Harking Back: Ethnic-linguistic trends that Lahore still experiences

Lahore has a history spread over thousands of years, but very few narrations dwell on the people themselves, on their ethnicity, their linguistic trends and their various sociological structures. If history is about people then we must look at the essentials.

Let us look at the numbers over the last half a century. In 1950 the Survey of Pakistan tells us that Lahore had a population of 835,769 persons. In 2021 the ‘World Population Review’ says the number has risen to a projected 13,095,166 persons. This means a staggering annual average increase of 14.66 per cent a year. This is also the speed of urbanisation. Based on an area of 6,300 square kilometres in 2019, this makes the average density of over 16,000 persons per square mile.

The UN research tells us that 87 per cent of the people of Lahore have Punjabi as their mother tongue, and speak it in their daily lives. Another 9pc speak Urdu and an amazing 4pc speak Pushto. As religion has an important factor in our political and sociological life we have 94pc belonging to 17 different Islamic sects, all claiming to be ‘true’ Muslims. The Christians of six different sects make up for 5pc with just 1pc being a combination of Sikhs, Hindus, Parsi and Jains. But the most important statistic is that over 40pc of the total population is under 15 years of age.

These statistics hold a few surprises. The UN projections tell us that the population growth will be over 2.5pc annually till the year 2035. So for the normal over 500,000 additional persons added will need over 125,000 new homes every year. But here we must point out that the Lahore Cantonment is the least congested area while the walled city of Lahore is the most congested. Here we will be discussing the sociological structure of the old city and how history has shaped it to become what it is today.

A recent research tells us that over 58pc of the resident population of the walled city speaks Pushto as a mother tongue as opposed to just 4pc in the whole city. Amazingly the new born-Pushto speakers all speak fluent Punjabi too. The elders also speak a combination of Urdu and Punjabi. The remaining 42pc in the walled city speak Punjabi of two Lahori varieties. It should not come as a surprise that the Punjabi spoken in Bhati Gate area is fairly different from that spoken in the Mochi Gate area. There are reasons for this, all embedded in history.

The difference is in the delivery of different syllables, mainly ‘r’ and ‘d’. The reason is that when the Emperor Akbar expanded the then walled city to its present state, to the west he settled the rebellious Punjabi Rajput Bhat tribes, hence the name Bhati Gate. They spoke a harsher ‘r’ and ‘d’ which still persists in their original Punjabi. Far away from them to the extreme east he settled his supporting mainly Qizilbash cavalry men from Turkmenistan of the Ottoman era, as well as the horse trading Kakayzais of the Tarkani Mamund tribe primarily of Bajaur area. These were Persian speaking people delivering a softer ‘r’ and ‘d’ in their acquired Punjabi speech.

Hence we see local and foreign tribes settling inside the walled city to support local rulers. This has been going on for well over a thousand year. The structure of the languages, dialects and delivery of Punjabi has been heavily influenced by their mother tongues. For example the elite Persian speaking Afghan families who came during the Durrani era before the Sikhs took over, still speak Persian in their homes.

So added to the harsher Bhati Gate Punjabi delivery we have an added Pushto syllable, which one expects to soften it a bit. After the Russian invasion of Afghanistan over a million immigrants moved into Pakistan. In this time period the mostly Amritsari traders who had moved into the walled city after Partition, had consolidated and were expanding, in the process knocking down the remaining ancient city walls and gateways as well as a lot of historic buildings. This process still continues.

The migrant Afghani migrants provided labour at half the cost of a local one. So with trader support they started buying up old buildings and packed it with their families. Hence today over half of the population of the old walled city are Pushto speaking. Initially they posed a problem to the local police for allegedly backing terrorists, and quite a few were found there. But now they have settled in well and have themselves become major traders in the old city, as well as all over the new markets of Lahore.

The Pushto-speaking population have extreme reactions to social change. They are either very modern by Pakistani standards, or as with the vast majority are ultra-conservative. Hence inside the walled city most mosques are managed by them. In the Durrani-era this same trend took place, which in the Sikh period subsided. The British were neutral depending on local politics.

A very dear friend points out that where there is a Punjabi-Pathan mix in walled cities, people prefer to buy their breakfasts fresh instead of making them in their houses. The current spread of Kabuli tandoors inside the walled city is proof of this. Amazingly this is also the trend in another major walled city, that being Multan. Why this happens at this stage I cannot pinpoint, but will surely research. It is just one of scores of social habits whose roots lie in history. The ‘Das Kulcha’ is also one example with Euro-Turk roots, or Sicilian to be exact who use fennel seeds as yeast.

The question that we must confront is just how will this play out? In this brief piece my take is that over time Punjabi will dominate even though two foreign languages, the growing influence of English and the relatively historically recent Turko-Persian-Arabic-Hindi-Punjabi mix that is Urdu, will prove to be irritants. These two foreign languages are supported by the elite rulers, and the mother tongue issue continues to be sidelined, with foreign rulers and current religiosity to squarely blame.

The question is ‘will they succeed’? My take again is that they will continue to create confusion. Let me explain. In Indian Punjab the labourers are mostly from Behar and Uttar Pardesh. Their children all speak pure Punjabi while the elite Sikhs like the Pakistani elite learn English and Sanskritised-Hindi, just as we use Persianised Urdu.

All these irrefutable facts about languages and learning and social habits need a lot of research for us to return to a sensible healthy mix. One does not preach changing completely, but what we certainly do need is to return to our mother tongue, to our historic social values and to a culture which tolerates ancient and modern cultural pastimes.