HARKING BACK: The walls of Lahore have been lost many times in the past

Lahore is full of strange stories that are slowly dying out.

In the narrow lanes and streets of the old walled city of Lahore you can find ‘story narrators’ – kissa goh’ – who can mesmerise you with tales that surely amaze the most scientific of minds.

In this column let me tell you about the strange story of ‘Mansel Sahib’ as told to me by the late Sheikh Mubarak Ali, a sage and religious man who gave away, free of cost, secret talismanic bits of paper to ward off evil spirits.

His small tailor shop in Tehsil Bazaar is now run by his son.

Of recent I have checked up documents about the man, let alone East India Company records and to my shock they tally with what the old sage told me.

When the Shahi Hammam inside Delhi Gate had been taken over to conserve by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, my friend Masood Khan rang me to immediately come to the ‘royal bath’ and see what they had discovered.

When they dug the outer hall where till recent marriage ceremonies used to take place, they discovered an octagonal water tank beneath the floor with a large side sitting platform.

This was the major bath which had an impressive dome.

As the debris was cleared a clear picture emerged.

This was the beginning of the Shahi Hammam project being reclaimed in what surely is now a World Heritage Site.

As I took my weekly walk through the walled city I mentioned the discovery to Sheikh Mubarak Ali.

He immediately responded: “My elders used to call it Mansel Sahib de Katchery”.

He then pointed out to an old house in a lane on the northern side of Tehsil Bazaar where once lived Dr.

Johann Martin Honigberger, the royal surgeon to Maharajah Ranjit Singh.

“This is where Mansel Sahib lived for two years when the British Sarkar came.

He was the most powerful man in Lahore and Punjab, even stronger than Lawrence Sahib,” he said.

This was news to me for we had never heard of the man.

This amazing history lives, or lived, in the minds of our elders.

So it made sense to check out the facts and so I went to the Record Office of the East India Company in London, as also to the libraries at Cambridge University.

When the Punjab was captured by the East India Company Army at the end of the Second Sikh War in 1849, the country was ruled by a Board of Administration headed by Sir Henry Montgomery Lawrence, with two board members, they being his brother Sir John Lawrence and by Mr. Charles Grenville Mansel.

The senior Lawrence tackled political questions, the junior Lawrence military matters, while Mansel organised the entire civil, judicial and monetary side of governance.

He is the real man who organised British rule in Lahore and Punjab, and the man we know the least about.

The very fi rst court set up by the British was in the Shahi Hammam front bath, which served as a round courtroom, and on the platform sat Mr. Charles Mansel.

It acquired the name as ‘Mansel Sahib de Katchery’ and the name lived on till the first civil courts moved to first Tehsil Bazaar, then to the District Courts new building, which was originally a Sikh Army outpost outside the walled city and was then to the west of the River Ravi as it fl owed and curved along the road that is today known as Sanda Road.

The curved alignment is because this is where the river flowed, and when it dried because of the river changing its alignment, a road was built on the dry bed.

For some time the major outfall of waste water from the walled city flowed along this track and was later called Outfall Road.

A small portion of the river remained in what is known still as ‘Budha Ravi’ which has also dried up.

So it was that Charles Mansel set up his very first court.

In a way this place is the beginning of British law as enforced in Punjab after it lost its freedom.

So the picture that we have built of Charles Grenville Mansel, is that he was born in 1806 in Glamorgan in Wales of a Welsh father and an Irish mother.

He was one of six children.

As he excelled in school he managed to join a shipping company in London at the age of 18 and excelled in his work.

The owner introduced him to a director of the East India Company who after testing his skills appointed him as a Company Writer in April 1826.

He was posted to India and made an assistant to the Secretary of the Western Board of Revenue, Bengal, in 1827.

From the record it seems that he impressed the Secretary of India with his efficiency and skill and hard work.

He was moved westward to Agra and made a registrar of the court of the magistrate.

There he impressed and he was a collector and then officiated as a Magistrate of Agra.

In 1834, he was appointed Superintendent of Agra College and quickly became secretary to the Lt. Governor, handling complex political, judicial and revenue matters with immense dexterity.

This led him to be appointed as the Settlement Officer of the military cantonment of Agra and in 1842 he produced the ‘Report on the Settlement of the District of Agra.

This provided him with the credence to become the Deputy Accountant-General of Calcutta, then one of the most prestigious postings in the East India Company, for he surely was the most trusted person for the directors of the Company.

He was made the Company auditor and sent to London to understand the EIC accounts and political and trade questions.

It is clear that he was then one of the most powerful persons in the EIC.

When Punjab was finally captured after a fierce war with the Sikhs, in 1849 he was rushed to Lahore and appointed on the three-member Board of Administrators of Punjab led by Sir Henry Lawrence and his brother John.

So it fell to Charles Mansel to organise this new “wild country”, a task he undertook with immense success.

He is the person who organised the courts that we see today, the revenue system that we still work with and the civil bureaucracy that still rules over all of us with a ruthless efficiency.

He instilled in every bureaucrat that their success lies in remaining unknown, yet having a fi rm grip on everything within their domain.

At the age of 60, he returned to England and lived a retired life in Brighton, where he died at the age of 80 in 1886.

The discovery of ‘Mansel Sahib de Katchery’ by Masood Khan and his team of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture is in a similar vein.

They remain relatively unknown, unrecognised and officially unrewarded, even though his team have done major work to save and conserve Lahore that we should be so proud of.

In a way they remain in the Mansel mode … silent contributors to a great tradition.