Harking Back: ‘Takia’ that was built to honour Amir Khusrau

In the late 1990s in the Inter-Continental Hotel of Lahore, since renamed as Pearl Continental (PC), the famous Indian ‘tabla’ player Ustad Zakir Hussain was performing. In walked Pakistan’s famous ‘tabla’ player Ustad Shaukat Hussain. The young Zakir stopped, leapt forward and fell on the feet of the great Pakistani. This incident has been narrated by a few writers, including the knowledgeable Saeed Malik, as proof of the importance of Lahore as a great classical music city. That still remains the case. Ustad Zakir informed Shaukat Hussain that his father in India was Ustad Allah Rakha, but his musical father was Ustad Shaukat Hussain in Lahore. In our youth my father’s house every evening hosted the poets and musicians of the city, where they were well fed and lubricated. When no one came he complained that the “dinner was rather bland”.

So it was that I got to know Ustad Shaukat Hussain, as also other greats like Roshan Ara Begum, Ustad Amanat and Fateh Ali, as also Ustad Ghulam Hussain Shaggan. When the young Hamid Ali Khan sang the old man used to say that he sounded so much like the great Ustad Ashiq Ali Khan. Such remarks added to the mystique of the man.

The great Ustad Ashiq Ali Khan passed away in 1958 (though some sources claim it was 1948), so we never got to hear him first hand. The old gramophone 33.3 rpm records of Ustad Ashiq Ali Khan was one of the ‘untouchable’ items in my father’s collection. Last fortnight I decided to look him up for he was buried, as my research revealed, at Takia Mirasian, just opposite Mochi Gate on Chamberlain Road. Local assistance from shopkeepers finally got me to the place.

When we reached Takia Mirasian it was a shocking reminder of how the arts have been ignored. The dilapidated grave of Ustad Ashiq Ali Khan was very much there, but then around it is a small filthy leather tannery which operates from the rooms that once housed the musical greats of our land. Just behind the Do-Muria Pul is the raw hides and skins market, with a finished hides and skins market of sorts coming up on Chamberlain Road. Hence the tannery.

This place has a unique history, for it was the Mughal Emperor Shah Jehan who ordered it to be built to house the numerous musicians who came to Lahore to perform at the Mughal court. One study states that Ameer Khusrau, when he came to Lahore, stayed outside the city in a small hut for some time. People then started calling it ‘Takia Mirasian’”.

In those days it was surrounded by a garden and a lot of trees. What Shah Jehan essentially did was to carry forward that ‘miras’ (heritage) by creating ‘Takia Mirasian’ as a safe haven for those classical masters who performed at the court. In a way it was a tribute to Amir Khusrau.

Lahore since ancient times attracted music and dance exponents. Few know that inside the Taxali Gate in the third narrow lane to the south is a small temple where once was the Ghandara Mahavidhyala, India’s very first music academy. So music and dance, essentially in the classical mode, was always very much part of the city’s culture. Our current cultural ethos, laced as it is with a dry non-musical whiff of the desert, has a rather twisted image of what a ‘mirasi’ is. In the strict grammatical sense they should be considered propagators of our cultural and social heritage. They are conservers of our ‘miras’, an Arabic word meaning our inheritance, or heritage.

A ‘Mirasi’ in historical terms belonged to the ancient Charan Rajput clan, placed in caste terms as a person with the best traits of a Brahmin and a Kshatriya. Their honesty and upright nature is said to be the reason for them being respected in a caste-ridden society. With time a lot of Charans converted to Islam, which helped them shed all caste pretenses. This is what impressed Ameer Khusrau and the Mughal rulers. Hence their excellence was a product of an enabling environment.

So Lahore’s ‘Takia Mirasian’, away from the hustle bustle of the noisy life of the walled city, was a serene place for musical ‘baithaks’, and it was here that men like Ustad Bare Ghulam Ali Khan came to perform. Though he did not, like other visiting musicians, stay overnight, he was always a guest at Haveli Mian Khan, a historical landmark of old Lahore that the trader-politician nexus after 1947 demolished. My dear friend Tahir Azam of the royal Shahzada family volunteered to save whatever was left, but it seems word got out and the remaining portion was demolished within three days.

In the days of Maharajah Ranjit Singh, this place was much visited by the elite of Lahore. Ustad Bare Ghulam Ali Khan’s grandfather, who belonged to a village near Kasur, was a court musician in the Lahore Darbar and stayed here when in the city. The list of greats who stayed here is countless, and encompasses almost every well-known ‘gharana’ of classical music. With time as more and more musicians settled in Lahore, they moved northward and initially settled near Chowk Nawab Sahib inside the Mochi Gate.

Over time the musical instruments manufacturing experts moved further northwards to settle at the end of Paniwala Talab near Chuna Mandi. This also meant that the masters moved near Chuna Mandi. The result of this historical shift was that the entire area to the east of Chowk Tibbi housed musicians and classical dancers. To the west the courtesans connected to the court of Lahore dwelt. Initially they educated the elite of the city in social manners and etiquette, but with the decline of the Mughals they increasingly tended towards prostitution. By the time the British took over it was designated a ‘Red Light Area’, a military term meaning a ‘No-Go’ area, just as a ‘red’ traffic signal means to stop. Sadly, the reputation of the activities of the western part of Taxali Bazaar rubbed off on the musicians and dancers dwelling in the eastern portion of the bazaar. It was a sad development, for it harmed the ancient art of music and dance, a basic human instinct.

In my youth I remember once going to visit the house of Ustad Akhtar Hussain Khan, the illustrious father of Ustad Amanat Ali Khan, Ustad Fateh Ali Khan and Ustad Hamid Ali Khan. Then Ustad Asad Amanat Ali was a young lad learning the ropes from members of his great Patiala Gharana. Much later the family sold their house as the government pressurised them to vacate it to create the Lahore Fort ‘food street’. The same was true of everyone who lived there. Earlier, an imagined piety got prostitution banned, resulting in them spreading all over the city, so it was that a food street project saw our music and dancing families also isolated all over the city.

When I last met the polite Ustad Hamid Ali Khan, he informed me that he had to shift to Mohni Road more towards Pir Makki. Food has overtaken the classical arts. His remark remains embedded in my mind: “It seems hunger of the stomach is more important than hunger of the mind”.