Tahir Kamran
Published in Dawn, January 11th, 2026
In the latter half of the nineteenth century Lahore emerged as the principal intellectual and literary centre of North India, a position it acquired neither by historical accident nor by the uninterrupted continuation of pre-colonial traditions. Rather, its ascent must be understood as the outcome of deliberate colonial intervention in the domains of education, language, and culture following the British annexation of Punjab in 1849. The remaking of Lahore’s intellectual landscape was mediated through institutions, policies, and individuals who were themselves migrants—geographically, culturally, or intellectually. Among these, Colonel William Rice Moreland Holroyd, Dr. Gottlieb Wilhelm Leitner, and Muhammad Hussain Azad occupy a central place. Acting through the Directorate of Public Instruction, the Anjuman-i-Punjab, the reform of Urdu mushairas, and the establishment of Government College Lahore and the Punjab University, they inaugurated, what may be described as, a colonial vernacular modernity.
Viewed through an Orientalist lens, however, this modernity was not ideologically neutral. As Edward Said, Bernard Cohn, and Tariq Rahman have variously argued, colonial knowledge was inseparable from power, classification, and governance, and the elevation of vernaculars such as Urdu functioned simultaneously as an instrument of reform and of control.
The annexation of Punjab brought education immediately within the purview of colonial governance. Initially administered by Judicial Commissioner Robert Montgomery and later by Financial Commissioner D. F. McLeod, educational policy in the province was decisively shaped by Wood’s Despatch of 1854. The Despatch, often hailed as the Magna Carta of Indian education, prescribed the establishment of separate provincial education departments and emphasized the dissemination of knowledge through vernacular languages, alongside the encouragement of classical Oriental languages such as Sanskrit, Arabic, and Persian.
Bernard Cohn’s insight into colonialism as an “investigative modality” is particularly illuminating here: the classification, codification, and standardisation of languages were not merely pedagogical measures but techniques of rule. By privileging certain vernaculars and institutionalising them through state machinery, the colonial state rendered Indian society legible and administratively manageable.
In January 1856, a distinct Department of Public Instruction was created in Punjab, with authority vested in the Director of Public Instruction and a cadre of European inspectors. This apparatus survived the rupture of 1857 and was reaffirmed under Crown rule in 1859, ensuring policy continuity. As Tariq Rahman has argued, the post-1857 period witnessed a strategic deployment of language policy to stabilise British authority, particularly through the promotion of Urdu as a vernacular associated with Muslim elites yet detached from the political radicalism of Persian. Lahore, as the provincial capital, became the principal site where this policy was operationalised and culturally elaborated.
The appointment of Colonel William Rice Moreland Holroyd as Director of Public Instruction (DPI) in 1868 marked a critical moment in this process. Holroyd was not merely an administrator but a cultural arbiter who believed that literature could serve as an instrument of moral instruction and social reform. Under his supervision, Urdu was transformed from a functional medium of instruction into a vehicle for reshaping literary taste. His patronage of Urdu mushairas, convened under the auspices of the Anjuman-i-Punjab, represented an unprecedented attempt by the colonial state to intervene directly in the evolution of indigenous literary forms. From a Saidian perspective, these efforts exemplify Orientalism’s “positional superiority”: the assumption that the colonial official could diagnose the decadence of native culture and prescribe corrective measures derived from European norms of realism, morality and discipline.
If Holroyd embodied official authority, Gottlieb Wilhelm Leitner supplied intellectual energy and institutional imagination. A Hungarian-born polymath and accomplished linguist, Leitner arrived in Lahore in 1864 as the first principal of the Government College. His educational philosophy diverged sharply from the Anglicist orthodoxy associated with Macaulay. Instead, he championed Oriental learning and the diffusion of “useful knowledge” through vernacular languages. Yet, as Bernard Cohn would remind us, this Orientalism was not antithetical to colonial power but complementary to it. Leitner’s advocacy of vernacular education rested on the premise that Indian knowledge systems could be preserved, classified, and reformed within a framework defined by European epistemology.
The founding of the Anjuman-i-Punjab in 1865 epitomised this synthesis of Orientalist scholarship and colonial governance. Though elitist in composition and closely aligned with government authority, the Anjuman sought to revive classical learning while simultaneously introducing modern scientific, social and literary ideas in Urdu. Its activities—public lectures, journals, translations, libraries, and educational institutions—created a discursive space in which indigenous elites were co-opted into the colonial project of reform. Tariq Rahman’s observation that the Anjuman functioned as a “zealous advocate of oriental studies” is crucial here: it was a site where Orientalism was indigenised and made productive for both the colonial state and local elites.
The Anjuman’s most enduring institutional legacies were the establishment of Oriental College and the Punjab University College in 1869, later elevated to a full university in 1882. These institutions embodied Leitner’s belief that higher education in India should rest on vernacular foundations. At the same time, they exemplified, what Said would describe as, the reconstitution of the Orient through Western systems of knowledge. Classical Arabic and Persian learning was preserved, but within curricula, examinations, and administrative structures designed by the colonial state.
The cultural programme of Holroyd and Leitner found its most articulate literary expression in Muhammad Hussain Azad. A migrant from Delhi whose life was irrevocably disrupted by the events of 1857, Azad arrived in Lahore as a displaced intellectual and gradually emerged as the linchpin of the Anjuman-i-Punjab. His roles as lecturer, secretary, editor, and later assistant professor at Government College placed him at the intersection of education, literature, and colonial patronage. Azad’s trajectory exemplifies what Tariq Rahman has identified as the emergence of a new class of vernacular intellectuals whose authority derived from their mediation between colonial knowledge and indigenous culture.
Azad’s manifesto at the mushaira of May 1874, in which he subjected classical Urdu poetry to critical scrutiny and called for new themes and forms inspired partly by English literature, marked a decisive rupture with the Persianate aesthetic tradition. While his criticism was uneven, it inaugurated modern literary criticism in Urdu and reflected the internalisation of Orientalist categories of progress, decadence, and reform. His prose works, particularly Qisas-i-Hind and Ab-e-Hayat, further illustrate this transformation. By re-narrating Indian history and Urdu literary development through a quasi-historiographical lens, Azad participated in, what Bernard Cohn would describe as, the colonial reordering of the past.
The mushairas held between 1874 and 1875 were the most visible manifestation of this new literary discipline. Poets were assigned subjects such as nature, patriotism, and moral dialogue, and encouraged to compose nazms rather than ghazals. Although the experiment was short-lived and met with resistance, its long-term influence was profound. Altaf Hussain Hali’s emergence as the most accomplished poet of these gatherings demonstrated the expressive potential of the nazm as a vehicle for modern sensibility. His later work, particularly Musaddas-e-Hali, would extend the ethical and reformist impulses first cultivated in Lahore.
The institutional and literary transformations initiated in this period ensured that Lahore inherited the cultural mantle of Delhi and Lucknow after 1857. Government College, Oriental College, and the Punjab University provided a durable infrastructure for vernacular scholarship, while journals, poets, and critics carried forward the aesthetic and ideological shifts inaugurated under the Anjuman’s patronage. In this sense, Lahore became not merely a recipient of displaced cultural capital but a site where colonial Orientalism was reworked into a vernacular modernity.
The influence of Holroyd, Leitner, and Muhammad Hussain Azad on Lahore’s instructional and literary culture was thus neither accidental nor ephemeral. It arose from the convergence of colonial educational policy, Orientalist knowledge practices, and migrant intellectual capital displaced by the upheavals of mid-nineteenth-century North India. By reshaping institutions, reforming literary practice, and legitimising Urdu as a medium of modern knowledge, they helped inaugurate a new cultural order. Yet, as Said, Cohn, and Rahman collectively remind us, this order was deeply entangled with power, producing not only enlightenment and reform but also new hierarchies of language, knowledge, and authority. Lahore’s intellectual modernity, forged in this crucible, was, therefore, as much a product of colonial governance as it was of indigenous creativity.
Published in Dawn, January 11th, 2026