HARKING BACK: The forgotten martyrs from the land of the brave

In the chequered history of Lahore there have been moments of great shame, of glory, of despair and also of immense scholarship. It seems somewhat cyclic, almost like a process. The walled city has been decimated seven times, only to rise with greater glory.

In all this process we must now, given so much information before us, pause to think about the hundreds of thousands of those who laid down their lives for the city, for its people, and for their rulers. They are the Martyrs of Lahore, the ones we never recall. In this piece let us look at a few people we have forgotten, some deliberately, let alone acknowledged, and some we remain silent about. It is the great hypocrisy of our times, a semi-literate people unsure of themselves and, for purely religious reasons, ashamed of our past. The process in a way ‘de-cultures’ us all, probably in the fake belief that we will return to a puritanical mental state that has nothing to do with our history or our land. To my mind this is criminal in intent. It does not seem to register that as one of the oldest civilisations on Mother Earth, we have a bigger claim to our past than any of our neighbours.

This piece was instigated by a query from a reader as to why Lahore had two ‘Shaheed Ganj’ places, for he did not know their history. We can start from the beginning of time, but for brevity we will restrict ourselves to a mere 1,000 years. The year was 1002 AD and the Hindushahi ruler of Lahore, Raja Jayapala, had been defeated in Peshawar by the Afghan invader Mahmud of Ghazni in Afghanistan.

The proud Rajput returned to his capital Lahore, walked out of Mori Gate, stood on a sandal pier drenched in ghee and set himself alight. He was without doubt the oldest known ‘Martyr of Lahore’ who opposed foreign invasion. Surely a small monument, or even a small signboard, next to the old ‘pipal’ tree outside Mori Gate needs to honour this brave Rajput. Once Lahore was decimated and completely depopulated, those left alive were enslaved and sold in the slave markets of Central Asia.

Surely these over 100,000 unfortunate inhabitants of Lahore should be remembered, as part of a larger awareness, for the extreme genocide they suffered. Mahmud left behind his favourite slave and lover Ayaz, who was buried outside the city walls. His grave, now in Rang Mahal Chowk, came within the walls of the city after Akbar expanded his new capital.

We then have the forces of the Mongol remembered as Taimur the Lame, who hit Lahore in 1327 AD and knocked down all its walls. Over 57,000 inhabitants were butchered and the remaining almost 100,000 were taken as slaves for sale in Central Asian markets. All the gypsies living along the River Ravi were forced to look after their horses and were among the first gypsies that ended up in Europe once he set sight on the West. Should those lost souls of Lahore be remembered?

It was during those raids that we have a religious leader called Pir Zakki who opposed the Mongols. Legend has it, unbelievable that it sounds, that after his head was chopped off the body kept fighting on and fell about a hundred yards away. So the head is buried in one place in ‘Purani Ghas Mandi’ while his body, as were those of other of his soldiers, buried nearby collectively in a huge grave opposite the ‘Madina Masjid’ in Yakki Gate. This ‘Shaheed Ganj’ is never venerated as a ‘Martyrs Grave’ of those who died fighting foreign invaders.

Just to clarify that the name Yakki Gate is said to be a corruption of the name Zakki because the letter ‘z’ is pronounced as ‘y’ in Lahori Punjabi. My considered view is that this gate is called ‘yakki’ because in days of old this was the first horse market or stand (‘yakka mandi’) and hence the name Yakki came about.

But the place that became famous as ‘Shaheed Ganj’ was the site of massacre of Sikhs that took place outside Delhi Gate in 1764 in the reign of Mir Mannu, the Subedar (governor) of Lahore. The elimination of Sikhs was a Mughal priority and Sikh sources claim that over 200,000 Sikhs were killed by Muslim butchers living inside the gateway in ‘Kasaban de Gali’ and other nearby lanes. There is evidence that this is historically correct, only that the numbers were near 50,000 plus. It was an unprecedented slaughter of the innocent.

The massacre took place over one whole week at Gurdwara Bhai Taru Singh in Naulakha Bazaar, with women being raped and then butchered and along with their children thrown in the huge well that exits outside the gurdwara. Ironically, the Muslims of Lahore built a mosque there much later and named it ‘Masjid Shaheed Ganj’.

In 1910 the Muslims of Lahore tried to take possession of the Shaheed Ganj premises and a dispute arose. A piece on this has already appeared in these columns in great detail. Ultimately the Lahore High Court ruled in favour of the Sikhs. Today it is an important Sikh shrine and monument to the martyrs who laid down their lives against the Afghan ‘subedar’ and his henchmen. However, they were kind enough to leave the mosque intact. Surely there is a need for all of us in Lahore to recognise all those innocent women, children and men ‘martyred’ at this place.

There are three other groups of ‘martyrs’ who need to be appreciated and recognised. Firstly, in 1857 when the East India Company soldiers at Lahore’s Saddar Bazaar revolted in what is known as the Sepoy Mutiny (we call it the first War of Independence). Hundreds were blown apart in front of cannons all over Lahore, or were suffocated in a small room at Attari, or shot in the River Ravi. They were the first colonial era Martyrs who have been forgotten. Should not a memorial be built in Saddar Bazaar of Lahore to honour those patriots?

Then in the First World War almost 39,000 soldiers from the Lahore Division were killed in the battlefields of Europe. At Ypres in Belgium they have the Menin Gate memorial for them. At sunset every day the ‘Last Post’ is played for them. In Lahore no one cares for soldiers lost in battles afar. In the Second World War a much larger number was lost in the forests of Burma, in the deserts of North African, in France and Italy and even in Germany. They are never remembered. Why? Surely they deserve some recognition.

After Pakistan was created it has been constantly in conflict with India, and some very brave soldiers have sacrificed their lives just as did others over hundreds of years. All of them deserve one impressive monument with a Remembrance Day every year. At the base should be written something to the effect: We will never forget. Our martyrs deserve some respect no matter when, or for whom, they sacrificed their lives.