By BARBARA CROSSETTE; BARBARA CROSSETTE IS AN ASSISTANT NEWS EDITOR OF THE NEW YORK TIMES.

Published: June 14, 1981

History has dealt the lovers of Lahore more than their share of broken hearts. This graceful and cultured city, with a history that stretches by some accounts back into the days of the epic Ramayana, passed through many conquering hands - Hindu, Mogul, Persian, Afghan, Sikh and British -on the way to becoming an intellectual center of the Indian subcontinent, only to be relegated with the partition of British India to the status of a provincial Pakistani capital.

Over the years monuments rose, monuments fell and charges flew: Sikhs decried Muslim damage to their shrines, Muslims pointed to desecrations perpetrated by Sikhs. A generation of Hindu and Sikh Punjabis, forced in l947 to flee bloody religious violence, still mourns the loss of a city they can longer visit but can never forget, and to which they will always belong.

''Lahore,'' the elderly Sikh photographer in Chandigarh said in a low, choked voice as he held up to the light the negatives I had brought to him for printing. ''My god, you have been in Lahore. Tell me, how is it now?''

Lahore is fine. Lahore is a survivor, and all of its bittersweet history is here for the tourist to see, in the tombs and mosques, palaces and fortresses, museums, gardens and parks that make this one of the most fascinating and pleasurable of the subcontinent's attractions. Pakistan - Lahore is its second-largest city - has restored and preserved historical buildings while developing a clean, modern town around them.

Lahore is quiet now: The reputation for carousing that Rudyard Kipling touched on in his brief autobiography, ''Something of Myself,'' has been obliterated by the martial-law government's Islamization program. There is no more public drinking in Lahore (or anywhere in Pakistan), and there are fewer women in public places. The Soviet presence in Afghanistan has closed the overland route from Kabul to Delhi and Calcutta, reducing the number of foreign travelers. The war between Iran and Iraq has further deterred tourists. So lovers of Kipling, admirers of Shah Jehan's architecture or followers of Guru Arjan Dev may find they will not be elbowed out of the places they came to see.

I went to Lahore after several months in India's Punjab, where it seemed no one over the age of 40 was without stories to tell and reminiscences to share about this city. Resisting the blandishments of the new international hotels advertising on billboards along the road into town from the border crossing at Wagah, my husband, David, and I settled in at Faletti's, Lahore's once-grand hotel where pre-independence society congregated. It was at Faletti's that much of the rump of British colonial society in the Punjab danced partition away to the music of a genteel orchestra while neighborhoods burned around them.

Faletti's, now run by the Pakistan Tourism Development Corporation, is still a comfortable, rambling place separated from busy Egerton Road by a quiet lawn. Its rooms, arrayed along verandas, are large, though the furnishings are worn with the kind of age that lacks interest. The large dining room - the proverbial palm court - was never open during our stay in January, and all guests were sent to the small and fairly dismal coffee shop for meals. Breakfast there was fine, but for other meals we frequently walked around the corner to the Lahore Hilton, where the menus in both coffee shop and dining room were more varied and the ambience a good deal cheerier.

Still, Faletti's was an experience we would happily repeat. Like Flashmann's in Rawalpindi and Dean's in Peshawar, Faletti's has a feeling all its own: life is lazy among the potted plants; the roomservice staff seemed more like retainers than employees. There was always a cup of tea or coffee within minutes of asking. Faletti's was also handy to airline offices, shopping and restaurants. We did much of our exploring of the city on foot, supplemented by three-wheeled, scooter-powered rickshaws when it rained or horse-drawn tongas - two-wheeled carriages in which passengers sit facing backwards - when we were tired but not in a hurry.

Even a short visit to Lahore, which is well-connected by rail and air to the rest of Pakistan as well as to India, can encompass much of its history and culture. One starting point for an introductory tour of the city might be Lahore Fort, on the northern edge of both the old, walled city and the larger metropolitan area. From the ramparts of the fort it is possible to get one's bearings on the setting of Lahore. The River Ravi, one of the five rivers (panj ab in Hindi) that gave the Punjab its name, flows to the west and northwest beyond the playing fields around the Minar-e-Pakistan, the tower built to commemorate the spot where a resolution calling for the creation of a free, Muslim nation was passed in 1940. The city stretches south and southeast of the fort, first the ancient town and then the newer city with its Victorian brick and contemporary concrete.

Within the fort there are palaces and halls built by a succession of Mogul emperors from Akbar (1560-1605), who frequently held court in Lahore; through Jehangir (1605-1627) whose tomb and that of his empress Nur Jehan is northwest of the city; Shah Jehan (1627-1658), of Taj Mahal fame and Aurengzeb (1658-1707), whom Indians continue to portray as history's prime Islamic zealot. The Shish Mahal, or palace of mirrors, is a favorite of Pakistanis and foreign visitors alike. The little palace is a spectacle of glass, colored mirrors, gilt, marble and fretted screens for windows.

The fort compound also includes the Moti Masjid, a small mosque for the use of royal women; the all-marble Diwan-i-Khas, or hall of private audience; a throne room and public audience hall, and private royal apartments. There is also a small museum of weapons, maps and drawings, most from the period in the 18th and early 19th centuries when the Sikhs, people of northern India who had broken from Hinduism and were known for their warrior qualities, ruled Lahore. The Sikhs, especially under the Maharajah Ranjit Singh, did some building and restoration work of their own within the fort, but their work never approached that of the Moguls, who lavished both their love and their considerable talents on the city.

Visitors to Pakistan are frequently warned not to take photographs of Moslem women - a caution that created problems for me in the fort complex, where almost every interesting angle seemed to be populated by somebody's wife or mother. Trying to catch both people and buildings surreptitiously, I was startled to hear a male voice shouting in my direction, ''Excuse me, excuse me.'' A young man headed toward me, waving for attention and pointing at my camera. Before I had time to take fright, I realized what he wanted. He was lining up his large family for a group picture - he had to drag one shy, veiled (and giggling) woman out of the shadows. The picture taken, we exchanged addresses and pleasantries in a fairly primitive mixture of Punjabi and English. Two minutes later a trio of touring Afghans took his place, inviting me not to take their picture, but to pose with them - very methodically taking turns at the camera to be sure each one would be included. All we could exchange were smiles. This curious invitation was repeated many times across the subcontinent, where being photographed with a visiting foreigner seems to hold a certain fascination for people on a day's outing at one tourist spot or another.

A short walk from the public entrance to Lahore Fort - probably no more than several hundred yards across the Hazuri Bagh square - is the Badshahi Mosque. It was built during the reign of Aurengzeb and it is regarded with pride by the Pakistanis as one of the Islamic world's largest places of worship. The courtyard can accommodate 100,000 people. From the mosque's minarets there is reputed to be a superb view of the city and its environs, but I was too lazy to climb its 200-plus stairs.

Near the Badshahi Mosque are two Sikh places of pilgrimage. One, north of the mosque, is the samdhi of Ranjit Singh. It is a brick, sandstone and marble architectural mix built over the ashes of the maharajah (whose birth bicentennary is being celebrated this year), and of his four wives and seven concubines who becames satis -burned alive on his funeral pyre. The samdhi is decorated inside with mosaics of glass and mirrored ceilings. Just north of this memorial is the gold-domed gurdwara (place of worship) dedicated to the memory of Guru Arjan Dev, the fifth of the Sikhs' 10 founding gurus and the author of the Sikh holy book, the Adi Granth. His followers had reported that it was on this spot that the guru had sunk mysteriously into the River Ravi, never to reappear.

Though the Sikhs' holiest city has long been Amritsar, 40 miles or so across the border in India, Lahore's shrines remain important to them and they have mounted international campaigns for access to these places, which Pakistan is now granting to limited groups of pilgrims.

While there seem to be no end to mausoleums, memorials and mosques in Lahore, it would be a mistake to dwell on them at the expense of some aimless, freelance wandering around the city's bazaars, here as elsewhere one of the real delights of the Islamic East. From the fort and Badshahi Mosque, the hardy can wander by foot into the old city toward the warren of shops that surround the Golden Mosque and radiate out to the Mori, Lohari, Shah Alami and Delhi gates.

In the bazaars are small stalls spilling brass, copper, leather, cloth and jewelry into the laps of shoppers. Also worth seeing are alleyways of old brick-and-wood houses with overhanging windows and balconies that can be missed by those who forget to look up from the color and life at street level. A walk from the fort through the old city's bazaars to the southern gates, would cover about two miles.

South of the Lohari Gate, leading into the Victoriana of British Lahore, runs the Anarkali Bazaar. Of all the shopping areas it is the best known, as much for the story of Anarkali herself as for the variety of its merchandise - which incidentally includes, along with all the richness of the other bazaars, many used books on sidewalk tables and streetside heaps that offer bargains like an archeological guide to the ruins at Taxila for one rupee (about 10 cents) or 19thcentury travelogues on the Punjab for less than a dollar.

Anarkali (pomegranate blossom in Persian) was a woman in the court of Akbar, either a courtesan or a royal wife, depending on whose version of the story one chooses to believe. What she did is also a matter of dispute. Local legend says Prince Salim (later the Emperor Jehangir) fell in love with her, to the immense displeasure of Akbar, his father, who had the unfortunate woman buried alive in 1599. After Jehangir ascended the throne he had a spendid mausoleum constructed in her memory. Completed in 1615, it later became a British church and is now a records office.

But the legend is dismissed as ''vicious fiction'' by Professor Masud al-Hasan in his recent ''Guide to Lahore,'' published in the city by Ferozsons (20 rupees - $2 - though hotels may try to ask up to three times the price). According to Professor Hasan, whose evidence is interesting, ''Salim was only 30 years old in 1599 and it is inconceivable that a young prince of 30 would have made love to a woman of 50.'' The professor's candidate for the tomb is Jamal, a legitimate wife of Jehangir, who was buried in her beloved pomegranate garden. Whoever she was or whatever she did, Anarkali is nonetheless woven into the tragic history of this place. At least no one questions that it was Jehangir who had engraved on her tomb: ''If I could see again the face of my beloved, to the day of judgment would I thank my Creator.''

Where the Anarkali Bazaar meets the Mall (now the Shahrah-e-Quaide-Azam), the visitor enters another Lahore, an area of broad streets and ornamented brick and sandstone buildings that owes its atmosphere to the British, who not only restored some monuments of their predecessors, but also constructed some imposing edifices of their own. The British built as if they meant to stay. Though their neo-Mogul and other derivative buildings do not please every eye, their tree-shaded plots bring welcome relief to a traffic-filled boulevard.

A walk westward along the Mall brings one to two of these contributions: the old Punjab University and the Lahore Museum. The university -arched, turreted, domed and ornamented at every turn - was among the most distinguished centers of learning in British India. Like so much else in Lahore, the university was split after partition, with a portion of its faculty moving into exile in India, where a new Panjab University was eventually built in Chandigarh, the new capital of India's Punjab state. Pakistan also has a new campus for the university that is south of the city. Punjab University remains the country's largest teaching institution.

Between the old university campus and the museum across the Mall is a small traffic island on which sits Zamzama, the 18th-century cannon known to readers of Kipling as ''Kim's gun.'' This part of town has many associations with Kipling, who worked as a journalist in Lahore and made his name as a writer here between l882 and l889. Kipling's father taught at (and made famous) the Mayo College of Art, and became a leading curator/director of the museum. The story of Kim, recognized in both East and West as a classic tale of old India, begins in Lahore, where Kipling, still in his teens, had plumbed deeply into the life of backstreet and bazaar.

Lahore Museum - another towered and ornamented example of Victoriana on a Mogul theme - is a treasure house. After the sometimes-careless, incomplete or nonexistent exhibit-labeling of many Indian museums, it is a pleasure to find an institution full of information. Exhibits are varied: There is a first-rate collection of Gandhara art, works of the Greco-Buddhist school that flourished in what is now Pakistan just before and after the birth of Christ.

This Gandhara art (much of it excavated from archeological sites that can be visited at Taxila, west of Islamabad, the country's capital) offers a visual and intellectual link between the Hellenistic world and the religious east. Buddhas displayed here have western features, their garments are draped in Mediterranean style. One of the most famous and dramatic of all Buddhist sculptures, the meditating Siddharta or ''starving Buddha'' is in the Lahore collection. It depicts the future Buddha gaunt and near the point of death from fasting before achieving enlightenment.

The museum also has an extensive collection of photographs and newspaper reproductions that tell the story of independence, with an emphasis, of course, on the creation of Muslim Pakistan under Mohammed Ali Jinnah. The material on view illustrates the extent to which Lahore had become a thinking, writing and publishing center, led by its venerable English-language newspaper, The Tribune, founded in 1881. It is now published across the border in Chandigarh, another loss Lahore suffered in partition. (The museum's collection was itself split in two at that time.)

A walk back along the Mall past Charing Cross takes in many other monuments to British Lahore: the telegraph office, the post office, the federal court (built in what resident architectural historians describe as medieval Pathan style; to the uninitiated it is just another wondrous Victorian extravaganza on an older theme), an Anglican cathedral and finally the Jinnah (formerly the Lawrence) Gardens, a recreational, botanical and zoological park.

A very different kind of garden awaits the visitor a few miles east of Lahore. There, in what was once a patch of countryside, Shah Jehan built his Shalimar Gardens to rival Jehangir's Shalimar Gardens at Srinigar in Kashmir. This classic, Persian-style Mogul park covers 80 acres. It is enclosed by a high brick wall and divided into three terraced levels with a water channel, a favorite of the Moguls, flowing down the center over steps and through latticed niches. A canal intersects the garden; it and a smaller channel feed no fewer than 450 fountains. Pavilions and a royal resthouse complete the symmetrical plan. Flower gardens add dashes of color, and now and then the scent of roses.

Burkha-clad Muslim women and Punjabis of both sexes wearing baggy trousers and tunics, stroll, rest and chat among the trees. Gentle Shalimar seems a good place to end a visit to busy, noisy Lahore, and a good place to think about its timelessness. Maybe it was here that someone coined the proverb that no guidebook can resist. ''Lahore - '' it says, ''Isfahan and Shiraz together would not equal half of it.'' If You Go ... ...Lahore, the capital of Pakistan's Punjab province, has an international airport served by Pakistan International Airlines and (from New Delhi) by Indian Airlines, India's domestic carrier. Connections with other international airlines can be made through Karachi.

Good rail service also connects Lahore with other major Pakistani centers. It is possible to cross from India to Pakistan by train from Amritsar and Delhi, but border procedures can be long and complicated. A road crossing at Wagah is also open for a few daylight hours. Check schedules, and allow several extra hours for border formalities.

Tourists can obtain a free, 30-day visa (necessary for Americans) at border crossings and airports. Transportation within Lahore is plentiful, with taxis, scooter rickshaws and horse-drawn tongas (especially in the old city) readily available. Insist that taxis and scooter rickshaws use their meters to determine fares, however. Fares for longer journeys (for example, to the Shalimar Gardens) may have to be negotiated; ask the hotel staff for help. (We paid about $2 by scooter for the round trip to Shalimar.) Tonga fares are always agreed on through bargaining; most rides should cost less than 50 cents.

Though Lahore has several hotels in a variety of price ranges, three are most frequently recommended to foreign visitors: the Lahore InterContinental, the Lahore Hilton and Faletti's. The first two range in price from $40 for a single room to $60 for a double; Faletti's has rooms in the $25-to-$30 range. (We paid just over $30 for a suite of two large rooms and a bath.)

Food in Lahore is similar to North Indian cuisine, with spicy chicken and vegetable dishes, served with nan or other Indian breads. Tandoor cooking is common. There are several restaurants along the Shahrah-e-Quiad-e-Azam (the Mall) featuring Pakistani as well as Chinese food. We did not try them, preferring to rely on quick meals at one or another hotel since time was short and Pakistani cuisine, while good, is not among the most distinguished.

Furthermore, since alcohol is no longer served in public places (you can get it in your hotel room if you are a non-Muslim foreigner) the lure of a lingering restaurant evening was somewhat diminished for us. A huge Western-style breakfast at Faletti's - from juice through porridge and eggs to coffee - cost about $2 each. Lunch at the Hilton's coffee shop - a curried vegetable dish, an omelet or kebab and nan -never cost more than $6 or $8 for two. Dinner in the dining room -with chicken or mutton as a main course - cost about double that.

Pakistan's official language is Urdu, an Indo-Iranian language related to the Sanskrit-based languages of India. The common language in Lahore is Punjabi. English is spoken in large hotels.

The climate of Pakistan's Punjab province is extreme by subcontinent standards. In summer, which begins in April, temperatures can rise to 115 degrees Fahrenheit on occasion; 90 to 105 degrees is considered the normal range. July to September brings the monsoon rains and some relief from the heat. In winter (November to March) temperatures drop into the 60's and 70's, lower at night.December and January can be rainy, but with showers rather than the heavy rains of the monsoon.

Because Pakistan is an Islamic nation, most tourist attractions and all mosques are closed to visitors on Fridays. The Pakistan Tourism Development Corporation (with an office in the Faletti's Hotel complex and information publications available at major hotels) maintains up-to-date lists on museum opening hours, as well as on city tours.

For more information write to Pakistan International Airlines, 551 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10017 (212-949-0477) or to the Pakistan Mission to the United Nations, 12 East 65th Street, New York, N.Y. 10021 (212-879-8600).