Daily Times

One is constantly learning and one should always keep learning. At 67, I can claim to know much more than I did when I was 17 but, like all those wise men in the past who devoted themselves to finding out the truth but realising how little they were able to achieve in that endeavour, one should in all modesty and humility accept the limits of one lifetime on the knowledge of an individual. However, the process of learning and correcting must go on.
With regards to Lahore, indeed the mists of the past conceal many truths but I believe nothing has been more vitiating to its history than the sudden and complete, surgical rupture with its pre-August 14 past. Since then the official narrative has emphasised only one strand of its variegated past: the one that ascribes a natural, quasi-divinely ordained authenticity to its antecedents as the citadel of the Two Nation Theory. The rest has to be rejected, ignored and forgotten. Ideologically and politically that makes perfect sense, but we are neither at the end of history nor of time and, just as the arrival of the Mayflower in 1620 will always dominate the narrative of the founding of the US, the pre-Columbian Indian past has not been erased altogether. As US scholarship gets more confident and honest, the story of that past will need to be told in some measure.
Similarly, Lahore’s pre-partition past needs to be traced and discussed even when we must concede that, finally, the Two Nation Theory captured the fancy of its Muslim majority population. However, to my very great horror, not even the two nation narrative is told with enough seriousness and competence. Thus, for example, when I began to look for source material on the Barkat Ali Islamia Hall, I found no entry on Wikipedia! Remember, its centrality to the agitations for Pakistan cannot be denied as it is bang across the Mochi Gate Park where mass meetings were held once the Pakistan Movement picked up momentum. In any event, what I came across were a couple of articles published in a local daily where its name had been attributed to Malik Barkat Ali. There seemed no reason why some journalist would publish those articles without proper research. However, that is exactly what had happened.
Early morning, last Tuesday, when the article was published, veteran Professor Amin Mughal wrote to me advising that I check the sources again because he believed that the hall had been named after Khan Bahadur Barkat Ali Khan, a Pathan who lived in Lahore. In the evening I met Ambassador Toheed Ahmad during dinner at Advocate Shamoon Zakariya’s residence where we were joined by the distinguished writer and columnist Khaled Ahmed. Toheed had been rung up by another veteran academician, ProfessorTabassum Kashmiri of the Urdu Department, GCU, Lahore, who told him the same that the person after whom the hall is named was Khan Bahadur Barkat Ali Khan. Later, I found some reliable information about the gentleman.
Khan Bahadur Barkat Ali Khan had rendered support to the British in 1857 to crush the uprising and, like many other loyal supporters, had been amply rewarded. He served as a senior civil servant and educationist, and was also involved in the legislature. He was a close associate and supporter of Sir Syed’s efforts to establish the Muslim college at Aligarh. When the latter visited Lahore, Barkat Ali Khan rendered him hospitality and many other services. I do hope someone makes an effort to write a proper entry on the history of the Barkat Ali Islamia Hall and have it hosted on Wikipedia.
Simultaneously, we need to keep telling the truth about a different past and a very different future if we hear voices from across the border in favour of peace and friendship between India and Pakistan. In Voices of Sanity: Lahore: Architypes, 2008, Zaman Khan has done yeoman service by collecting such voices. Not surprisingly, a majority of them are from old Punjab and some very prominent among them have a Lahore connection. Among them is one of the towering giants of Indian historiography, Professor Bipan Chandra who, though from Kangra, studied at the famous FC College in Lahore. There is hardly any scholar who has more authoritatively exposed the destructive nature of communalism. Also, in this collection of essays is another great Indian academician, Professor RomilaThapar, whose family hailed from Lahore. She told him that she did not subscribe to the Hind-Sindh theory, a bogus theory, which has had some attraction in Pakistani Maoist and People’s Party circles. Professor Mridula Mukherjee, whose parents were from Lahore, told Zaman Khan the importance of collecting oral history in order to bring out the forgotten history of Lahore where communal harmony prevailed once and many revolutionary movements were based.
From the wider pre-partition Punjab, we hear the voice of short-story writer Kartar Singh Duggal, hailing originally from Rawalpindi but also an old Formanite. Also, that of the late character actor of Mumbai, A K Hangal, who was born in Sialkot, can be heard. When I met him in January 1997 he told me that his family was connected to that of Allama Iqbal some generations ago as both were of Kashmiri Brahmin extraction. Hangal sahib told Zaman Khan that he had been brought up in Peshawar but then moved to Karachi where he joined the Communist Party of India before partition. Hangal sahib was harassed and threatened by Shiv Sena’s Bal Thackeray for expressing a desire to visit Pakistan but he remained steadfast in his belief that both India and Pakistan gained most by becoming friends. Others voices in the book include those of famous champion and activist of India-Pakistan friendship Kuldip Nayar, Justice A M Ahmadi, Prakash Karat and other great intellectuals.

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