Harking Back: The abiding contribution of Sir Ganga Ram

Once the British had taken over from the crumbling Sikh Empire in 1849, it took them another 50 years to develop Lahore on modern lines, put into place an accountable government and repair the physical damage done. Never a greater change had taken place.

What you see of Lahore today had some great men who combined to build it. The British governed fair, this much cannot be denied, though the huge spoils of colonialism they certainly did enjoy, enriching their own homeland and people. But in the process some excellent humans here arose who combined to make what Lahore is today.

To be fair hundreds of skilled persons emerged, but four of them stand out. This piece is about one of those four persons, those four being John Lockwood Kipling, Rai Bahadar Kanhaiya Lal, the amazing architect Bhai Ram Singh, and least, but not the last, was Rai Bahadar Sir Ganga Ram Agarwal. Some of the finest structures that you see of British-era Lahore has their hand and mind in it.

Let us start from Lower Mall with the Town Hall, the National College of Arts, the Lahore Museum, Tollinton Market and behind it the Punjab Public Library, the Punjab University old campus, the Lahore High Court, the Lahore GPO, and as you move along each and every structure right up to the Lahore Cantonment has been built mostly by these four. Their hand and role is in them directly, or even indirectly.

A few other architects also contributed, but the mark of our four persons is in all these buildings. Far away developments like Model Town, and even the plan for Gulberg have their mark on them. Let us analyse just one of them, Rai Bahadar Sir Ganga Ram Agarwal, for famous that he is, but very little is known about the real man and his real achievements.

Born in 1851 in Mangtanwala, in Nankana District, he moved to Amritsar where after excelling in his Matric examinations he joined Government College Lahore, and then went to Rookree to become a ‘water and drainage engineer’. In 1873, he joined the PWD aged merely 21 years, and after an assignment in Delhi he returned to join the agricultural wing.

Now in this manner he was very different from the remaining three. After working for three years in water drainage he managed to get a lease of 2,000 squares (murabas) of dry arid land in the then Montgomery (Sahiwal) areas. Just how did he manage that is anyone’s guess! But then why did he want to get a lease on so much dry arid land that had never provided any crops? It still boggles the mind, for in this lay his real talent.

Mind you the Agarwal clan are North India Hindu Jatts, and his family belonged to a merchant money-lending class. As the father owned a very small patch of land, Ganga Ram by birth was a cultivator and had a merchants mind. A bit of history might help.

At that time the British wanted the Punjab, which had plenty of water in its five rivers, but its arid land remained mostly unutilised. So Ganga Ram hit on the idea of using a lot of this arid land to produce crops with the water available. Hence this dazzling lease of 2,000 ‘murabas’, which comes to a massive 50,000 acres, made sense after he put forth his plan to produce hydel electricity and pump the water to his land.

The Renala Khurd hydel power project thus came up. Mind you it is still working to this day. With his water and drainage management skills he built over 1,000 miles of small drains and got a bumper crop. Hence money flowed to make him among the richest in the Punjab. But his influence among the British was immense for he paid all his taxes, unlike other rural land owners. So much did the British trust his honesty that they presented him with another 200 acres as a gift.

To gauge his wealth just imagine that only five maunds of wheat was produced per acre. So for 50,000 acres that makes 250,000 maunds. One does realise that an acre produces over 30 maunds, but let us remain within safety limits. The amount he collected from every crop made him, within three years, not a millionaire, but a billionaire.

But in his PWD job he supervised a number of buildings on The Mall, including the Lahore Museum, Aitchison College, Mayo Hospital Albert Victor Ward, and the Lady MacLagan Girls School. The sheer grandeur of those building, which still impress, all have the name of Ganga Ram attached to them, even though he was just the supervising engineer of the project.

But then in 1903 at the age of 51 years he retired and used his own wealth to invest in health, education and housing. But as he invested he acquired fame as the great philanthropist. He came to be known for his kindness. Among his own investment, made through Trusts, he built the Ganga Ram Hospital, the Ganga Ram High School for Girls which after 1947 became the Lahore College for Women, and the Ravi Road House for the Disabled. He built Model Town and planned for Gulberg.

After his death in 1927 his family continued the work of his Trusts. The point of this piece is that no one single person can claim the credit for how the British propelled Lahore into the modern British era. It was a combination of highly organised efforts led by some very talented persons.

The two world wars of 1914-19 and 1939-45 effectively halted this effort. But The Mall had other projects too, like the Lahore Zoo, the Freemason’s Hall, the Punjab Assembly, and a number of other buildings that still stand. That they are not maintained does not speak well of how we manage things.

Come Pakistan and a new set of architects and engineers emerged, who in no small measure have performed just as well. The tradition of the early masters was Indo-Saracenic architecture, a combination of Mughal and Gothic styles meshed with Indian traditions. The newer architects are much more contemporary and a few combine the older styles in some exquisite brickwork.

But what stands out that while Lahore had four brilliant masters in the British era, in the Pakistan era men like Kamil Khan Mumtaz, Nayyar Ali Dada and a host of others continue to enrich Lahore in no small measure.

So how would you analyse the personal efforts of Rai Bahadar Sir Ganga Ram Agarwal? He invested in health, in education and in providing quality foods to the people. These efforts have grown in size, and even today continue to grow. To my way of thinking this is the real contribution of Ganga Ram to Lahore and its poor, not the buildings he supervised as a PWD engineer, not that they are no less a contribution.