The Dawn 08-05-06

MY grandfather was in the prime of his bureaucratic career in Lahore in 1919, a momentous year in the political history of the South Asian subcontinent. I have given you excerpts from Ravinder Kumar`s account of the Rowlatt Act agitation in the Punjab capital that year. But what was the city like in 1919? Here are more excerpts from Ravinder Kumar:

The city of Lahore occupied a position of pre-eminence which rested firmly upon the historical traditions of Punjab. As the capital of the province it occupied a dominating position in the plains of central Punjab, on the banks of the river Ravi. According to mythical accounts Lahore was founded by Lava, the son of the epic hero, Rama, in the remote centuries B.C. But the first historical reference to the city is found in the journals of the Chinese pilgrim, Hiuen Tsang, in AD 630. When north India was invaded by the Muslims in the eleventh century, Lahore acquired as a provincial capital an importance which it had not possessed earlier. Thereafter, successive Muslim rulers like the Ghaznavids, the Khiljis, the Lodis, and the Mughals looked upon it as a city control over which enabled them to dominate the territories between the Indus and the Jamuna. This was particularly true of the Mughals, one of whom, Jahangir, made Lahore the capital of his extensive possessions in India. The Mughal presence in the city remains enshrined in architectural monuments of marble and sandstone which speak eloquently of the taste and sensibility of their creators.

The decline of the Mughal Empire cast a shadow over Lahore, and during the eighteenth century the city was controlled either by weak Mughal governors, or by uncivilised Sikh chiefs and half-tame Afghan nobles. Under Ranjit Singh, however, Lahore recovered partly from the vicissitudes of the eighteenth century, since the Sikh ruler made it the capital of his empire. But it was only after the establishment of British rule over Punjab that the city regained its former position of pre-eminence. Indeed, after the British conquest of 1849, Lahore, as the centre of a modern system of administration, dominated the rest of Punjab in a way it had never dominated it before.

The history of Lahore is vividly reflected in its ecology, and in the complexion of the social groups which resided in it. The hub of the city comprised the native quarter, which had grown up during the time of the Mughals, but which contributed substantially to the ethos of the city even in the opening decades of the twentieth century. The native quarter was surrounded by a brick wall, which was reinforced by a moat and other defences. After 1849, however, the city wall became useless and was allowed to decay; the moat too was filled in, and a garden came to occupy the site of the wall and the moat. The garden encircled the city wall on all sides except the north, which was dominated by a fort built by the Emperor Akbar. A metalled road skirted the outer edge of the garden, and it gave access to the city through thirteen gates.

Within the walls of the city lay a cluster of bazaars and mohallas which sheltered its inmates from the world that had grown up outside after 1849. The principal bazaars of Lahore divided the city into half-adozen different sections, which were in turn divided by gullis or lanes into mohallas or residential blocs. The bazaars, which were gay and colourful and throbbed with activity, formed the principal markets of the city. Yet rarely were they very wide, and they were in addition encroached upon by open booths, and by the projecting fronts of the shops which lined the bazaars on either side. The gullis, of course, were even narrower and virtually impassable for vehicular traffic. They led from the bazaars to the mohallas, and usually ended in a culde-sac. The mohallas were lined on both sides by houses of pucca brick two or even three storeys high, which presented a gloomy and forbidding appearance to the eye. A massive gate of wood often guarded the approach to a mohalla, and this gate, when closed, completely shut the mohalla off from the world outside.

To view the sights and hear the sounds of the native quarter of the city at the turn of the century, we can do no better than follow in the footsteps of Kim, the hero of Kipling’s Lahore, as he escorted a stranger to a serai in the city:

The hot and crowded bazaar blazed with light as they (Kim and the Lama) made their way through the press of all the races in Upper India, and the Lama mooned through it like a man in a dream. It was his first experience of a large manufacturing city.... Half pushed, half towed, he arrived at the high gate of the Kashmir Seria; that huge open square over against the railway station, surrounded by arched cloisters, where the camel and horse caravans put up on their return from Central Asia. Here were all manner of northern folk, tending tethered ponies and kneeling camels; loading and unloading bales and bundles, drawing water for the evening meal at the creaking windlasses.... swearing, shouting, arguing and chamfering in the packed square:

(R. Kipling, Kim (London, 1943), p. 24.) The bazaars through which Kim escorted the Lama were flanked with shops which overflowed with foodstuffs and cloth, hardware and jewellery, and articles of daily consumption. Groups of merchants in the same trade occupied a particular section of a bazaar, and if trade was important enough, which it frequently was, then it would have an entire bazaar to itself, like the bazaar of the grain merchants, or the bankers and money-lenders or the goldsmiths. The merchants resided in rooms above or behind their shops, or in mohallas in the vicinity of the premises where they conducted their business.

The mohalla formed a little world in itself, and it bestowed a sense of community on its residents, a sense of community which undermined, albeit to a limited extent, the barriers of caste, class, and religion. A khatri residing in a mohalla could have as his neighbours ‘a Muslim lawyer, a Hindu confectioner, a Muslim clerk in the municipality and a Brahmin family’. P.Tandon, Punjabi Century (London, 1961), p.95.) But despite such differences in background the social life of the residents of a mohalla was on the whole free from serious tension and strife. The men rose early in the morning, and congregated around a well to bathe and to indulge in innocuous gossip. After an early meal they departed for work, leaving behind them the women and children, whose interests and activities contributed substantially to the social climate of the mohalla. As soon as they had dispensed with the household chores, the women took out their piras or low stools and embroidery, and posted themselves on the tharas outside their houses, talking of births, deaths, and marriages, or what they had cooked for the evening, while the children played together in boisterous little groups.

Mohallas were both ‘mixed’ and ‘pure’. In a mixed mohalla high and low castes and Hindus and Muslims lived as neighbours, while pure mohallas were inhabited by a single caste. The sentiment of community prevailed even in the mixed mohalla, but this sentiment was considerably stronger in pure mohallas, which resembled extended families, since in addition to the ties of neighbourhood, they were also held together by bonds of kinship and marriage. Despite the freedom with which different social groups mixed together, however, caste identities remained distinct in mixed mohallas, and caste taboos were never violated in questions concerning marriage and kinship. As a Punjabi who had grown up in a mixed mohalla points out, ‘khatris and sonars ... (could live) amiably for generations without any interdining, intermarriage or much social intercourse.’ One of the most important members of the mohalla was the choudhry or elder, who was often a prosperous businessman or merchant, and who advised the residents of the mohalla in the conduct of civic affairs.

Part 2- May 15, 2006

A ND now to continue with last week’s account of Lahore, 1919, by Ravinder Kumar. The author says: The world which lay outside the city walls of Lahore was strikingly different from the world which lay inside the city walls. The bazaar leading through Lahori Gate, the principal entrance to the city, debauched on the Anarkali, which was the most important commercial centre in Lahore, and which represented a compromise between a native and a modern shopping centre. Within the Anarkali stood the stores of the leading merchants of Lahore; substantial men like the Bhallas, or Raja brothers, some of whom played an active role in the events of 1919. The southern end of the Anarkali was the site of an urban complex which had come up after 1849. This complex represented the British presence in Lahore, and the position which Lahore held as the capital of the Punjab. It consisted of the Secretariat, the District Courts, the Punjab University and its affiliated Colleges, the Town Hall, the Museum, the Public Library, and the Mayo and Aitchison Hospitals.

Since the Anarkali connected the native quarter with the administrative hub of the city, it served as a bridge between mediaeval and modern Lahore. It also linked the bazaars within the city walls with the Mall, which was the Anglo-Indian shopping centre. The Mall stretched from east to west for three miles, and it connected the Secretariat with Government House, the residence of the LieutenantGovernor of the Punjab. It was flanked on either side by stores and shopping centres which catered to the needs of the Europeans or the native landed gentry. On the Mall, or near it, were located the hotels or clubs which served the social needs of the civil servants and the Europeans engaged in the liberal professions who lived in Lahore.

The striking contrast between the Mall and the bazaars within the city walls was highlighted by the spacious suburbs which stretched between Government House and the Anarkali. These suburbs were inhabited by Europeans, who braved the rigorous of the north Indian climate in luxurious bungalows, and whose life was regulated by a rigid code of precedence and privilege. In a curious way Anglo-Indian society was as much a prey to ‘caste’ sentiment as the Hindu community sheltered within the walls of the city. Indeed, ‘caste’ distinctions, based on occupational rather than on hereditary status, played just as significant a part in Anglo-Indian society as they did in Hindu society. A civil servant, for instance, assumed a distinctly brahmanical air of superiority in his dealings which businessmen or men in the professions, while a teacher or a journalist was a veritable pariah in the world of the Anglo-Indians:

The social distinctions are by no means lost sight of in India; on the contrary, they are perhaps more rigidly observed here than at home, and the smaller the society, the broader are the lines of demarcation (pointed out one observer of the Anglo-Indian scene). Each man depends upon his position in the public service, which is the aristocracy.... The women depend upon the rank of their husbands....Mrs. A—the wife of a barrister, making pound 4,000 or pound 5,000 a year, is nobody as compared with the wife of B—who is a deputy commissioner, or with Mrs. C, who is the better half of the station-surgeon. Wealth can do nothing for man or woman in securing them honour.... A successful speculator, or a merchant prince, may force his way into good society in England... But in India he must remain forever outside the sacred barrier, which keeps the non-official world from the high society of the services.(H Brown, The Sahibs (London), 1948), pp.1267.

To look upon the AngloIndian and the Indian societies of Lahore as two completely distinct worlds, however, would do violence to facts. For in the course of half a century British rule had created opportunities, in the professions, in public service, and in business which stimulated the growth of social groups that bridged the gulf between modern and mediaeval Lahore. As soon as a Punjabi prospered in life, he moved out of his mohalla, first to a suburbs near the city walls, and then to a more exclusive residential district in the proximity of the Mall. Suburbs like Mozang and Qilla Gujjar Singh, which were located between the Anarkali and Government House, housed the new middle class of Lahore. Fane Road, for instance, was exclusively occupied by barristers and lawyers who had made their reputations and their fortunes, at the High Court in Lahore. The landed gentry lived in even more select parts of the city, in close proximity to Government House, which was itself located, not inappropriately, on a site formerly occupied by a famous Sikh soldier. Tenuous ties therefore linked the European to the Indian city, through the landed gentry or the raises, and also through the middle classes.