In "Disrupted City," a Columbia Historian Brings Lahore to Life
In his new book, Manan Ahmed shows readers that the cultural center of Pakistan has not disappeared, but it can only be glimpsed in reflections.
The city of Lahore was more than 1,000 years old when it went through a violent schism. As the South Asian subcontinent was partitioned in 1947 to gain freedom from Britain’s colonial hold, and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan was formed, the city’s large Hindu and Sikh populations were pushed toward India, and an even larger Muslim refugee population settled in Lahore.
Disrupted City: Walking the Pathways of Memory and History in Lahore by Professor Manan Ahmed traces how, over the centuries, Lahore has kept a firm grip on the imagination of travelers, poets, writers, and artists. More recently, journalists have been drawn to the city as a focal point for a nation that continues to grab international headlines. Ahmed brings to life a diverse and vibrant world by walking throughout Lahore over the course of many years. Along the way, he joins Sufi study circles and architects doing restoration in the medieval parts of the city, and speaks with a broad range of storytellers and historians. He also juxtaposes deep analysis of the city’s centuries-old literary culture, noting how it reverberates among the people of Lahore today.
Ahmed shares his thoughts on the book with Columbia News, along with books he’s read recently, and what he’s working on now.
What was the impetus behind this book?
I have had a long-standing question: How and why did the nation-state of Pakistan, founded in 1947, invent an origin for itself, which dated back to the early-8th-century establishment of a Muslim polity by the Indus basin region of the Indian Ocean? The answer to this question first led me to a Persian history, written in the 1220s, which described that establishment. I discussed that text and its claim on the origin narrative of Pakistan in my first book, A Book of Conquest: The Chachnama and Muslim Origins in South Asia. Next, I turned to how the European colonial project of history writing effaced other ideas of geographies that had existed in pre-colonial eras in the subcontinent, and what such erasures did to the ideas of political and social co-existence. This was the topic of my second book, The Loss of Hindustan: The Invention of India.
Having tackled text, and history-writing, I finally felt able to turn to the question of historical memory and the role of the post-colonized nation-state. This is the aim and subject of Disrupted City.
Can you share some examples from the book of what happened to Lahore's literary and artistic history and culture, after the 1947 schism?
I look at a number of ways in which the longue durée history of Lahore remains visible, despite the Partition of 1947, which resulted in the mass migration and mass immigration of over a million people across the Pakistan-India border, alongside religious and gender-based violence, destruction of property, and mass dispossession.
The Lahore that emerged then underwent subsequent attempts at erasures—as its Sikh and Hindu heritage was slowly stripped away—by the destruction of temples, the renaming of streets, the deletion of Devanagari (used to write Hindi) and Gurmukhi (used to write Panjabi) scripts from public spaces. Yet, traces remain in odd corners—in memoirs of those who lived in Lahore prior to 1947, and who would visit in the aftermath, and in sites and shrines where long-standing practices of devotion and commemorations remain. The ancient Lahore has not disappeared, but it can only be glimpsed in reflections. In the book, I discuss state archives and public monument sites where a new idea of Lahore was created after 1947.
What book has had the greatest impact on you?
The books that most prominently impacted me for this project were Walter Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood around 1900 and Qurratulain Hyder's Kar-e Jahan Daraz Hai. Both of these authors also had a collage technique (such as Benjamin's Arcades Project), which I employed in writing Disrupted City. The walking/history approach crystallized for me via W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn.
Do you prefer to read fiction or non-fiction?
I confess that it is very rare that I read fiction. But I assure all of my very dear friends who write fiction that I certainly read them!
What are you teaching this semester?
Colonization/Decolonization, which is an undergraduate class based largely on primary materials tied to the histories of violent dispossession by European colonizers and the brutal aftermath. My other class is a seminar on Mughal ego-documents from the 16th to the 18th centuries. I love teaching texts from/by historical actors because it gives an unvarnished view (albeit with attendant silences and biases) to my students, and I endeavor to teach them the difficult tasks of hermeneutics.
What else are you working on now?
My next project is on U.S. wars and U.S. knowledge-systems—from the grammars and dictionaries for preserving Native languages, to the rise (and fall) of Area studies and the most recent turn toward AI and large language models.
What are the books you would recommend your students read before they graduate?
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin and Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017.