put to rest. Lahore became for me 16.5 years of a totally blank period of time — a period of my lost youth. Only recently, after reading your book and your articles and in the personal contact with you, I have gradually started recalling the myriads of facts, emotions and sentiments that are associated with my ‘Lahore Days’. This awakening — which is still a continuing process — has been an interesting and a wholly unexpected experience for me. (As you have played a significant role in this, I would like to continue sharing my evolving thoughts with you).” Do I need to say anything more about what Lahore is all about?

The writer is a visiting professor, LUMS, Pakistan, professor emeritus of Political Science, Stockholm University, and honorary senior fellow, Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore. Latest publications: Winner of the Best Non-Fiction Book award at the Karachi Literature Festival: The Punjab Bloodied, Partitioned and Cleansed, Oxford, 2012; and Pakistan: The Garrison State, Origins, Evolution, Consequences (1947-2011), Oxford, 2013. He can be reached at billumian@gmail.com