By Reema Abbasi

The News   3 may  2015

Less of an academic and more of a jaywalker, Majid Sheikh believes in capturing the living moment, the life as it is lived by the people behind the walls and streets of the city


Lahore has had many chroniclers and the latest has been Majid Sheikh who has written about the city and its history now for more than forty years.

His father Hamid Sheikh, too, was a chronicler of the city and he wrote, researched and recounted the various tales associated with this legendary habitation. Historically, Lahore may be a thousand year old but in terms of mythology, much older and that yields easily to fable. This is what attracted them both, the fascination for it passing from the father to the son. Majid Sheikh has had the good fortune to live much longer than the father, for Hamid Sheikh was in his late forties when he died an untimely death.
Majid Sheikh then took up journalism, like his father, while still being a student at the Government College and wrote on many subjects but the one closest to his heart was the city that he was born, educated and had lived in most of his life. From the vast number of articles published in the various newspapers in the country many selections have been made and this one happens to be yet another one. At least one Lahore Tales without End, was published by the Society for the Advancement of Higher Education in 2006.

An ancient city always harbours a myth about its origins. It may have founded by Lava, the son of Ram, it is mentioned in Mahabharata and the Ramayana. Or it could have been the village of Salatura, the place where Panini, the great grammarian was born which may have been an ancient name of Lahore. In the multilayered reading of the past, there is a possibility that when Hans attacked more than a hundred years before the advent of Islam, being the religion of the majority, the Buddhist monks began interring the statues of Buddha to preclude their destruction. Since the statues were larger than life, the graves were giant-sized and aligned north south since the sun was sacred and the face was turned to the rising sun may have given rise to the legend of the Naugaja Pirs.

Much later, entering the age of documentation, it is certain that the Mughals left behind a large number of monuments and from this city the British rallied to retake Delhi in 1847.

Of the many sources of information, the ones concentrated in an area could have been the Kashmiri Bazaar which became a place for publishing of books. Probably, the oldest book published in the city was the poetry of Masood Saad Salman in 1121AD. He was born in Lahore, captured and made a slave by the invading Mehmood of Ghazni. The poetry has many versions in manuscript form, later Janam Sakhi; the traditional biographies of Nanak were produced. Once the Wazir Khan Mosque was complete in about 1642, a number of bazaars were established and Kashmiri Bazaar became the hub of publishing and the allied trade of specialising in paper supply, floral decoration, calligraphies, book binders and book sellers.

The most popular book to have been sold in the last two hundred years is the various versions of Heer Ranjha, Si Harfi series of Fazl Shah, various versions of Ghulam Hussain. An earlier version called Heer Hussain was published in 1873 and Si Harfi Arora Rai. Heer Waris Shah was published by every publisher and a hand-written manuscript prepared in Wazir Khan Mosque now lies in the Berlin Museum, Germany.

The first English language Lahore Chronicle furthered the cause of the British. Facilitated by the British Resident, it was printed at the Chronicle Press in 1850 by Muhammed Azeem, an experienced printer who was brought in from Delhi as he was associated with the Delhi Gazette. Another experienced printer from Peshawar, Hassock Rai, was invited to set up the first Urdu language printing press, and Kohinoor, the first Urdu Newspaper, was launched.

Besides a plethora of such information that saddles almost all aspects of life, culture and archaeological remains, the one aspect that is missed the most is the slow and sudden death of various festivals that made Lahore one of the most culturally rich cities of the subcontinent. Majid Sheikh says the city is being robbed of its joy.

It is now becoming a multitude where people are unhappy and dissatisfied as the modes of their happiness have been sucked away from them mostly in the name of religion. The most important festival of the city, Basant, has been muzzled over the years in the name of public safety and the fear of loss of life when actually it is a capitulation to the readings of culture by the more orthodox sections of the population. Similarly, many more festivals which were very much part of the cultural matrix of the city are now being placed on the backburner or are totally being forgotten. The joy and conviviality, the most important feature of the city and its people, is being drained out and replaced by a certain morose religiosity.

These phases of religiosity in the past have also not served the city well. They only resulted in intolerance, violence and bloodshed from which the city took decades to recover. Now the city is not being given the chance to be on its own and discover its true colours, rather it is being drowned in this piety and self-satisfaction.

Less of an academic and more of a jaywalker, Majid Sheikh believes in capturing the living moment, the life as it is lived by the people behind the walls, streets and katris of the city. The living, pulsating reality is more poignant than turning of the dusty leaves of books in archives, though he is not totally averse to it for he has been all over the world researching the valuable material on the city but it is only in aid of the feel the city.