HARKING BACK: Is restoring royal kitchen of fort ‘false history’?

On Wednesday an interesting ‘legal story’- as journalists love to call them - appeared in this newspaper that mentions a suspicion that the famous royal kitchen in the Lahore Fort was being tampered with. The history of this kitchen needs to be explained.

As the court proceedings are ‘sub-judice’ - as an ‘under judgement’ matter is called in Latin - we will steer clear of the ‘legal process’. In an understandable move, His Lordship at the Lahore High Court ordered the WCLA to explain the legal position, and rightly so. It is in the fitness of things that Lahore’s historical monuments are not damaged in anyway. The Lahore Fort is, after all, already on the World’s Endangered Monuments List. So we will dwell on the history of the place, and one hopes it will add to an educated discussion on the suspicions, both founded and unfounded. The story of the royal kitchen of the Lahore Fort is legendary and has been for almost 340 years.

Lahore and food to a lot seem one and the same thing. On a lighter note when a former prime minister went to China, he took his entire kitchen with him. In faraway lands the mention of Lahore invariably brings forth its legendary food, let alone a royal kitchen. A Lahore lawyer has claimed that the integrity of the royal kitchen of the Lahore Fort is at stake with this ‘kitchen’ development, which he claims will be used for commercial purposes. Irrespective of the merits of the case, which as I have made clear is ‘sub judice’, it would be of interest to our readers to know some historic nuggets about Lahore’s royal kitchen in the Lahore Fort. They can then follow the case with a wider understanding of the issues.

The story made me research mention of the kitchen of the Lahore Fort in various writings. The first mention of the huge kitchen and the massive food grain warehouses was in the ‘Akbarnama’ when a famine hit Lahore from 1566 to 1569. Over 25,000 starving people of Lahore had increasingly resorted to cannibalism. Every day bodies found in the streets were being thrown in open fields to the north of the fort at today’s Mahmood Booti Bund area. From this tragedy arose the term ‘Moyanan de Mandi’. To help the starving population Emperor Akbar came to their rescue. For three years he used these starving people to work in return for food as brick-makers and brick layers. These unfortunate people built the Lahore Fort in 1566-1569.

The experience of handling so much food grain led to massive food storage facilities being built inside the fort with a huge royal kitchen. Though the three cooking camps were set up outside the fort, within it worked hundreds of chefs, with the emperor taking a special interest in food quality. All over the sub-continent the quality of the food at the Lahore Fort became legendary.

The next mention of the royal kitchen comes in Inayat Khan’s ‘Shah Jehan Nama’ when Mughal Emperor Shah Jehan was in Lahore from the 4th of November, 1645 onwards. He lavished an impressive dinner for over 2,222 persons on hearing his forces victory over the Uzbeks of Badakhshan. The royal kitchen was able to handle this with ease. Sadly, on the 18th of November of the same year the Queen Dowager Nur Jehan Begum died in Lahore. For 40 days this kitchen cooked food for 10,000 people for 40 days of mourning. Amazingly, grains from the fort’s warehouse managed to hold out.

As news of various victories and sad news of deaths came, Emperor Shah Jehan remained in Lahore Fort till the 5th of April 1646. When he left the stocks were replenished and the royal kitchen continued to function as normal.

The next mention of the kitchen comes during the reign of Aurangzeb when he was building the Badshahi Mosque. Though the fare provided to his guests was relatively simple, yet this kitchen is recorded as once having cooked for 20,000 people. My own view of these massive figures is that they represent ‘a lot of people’, depending on the writer’s imagination.

We then move to the reign of Maharajah Ranjit Singh, whose lavish dinners were taken care of by the royal kitchen. As he was fairly superstitious, every day he sent large amounts of food to various shrines, temples and gurdwaras. Often he would set up ‘langars’ in different city squares to feed the people.

But on his death matters moved on for the royal kitchen, that is till a siege took place of the Lahore Fort on the 13th of January 1941. Inside was Rani Chand Kaur with 5,000 men and very little ammunition, and outside was Sher Singh with 26,000 infantry, 8,000 cavalry and 45 guns. From the minarets of the Badshahi Mosque the guns of Sher Singh pounded the Lahore Fort, and his first target was the royal kitchen. Cooking inside the fort virtually ceased. For two days Sher Singh’s guns pounded the kitchen only, completely destroying it, as also the entire residential quarters. The fighting lasted till the 17th of January, 1841, and after 10 days of negotiations and with food being provided from outside by Sher Singh, the siege ended on the 27th of January, 1841.

Punjab had found a new maharajah, but the royal kitchen had been completely destroyed, never to be rebuilt. In the last years of the Sikh Raj, which ended in 1849, the cooking was done in a makeshift kitchen on the eastern side of the fort near Akbari Gate. The British, initially, cooked their meals in mobile canteens parked within the fort. Later rooms of the Haveli of Kharak Singh were used for this purpose.

So in a way it is good news that the famous and legendary royal kitchen of the Lahore Fort, or what is left of it, is being conserved. After 1841 this is the first effort to conserve this famous kitchen. If conservation was all that was to be done to this flattened side of the neglected fort, then there is no issue. If ‘restoration’ is done in a partial manner, even then it is fine and a good thing. But if a modern kitchen is being built then that is a violation of the Ancient Monuments Protection Act, 1882, inherited from colonial days. But what surely is in the field is ‘The Venice Charter for the Conservation and Restoration of Monuments and Sites’ passed in 1964, which was an extension of the earlier Athens Charter.