Harking Back: Of drawbridges, moats, walls and a garden at the brink

Just why did old Lahore have walls, why did it once have a moat surrounding it, what happened to its drawbridges, and what has happened to the garden surrounding it. It remains an unfolding tragedy to our heritage.

As a child my father, who knew a thing or two about the old walled city and its people, told us about the drawbridge outside Mochi Gate that was pulled up every evening at sunset. Sounds antique stuff, but the official record tells us that the Mochi Gate drawbridge was dismantled in 1931 because the city outside had expanded enough to make it ‘irrelevant’, because people now moved about even at night.

In this piece let us have a look at why the moat was dismantled, what happened to the drawbridge, what is happening to the garden and just why the walls surrounding the city do not interest our heritage officials. These four elements of old Lahore life had a meaning to the way people lived, safely. So first let us have a brief look at the moat.

Before the era of heavy guns and cannons, the most efficient way of stopping invaders was a moat surrounding the fort and the city. As then the River Ravi flowed around the fort and the city the strategy was to have a rough ‘maidan’ or ground beyond the river. In traditional parlance it was known as ‘rahra maidan’. Even today this usage is in practice. Beyond the ‘maidan’ was a mud barrier or a ‘ghatti’ which prevented wheeled carriages from reaching the ‘maidan’.

So an invading force had to first counter the ‘ghatti’, then face arrows flying onto the ‘maidan’, then came the river, and then an open ground before the city and fort walls. At the gateways the drawbridges were pulled up and then it was a matter of just how much damage the offensive force could face and for how long. In the markets it was a royal decree that a year-long supply of food grain was always in store.

Then two major developments changed life in Lahore. The most important was that the River Ravi meandered westwards initially to where today is the ‘Buddha Ravi’ and then to near its present position a mile from old Lahore. So in place of the river a moat came about. This was formalised by the Sikh ruler Maharajah Ranjit Singh. But more about that later.

The second major development was the invention of the cannon, which made fort walls partially irrelevant given sufficiently powerful explosions. That stage came much later. The first invader to test cannons against the strong mud walls of the fort and the city was the Mughal ruler Babar. He managed to decimate the mud walls with considerable ease.

The moat around the city was strengthened by the Sikh ruler, who also raised the wall height by almost 10 feet, or ’12 chappay’ as the record tells us. The drawbridges operated at three gateways and a constabulary monitored human movement, with the maharajah immediately informed of any new entrant.

By the time the British captured Lahore in 1849, the moat had dried because it was not properly replenished from the Buddha Ravi near the fort’s Roshnai Gate where boats arrived. Mind you highways had not become a major consideration till then.

After 1857 the British were of the opinion that moats and walls meant that the local population could at any stage raise a siege. So they undertook two major undertakings. First, they demolished the southern portion of the walls of the Lahore Fort and replaced it with a sliding entrance, one that can still be seen. Secondly, they knocked down portions of the eastern and southern walls at five different places. This allowed British troops to enter the city and the fort with ease in case of a siege and/or rebellion.

They also filled up the empty dry moat and built a beautiful garden surrounding the old city further surrounded by a ring road called Circular Road. The garden was where the population of the old city went for walks and beyond at the old Parade Ground of the East India Company renamed Minto Park by the British, and again renamed as Iqbal Park after 1947. Cricket clubs emerged, the most famous being Crescent and Mamdot. Sadly, that park is now a showpiece park and the clubs have all been shut down.

Now back to the story of the walls that surrounded the old city. For centuries, probably for 3,000 years of known history, the walls of the fort were made of mud. The technology of making mud fort is ancient and can be seen, to some extent, at Harappa and Mohenjo Daro and also Taxila. Given the Indian archaeologists claim about nearby Rakhigarhi and its mud fort walls, surely Lahore Fort by this conjecture would be older.

The huge mud clay bricks with sand, chalk, straw and stone that made up a Mud Fort had several wall layers. It was normal for them to be at least over 30 feet thick. The outer layer was plastered four times a year, making them always look neat and clean. Experts on the subject claim that they were as strong as a 10 feet thick brick wall. However, rain was the only thing that weakened them, and hence the constant attention.

Come the rule of the Mughal emperor Akbar, we see that Lahore and the Punjab faced a major famine in 1574 that went on for three years. With heavy taxation on farmers while the Mughals became rich the people started starving and to appease them he set up a meal-a-day kitchen for 25,000 people on the condition that they bake bricks and build the Lahore fort and old city. Given a rebellion by Rajputs he sought assistance from Turkmen cavalry and housed them to the east and appeased Rajputs to the west in an expanded Lahore.

The old graveyards in the old ‘maidan’ now came within the new expanded Lahore walled city, with one example being the grave of Ayaz, the Georgian slave of Mahmud the invader from Ghazni. Hence the new walled city came about.

But then the Partition of 1947 saw large-scale destruction and a new trading class from the eastern Punjab cities moved in, stealing bricks from the destroyed walls for their new construction. As traders occupied over half of Lahore’s residential area, the law simply ceased to apply, a situation that still exists. Walls hinder the movement of trade, and for this specific reason the walls of the old ‘once walled’ city are not reconstructed. The bureaucrats in power continue to follow the wishes of the traders.

In a way the old Lahore remains under siege of the trader-bureaucratic combine. The proof of this is for all to see in that monuments of interest are being redone to show performance, while the houses of the poor continue to decay. The media is filled with performance stories of showpiece restoration of monuments.

So we see the beautiful British-era gardens now full of garbage, illegal shops and buildings and every commercial use possible. No one in power dare to remove them. It is a matter of a few years when the complete destruction of old Lahore’s gardens and walls, what to speak of old houses being allowed to fall and a new trader illegally paying his way through. The law exists on paper. The bureaucrats remain paper tigers.