Har Gobind Khorana is ours too

 A DAWN article on Har Gobind Khorana (1922-2011) threw me back 50 years when I, along with 600 other students had packed 26-100 (MIT’s largest lecture hall) to hear him speak. Being clueless of the basics of molecular biology, I understood little and left halfway through. Curiosity had driven me there because this famous MIT professor had won the 1968 Nobel Prize and started a brand new field — protein synthesis via nucleotides. More interestingly, he was a Lahori with bachelor and master’s degrees from Punjab University.

Alas! Lahore, to its misfortune, does not know — nor cares to know — who this man was. The same holds true for another of its sons, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar (1910-1995), who became a Nobel Laureate in recognition of his definitive work on the death of stars. Today a Nasa satellite named Chandra scours the skies for neutron stars, black holes and other unusual astronomical objects.

The story of Abdus Salam (1926-1996) is too well known to repeat here. Winner of the 1979 physics Nobel, he studied at Government College (GC) Lahore and later taught at Punjab University. However, no road or landmark in Lahore bears Salam’s name — or that of Khorana and Chandrasekhar. While a GC affiliated institution called the Abdus Salam School for Mathematical Studies nominally exists, to display his name on its signboard could be dangerous in a city often gripped by religious fervour.

Less well known is the story of Chowla and Chawla. At GC there have been two mathematicians in number theory. One was Sarvadaman Chowla, an accomplished mathematician who headed the mathematics department from 1937 to 1947. Being Hindu, he left Lahore after the rioting began and went to Princeton University, then the University of Colorado at Boulder, and eventually became professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He died in 1995 and was celebrated as a famous number theorist by the American Mathematical Society with several important theorems to his name.

Unless Pakistanis learn to value the works of non-Muslims, science in Pakistan shall remain dead.

The other was Lal Muhammad Chawla who graduated from Oxford in 1955 and then taught at GC for many years. With rather modest professional achievements, he had only one well cited paper. As a Google search of his publications reveals, Chawla was more interested in writing religious books than advancing mathematics. However, the GC math society is named after Lal Muhammad Chawla and not the more famous and much more accomplished Sarvadaman Chowla. No Hindu scientist is celebrated in Pakistan.

Rejecting non-Muslims of high professional merit has come at devastating cost to Pakistan. For one, it lost those who could have helped the newborn country establish a scientific base. For another, it became difficult to create institutional meritocracies. After Partition, many clever ones played the religious or ethnic card and undeservedly rose to positions of high authority. In time they became institutional gatekeepers with catastrophic consequences.

The weakness of science education in Pakistan is too evident to belabour here. Unsurprisingly, our best and brightest young people usually go for soft stuff like medicine, law, and business. Unlike in China or India, hardly any opt for tough, demanding, scientifically oriented careers. So, how can we persuade our children towards them? What stories to tell them about science and scientists? Most importantly, who should be their role models?

This brings up a civilisational problem. Over the last 300 years — which is how old modern science is — there are no Muslim subcontinental names associated with first tier (Nobel calibre) scientific accomplishments (after 1974 Salam must be excluded). Notwithstanding the valiant efforts of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan (1817-1898), Indian Muslims shunned science and the English language. Thus, even at the distant second or third tier level, one finds barely a dozen names.

Since one cannot find Muslim science heroes who belong to the soil, books for Pakistani children inevitably valorise Arabs from the Golden Age such as Al-Battani, Ibn-e-Shatir, Ibn-e-Haytham, etc. While these luminaries of Muslim science were genuine path-breakers, they do not serve well as role models. For one, persons from centuries ago cannot inspire today’s children. For another, excitement is inspired by those ‘of your own kind’. Arabs, however, are visibly different from people around here.

Ancient Hindu scientists could have found some place in Pakistani books. However, they are excluded on ideological grounds because ‘woh hum main say nahin hain’ (they are not us). Instead, many Pakistanis anxiously seek ancestral roots in Arabia, Afghanistan and Central Asia. But modern laboratory tools are ripping apart dearly held myths of racial origins. Now several genetic marker studies are suggesting that the subcontinent’s Muslims have descended primarily from local Hindu converts with only a few per cent admixture of Arab or Central Asian genes. Excluding Hindu scientists from our books is absurd.

Ideology and science are like oil and water — they refuse to mix. Science cares only about facts and logic, not personal likes and dislikes. History is replete with examples of failed attempts to fuse science with cherished beliefs. When Stalin sought to impose his Marxist views upon Soviet biology through his chosen tout, Trofim Lysenko, he nearly destroyed agriculture and forestry.

Soviet Russia’s good fortune was that it had a scientific community robust enough to counter Lysenko’s meddling. Pakistan has not been so lucky. It has an abundance of charlatans pretending to be scientists but just a few who deserve to be called such. While there is a science ministry, several scientific bodies, and hundreds of institutions that purport to teach or do research in science, no community of genuine scientists exists. High-sounding scientific bodies — such as the Pakistan Academy of Sciences — are a joke. They command no respect internationally and should be dissolved.

Every kind of intellectual endeavour, science included, needs an enabling cultural and social environment to flourish. Science suffocates when scientists are judged by their religion, race, ethnicity or any criterion other than scientific achievement. Before Pakistan can produce any science worth the name, it will need to overcome its deeply held prejudices. It must learn to value all who share the common heritage of humankind. The day we count Khorana, Salam, and Chandrasekhar as our very own, Pakistan will have begun breaking the shackles of scientific under-development.

Pervez Hoodbhoy, is an Islamabad-based physicist and writer.

Published in Dawn, January 15th, 2022

(Source: Dawn)

Lahore and Amritsar: Two cities joined at birth are dying together

 A border drawn across the map severed centuries of bonds forged between the two cities. But memories of the past linger in the air.

Amritsar was born in Lahore. It was born inside the walled city, in a small house in its narrow and winding streets. It was the month of Assu, corresponding to the months of September and October in the Gregorian calendar. It was a month when the monsoon rains, having unleashed their fury, had finally taken mercy and receded. The demons of the summer had been defeated, while the tyrant winter was still imprisoned. It was that time of the year when there was perfect harmony, when nights were balanced by day, heat by cold. It was the time of the year so uncharacteristic of the extremities of Punjab that it seemed out of sync, an anomaly, to its vagaries.

Amritsar was born in the family of Sodhi Khatri, a family of ancient kings, a family that was destined to rule not just the kingdom of this world, but also the higher realm, miri and piri, as articulated by the sixth Sikh Guru, Guru Hargobind. These kings were not destined to be ordinary rulers, but true rulers, Sacha Padshah, whose reign would overshadow the reign of the mighty Mughal Empire. This new kingdom that was their destiny was born, along with Amritsar, in Lahore in the year 1534.

Maharaja Ranjit Singh's darbar in Lahore. | Hasan al Din/Wikimedia Commons [Public Domain]

Amritsar lived in Lahore till it was seven years old, till the time its parents, Hari Das and Mata Daya, were alive. They died in the same year, leaving their child orphaned. The child, initially named Jetha, was raised by his grandmother in a small village, where the child first interacted with Guru Amar Das, the third Sikh Guru, and became his lifelong devotee. Bhai Jetha eventually became a part of the Guru’s family, marrying his daughter Bibi Bhani. Such was his devotion to the Guru that he was chosen as his successor. Bhai Jetha became Guru Ram Das, the founder of Ramdaspur, the name by which Amritsar was once known.

Inside the walled city of Lahore, in an area known as Chuna Mandi, close to Kashmiri Gate, there is a gurdwara that marks the spot where Guru Ram Das was born. It was lying in a shambles till a few years ago, much like several other gurdwaras across the country, before it was renovated, along with a number of gurdwaras, by the Pakistani state and opened for Sikh pilgrims.

Lahore was born in Amristar. Actually, about 11 kilometres west of the city. It was one of a pair of twins, its fate permanently sealed with the city of Kasur that was born with it. It is not possible to pinpoint the exact day, the season or even the year of Lahore’s birth. It first came to existence at a time when time did not exist. There was no history or chronology, only the circular trajectory of mythology. This wasn’t the time of people, but rather of characters, caricatures and archetypes. This was the time of the perfect man, the just king, his perfectly devoted wife, and his perfectly loyal brother. This was the time of the greatest villain, a character so powerful that it was as strong as the power of ten. This was a time when gods and demons lived as men and women, a time when there was either good or evil, nothing in the middle.

Gurdwara Janamasthan Guru Ram Das in Lahore. Courtesy: Haroon Khalid.

It was at that time, when history was yet to be conceived, that Lahore was born in the ashram of Bhagwan Valmiki. The greatest sage of his time, for that was a time when nothing existed in ordinariness, Bhagwan Valmiki was composing the greatest book ever, when the cries of Lahore and Kasur first resonated in the ashram. It was the story of their father, of Lord Ram, that Bhagwan Valmiki, the Adi Kavi, the first poet, was composing when he heard these cries. Sita, their mother, had found refuge in this ashram after she had been banished from Ayodhya, following her return from Ravana’s Lanka. It was her story, of her marriage with Ram, of her exile from Ayodhya, of her capture by Ravana, of her rescue by Ram and her trial in Ayodhya that the Adi Kavi had decided to write about. In the process, he composed the first verses of poetry humans had ever realised. Lahore was born with Ramayana.

Her twin sons were named Lava and Kusha. Lava founded the city of Lavapur, which came to be known as Lahore, while Kusha founded Kasur. Today, about 11-odd kilometres from Amritsar, Bhagwan Valmiki Tirath Sthal marks the spot where the ashram was located and Lava and Kusha were born. The three cities at their birth were tied together in a triangle, a relation that is now testified by their cartography. In contemporary Lahore, at that highest point of the city, next to the river, where the first signs of civilisation developed, where lie the earliest traces of Lavapur, there is a small temple dedicated to the founder of the city. Inside the Lahore Fort, next to the Alamgiri Gate, are the remains of the temple of Lava.

A Lost Past

How is one to imagine the cities of Lahore and Amritsar, whose origins are so deeply intertwined, separated today by boundaries that doesn’t just divide geographies and people, but also mythologies, legends, religions, cultures, heroes and villains? It is a border that lies in the middle of these two cities, fabling stories about itself, about its previous incarnations in different forms, telling tales about its inevitability, its naturalness. Chanting mysterious mantras, the border blows in the direction of these cities, transforming their appearances through its prayers.

Lahore today is the ultimate symbol of Pakistani nationalism – a Muslim majority city, the site of Lahore Resolution, where the Muslim League first demanded a separate homeland for Muslims, home to Minar-e-Pakistan and host to proud Mughal architecture, the Lahore Fort, Badshahi Masjid, a tradition that marks the zenith of Muslim civilisation in an undivided subcontinent. Besides a few, inconvenient remnants of traditions scattered around the city, all those traces of a pre-Pakistan Lahore have been suffocated and left to die. It is easy, in fact encouraged, to forget about that lost city, that lost geography which connected Lahore with Amritsar and Delhi, a Lahore that emerged as an important economic, political and cultural hub because of its strategic location on that ancient route that flowed from Bengal to Kabul, a river dammed up by the border.

Gurdwara Dera Chahal on Bedian Road. Courtesy: Haroon Khalid.

Lahore today is still an important city, perhaps more important than it has ever been, but it is not the Lahore of the past. Its contemporary geography and location are an awkward testimony to its changed status. A city that once looked in both directions, has today its back towards the east, and looks desperately towards the west, towards Islamabad, Kabul and beyond in search of a new identity, in search of a new incarnation.

The story of Amritsar is not much different. It was wedded to Lahore at its birth, tied a knot with the city that spanned over several centuries. It was a marriage that was sanctified by Valmiki, as Ramayana his witness, by the shabd of the Gurus and the blessings of Sufi saints like Mian Mir. It was a marriage of interdependence, of convenience and even complimentary traits. It was a marriage in which Lahore took on certain roles and Amritsar others. Thus, in 1799, when a young Ranjit Singh took over Lahore, he effectively became the ruler of Punjab, with Lahore the political symbol in his control. But, without the blessings of Amritsar, the spiritual symbol, he could not yet call himself Maharaja. The capture of one was incomplete without control over the other. Lahore held the past, while Amritsar was the future. Lahore was regal, while Amritsar sacred. If Lahore was miri, then Amritsar was piri. The two were not distinct entities, but one. They were an extension of each other, incomplete without the other. Like an archetypical marriage, they were two bodies and one soul.

The divorce was sudden, ending the gradual dependence that had developed over (almost) 400 years of marriage. It was an immediate severing of relationship, a violent rupture of all connections. Memories of Lahore, however, continue to haunt Amritsar. It is a relationship the city today searches for, sometimes with Delhi and at other times with Chandigarh. It is that primary relationship that impacts its subsequent relationships. The memory of the divorce lurks within its subconscious, hampering it from fully realising itself, from fully expressing itself.

Road To Nowhere

The road leads nowhere, meandering non-committally. It’s not meant to be travelled on, to be explored. It is not meant to connect one part with another. It is meant to provide a semblance of connectivity, meant to fill up empty tracts of land. It is aimless, pointless, stranded like a branch of a family tree that has no progeny, that has no purpose.

One after another villages and hamlets emerge on both sides of the road. They are the children of distantly related family members with no children of their own. They are no longer part of the immediate family, no longer invited to its events. They are confined within their circles, isolated from the economic structures of the core. Their names represent their marginalized positions – Dera Chahal, Jhaman, Hair and Bedian, terms that have no resonance in contemporary Lahore, the Lahore of Islampura, Rehman Park, Model Town and Defence, a Lahore of postcolonial sensibilities, tinged with the flavour of Islamic nationalism.

I am travelling on Bedian Road, a road named after the village Bedian, which in turn was named after the Bedi descendants of Guru Nanak, who were allotted land in this village. It’s only the name that survives, a name that once resonated with significance, a name that today represents nothing but outskirts of Lahore, of vast agricultural fields, downtrodden villages, a dilapidated road and a few luxury farmhouses. Beyond these is the border, casting its spell, chanting its mantra. The road collides with the wizard and dies unceremoniously. It is a battle that it is destined to lose.

Smadh of Prithi Chand on Bedian Road. Courtesy: Haroon Khalid.

The road once connected Lahore with Amritsar, one of the many that linked them. Here the peripheries of the two centres interacted, creating villages and hamlets through this intercourse, these villages and hamlets bearing children of that relationship. Standing on a vacant ground, facing the historical village of Hair, now reduced to poverty and insignificance, is the remains of this unwanted child, the remains of a shrine that was constructed here by Prithi Chand, the eldest son of Guru Ram Das, a shrine that was intended to rival Harminder Sahib at Ramdaspur. It is a worn-down structure, stripped of all its ornaments, the paint, the frescoes. Its sacred pool, created as an alternative to the pool of Amritsar, is now lost, completely covered, its broken bricks scattered all over this ground.

The condition of the structure, however, is misleading. For a brief period, the shrine, named Dukh Nivaran, was important. For a brief period, it attracted Sikh pilgrims who believed Prithi Chand’s lies that he was the rightful spiritual successor of his father, that he was the fifth Sikh Guru and not his younger brother. In this endeavour, he was supported by many – Mughal officials and corrupt Masand, Sikh deputies appointed by Guru Ram Das as his representatives in different parts of Punjab. The strategic location of Hair made it easier for Prithi Chand and his followers to intercept Sikh devotees on their way to meet the Guru and to expand their network. With the Sikh pilgrims came their offerings. Prithi Chand’s coffers swelled, while that of Guru Arjan, who was in Ramdaspur at that time, dwindled. For that brief moment, it was Hair and this shrine that began to overshadow Harminder Sahib.

After Prithi Chand’s death, his smadh was constructed at Hair, while his movement was continued by his son, Meherban. This movement in Sikh history is referred to as Minas, the scoundrels. It was one of the most potent challenge to all the Gurus after Guru Arjan. After the formation of the Khalsa, they were referred to as Panj Mel – one of the five dissenting groups with whom the Khalsa were forbidden to engage. The Minas finally lost the battle for legitimacy, the struggle for spiritual inheritance of the Gurus in the 19th century, when they split into several parts and got incorporated into the formal Sikh community. With the disintegration of the community, the village of Hair too lost its political importance, as the memory of Prithi Chand, of the Minas and Dukh Nivaran began to disintegrate and crumble.

Symbiotic Relations

Before there was Partition, before there were riots and mass exodus. Before there was religious nationalism, the division of Punjabis into multiple airtight traditions. Before there were contemporary incarnations of Mughal armies and the Guru’s forces, fighting a perennial battle, correcting historical injustices. Before Lahore became a Muslim city, the city of Sufi saints, and Amritsar, the city of Gurus, there was Mian Mir and Guru Arjan.

Their friendship began at the house in Chuna Mandi where Guru Ram Das was born. It was here that a young Mian Mir, years away from becoming a Sufi saint, would attend the religio-philosophical discourse of Guru Ram Das, when the Guru came to Lahore from Ramdaspur. This was a time before the communalisation of identities, the partitioning of religious traditions, a time when it was the norm, and not an exception, to have Hindu, Sikh and Muslim devotees of the Guru. It was at these gatherings that a young Mian Mir met the young future Guru. They formed a connection that was to become a representative of the symbiotic relationship between Sikhism and Islam.

Upon becoming the Guru, despite the opposition of his elder brother, Guru Arjan continued the construction work at Ramdaspur, whose foundation had been laid by his father. He began the construction of Harmandir Sahib, the future Golden Temple, which was in time to become the most important Sikh gurdwara in the world. Before construction began for Harmandir Sahib, however, a message and a delegation were sent by Guru Arjan from Ramdaspur to Lahore (according to oral narratives of the descendants of Mian Mir residing in Lahore) to bring his friend Mian Mir to the city, to lay the first brick of the foundation of what was to become the identity of the city. Mian Mir travelled in a palanquin sent by the Guru and laid the foundation of Harmandir Sahib, tying together the cities of Lahore and Amritsar in a lifelong relation.

Years later, when on the orders of Emperor Jahangir, Guru Arjan was being tortured in Lahore before his execution, Mian Mir reached out to him and asked for his permission to destroy the city of Lahore to stop this torture. He was willing to sacrifice his home, to sacrifice the entire city, for his love of the Guru, but the Guru refrained him from doing so. After Guru Arjan’s execution, Mian Mir maintained a cordial relationship with his son, the sixth Sikh Guru, Guru Hargobind. It is a relationship that continues to be remembered and celebrated by certain groups and communities.

Abandoned Traditions

I met Bhai Ghulam Muhammad at his home in Lahore in February 2014. He passed away in April. His home was close to Data Darbar, the shrine of the patron saint of the city. The shrine is a thousand years old, as old as the known history of Lahore. Its existence and continued significance represent a continuation of a cultural and spiritual life of the city.

Residents of Lahore take pride in the city’s historicity, its recent and ancient past. But is Lahore, in its contemporary incarnation, the same city that it was, that it has been for a thousand years? Lahore was never Bhai Ghulam Hussain’s city. His home was Amritsar. But the city changed in 1947. Just like Ghulam Muhammad’s family, the city too migrated to Lahore, leaving in its shadow a distant memory of what the city once had been. The city where Ghulam Muhammad was travelling to was also not Lahore anymore, the glorious pride of Punjab, the multicultural jewel of the crown, of undivided British India. This was a new Lahore, a new city which only shared its name with that glorious past.

Bhai Ghulam Muhammad came from the family of Bhai Sadha and Madha, the Muslim rubabis appointed by Guru Tegh Bahadur to perform kirtan at the Harmandir Sahib. The performance of kirtan at Sikh gurdwaras by Muslim rubabis was a tradition that started with Bhai Mardana and Guru Nanak. It was maintained by subsequent Sikh Gurus. His was one of the most respected families of the city of Amritsar, the family that formed a connection between the Guru’s shabd and thousands of their devotees. His family was one example out of several that highlighted the complex relationship between different religious communities and hybrid identities. “We knew the Granth by heart…nothing about being Muslim,” he told me.

Once guardians of the Gurus’ words, they were reduced to odd jobs in Lahore. Only recently, with a growing interest in Sikh heritage in Pakistan, the family began performing kirtan again. However, this rediscovery of the profession is a far cry from what the situation had been prior to Partition. The odd jobs continued. In 2008, Bhai Ghulam Muhammad was barred from performing kirtan at Harmandir Sahib, for he was not an Amritdhari Sikh. His family had performed kirtan for generations at the Harmandir Sahib, without ever being Amritdhari, but that was a different city, a different Amritsar.

In the story of Ghulam Muhammad is the story of Lahore and Amritsar. It is the story of what the cities were, the story of their relationship, the story of their intermarriage. It is the story of what the cities are, of their antagonism towards fluid identities, of their newly discovered loyalties. The death of Ghulam Muhammad is the death of these two cities, of what they had been, of what they could have been.

Haroon Khalid is the author of several books, including Imagining Lahore and Walking with Nanak.

(Source: Scroll)

The fate of Lahore’s Hindu temples show the city’s shift from a cosmopolitan to monolithic culture

In a city spread across 2,000 sq km, only two publicly-functioning Hindu temples remain.

Lahore was currently dealing with the aftermath of a heavy downpour – the price for a cool July day was having to walk through a muddy Ravi Road. We turned down a dim alleyway that was bordered by one of the numerous Sufi shrines that dot the city. In front of us loomed a tall building made of ashy white marble and shrouded by electric wires. On the same road was a cluster of shops, indistinguishable from any other neighbourhood market in inner-city Lahore.

We combed through each alley looking for signs that might guide us towards one of the last few functioning Hindu temples in Lahore – an orange flag, a spire on top of a building, a placard, anything. Instead, there were only more shops and dead ends.

A boy who had been watching us for some time asked what we were looking for. “Krishna Mandir”, we told him. He pointed in the direction of the white building, the one we had taken to be an office building.

Minar-e-Pakistan, Lahore | Tayyab3425/Needpix.com [Public Domain]

A closer look revealed little else about the building. The gate was locked, and the windows were blacked out: The only way to see inside was a side entrance that was half covered by a curtain. Our only indication that this was a temple at all was the mellow scent of incense that surrounded the structure and a gold finial on the roof, visible only from several metres away.

Almost everything that complements the presence of a Hindu temple was divorced from this building. With the gates locked and windows darkened, it was as if the place had isolated itself from the busy bazaar that once facilitated its Diwali celebrations in the past. The mandir’s presence felt unwelcome in the neighbourhood, as if there was a conscious attempt to blend it into the surroundings.

According to the city’s Hindus, the inside of the Krishna Mandir feels equally unwelcoming. Raj Kumari, who has lived in Lahore since birth, says that the temple has no sitting room at all, save for a place to eat food and a latrine. “It is only a small two-story building with idols inside,” she says.

Despite being granted nominal religious freedom by Pakistan’s Constitution, Hindus like Raj Kumari still face extreme obstacles in being able to practise their faith. In a city of 11 million people across almost 2,000 sq km, only two publicly-functioning Hindu temples remain. One is the Krishna Mandir on Ravi Road, while the other is the Valmiki Mandir, located in New Anarkali.

“We’re not allowed to abandon our religion,” Raj Kumari says. But living in Lahore has severely impacted their visibility and how they practise their faith in public spaces. In order to fully appreciate how the Krishna and Valmiki Mandirs operate today, one must understand them within the greater context of Lahore and its spatial politics, whose complex history dates back long before the state of Pakistan was established. The foundation of Lahore, and Pakistan at large – namely, the Two-Nation Theory – depends on an exclusive definition of space, ultimately leading to social cleansing and contestation over control of spatial politics and architectural language in Lahore.

Communal violence

Lahore, as the already-developed political capital of several empires, was economically buttressed by the British Raj, becoming one of the largest and most advanced cities in the Indian subcontinent after the ascendance of the British Empire. In 1947, it was at the frontier of the Partition of India, a centuries-old union undone by years of communal violence underpinned by the Two-Nation Theory.

The Two-Nation Theory has dictated, to a great extent, spatial politics and architectural language in Pakistan. Credit: Rizwan Tabassum/AFP

The urban ecology of Lahore was defined by its spatial, religious and ethnic multiplicity. Lahore’s 1941 census highlights that Hindus and Sikhs comprised nearly 40% of the city’s population, forming the backbone of Lahore’s merchant class.

Reflecting this demographic diversity, Lahore was replete with mandirs and gurdwaras that hosted the city’s minority populations. Model Town, the first modern suburb built for the elite class in Lahore, was spearheaded by wealthy Hindu merchants.

However, the onset of Partition changed Lahore fundamentally as millions of people migrated across the newly-formed Indo-Pak border in 1947. The consequences for Lahore being demarcated as a part of Muslim Pakistan were colossal – thousands of Hindus and Sikhs fled their homes for India as Muslim rioters ravaged their properties and took their lives.

The Shah Alami Market, a bustling hub for Hindu traders and business elites, was captured entirely by a Muslim mob that had trapped its residents inside by setting the gate on fire. Bhagat Labha was 12 years old when he witnessed Shah Alami, the biggest market of Lahore, go up in flames. He recalls, “there were properties being burnt everywhere. None of us were allowed to go outside.” He narrowly escaped a Muslim mob during the communal unrest.

Vidya, also known as Mary, was living on Jail Road during Partition. “We used to come to the canal and play as kids,” she said. “We would see the dead bodies of massacred people there.” At the time, all of Vidya’s relatives were travelling to Lahore from India. None of them survived the journey.

Simultaneously, hundreds of Muslim refugees who faced identical violence in India were arriving into the city on a regular basis, filling in the gaps left empty by Hindu residents, all of whom had either left or had been murdered. The demographics of Lahore changed rapidly as its Muslim population grew and its Hindu and Sikh population declined. Today, Hindus and Sikhs constitute only 1% of Lahore’s population.

Transforming Lahore

A city-goer’s perception of Lahore is often dominated by its most well-known landmarks: the Badshahi Mosque, Liberty Market, Minar-i-Pakistan, Packages Mall, all conveniently located near the recently developed Metro stations. Amidst the novelty and fluctuating styles of architecture, it is easy to forget the presence of a heterogeneous society that continues to take residence within this same vicinity.

The Swaminarayan Temple in Karachi was a departure point for those migrating to India after the Partition. Credit: Haddid Uddin/Wikipedia (CC BY-3.0)

As the Muslim population continues to grow exponentially, the city takes the form of a monolithic space, all the while curbing traces of other religions. In this process, a Lahore that was once home to rich cultural and ethnic diversity quickly becomes a thing of the past. As per anthropologist Haroon Khalid, the Lahore that is now marked by huge infrastructure and everyday hustle that stretches beyond midnight conceals the Lahore that exists in historical imaginations.

In contemporary Lahore, the Krishna and Valmiki Mandirs are remains of the imagined city and its multiplicities. To understand the current dynamics of Lahore’s spatial politics and the extent of their deviation from the city’s indigenous foundations, one must dive back into the past and try to conceptualise this Lahore.

Today, just as we see Muslims heading to the Data Darbar on a Thursday evening, Hindus would visit the Seetla Mandir in Shah Alami for pooja. The stairs of the Lahore Fort casting its shadow on Hazuri Bagh, was the centre of Dussehra Jaloos that later spread to other parts of the city.

Looking at the rusty buildings and restaurants that are settled around the Lakshmi Chowk, the same neighbourhood was once drowned in colour as the centre of Holi. The high-spirited celebrations of Diwali were visible in the city’s temples, with decorations extending to Hindu neighbourhoods in the narrow streets of Anarkali.

Such festivals and religious practices were characterised by popular participation from all walks of life. Presently, however, these traditions are now secluded within the boundaries of homes instead of temples, resulting in dramatically fewer public displays of faith. The diminishing presence of Hindu spaces is key to how Lahore has fundamentally redefined itself since Pakistan’s independence.

The current state of Hindu temples and their significance within the city’s greater context hinges on the destruction and isolation of Hindu spatial expression that arose during Partition and continues to endure, reaching its zenith with the response to the Babri Masjid demolition in 1992.

Aftershocks of Babri

Hindu-Muslim differences crescendoed in Ayodhya in 1992, after decades of modern nation-building in India and Pakistan in light of the Two-Nation Theory – that Hindus and Muslims were indeed two different, irreconcilable nations.

Believed to be the birthplace of Ram, Ayodhya is an important pilgrimage site for Hindus all over the world. Until 1992, the town was also home to the famed Babri Masjid, a mosque whose construction is said to have been ordered by the Mughal Emperor Babur.

The aftershocks of the Babri Masjid demolition in Ayodhya, India, were also felt across the border. Credit: Douglas E.Curran/AFP

Ayodhya, with its rich Hindu and Muslim heritage, could have been a site for religious multiplicity but ultimately fell victim to communal hatred. Hindu nationalists claim that the Babri Masjid was built on the site where Ram was born and where a temple previously stood.

Calls to liberate Ram Janam Bhoomi, or Ram’s birthplace, from the ownership of Indian Muslims arose in the 1850s and culminated on December 6th 1992, when a group of Hindu nationalists led by the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Vishva Hindu Parishad demolished the mosque brick by brick.

The Babri Masjid demolition became the epicentre for a wider communal response, whose far-reaching consequences included the deaths of over 2,000 people in riots all over India, the majority of whom were Muslims. Consequently, parallel violence stretched across Indian borders into Pakistan and Bangladesh, where Muslim rioters razed dozens of Hindu and Jain temples to the ground in retaliation.

Tara Chand, a Hindu resident in Lahore, recalls being at work at the Valmiki Mandir one morning when a man rushed into the temple to warn him that he was in danger. “I ran outside to the street, and they all came with daggers, knives and guns, and set everything on fire,” says Tara Chand. “They took off the fans, they broke the idols...they left doing a lot of other damage.” The fire that consumed the Valmiki Mandir continued to rage for three days afterwards.

Shams Gill, who keeps his real Hindu name a secret in order to blend in, was attending a gathering at Mall Road that morning, protesting the demolition of the Babri Masjid in India along with other Muslim residents. Gill remembers hearing about numerous attacks on Hindu places of worship all over Pakistan. “Many temples in Lahore were destroyed,” he recalls, “including the temples in Ichra and the Jain temple near the university ground. They used tankers to run these to the ground.”

The destruction of the Babri Masjid and of temples all over Pakistan and Bangladesh is a demonstration of hostage theory, described by Abdul Kalam Azad as a means to assert minority rights: whatever treatment was given to Muslims in India would also be given to Hindus in Pakistan. This would keep “hostages” safe; the danger that could befall one’s religious brethren in the other country would be too great to ever risk hurting minorities in one’s own country.

But the founders never took into account that nation-building can also require the ethnic cleansing of the Other, regardless of one’s intention to protect a different country’s minorities. Ultimately, the episode only further exemplified the Two-Nation Theory and how spaces belonging to the Hindu or Muslim Other cannot be tolerated in the exclusive workings of the modern nation-state. Despite having a rich Hindu heritage that has existed long before Pakistan, it becomes essential to limit Hindu spaces as much as possible in order to reinforce the nation-state’s monolithic self-definition.

Destroying the mandirs was still not enough; all evidence of Hindu structures had to be erased and assimilated within Pakistan’s visibly Islamic landscape. The Seetla Mandir, a defunct site that had already been torn down during Partition riots, faced renewed violence, fueled by the same energy that tarnished it in the first place. A minaret was situated atop the Valmiki Mandir in a conscious effort to convert the building into a Muslim space.

The Krishna and Valmiki Mandirs were both eventually reconstructed after the aftershocks of the Babri Masjid demolition. Although they have been rebuilt as Hindu temples, they have not been rearticulated as such. Bhagat Lal Khokar is Valmiki Mandir’s long-time priest, whose family and associates have been the custodians of this land and temple for generations on end.

The Valmikis are considered to be untouchables in Pakistan, marginalising them within the Hindu community and within Pakistan. Many of them convert to Christianity and take Christian names but are still loyal to the Valmiki Mandir, compelling it to become a more syncretic space.

He describes the present state of the Valmiki Mandir to be modelled like classrooms adjoining an open space or offices at any ordinary plaza. “This is not what our temples look like,” he claims. The process of restoring both temples only further exemplifies the conscious effort to model these spaces as architecturally conformist, indistinguishable from any other building in the city, indeed for safety’s sake, but also as an easily assimilable and copyable architectural form that does not require unorthodox difference.

“All of Lahore’s gurdwaras look like gurdwaras, its churches look like churches, and its mosques look like mosques. Why doesn’t our temple look like a temple?” he asks us.

Tucked in a narrow street close to the famous bicycle shops of New Anarkali, the Valmiki Mandir presently looks like an abandoned house with khokhas and shops clustered along its outer boundary wall. The congestion of these shops and businesses leaves only a narrow space in between to be used as a door to the mandir. It can initially be recognised by the saffron coloured flag from a distance, standing side by side with the Pakistani flag at the entrance.

Once inside, you see an open space with a weathered brick floor and a semi-carpeted sitting area at one corner to accommodate visitors. The inner chambers of the temple are restricted to two small rooms, prone to flooding with even the slightest amount of rainfall. Inside the rooms, the garbhagriha occupies a central position, with the saffron-coloured flag taped to it at the forefront and the Pakistani flag again by its side.

“We did not put up the Pakistani flag as a form of protection,” Khokar says. “If anyone ever comes to try and disturb our temple again, the flag serves as a reminder that this space belongs to Pakistan just as any other building does. If they harm our land, then they should know that they are also harming Pakistan.”

Shri Krishna Temple in Mithi, Pakistan. Credit: Rizwan Tabassum/AFP

John, another congregant of the Valmiki temple, disagrees. “Why should we put up the Pakistani flag?” he asks us. “If we are so welcome in this place, then why do we need to constantly display our Pakistani identity? Mosques don’t even think about having Pakistani flags in their musalla. Why is the flag on our shrine itself?”

Capitalism and nation-building

Next to the grand lotus-petal Alamgiri Gate of the Lahore Fort rest the scattered ruins of the Lava Mandir, accidentally exhumed while the royal kitchen above the temple was being excavated. Hindu legend narrates that Sita and Ram’s son, Prince Lava, or Loh, founded the ancient city of Lavapur. The city would also be referred to by the prince’s latter name, Loh, becoming Loh-awar, eventually giving rise to the modern city of Lahore.

The abandoned temple has no congregation, only Hindu yatrees from across the border visit and worship at the Lava Mandir. The small room remains barricaded to Pakistanis and is easy to miss under the majesty of the Lahore Fort. Faded frescoes and well-worn arches surround the central shrine. The garbhagriha itself, comprised of an ancient stone pavilion topped with a lotus-adorned cupola, notably lacks any murtis in its hollowed-out middle. Instead, subdued garlands and burnt-out incense sticks mark the ephemeral visits that the temple hosts.

The dilapidated site of the Loh Mandir is a manifestation of the lack of public Pakistani investment in Hindu heritage sites, especially in Lahore. The durability of Hindu spaces in the city is not judged by their utility to the indigenous Hindu population, but rather their viability within a complex nexus of international relations and capitalist development.

The Kartarpur Corridor, for example, is the culmination of decades of Sikh diaspora activism to convince leaders on both sides of the border to open up a visa-free thoroughfare for Sikh pilgrims to visit Guru Nanak’s place of death. The brick-laying ceremony was attended by the prime minister of Pakistan and multiple ministers from India, both parties eager to co-opt the opening to soften India-Pakistan relations. Videos produced from the Kartarpur Corridor showcase large developments, an expansive highway and future plans for five-star hotels and world-star cuisine descending upon the space of this small ascetic gurdwara.

Similar arrangements for the repair of Lahore’s flagship gurdwara, Gurdwara Dera Sahib, were financed and organised by wealthy Sikh diaspora, rather than by the government agencies responsible for the upkeep of religious custodianship in Punjab, the Auqaf Department and the Evacuee Trustee Property Board.

While the government does facilitate the arrival of a few thousand Hindu and Sikh yatrees from across the border every year, it is particularly negligent and even exploitative of the precarious position of Pakistani Hindus living inside Lahore. At the Valmiki Mandir, John asserts that his fealty to the land runs deeper than both India or Pakistan. Bhagat Lal Khokar, the priest, tells us about how during and after Partition, the elders at the temple adamantly decided to stay in Lahore and care for their ancestral temple, even giving up portions of the large mandir complex to Muslim refugees coming in from India.

Those refugees never gave that property back. The temple’s land became increasingly encroached on by shops and khokas in the busy market, the rent from which was initially collected by the mandir. The Auqaf had started a Jinnah Fund for minority communities in the 1950s, and when they came to the Valmiki Mandir for contributions, the elders decided to give the rent from these khokas towards the Jinnah Fund.

However, the Jinnah Fund abruptly ended, yet the Auqaf did not remand revenue back to the mandir. Some congregants demanded that the dilapidated and encroached-upon mandir needed significant work, especially after the Babri Masjid demolition. This February, after decades of struggle, the Valmiki Mandir has finally filed a court case to regain revenue rights from their own property.

“We never ask the Auqaf Department for anything,” says Bhagat Lal Khokar, “All our festivals and celebrations we organise and finance ourselves for our brothers.”

Meanwhile, at the Krishna Mandir, the only other public functioning Hindu temple in the city, Diwali and other festivals are celebrated with huge fanfare with the economic support of the Auqaf, but with little substance as the entire road is barricaded and the Muslim community around the temple is prohibited from visiting.

That Muslims are not allowed to ring in festivals with the Hindu community further stratifies their religious identities, demarcating them at a point of difference. The Ministry of Religious Affairs visits the festival every year to take ceremonial photos, capitalising on the image of “inter-faith harmony,” but failing to account for the deteriorating state of the mandir.

This contestation of space hinges on the role of neoliberal capitalism in nation-state building. Not only do the Hindu temples fall under the coercive purview of the governmental departments with no other option, but they are also expected to accept and use these funds in a manner that suits the Pakistani ideology.

The specific deployment of Pakistan’s religious minorities is in service of Pakistani statehood as a benevolent caretaker. An image of “harmony” only holds insofar as it is relevant to the respective countries’ nation-state ideologies, but never for the sake of safeguarding minorities and their religious freedom.

Nation-building is inextricably linked to capitalist development in Pakistan. The only mode of “developing” property under capitalism is in the name of profit, and government agencies follow suit. In the case of the Valmiki Mandir and its outlying khokhas, these Muslim-led agencies take coercive control of the mandir’s property and benefit from their rented shops.

Meanwhile, in the case of the Kartarpur Corridor, the framework for free market profit has already been laid around the epicentre of the gurdwara. The opportunity to benefit from unorthodox religious spaces is ripe under Pakistan’s neoliberal regime, as Islamic nationalism is upheld and development grows at the expense of further limiting Hindu spaces to the point of social cleansing. Therefore, these unorthodox, non-Muslim religious spaces only become relevant in the context of profit.

Spatial politics

“In Pakistan, the Hindus have never been persecuted,” says Shams Gill, “but the anger against us has been vented on our temples.” Gill has reached the crux of the issue: Pakistani Hindus, a term that many consider to be an oxymoron, are represented through physical space.

Now, there are only a few traces of Hindu visibility in Lahore, such as the building once known as the Hanuman Basuli Mandir. Its shikhara peaks through the newly constructed plazas and old heritage buildings of the Anarkali Bazaar. This mandir, now a residence to numerous families, is easily distinguishable from its surroundings. It stands out with its antique Hindu architectural language, sculptures of deities whose faces have been scratched out and Sanskrit wall engravings that the city has grown to neglect over time.

The mere presence of the mandir in the midst of the crowded bazaar exemplifies the extent of capitalist development that continues to dictate the marginalisation of Hindu temples and sacred spaces within Lahore. After so many attempts to remove evidence of Hindu visibility in Lahore, the Hanuman Basuli Mandir, no longer functioning as a temple, remains the sole survivor of these efforts.

However, the building’s future remains precarious in the contemporary political climate. History tends to repeat itself, and there is no certainty regarding the fate of Lahore’s unorthodox religious spaces.

This article first appeared on Dawn.

(Source: Scroll)

KGF becomes first Kannada film to get commercial release in Pakistan

The film is reportedly doing well in Islamabad and Lahore.

Yash-starrer Kolar Gold Fields (KGF) has become the first Kannada film to breach the India-Pakistan border. The film got a commercial release in Pakistan, which comes as a boost along with its commercial success at the Indian box office. Although usually screened widely in the Gulf countries, south Indian language films usually do not enjoy a following in Pakistan, and hardly see a commercial release.

“The film was released on Friday in Pakistan and from the executive producer, we hear that it is running well. They have released the Hindi dubbed version of the movie and it is being received well across several multiplexes in Lahore and Islamabad. We understand it is doing quite well, although the distributors have not shared exact box office collection,” Harish Mallya, a film reviewer and one of the organisers of the Bangalore Film Festival, told TNM.

“There is a lot of appreciation and almost a similar form of interest that was noticed in rest of the country,” he added, “This is the first Kannada film getting screened in Pakistan officially. Before this, there was a talk about Pawan Kumar’s Lucia being released but eventually it was restricted only to film festivals.”

The last notable south Indian film that was released in Pakistan was Rajinikanth's 2.0.

Chennai-based Sreedhar Pillai, noted box office tracker and film writer told TNM, “The first half of KGF was set in Mumbai. So it has a north Indian connect. Nativity matters in films that are dubbed. A south Indian village-based subject might not do well if it is dubbed in north India. Also the subject of mining is something that people in Pakistan too can connect with. And the film has plenty of action, which is a universal favourite."

The much-talked about and big budget period drama that traces the fortunes of a gangster over decades released in over 400 theatres in Karnataka and in over 2,400 theatres in India. It became the first Kannada movie to bag more than Rs 200 crore in box office earnings, that too in a period of less than a month.

Even in the US, the film had remained in screens for more than three weeks and earned more than a $1 million. After Baahubali, 2.0 and Baahubali 2, this was also the fourth greatest earner for a dubbed Hindi film in India.

The trailer itself was released in five languages including Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu and Hindi.

(Source: TNM)

Mahatma Gandhi’s little-known love affair with a married, progressive woman in Lahore

Gandhi’s biographer Ramchandra Guha tells ThePrint about an unexplored chapter of the great man’s life, featuring a platonic love tie. Read on: 

Mahatma Gandhi is the acknowledged star of the decades-long freedom struggle that led to Indian Independence in 1947. But in the midst of this wide and dramatic landscape of events, it is incredible that Gandhi was unafraid to explore his feelings for an older, married, “very independent-minded” woman who lived in Lahore, said Ramachandra Guha in an interview with ThePrint.

The historian has just published the extraordinary story of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, in a book simply called ‘Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World, 1914 to 1948’ — the time he returned from South Africa to his assassination.

Guha also talks about Gandhi’s experiments with both love and brahmacharya, or the struggle to remain celibate.

In a searing account that seeks to excavate the great man’s experiments with sex and celibacy, Guha talks about how and why he decided to sleep naked with Manu, his much younger grand-niece.

This, of course, is a familiar story to Indians, even though it is not much talked-about.

But for the first time, Guha has explored a platonic love tie between Gandhi and Sarala Devi Chaudhurani, a progressive, middle-aged woman who lived in Lahore with her husband. Gandhi was married too, of course, to Kasturba.

Truly enchanted
Gandhi was “utterly charmed” by Sarala Devi. She was the daughter of Rabindranath Tagore’s sister, and was very accomplished. She was a poet; she sang at nationalist gatherings, and she sang beautifully. Gandhi had heard her singing.

So when he went to Lahore in 1919 — her husband was in jail at the time — and they met, they got on famously. This was unusual at the time, but as Guha says, “she had great charisma, and was very independent-minded”.

Sarala Devi married a widower quite late in life, which was an unusual act in itself.

“He was charmed, besotted…they got along famously. They were truly enchanted by each other,” Guha says about the Mahatma and Sarala Devi. “But there was no sexual consummation.”

Sarala Devi and Gandhi exchanged letters after he returned to Gujarat. In one letter, she wrote to him, asking why he hadn’t written. “There’s only the bathroom to receive my sobs,” she said.

Guha pointed out that “this happens in many marriages, after 15-20 years, (although) it happened less then…”

He went on to add that as a biographer of Gandhi, he wanted to pen down all the aspects of his personality, warts and all. He admitted that previous biographers hadn’t talked about Sarala Devi Chaudhurani in the same breath as the Mahatma.

Finally, C. Rajagopalachari told Gandhi to call it off, which he did. “He had to choose between furthering this romantic attachment or furthering the freedom struggle,” Guha said.

Asked what Kasturba Gandhi had to say, Guha admitted that nobody really knew.

“It was a moment of great intense passion. It was a moment of crisis in the marriage too. It was a very human story,” Guha added.

Experiments with Manu
As for the Mahatma’s experiments in brahmacharya with Manu, his grand-niece, Guha said he accepted he found the whole affair rather strange. As Gandhi slept naked with her, in an attempt to discover whether or not he was still sexually aroused, Hindu-Muslim riots exploded around them in Noakhali, Bengal.

One of the reasons for the sexual experimentation was because Gandhi felt, according to Guha, that the violence was somehow his fault. “The violence is happening because I am not pure,” Guha quoted Gandhi as saying.

“It was very strange. That is why in my book I have a chapter called ‘The Strangest Experiment.’ The most painstanking biographer of Gandhi cannot get a handle (on what Gandhi did),” Guha said.

“He was alone, lonely, without a guide.” So many of his loved ones had died, including Kasturba and C.F. Andrews, the historian added, seeking to understand and explain the mind of the Mahatma.

Manu Gandhi also becomes a subject of interest in the book. Guha points out that Pyare Lal, Gandhi’s closest confidante and aide, had expressed an interest to marry Manu, but that she had rejected him.

She called the Mahatma “Ma Bapu”. There is a short exploration of her own sexuality as well, although Manu is very clear that she looks at Bapu like her own mother, and to that extent is willing to go to the ends of the earth with him.

Guha reiterated that he included these explorations of Gandhi’s sexuality in his book because he “didn’t want to suppress” any of the complex facets of the Mahatma’s personality.

“The reader can make his own judgement,” Guha added.

India hoists tallest tricolour at Attari, Pakistan fears it could be used for 'spying'

Pakistan, which had objected to India flying the flag so close to the international border, fears the mast could be used by India to spy on its land.

India on Sunday hoisted the tallest tricolour in the country at the Attari border. The 360-foot tall flag is high enough to be spotted from Lahore in Pakistan.

Hoisted on a 110-meter high mast, the flag is 120-foot long and 80-foot wide. The weight of the flag pole is 55 tonnes, and an estimated Rs 3.50 crore rupees have been spent on this project by the Punjab government.

Before this, the title of the tallest national flag in India belonged to a 293-foot-high tricolour that was hoisted in Jharkhand's Ranchi.

PAKISTAN OBJECTS
Interestingly, Pakistan is not happy with India's decision to hoist the tricolour at the international border.

Sources said the Pakistan Rangers had also conveyed their resentment to the Border Security Force (BSF) and had asked them to install the flag away from the border.

Pakistan on Thursday had again raised an objection to the flag being flown at the IB, calling the act a violation of international treaties.

Pakistan authorities apparently fear that India could use the mast to spy in Pakistani land by installing cameras on the flag pole.

INDIA: NOT VIOLATING ANY TREATY
However, Indian authorities had made it clear that the flat was being installed 200 metres before the zero line and was not a violation in any manner.

"Not to my knowledge. It is our national flag and nobody can stop us from hoisting it on our soil," said Anil Joshi, a minister in the Punjab government, who hoisted the flag on Sunday.

The decision to install tallest tricolour at the Attari border was taken by the Amritsar Improvement Trust. The foundation stone of this flag was laid in April last year, by Joshi.

The tallest tricolour promises to be yet another another attraction at the Attari-Wagah international border, which already sees thousands of Indians pouring in daily to witness the flag lowering ceremony.

(Source: India Today)