Harking back: The genius after whom Lyallpur was named

We all know the names Lawrence, Montgomery, MacLeod, Durand, Davies, Egerton, Aitchison, Rivaz and Dane as the names of Lahore’s roads or areas. But very few realise that they represent the names of past Lt.-Governors of Punjab. All of them contributed to the modernisation of Lahore itself.

Our piety-ridden disposition has forced us to forget our past history - colonial, local or foreign – instead opting to replace their contributions with long, foreign and difficult ‘Islamic’ names. The only good that has come out of this ridiculous policy is that in the minds of the people, more so the common person, the original names remain functional, and rightly so. To change names of building or roads or institutions is a sure sign of cultural inadequacy and immaturity.

In this column we will describe just one of the many past rulers our city and land have seen, and have a look at his contribution. My story begins when I was a small child. My father had just returned home from England after serving the BBC World Service for almost 14 years, most of his stint was as a war correspondent attached to the Lahore Division serving in the Dunkirk evacuation, in El-Alamein in Egypt, in Italy, in France and, lastly, with Richard Dimbleby in Germany. The amazing yet untold stories of the bravery and service of the Lahore Division of the soldiers of our land remain untold.

But then our family had landed in the Thal Desert of Sargodha, where my father was the PR Director of the Thal Development Authority. Once I asked him why are we in this desert where only jackals howl? His reply was crisp: “Lyall Sahib da Khawab aye puttar”, (It was Lyall Sahib’s dream and plan). The name Lyall had stuck in my mind and much later I realised that he was the man who had, probably, contributed the most to modernising Punjab.

At the moment I am researching the British period of Punjab’s history, so, naturally, my interest is focussed on a person by the name of James Broadwood Lyall, after whom was named the city of Lyallpur as the canal colonies were being established and expanded. Though his contribution has still to be fully appreciated, it seems piety and economic gain ultimately took over and the city named Lyallpur was renamed Faisalabad. Ironically, it was ZA Bhutto, an alleged progressive, who wanted to please the Saudi ruler then as he came to the Islamic Summit Conference. Thankfully, there is a very strong and growing movement to bring back the original name.

So let us take a peep at just who was the man Lyall? Sir James Lyall was born in 1838 and came to India at the age of 18 to join the Bengal Civil Service in 1857, the year of the First War of Independence, known in most books as the ‘Sepoy Mutiny’. It depends on which side one is on. He spent 30 years in the sub-continent before becoming a Lt. Governor of Punjab in 1887. In his long career he served in Mysore and Coorg, but within two years of coming here he was made a member of the Punjab Commission. Many attribute his fast rise in the ranks to his uncle, William Lyall, who was the chairman of the East India Company.

He quickly rose to be appointed as Financial Commissioner of the Punjab. In this position James Lyall was to work away on setting up of the Punjab University, Lahore, to which he was appointed in 1882 as the first vice chancellor, as also two years later he inaugurated the Khalsa College Amritsar. He rejected all offers for the college to be named after him. In his term as the vice chancellor he expanded the science departments, as well as those connected with languages and culture. In a small way he was instrumental in Lahore being labelled as a ‘city of education and culture’.

But then he also played a major role in the setting up of the Oriental College, Lahore, and also assisted in the initial years in the setting up of the Government College, Lahore. As the Financial Commissioner his contribution to overcome financial problems of educational institutions proved to be critical. As Prof Gottlieb Wilhelm Leitner, the first principal of GC was to mention in his books, that it was Lyall who assisted him the most in making finances available for the college to get going.

But James Lyall’s lasting contribution, and undoubtedly the most important, was the making of Punjab as the granary of India. His planning and amazing precision execution of the ‘Triple Project’, in which six million acres of desert land was, thanks to a network of canals, converted into fertile land. Farmers from Eastern Punjab were offered land on credit at cheap rates to produce wheat, cotton, rice and an array of crops.

To help them an agriculture college was set up, as well as smaller research-related schools. It was here that the sub-continent’s first planned city came about, which was named Lyallpur. The Chenab Colony also was named Lyallpur, as was eventually the whole district. The virtual magical emergence of Lyallpur as the centre of agriculture and agro-learning was in no small measure to his financial expertise, as also to his precise planning of money flows and actual on-the-ground performance. It was a strategic plan par excellence.

His drive to merge learning with agro-production, as well as with other cotton-related industries, needs to be appreciated much more than it is, even though he was a colonialist. In May 1892 he was knighted for his “outstanding contribution” to the British Empire and was appointed to the Royal Commission on Opium, where it emerged that he was in favour of opium as a medicine. He is on record as having said: “The moderate use of opium is not harmful, therefore, I recommend not banning it but restricting it”. Amazingly that policy is still legally valid in India and Pakistan.

Once famine hit the whole subcontinent he was made head of the ‘Famine Commission’ and very soon got agriculture back on track. Once the food industry was back in stride he was to say: “India should logically never starve, if it does it will be because of traders hoarding”. Need one give examples now? So it was that the Thal Development Authority completed the final part of James Lyall’s plan to turn Punjab’s deserts into the most fertile portion of our land. Sir James Lyall died at the age of 76 in 1916 in Kent.

The name Lyall is of Scottish origin, which in Gallic means ‘the wolf’, which he was in his performance. The Lyall family saw his great great grandson Mark serve as the British High Commissioner to Pakistan. Most of the family migrated to Canada and Australia, where they are even today outstanding musicians and writers. One hopes the name Lyallpur is restored, completing the amazing story of a most amazing person of the colonial period that Punjab saw.