Harking back: Of Mai Phaggan and Lahore’s old Walled City lifestyle

The history of a city, or a land, lies in everything it possesses. It could be architecture, the furniture, the household goods, the clothes people wear and how they changed over time. If you look at old photographs of Lahore, you will notice that more than half the people in them are wearing ‘dhotis’ and a loose ‘pagri’ (turban). The others wore not ‘shalwars’, but a loose pyjama. At home everyone wore white pyjamas with a ‘kurta’. The ‘shalwar’ was solely a woman’s trouser, or was worn by people west of the Jhelum.

Historically, the first ‘shalwar’ came to Punjab in the 13th century from Central Asia. It is not a Punjabi dress. Amazingly if you look at ‘dhotis’ starting from Vietnam where they are merely small pieces of cloth around the waist, the ‘dhoti’ increases in size and by the time it reaches Khushab, it is a massive sheet of cloth. Beyond the River Jhelum it suddenly disappears and the ‘shalwar’ takes over. For that matter in Iran to the west it becomes a ‘pantaloon’, from where the word pants comes.

When I first wore a ‘shalwar’ our cook could not stop laughing. He probably thought the sahib had ‘other ideas’. It was ZA Bhutto and his ‘awami’ suit that truly introduced the ‘shalwar kamiz’ as a national dress, which resulted in it replacing, not entirely, the ‘dhoti’.

Time and place have a great role in the clothes we wear. A video doing the rounds on social media shows women in Manchester, England, just 100 years ago all with shawls covering their hair and entire body. In a way ‘hijab’ reflects not religion alone, but the state of society. Feudal dispensations tend to force it on women. That dubious role of honour still pervades our society.

The Khushab connection was because young Karim’s maid was from a village near Jauharabad, a place where our house was among the first five to come up in this Ayub-era town under the pioneering Thal Development Authority, where my father worked for two years. The maid’s name was Mai Phaggan and my English mother always suspected that she secretly fed him ‘bhang’ to put him to sleep for unusually long hours. She would often take him home to her village for an overnight stay.

In Mai Phaggan’s village near Khushab, just as in our grandmother’s old walled city Lahore house, the furniture was traditional. Our grandmother’s house in Kucha Chabaksawaran had a large beautiful ornate chest. It was called a ‘khotia majus’ for it seems to have been purchased by my great grandfather while visiting Rajasthan. It was exquisite for its bright colours and the huge brass handles were most attractive. But then these huge colourful chests, called ‘sandook’ in Punjabi, were seen in almost every house with varying shades of intricacies. There was one almost in every room. In Punjab’s villages they still have a storage function.

But the most important piece of furniture was the ‘baithak kursi’ (traditional chairs) with its silk or cotton ‘takiyas’. The word ‘baithak’ means a place to sit, which we still call our sitting rooms. In our house there was an elaborately carved ‘kursi’ which had cushions on all three sides and a thick mattress underneath. The younger ones often slept on it. Come to think of it the ‘baithak kursi’ has evolved over centuries and are very comfortable.

Another interesting item in almost all houses was the ‘hichkola’, which came in two forms. One was a wooden formal swing with a small bed, sometimes even a chair, while the other, an informal contraption made from cloth, for babies. These ‘hichkolas’ can still be seen in most village houses, as also in a lot of walled city houses. Of recent it has emerged again as a high fashion swing chair.

The most common item is the traditional ‘charpai’, the bed which every house has in one form or another. The poor man calls it a ‘manjee’ while its formal name is a ‘charpai’. The name itself is ‘char’ meaning four and ‘paya’ meaning feet. The traditional woven bed uses cotton or other natural fibres - the ‘manj’- and hence the name. Its weaving patterns and materials have evolved over time.

But one basic piece of furniture in every house was the ‘pirri’ and the ‘phatta’, which is a small very low wooden plank on two long wooden legs. I remember that in my grandmother’s house we used to be served our meals in the kitchen only, for a formal dining room was a rarity. Consuming piping hot ‘rotis’ fresh off the ‘tava’ while sitting on our own ‘pirri’ around the ‘choola’ is a pleasure not experienced any longer. But the sheer happiness and warmth of the arrangement of these exceptionally simple kitchens still lives in my memory.

Another very interesting piece of old furniture also found in Lahore is the ‘sev-ne-phatt’, which in simple English is a ‘long thin-back chair’. As I have married in a Kashmiri family I noticed that every Kashmiri house had at least two or three of them. They are prestige items and their wooden construction is an engineering marvel. They are a form of a deck chair, but its back is thin and elongated and elaborately carved yet comfortable enough to put you to sleep.

Its construction seems to suggest that there are no joints. In Kashmiri it is called a ‘tashoo lamba’ and even today inside the old walled city they can be found in almost every house where Kashmiris live. Along with such traditional furniture there were always two items that most houses had. One was a small ‘dholki’ used on happy occasions and the other was a ‘paan daan’, or a ‘paan’ box. The dholki every girl learnt to play from an early age and not knowing this skill was a setback of sorts, at least when a marriage took place in the house.

But the ‘paan daan’ was more of an Uttar Pardesh (UP) culture acquired from the decadent Mughal court in its dying days. My grandmother’s family had a ‘mother-in-law’ who came with her ‘paan daan’. As children we loved pinching the sweet ‘saunf’ when no one was looking. It was an exquisite ornate silver piece with numerous sections.

So the traditional Lahore house had all these things and just one item in the kitchen that was a ‘must’ and that was the ‘phookni’, or blow pipe. Now I am talking of the wood and coal fire age when youngsters were virtually forced to blow in it to light a fire. With gas and electricity the age of the ‘phookni’ ended. The advance of electrical gadget has robbed our houses and kitchens of a lot of traditional items. Mind you in those days families were large, so it must have been an effort to satisfy a family. That is why the principle of ‘eat it or starve’ ruled supreme.

Things today are very different. The furniture of the house, its fixtures, the staple food, the fittings of the house, the very structure of the modern family has changed the way the young think and operate. But they have the advantage of a bright future which we do not … but then at least we have the luxury of knowing our past ‘interesting’, if not better.