Poor Lahore. This jeweled city of the Raj was recently hit by a suicide bomber aimed at lawyers protesting President Pervez Musharraf s imprisonment of his top judiciary. As body parts scattered the tree-lined Mall, Rudyard Kipling s city of dreadful night became the city of dreadful day. The outrage could not have happened in a more symbolic spot. Just up the road from the bombed Victorian high court stands Kim s gun – the great 18th-century Zam-Zammah cannon made famous in Kipling s book “Kim – pointing towards the scene.
While the historic cities of Pakistan s great rival, India, soar up the league table of celebrity, nothing better displays Pakistan s current misery than the state of Lahore, joint capital of many an Indian empire and of British Punjab. Splendid Victorian palaces still line the boulevards of the Mall: the high court, the governor s house, the general post office, the government college and Lahore s museum, Kim s Wonder House. Even the art college built by Kipling s father, John Lockwood Kipling, survives, with students squatting under giant fans in its corbelled hall.
Two kilometers away, across this now sprawling eight million-strong metropolis, heaves and sweats Lahore s walled city, old and unchanged. Here, on a wet January night, one can easily imagine the fleet young Kim darting through the mud and huddles of humanity, over the rooftops on some mystery woman s errand. At its heart lies Lahore Fort, its gates, gardens, mosques and decorative finishes the finest Mughal monument after the Taj Mahal. Crowded outside its walls are scruffy courtyard houses called havelis, markets, food stalls, brothels and alleys of unimaginable dirt and decrepitude. Buried within are shrines, mosques and derelict palaces. Only a few structures have been restored by enthusiasts, such as the exotic Cuckoo s Den restaurant by the fort.
In no other world city have I seen so much magnificence so neglected. Pakistan s ancient sites, those of the Indus Civilization and Taxila and Moenjodaro, are well guarded. Limited preservation is being done on Lahore Fort and Shah Jahan s exquisite Shalimar Garden in the suburbs. But saving Lahore itself has become a desperate struggle conducted by a few lone warriors, such as the Karachi architect Yasmin Lari, and Lahore s Kamil Mumtaz.
The recent blast at the high court followed persistent attempts by the government to demolish the building, despite its handsome moulded brick walls and terracotta, marble and teak inside. The authorities also tried to demolish old Tollington market on the Mall. Looking like England s East Anglian railway station, it was saved by public outcry and is now a thriving art centre.
Such carelessness is not for want of help. The World Bank offered $10 million to restore the old city, which the authorities used to pay for drains. A so-called Sustainable Development Walled City project has hired offices and bureaucrats, but seems to have lost the will to conserve anything. Nobody is trying to stop a hotel company from buying up a street of traditional private residences and demolishing them – houses that in Marrakech would be worth millions and might one day be so in Lahore. There is no protection for these structures, and if there were, a well-placed bribe would negate it.
Even a modest project initiated by Lari to restore the royal route through the walled city from the Delhi Gate to the fort has ground to a halt, from a mix of corruption and inertia. The gate itself was demolished by the British in the 19th century but rebuilt, probably at British viceroy Lord Curzon s instigation, in the 20th. Through the murk of the royal route can be seen Mughal arches, lattice-work panels and classical porticos. All Pakistan s history is here, but disintegrating beneath encroaching shanties, cobwebs of wires and piles of rubbish.
Pakistan used to pride itself on its cities being cleaner and more modern than India s. This is no longer so. While Islamabad seeks to create a past for itself, Lahore s past is collapsing around it. Hovering over its ancient walls is a sense of utter neglect, so much so that some 400 buildings have been scheduled for demolition as they have been deemed dangerous.
The reason is rule by distant dictator. Some dictators take pride in their past, eager to make their mark on the nation s narrative. This was true of the Shah of Persia and even of Saddam Hussein. It is sad that present-day Pakistan, once a prized province of India s Mauryan, Mughal and British empires, should have cut itself off from that narrative. Though eager to be admired abroad, Musharraf has allowed one of the great cities of Asia to decline into squalor.
I am not sure, but any country that neglects its past loses touch with its present and endangers its future. From the Indus to the Himalayas, Pakistan should be the object of every traveler’s desire.
Simon Jenkinsis a veteran British journalist and Guardian columnist. This article is distributed by the Common Ground News Service, and can be accessed at www.commongroundnews.org.
