Lahore Diaries V: Twilight in Lahore

All of the men working for The Weekend section of The Frontier Post Lahore Edition in the early 90's were under 35, and all of them were fans of Madam Noor Jehan. One of them, who called her Madam most matter-of-factly, had met her and kept a signed photograph of hers by his bedside.

I was one of them but I never wanted to meet Madam. Though I have spent most of my working life in Lahore the thought of talking to her makes me want to say: I don't speak Punjabi.

Recently, another friend from The Frontier Post days, now editor of The Herald magazine in Karachi, interviewed Madam. She has a cancer in her throat, other organs are failing her, and looks a wraith of the woman that is her public image. He found out from Madam's assistant that she did ask if a munda was going to be interviewing her. Allegedly, she spent four hours putting on her make-up.

Her first words to him: yeh sahafi bhonsri chaud hotay hehn… wo Manto bhi bhonsri chaud tha…(even my memory cannot cope with her Punjabi).

She will never sing again.



My friend Khurshid Qaimkhani, a Sind-based Urdu writer has written a book on the gypsies of Sind called Bhatakti Naslain and has just finished his autobiography.

He served in Kargil in '65. This is a story from the unpublished manuscript of his life's story:

Somewhere on the Kashmir front, an officer friend of his was inspecting his troops on the front line. The Pakistanis and Indians were eyeball to eyeball. In the pre-dawn fog this officer realized that he had crossed over to the Indian side. He kept up with the "kesa hai jawan" officer talk. And made it back to his lines.



For the last dozen years this event is a not-to-be-missed highlight of the Lahore season: an evening of Zia Mohyeddin reciting poetry and prose (selections from the Urdu/Hindi canon) to a select Lahore audience. No other Lahori cultural ritual signifies as well the struggle of the ghost of Lahore-the-bygone with the personality of contemporary Lahore.

The central character in this drama is Zia Mohyeddin. He is the most internationally recognized artist living in Lahore now that Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan is dead. Some of Zia’s career highlights known to Lahoris: Zia has performed at the West End in the late 60s and was the unrequited lover of Jennifer Kendal in Merchant Ivory’s Bombay Talkies. He hosted a game show on Pakistan Television in the 70s, one of the first of its kind. In the 80s Zia worked in a number of BBC and Channel 4 productions.

The other players in the drama are the Lahori cultural elite. This elite has been coming to watch Zia Mohyeddin perform and they keep the rest out. The rest are the rest of the bourgeoise of Lahore. Or those who would bring their mobile phones to the performance (and one suspects would not be loathe to call themselves if that were possible.) The first bourgeoise, the cultural elite, refers to the second as noveaus. The organizers of this event, members of the cultural elite, do not sell the tickets. Tickets are distributed.

The two hundred or so people who are the cultural elite share the following characteristics: the women are all from Kinnaird College (class of the 60s), the men from the missionary schools (St Anthony’s and Aitchison) and then from Government College Lahore or FC College, again graduates from the 60s. A number of them are the kith and kin of famous Lahori men of letters, or the kith and kin of the friends of Lahori men of letters, or friends of his kith and kin. The men are by and large well to do, but in the professional sense as opposed to the “seth.” A “seth” is not an equivalent term for tycoon in Lahore. He is a captain of industry but behaves as a “feudal” and is thus not deemed urbane enough for the performance.

And now a word about the stage upon which these characters are acting: contemporary Lahore. The geography that is synonymous with Lahore’s golden period is in decay. Centered on the Mall pre-47 Lahore was a center of cinema, the arts and learning in India. This was the painter Amrita Sher-Gill’s and the poet Iqbal’s city and one of the greatest university towns of the country. Government College Lahore was the crowning glory of Lahore.

In the 50s and 60s Lahore continued to thrive as the art capital of Pakistan. It was the poet Faiz’s city, the city of the divas Noor Jehan and Malika Pukhraj. These days newspapers regularly lament the passing of the golden ages of Lahore. The city is often referred to as haunted and haunting in reports of the decline of the publishing industry, theatre and cinema.

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and his brother Chief Minister of Punjab Shahbaz Sharif, natives of Lahore, on coming to office in 1997 swore to resurrect the lost glories of Lahore. What they have done is build the roads of Gulberg, the financial district and the center of shopping, and added a flyover. Gulberg, not the walled city, nor the Lahore of the Mall the British left behind, is the contemporary heart of Lahore.

The annual evening with Zia Moheyeddin, held at Ali Auditorium in Gulberg will never have the Sharif’s as chief guests. But this event, a gesture to resurrect the spirit of bygone Lahore, elaborate in its efforts to keep out the seths, represents yet more anxieties of the cultural elite.

Zia Mohyeddin, in his annual readings, favours the men of letters from Delhi of mid 19th century (Ghalib, Dard, Zauq, Zafar). He brings to life the mahavras, the idiomatic expressions, of the bazaars and the mohallas of the Delhi of that age.

In these the twilight years of Lahori cultural life it was seemly that this year Zia began from reading Mir Sauda. Delhi-based Mir Sauda, writing in the mid-nineteenth century, wrote about the twilight years of the Mughal empire. The new British order was asserting itself and Sauda took a caustic look at the dying Mughal culture.

The appreciative audience, year after year, leaves the hall remarking Delhi must be kin to Lahore.

So, what does one make of the cultural elite enjoying the sounds of a bygone Delhi?

Previous years’ performances used to leave me wondering: what do these people, most who have never been to Delhi, think of Delhi? I’d be reminded of a remark of a Delhi born-and-raised friend: until he was about 10 he thought, taking in the ruins of Delhi and the tales of those whose leavings they are, the Muslim emperors and sultans, that Muslims were dead people.

It occurred to me that what these Lahoris deify of a bygone Delhi is the urbane Urdu, a marker of elitism for the cultural elite of Lahore struggling to keep the seths at bay. But before the performance ended I had another feeling.

There was no doubt that what the audience celebrated the most this year was Zia’s reading of an essay called “Krishen Lal.” The essay told stories from the childhood and the youth of Lord Krishna. Zia frequently paused and sang snatches of bhajjans that melodiously recounted the romance of Krishna and Radha.

Perhaps it has to do with another fear of the cultural elite: the censorship that is being brought upon by the militant Islamist parties, the fear of an ever tightening definition of Islamist identity.



In the fall of 1998 I got the following email.

"Dear Rehan Ansari,

I am an Indian writer now living in New York. Amongst my

books are 'In An Antique Land' and the 'Shadow Lines'.

Amitav Ghosh had sent me a letter out of the blue. When I had begun to read the letter I had no idea who it was from, not having glanced at the name at the end. The first thing I saw were the titles of the books and I felt the peculiar feeling that a book was speaking to me.

He went on to write:

"I am currently working on an article for the New Yorker magazine on the nuclear tests in India and

Pakistan. In connection with this I'm hoping to visit Pakistan."

He explained how he got my email and that he hoped I could give him names of people to meet in Lahore.

As things came to pass I was not able to meet him in Lahore. In a way he did meet the people that I never got to suggest he meet. He met the uncles and parents of people I would have suggested he meet.

I never saw that article in the New Yorker, but he has published a thin, small, pocket book of a book on the same issue. The book can be read as a travelogue: a journey from Delhi to Lahore.

This is how he describes his initial feeling about being in Lahore. He began by saying that on the eve of this, his first visit to Pakistan, the circumstances were grim.

"The week before eighty U.S Tomahawk missiles had rained down on southern Afghanistan. Some had gone astray and landed south of the border. There was outrage in Pakistan. There were daily reports of Indian and U.S flags being burned in the streets of Pakistani cities…At the airport in Lahore, on reaching the end of the immigration queue, I steeled myself for a long wait. My Indian passport would lead, I was sure to delays, questions, perhaps even interrogation. But nothing happened. I was waved through with a smile.

When Indians visit Pakistan (and the other way around) there is often an alchemical reaction, a kind of magic. I had heard accounts of this from friends who had been to Pakistan: they had spoken of the warmth, the hospitality, the intensity of emotion, the sense of stepping back into half-recalled memory, the encounters with strangers that began in mid-sentence, like interrupted conversations. Almost instantly upon arrival I found confirmation of these tales-- in the smiles that appeared on taxi-driver's faces, in the stories that people sought me out to tell, in the endless invitations to meals, in the voices of new friends: "Of course you can't stay in a hotel, what can you be thinking of…?" It was hard to believe that I'd arrived in Lahore knowing no one, armed only with a few telephone numbers."

Amitav Ghosh's book is called Countdown, and has been published by Ravi Dayal of Delhi. It has a simple terrible conclusion. "The pursuit of nuclear weapons in the subcontinent is the moral equivalent of civil war: the targets the rulers have in mind for these weapons are, in the end, none other than its own people."

Earlier in the year the first contact, in my memory, was made between the Ansaris of my family in Karachi and Delhi. Perhaps that is why I experienced a fear for my genes when the nuclear tests occurred in the summer of '98. Whichever way a nuclear exchange blew it would hurt me and mine.

So when I read his conclusion to the book I felt that though Amitav and I had not met some of our thoughts had that year.