Nostalgia and Modernity in Lahore

The collective memory of urban society tends to contrast today’s Lahore with an idealized, pre-Partition paradise lost. Consider the tautological Punjabi phrase “Lahore is Lahore” (Lahore Lahore ai). Normally this is an expression of pride in the city’s glorious heritage as the political, cultural, commercial, and gastronomic center of Punjab. Lahore is Lahore because it is unique, incomparable.^[5] Yet the local journalist Imtiaz Sipra modified the cheerful chauvinism of Lahore Lahore ai by appropriating it as the title for a series of English-language columns on Lahore’s cultural identity. These essays shed a nostalgically normative light on contemporary Lahore, often harping on the theme that the core values of local society had been destroyed by modernization and urban growth: “The real, original Lahorite…illustrated politeness, helpfulness, love for nature and beauty and importance given to friends and friendship.…It has all changed now, thanks to modern amenities and ‘urbanization’ [sic]” (Sipra 1993, 3). Given the moralistic tone of this argument, its explicitly materialist conclusion deserves comment. Effectively, Sipra argues that technological progress (“modern amenities”) and demographic change (“urbanization”) together determine the nature of moral relations in society. Because of technology and urbanization, Lahoris have apparently become rude, unhelpful, and indifferent to nature, beauty, friends, and friendship. This is a materialism devoid of class consciousness, however: the “real, original Lahorite” belongs to no particular class, although (s)he is anachronistically defined as a Muslim: “This more or less uniform character and identity of Lahorites allowed them to ‘integrate’ fully with migrants, conquering intruders and converts and followers of religions other than Islam” (Sipra 1994, 3).

Sipra’s narrative interprets the past selectively, ignoring the communal bloodbath of Partition and the fact that Lahore was a Hindu city for the first thousand years of its history, not to mention the mythical tradition of Lahore’s foundation by the sons of the Hindu hero Rama. But it does reflect material changes in the demography and political economy of the city, whose population has exploded from about 400,000 in 1931 to perhaps 5 million today, growing at an annual rate of more than 4 percent (PEPAC 1993, 6). This dramatic growth has stretched Lahore’s police, sanitation, transport, and communication systems to the cracking point (see Lahore Development Authority 1980; Qadeer 1983). The city has become demonstrably dirtier, more crowded, and less safe since Partition. Independence drew a line also between Lahore’s multicommunal past and its overwhelmingly Muslim present. The city’s Hindu and Sikh heritage is preserved only in the names of certain streets, in sacred architecture,^[6] and in hospitals and schools endowed by long-dead philanthropists whose families now live in India. According to the 1981 District Census Report of Lahore, 42.8 percent of Lahore’s population was fifteen years old or younger. As a result, the collective memory of pre-Partition Lahore is fading into romantic nostalgia for an imagined time when, as one local politician put it in a newspaper interview, “the pace of life was slower, evenings were lit by the soft light of lanterns and people had time for one another.”^[7] This sort of elegiac materialism is the complement of a progressive theory of history inspired by Western models of social and economic development.

In modern Pakistan the language of development carries with it a concept of time lived forward in moral as well as strictly chronological terms. This is a global discourse based ultimately on popular Victorian notions of social evolution, according to which the “developed” societies of the industrialized West represent cultural and economic advancement (“modernity”) relative to the “backward” societies of the developing world. The main local symbols of modernity—high technology, the English language, Western styles of clothing and architecture—continue to enjoy widespread prestige. The rhetoric of “advanced” versus “backward” modes of life is also very much in local use. Rich and poor Lahoris alike, however, are conscious of what economists like to call the “costs” of Pakistan’s highly uneven economic growth: pollution, crime, unemployment, and salaries that stubbornly refuse to keep pace with inflation.^[8] In an increasingly polarized political context shadowed by the breakup of the country in 1971 and marked by sharp ethnic and sectarian tension in many parts of the former West Pakistan, this ambivalent sense of having, perhaps, grasped the short end of the Faustian stick has all the more influence over the ways in which people structure their personal and familial relations with the past.

In interior decoration, music, and fashion, for example, there is a growing urban upper-class vogue for styles perceived as “ethnic” or “traditional”: handcarved Swati doors and arches, print reproductions of Mughal miniature painting, the Sufi devotional music (qawwali) of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan,^[9] embroidered mirror-work textiles from Sindh. A typical issue of the Lahore and London-based Pakistani fashion magazine Libas International includes articles titled “Mughal Treasures on Bond Street” and “Jewelry: Ethnic Richness.”^[10] And throughout the society great value is placed on belonging to an established family. While this is neither unique to Pakistan nor new in Lahore, the contemporary context of nostalgic reaction against “modernity” determines that more established families are currently perceived as living links to a time when society as a whole was better off.

The Urdu/Punjabi term for this sort of background is khandani, literally, the adjective form of family (khandan) but connoting the kind of family that has long held a position of social prominence. There are no precise criteria for being khandani. At most, khandani people say they have been in their social position “since the time of our [paternal] grandfather’s grandfather” (dada ka dada) or point to some notable ancestor. However, one of the more striking aspects of Pakistani English is its appropriation of quasi-Marxist class terminology to mark everyday social distinctions. Often shorn of their critical implications in Western political theory, terms such as “elite” and “feudal” denote, respectively, the upper classes in general and the landowning gentry in particular. The term “feudal” is similar to other Pakistani class terms in that it changes its moral valence according to the social context in which it is articulated. Members of the landowning notability describe themselves, with no apparent irony, as “feudals.” In Gulberg, a Lahore residential suburb where property values are among the highest in Pakistan, there is a tailoring shop whose signboard reads “Ossian Tailors, Stitched and Stitching, For Elites and Feudals.” Yet in other contexts Pakistani intellectuals often blame the country’s political and economic problems on “feudalism,” understood here as a social system in which land tenure and political power are, if not freely convertible, at least organically linked.^[11] Not all khandani families deploy rural landowning claims to social prestige. Nor is the term associated exclusively with upper-class families. Khandani lineage, in the diffuse sense of kinship claimed with some more or less distant ancestor of glorious repute, can be constructed in many different ways. Among working-class musicians in the Old City of Lahor, glorous ancestry is associated with the transmission of musical competence. Some of the more khandani musical families claim descent from musicians at the court of Akbar and other Moghul emperors. For urban notables such as my Old City patron, Mian Yusuf Salahuddin, the virtue of descent was political and patriotic prestige. His maternal grandfather was Allama Mohammed Iqbal, the poet-philosopher generally credited with articulating the idea of Pakistan; his paternal grandfather was Mian Amiruddin, a former mayor of Lahore. Leaving his Old City residence in Barud Khana Bazaar, Mian Yusuf would sometimes point to an empty chair in the doorway and remark, “From that chair my grandfather [Mian Amiruddin] ran the politics of Punjab.”

The local term for this sort of distinction is ‘izzat, often translated as “honor” but more accurately glossed as the respect of society. As such, the ‘izzat of a khandani family is construed in nostalgic terms, suggesting a glorious past rather than present-day political or economic clout. However, khandani status is always open to contestation. Lahoris are quick to point out that many of the leading families in society are commercial clans who have been upper class for at most three generations. Some have marriage connections with khandani rural families who in many cases rose to social prominence in the nineteenth century when they received land grants in exchange for their loyalty to the British Raj. While historically accurate, this is often mentioned in contexts of social rivalry. Thus great landowning clans are often attacked on nationalistic grounds by people wishing to challenge their claims to social eminence.

This was the thrust of a series of articles in the Lahore Friday Times titled “The Hidden Face of History.” Written between 1992 and 1996 by the local historian Ahmad Salim, most of these essays examine the historical relationship between Punjab’s leading political families and the British Raj, with particular reference to the honors and financial rewards granted to historical notables in exchange for supporting the British at moments of crisis such as the sepoy rebellion of 1857. Pakistani history textbooks invariably describe this conflict as a South Asian “War of Independence.” The fact of having ancestors who sided with the Raj in 1857 is thus politically loaded in the context of modern Pakistani nationalism. In a piece on the Tiwana family of Sargodha, for example, Salim notes that Malik Sahib Khan Tiwana fought on the British side in 1857 and was subsequently granted “the title of Khan Bahadur and a life jagir^[12] of Rs. 1,200 in addition to his previous life pension of Rs. 480 per year. On his return to the Punjab…he obtained a large grant of land.” Salim concludes by describing how Malik Sahib Khan Tiwana’s modern descendants had deserted their former ally Nawaz Sharif after his government was dismissed in April 1993:^[13] “The Tiwana brothers were staunch allies of Nawaz Sharif.…Then they joined [Sharif’s Islami Jamhuri Ijtehad (IJI) rival Manzoor] Wattoo and have been his staunch supporters since. From advisors to Sharif to manipulators for Wattoo, the transition has been remarkably smooth” (1996, 134). The unveiled message of this and most of Salim’s other articles is that Punjab’s more khandani political families are and always have been cynical opportunists with dubious patriotic credentials.

Even families of such unimpeachably patriotic antecedents as the Mians of Barood Khana can be described, by social rivals, as unworthy of their glorious ancestry. At a private Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan concert sponsored by the Mians at their residence in the exclusive Lahore suburb of Gulberg, one of the guests was heard to remark, cattily, “So these are the grandsons of Iqbal?” Another popular line of social attack against the Mians was to suggest that they were an immoral family because of their traditional ties to the Taxali Gate area of the Old City, which contains Hira Mandi (the Diamond Market), Lahore’s notorious red-light district. (In this context it is ironic that among the socially despised Kanjar, or dancing girl, community that dominates Hira Mandi, certain families describe themselves as khandani in order to make the point that they have been established in the dancing business for longer than their rivals.)

The Kanjar community as a whole is perceived, predictably, as being in a state of sad decline compared with the past, when dancing girls (tavaayif) were northern Indian high-culture virtuosos and the sons of sharif (noble)^[14] families flocked to learn music, poetry, and polite conversation at their feet.^[15] This romantic image is famously conveyed by the 1981 Hindi film Umrao Jaan, a sprawling nineteenth-century historical drama about a tragic love affair between a dancing girl and the son of an Uttar Pradeshi nawab. Invidious comparisons between the vulgarity of modern dancing girls and an imagined golden age of courtly nawabs and polished courtesans singing tasteful Urdu ghazals (lyric poems) are reinforced by films such as Umrao Jaan (Dear Umrao) and by many Pakistan Television (PTV) serials. The influence of Bombay films and MTV music videos, meanwhile, is often cited as contributing to Hira Mandi’s “decline.” Once again the historical accuracy of this contrast is irrelevant to its nostalgic force.

It is at this aesthetic level that we can most clearly contrast Lahori representations of modernity and authenticity. On the one hand, the modernist perspective casts history as a developmental process tending toward a vaguely defined ideal of moral, economic, and political perfection. On the other hand, the rhetoric of nostalgia devalues the present in relation to the past. From a nostalgic point of view, aesthetic products are dismissed as inauthentic insofar as they betray the influence of modernity. From a modernist point of view, the same products are dismissed as “backward” insofar as they can be identified with local tradition as opposed to international style. Authenticity and modernity contest the same aesthetic ground. At stake is the relative moral status of the future and the past.