Lahore: The Elusive Road to Freedom and Safety

My last night in Lahore, a couple of faculty arranged to take me to the Walled City, or Old City.  The Walled City is the oldest part of the city that goes back to about 1000 AD but gained prominence when Lahore became the Mughal capital.  During the Mughal era, which lasted from 1521 to 1752, the Lahore Fort and the Badshahi Mosque, the last great Mughal mosque, were built on the northern side of the Walled City.  Much of the elaborate monuments and buildings of Lahore have their origins in the Mughal period.

The Old City had thirteen gates at one point in time.  For example, the Kashmir gate, which faced Kashmir was made out of material from Kashmir, according to our local guide.  Many of the gates have been destroyed over the years yet their imprint on the landscape remains.  When we entered the Walled City we went in through the Delhi Gate.  While the Walled City is a tourist destination during the day, I arrived at the time when the locals were coming out to inhabit the space.  Life starts in Pakistan around 7:30 p.m. 

Our local guide took us through the narrow streets of the Walled City to visit the Wazir Khan Mosque, built in the 1600s.  We also wandered through the narrow backstreets, seeing evidence of a variety of architectural types and businesses.  At one point we dodged a ball being thrown back and forth between some boys and their father—clearly this is a space that is inhabited by daily life.

One section of the Walled City had spice shops. These are spices being ground.

The diversity of the community of the past was there as something of an echo—the Star of David above a door; a Shia worship area, the Moghul-era mosques, a Turkish bath, and the major fort built during the Moghul era but once inhabited by the British. 

Star of David.

Turkish-style bath.

The Simplicity of a Shia worship space.

We ended our visit on Fort Road Food Street, adjacent to the Badshahi Mosque and the Lahore Fort.  We threaded our way up narrow stairs to a roof-top restaurant that afforded us a view of the city and adjacent mosque and fort, giving me a different perspective from when I had visited these sites during the day.  And surrounding, in the skyline as well as within the walls of the city, I could see the evidence of the history of inhabitation by Hindu, Sikh, Muslim, and Christian communities. 

As part of my journey in encountering Pakistan, I had been working through the book, Freedom at Midnight, by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, on the partition of India in 1947.  As I left Lahore the next day, with images of the Walled City in my mind, I came to the section of the book that dealt with the impact of the Partition on Lahore. Collins and Lapierre describe Lahore as the pampered princess of the Moghul emperors, the Paris of the Orient, and an educational center where Hindu, Moslem, Sikh, and Christian were all educated together.  It was a tolerant city where groups intermingled socially with a population of 500,000 Hindus, 100,000 Sikhs, and 600,000 Muslims.  And with the anticipation of partition, based on fear of the “other,” and uncertainty on where the boundary would be drawn, the walled city of Lahore became the most troubled area. This area, where all these groups had co-existed within tight quarters, became wracked with violence and death—it was a blood bath. And of course, this was only the beginning of slaughter that followed.

I have just spent six weeks in Lahore, the main city in the Punjab, the granary of India that had to be divided with the partition, leading to massive displacement of peoples and slaughter.  I have been contemplating the elusiveness of the universal desire, underlying the push for partition, to become free through separating yourselves from others in an attempt to create a pure community and find peace in that purity—to live with those who are like us.

I speak of the elusiveness of this vision on two grounds.  First, such homogeneity cannot be achieved.  This illusion has driven the goal of the development of the nation-state where the “cultural” nation coincides with the political state.  The reality is that no matter how small the pieces, the mosaic of cultural diversity does not match political boundaries.

I have been struggling with parallels in my own New England community over the past seven years which is not unlike other suburban communities.  Municipal boundaries are drawn or maintained at a scale that attempts to maintain a pure social community, in this case a particular rural idyll.  The reality is that those that serve—teachers, cleaners, policeman, tutors—find it difficult to be able to afford to live here, along with the next generation of families and the elderly.  And the rhetoric seems to be that there are plenty of other places for them to live.  Fear of losing what we think we have and fear of those who might be different than us drives exclusionary decision-making, the equivalent to walls.  Yet these “others” come and go as they cross into the town to serve, work, or visit friends and family.  Homogeneity, no matter how small the boundary that is drawn, is an illusion. Our lives are intertwined.

And safety does not come from such exclusionary moves.  Safety only comes from knowing and learning to trust others through working together.  One of my Muslim colleagues at FC College talked about women being inherently “embracing” in their posture.  I would argue that being locked in an embrace—all of us with others—is the only thing that leads to safety.  Knowing is the route to safety rather than being walled off.  Being locked together in the debate over the vision of the future of a place that is loved, and can be loved, by multiple groups of people is hard work but it is the only choice when it comes to building safety.  And we become stronger through the process.

Gandhi’s solution to the challenge of India was to give the minority—the Muslim League—the initial control of India and trust them to treat others as they were being treated.  He predicted that terrible violence that would come from the partition and that this was the only solution he could see to lead in a different direction.  All groups would have been locked in an embrace.

I have no illusions about Gandhi’s solution and its ability to have led to a different result. Nor do I hold any illusions about some ideal past.  I do believe that Gandhi’s impulse was correct.  Charles Marsh, in his book on the Civil Rights Movement, The Beloved Community, portrayed the need for the vision that went beyond the end of segregation.  Martin Luther King, Jr. declared that the goal was not simply the end of segregation but rather reconciliation and the creation of the beloved community.

I envision this image of a beloved community to be more akin to the past world of the Walled City of Lahore as a home of communities of Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Jews, and Christians who knew each other, than to a pure nation-state.  And I envision this image of a beloved community to be more akin to a New England community that ensures it provides for multiple groups with differing needs and interests than one that holds on to a rural idyll while the population ages out of existence.