Harking Back: ‘The King of Lahore’ and other images of our past

As we study Lahore, the city so adored and yet so ignored by us, we come across some amazing descriptions by the greatest western writers. Of recent, finally, local academics and journalists have started taking the city seriously. But let us recall the colour and twist of the great western writers over the last 300 years.

The colonialists, as even Europeans traders-cum-‘explorers’ before them, tended to paint Lahore as almost a ‘dreamland’ of perfection. Of the colonialists probably Rudyard Kipling painted a picture of ‘perfection,’ yet on the other hand he also ‘lamented’ its shortcomings. But more on that later.

For starters, let us begin with the famous lines of John Milton and go on to Thomas Moore’s 1817 poem ‘Lalla Rookh’, which are described as having a ‘pseudo-historic Mughal colour’. The poem is about Aurangzeb’s daughter going to Kashmir from Delhi and stopping in Lahore. The description of Lahore is utterly amazing, with a few lines worth recalling. “life in Lahore is a brilliant display of life and pageantry among the palaces and domes and the gilded minarets of a city where trades ensure it is a city of enchantment …”.

The interesting point is that Aurangzeb never had a daughter named Lalla Rukh. But then that is what imagery is all about.

The image of Lahore’s walled city as a secure ‘procession of a happy life’ is better provided by the Russian traveller Prince Alexis Soltykoff (1806–1859) in his co-authored book ‘The Punjab a Hundred Years Ago’. He writes: “cavalcades of horsemen and mounted elephants move through the narrow streets with five-storey aging buildings leaning over on both side. Additional colour is provided by bare-chested dervishes, bearded akalis, loathsome eunuchs and fakirs covered in ashes, yet in the windows stand barefaced females”. What could be more colourful? Probably this was the scene in the northern portions of the city opposite the fort.

The colour and mystic image of Lahore managed to slip into Western opera and exotic musicals too, with Felicien David using different classics for show in Paris’s famous Opera Garnier (Grand Opera). Outstanding among them was Jules Massenet’s ‘The King of Lahore’ which made him world famous as an opera composer. The play ‘The King of Lahore’ was staged in most European and American opera houses, and with time as the French musical theatre’s grandeur receded, so did the fame of ‘The King of Lahore’ fade. Maybe it could be resurrected as a classical Pakistani musical.

Amazingly, such an image of Lahore in various operas of Europe was attacked by the great Leo Tolstoy who wrote: “such an image of Lahore did not exist in reality, and all this was beyond the possibility of doubt. There never was, or ever could be, such a Lahore”. The world of realism brings down even the greatest of poets and writers when a master provides his realistic opinion.

It would not be out of place to recall the plot of this classic ‘The King of Lahore’. It begins with Mahmud, the Afghan invader, and the scene is of a temple with the population of the city requesting the deity Indra to save the city. The chief minister, then by the name of Scindia, appears and wants to marry his niece, Sita. The ‘king’ rejects the proposal and marries her instead.

The second act is located in the Thar desert, while the third act is in Indra’s heaven (Svarga) and is located on Mount Meru. The fourth act is in the palace of Lahore where Sita is in captivity and is begging Indra to free her from the captivity of Scindia, the newly-crowned King of Lahore.

The fifth act is where Sita has managed to escape from the palace of Lahore and the clutches of Scindia. In the end, Sita kills herself with a dagger and Scindia begs forgiveness for his wrongs. Reviews of the play mention amazingly colourful scenery and backdrops. It seems that later writers were influenced in their descriptive narrations by the play. It seems most descriptions of Lahore were based on pre-colonial images of the city provided by travellers and traders.

But among the leading writers about Lahore was surely Rudyard Kipling and his classic, titled ‘Kim,’ and his Lahore. Kipling learnt to speak Urdu and a bit of Punjabi before he learnt English. He recalled that his Portuguese nanny and Hindu bearer used to tell them strange wild stories, and once it was time for dinner they would send them with the caution: “Now speak in English”. He was then sent to England, as all colonial children were then sent for their education, and returned to join the newspaper ‘The Civil & Military Gazette’ as an assistant editor. Here his Lahore columns started.

Just for the record, in those days Lahore was divided into two sections, one was the ‘Civil Quarters’ and the other was the ‘Military Quarters’, hence the name of the newspaper. In Lahore, as a journalist, he walked all over the city and learnt matters most colonial officers were unaware of. In Lahore, he wrote ‘Confessions of an English Opium-Eater’, and this was located just next to the Wazir Khan Mosque, in the ‘Tambanwali Gali’. He used the phrase ‘chandoo khana’ and brought forth the hidden social evils of old Lahore.

But Kipling’s description of Lahoris is excellent for he writes: “They sit together, laughing, calling each other their pet names and descriptions that would move the wrath of the gods’. He describes the scene opposite the mosque in the square at night as “people sleeping like corpses”. The excellent novel ‘Kim’ brings forth all these images of Lahore as few Europeans could have understood.

All these and many more aspects of Lahore have best been described by Dr Anna Suvorova in her book on Lahore. As she is a scholar of classic Urdu literature, she has mentioned Iqbal’s ability to describe the Lahore as he saw it standing on the banks of the River Ravi near Jahangir’s tomb:

Fasana e sitam-e inqilab hai yeh mahal
ko’i zaman-e salaf ki kitab hai yeh mahal

But then the poet Faiz also described Lahore in his poem ‘Ae Roshniyon Ke Shehr’ written in prison in 1956. The translated concluding lines are:

“Just tell all your lovers
To turn the wicks of their lamps high
So that I may find you, Oh city,
My city of many lights”

There is so much to learn about our city, and the best and colourful portions exist in the lives of ordinary people. All you have to do is visit them, talk to them, or share a meal with them. That is the lesson that we can derive from the observations of John Dryden, Thomas Moore, Jonathan Scott, John Hoppner, Francois Bernier, Alexis Soltykoff, H. Blavatsky, Rudyard Kipling, Pran Nevile, Allama Iqbal and Faiz, as also M.A. Munir, what to speak of others.

The point is to ask whether our schools and colleges, let alone our universities, teach the students of Lahore about their city? The answer our readers know well. The fact is that we know ourselves the least. The official lesson is: ‘Go to the shiny monuments and forget the rest, be it people, places, things or faces’.