From the remote northern reaches of the Hindu Kush mountains to the Indus River delta in the south, and along the vast expanses of land on both sides of the Indus and its tributaries, exist traces of a rich past going back in antiquity.

Without doubt it is the largest ancient civilisation in the world, and yet no place else on earth is such amazing heritage under more threat than in Pakistan.

The earliest known ‘food-producing’ era (7,000-5,000 BC) was Mehrgarh in the ‘kachi plains’ of Balochistan. This is the oldest known ‘settled village life’ habitation, where crops were produced, skins tanned, copper mined and metal worked.

Life at Mehrgarh existed till 2,600 BC. It was roughly in  this time period (3,300-2,800 BC) that the Harappan cities along the Ravi came about. Mohenjodaro and other Sindh cities by then were busy trading towns.

Experts believe that the cities of Multan, Hyderabad, Lahore and Peshawar came about in this time period. Numerous smaller towns like Bhera sprouted up. All of them were on major trading routes.

Immensely rich that Pakistan is in its heritage, there seems to be a reluctance to accept this heritage. History in Pakistan, it seems, starts from the time the Afghan invader Mahmud of Ghazni pillaged the areas that are Pakistan and beyond. In hundreds of years of Muslim rulers, foreign invaders cemented the mentality that all cultures alien to the invader did not deserve consideration.

Pakistan, it could be reasonably argued, was born out of such a worldview. From this, right or wrong, flows the undeniable fact that culture is a low priority of Pakistani life. But then what is culture?

The poet Faiz summed it up succinctly when he said: “Everything that exists on the ground is our culture.” This is exactly what Unesco’s World Heritage Convention states, warning that human intervention, as well as natural causes, is destroying the heritage of the world, and needs to be reversed.

No place else is this more relevant than in Pakistan. We rightly vent anger and dismay at the destruction of the Buddha statues in Bamiyan in Afghanistan, yet what is happening in Pakistan is even more dire.

Mind you, before Pakistan came into being, the British also destroyed a lot of our heritage in the name of modernisation and security. The rest they stole for their museums in the name of ‘human progress’. Such are the ways of rulers who have no accountability.

But we must be concerned with what is left. Here it must be pointed out that the Indus Valley was the place where Hinduism and Jainism emerged, and Buddhism flourished. From the Hindu Kush to the coast of Makran, from the mountains of Afghanistan to the plains of Punjab, thousands of monuments exist that were once part and parcel of our lives.

Today they are fast disappearing. Even ancient sites like Mehrgarh, Harappa and Mohenjodaro are starved of funds to preserve, let alone conserve.

As they shrink and get damaged by human intervention, Pakistan is losing its immensely rich heritage. That we do not love and cherish our past is surely reflected in our regrettable condition today. Without a past and a woeful present, one shudders to think what the future will be like.

One can dwell at length on the plight of cities like Multan, Hyderabad, Lahore, Peshawar and even smaller towns like Bhera. Lahore’s walled city today is 70 per cent commercialised, with all its ancient walls knocked down to make way for commercialisation. When the Aga Khan Trust for Culture intervened, the trader-politicians of Lahore literally chased them out.

On the rebound, a former prime minister requested the Aga Khan to help conserve old Multan, and it goes to the credit of the Ismaili leader that he obliged.

One hears that the Punjab rulers are now making life difficult for the researchers in Multan. A potent combination of mercantile and religious interests is keeping the conservation of our past at bay. Of this there is no doubt.

Take a small town like Bhera, the place where Alexander clashed with the local ruler called the ‘Puru’, or Porus in its Latinised version.

Mind you Porus defeated the foreigner, even though respectable Western historians follow the Greek description of how their leader fared. But then Bhera remains an exquisite walled city that is disintegrating. Ancient Hindu temples have been knocked down and the houses of members of a religious sect have been reduced to ashes. The once old centre of power is today a ghost town.

As an example take the condition of the magnificent Lahore Fort. It is slowly disintegrating because of neglect. Sadly, Unesco is only moved if ‘officially’ approached. The official world does not want Pakistan to have too many endangered sites, and in that they manage well.

Pakistan, the world and Unesco are losing out to such manipulation. Experience tells us endangered sites are saved when the ‘relatively richer’ sections of society stand up to save their world. To take from Pakistan is easy and has reduced the country to ruins. It is time they gave something back. The government one should not rely on. Only then will the future seem worth the fight.

The writer is a senior commentator with a focus on heritage and economics.

A Muharram procession in Lahore, Pakistan.—File Photo

IN our school and college days we all loved to assist friends set up ‘sabeels’ alongside Lahore`s traditional ‘Ashura’ procession, providing cold drinks to the thousands who mourned. Sects and beliefs never mattered then. But then neither did one`s religion.

For well over 1,332 years, the tragedy of Karbala moves everyone who hears about it, be they Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Sikh or any other religion. This is one incident that brings out the need to support those with a moral position.

As children we attended the ‘sham-i-ghareeban’ with our Shia friends, and learnt the lesson of supporting those in the right. Everyone respected the beliefs of others. Yes, there were always a few silly chaps who wanted attention, but they were at best ignored.

The ancient city of Lahore is connected to the tragedy in no uncertain terms.

Historical accounts say seven brave warriors from Lahore died while fighting in the Battle of Karbala. It is said their father Rahab Dutt, an old man who traded with Arabia in those days, had promised the Holy Prophet (Peace be upon him) to stand by his grandson in his fight to uphold the truth.

That pledge the brave Rajput Mohiyals of the Dutt clan from Lahore upheld.

Today they are known as Hussaini Brahmins, who lived in Lahore till 1947.

Then there is the fact that besides the Hindu Rajputs of Lahore, in the battle also fought John bin Huwai, a freed Christian slave of Abu Dharr al-Ghafari, whose `alleged` descendents, one researcher claims, still live inside the Walled City of Lahore.

I have been on the track of these ancestors for quite some time and have been able to trace one Christian family living inside Mori Gate. They claim to have a connection with a `Sahabi` whose name they cannot recollect. M. A. Karanpikar`s `Islam in Transition`, written over 250 years ago, made this claim, but I do not think it is a claim worth pursuing.

But the most powerful claim of Lahore as the place where the descendents of Hussain ibn All came lies in the Bibi Pak Daman graveyard, where the grave of Ruquiya, sister of Hussain ibn Ali and wife of Muslim ibn Ageel, is said to exist.

Also graves here attributed to the sisters of Muslim ibn Ageel and other family members. Many dispute this claim.

But then no less a person than Ali Hasan of Hajweri, known popularly as Data Sahib, came here every Thursday to offer ‘fateha’ at the grave, informing his followers that this was the grave of Ruquiya. The place where he always stood to offer `fateha` has been marked out, and his book also verifies this claim. Mind you detractors exist, of this have no doubt, but the supporting evidence is quite strong.

Let me begin the story of the Dutts by going through the record of the Shaukat Khanum Hospital and the recorded fact that Indian film star Sunil Dutt, who belonged to Lahore, made a donation to the hospital and recorded the following words: ‘For Lahore, like my elders, I will shed every drop of blood and give any donation asked for, just as my ancestors did when they laid down their lives at Karbala for Hazrat Imam Husain.

Makes you think -but then there is this account which says that the seven sons of Rahab Dutt lost their lives defending the Imam at Karbala. The Martyr’s List at Qum verifies this. History records when the third thrust by Yazid’s forces came, the Dutt brothers refused to let them pass. The seven Punjabi swordsmen stood their ground till they were felled by hundreds of horsemen. In lieu of the loyalty of the Dutt family to that of the Holy Prophet (Peace be upon him) was coined the famous saying: ‘Wah Dutt Sultan, Hindu ka dharm, Musalman ka iman, Adha Hindu adha Musalman.’ Since then, so the belief goes, Muslims were instructed never to try to convert the Dutts to Islam.

A grieving Rahab returned to the land of his ancestors, and after staying in Afghanistan, returned to Lahore. I have tried my very best to locate their ‘mohallah’ inside the Walled City, and my educated guess is that it is Mohallah Maulian inside Lohari Gate. Later they moved to Mochi Gate, and it was there that the famous Dutts lived before 1947 saw them flee from the hate of the people they gave everything for.

The most interesting thing about the Hussaini Brahmins is that they are highly respected among Hindus, and even more amazingly it is said that all direct ancestors of Rahab Dutt are born with a light slash mark on their throat, a sort of symbol of their sacrifice. I was reading a piece by Prof Doonica Dutt of Delhi University who verified this claim and said that all true Dutts belong to Lahore.

I must point out to an amazing version of these events that an Indian historian, Chawala, has come up with. It says that one of the wives of Hazrat Imam Husain, the Persian princess Shahr Banu, was the sister of Chandra Lekha or Mehr Banu, the wife of an Indian king Chandragupta. We know that he ruled over Lahore. When it became clear that Yazid ibn Muawiya was determined to eliminate Hussain ibn Ali, the son of Hussain (named Ali) rushed off a letter to Chandragupta asking for assistance. The Mauriyan king, allegedly, dispatched a large army to Iraq to assist. By the time they arrived, the Tragedy of Karbala had taken place.

In Kufa in Iraq a disciple of Hazrat Imam Husain is said to have arranged for them to stay in a special part of the town, which even today is known by the name of Dair-i-Hindiya or ‘the Indian quarter’ The Hussaini Brahmins believe that in the Kalanki Purana, the last of 18 Puranas, as well as the Atharva Veda, the 4th Veda, refers to Hazrat Imam Husain as the avatar of the Kali Yug, the present age. They believe that the family of the Holy Prophet (Peace be upon him)is Om Murti, the most respected family before the Almighty.

All these facts bring me back to our days as school children working hard to provide relief to the mourners on Ashura. Reminds me of our neighbour Nawab Raza Ali Qizilbash, who invited us to his ‘haveli’ every year to see the preparations before the event. Raza Bhai is no more, and neither is the tolerance that we all enjoyed so much.

For starters there are no walls any more. We have a ‘walled’ city without its walls. Our wholesale traders, backed by crooked politicians, in order to create space for their merchandise to move efficiently, have knocked down all the historic walls that remained. Our rulers — the British and the ‘free’ Brown Sahibs that followed – have over the last 150 years deliberately knocked down the walls that made our city famous.

It is about time that we accept that we do not deserve to lay claim to a great city. The original residents of the city have, for purely understandable economic reasons, deserted the ‘mohallahs’ and ‘guzars’ of their forefathers. Once they moved to the various colonies miles away, they have never bothered to look back at the carnage. It is a classic case of the famous saying: “whom the gods want to destroy, they are blinded, their homes destroyed, their ancestors forgotten, their children desert them, and brigands occupy their space”.

This is the true story of the ancient walled city of Lahore, the city without walls, naked, exposed, without any city father to
bother about it as it slowly decays and disintegrates. The brute force of our rulers compels us to shut our eyes to this reality.

When the Punjabi poet from Lahore, Masud bin Sa’ad Salman, enslaved and imprisoned by the Afghan invader Mahmud of Ghazni, wrote his poetry lamenting the loss of Lahore to the illiterate (Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1905, pp 705-707), he was probably foreseeing the year 2012 and not 1121 when he died a lonely death a prisoner in a foreign land. But then we are all prisoners, all of us, to avarice. To us history is utter bunk and the education, the little that we blow our trumpets about, just does not enlighten our conscious. Our helplessness compels us to remain silent.

On Sunday morning I set off to walk around the old city that was once a walled city. I tried to get a few friends to join in the walk, but everyone had an excuse not to join in. Why see the obvious. A dear friend put forward the excuse: “What if Shia-Sunni riots break out”. That stumped me, and I said something unmentionable. But it does reflect the deep malaise, the utter rejection by a class totally alien to the condition of the poor.

I parked my car outside Lohari Gate and went inside to see Mohallah Maulian. This is, probably, the original Lahore and the oldest portion. Inside is a scene of decay, probably utter decay is a better word, where ancient houses, exquisite in design, are decaying. They smell foul. People are so poor they cannot afford to get their choked drains functioning again. Almost all the historic houses have developed cracks. The traders want it to decay and then they pick it up for a bargain. Poverty has its limits.

As I walked inside a ‘ghumti’ (curved lane but corrupted to be pronounced ‘gumti’), a few very old buildings have fallen and as traders dig deep to build new ugly concrete structures, it was painful to see, almost ten feet below the surface, ancient arches built in small bricks emerge. These are the remains of an even older Lahore.

But then who cares about ancient cities. In any other part of the world newspapers would highlight the discovery and TV channels would be praising the find. Not so in Lahore. Every day an ancient house or two is knocked down by hungry traders to build a new warehouse. They do not need permission from a bureaucracy castrated by the buying power of business.

Let me quote a research by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture. Mind you, the Punjab government’s Lahore Walled City Project, now a dead leaderless organisation because of powerful political and trader pressure, remains quiet about. In 1947 less than 15 per cent of houses in the ‘walled’ city were commercial. In 2012 they have crossed the 72 per cent mark. The evil has spread far and wide and even Mohallah Maulian, purely a residential area for centuries, is being, slowly, eradicated.

As a reaction to the entire walled city being declared ‘commercial’ by the LDA and by the current rulers, themselves traders, I went to the Lahore High Court after a newspaper advertisement of the LDA stated so. The honourable court has not been able to hear my ‘urgent’ plea for well over a year. I am not surprised at all, for even they are human.

So back to Lohari Gate I came, shocked at what I had seen. Then started my three-hour walk, along garden paths, the outer road, the patches of garden, and where possible alongside the paths where the wall once stood. Traders have built shops, warehouses, fences and open spaces to store goods. Not a single brick remains. The government at places has managed to auction portions of the old garden. Even a city without its fathers does not deserve this. Why should bureaucrats remain far behind given the profits to be made by inaction.

At Delhi Gate I stopped to see shops oozing out onto Circular Road. The sheer strength of the trader mafia is too strong for any political establishment to resist, let alone bureaucracy. There was the old ‘Nakkas Khana’ that was bulldozed overnight by the LDA backed by the son of a top politician, for he is part of the trio mafia who rule, informally, everything that happens inside the ‘walled’ city. If you want to sell a house, it has to be routed through them.

To the north the government, while building a hospital named after Nawaz Sharif, knocked down the remaining historic walls.

The Press did not flinch, let alone report it. This was after several gates were made in them by traders. This newspaper reported the development. The traders decided to get rid of the old wall to end the controversy. No head, no headache. Journalists remained silent. I am not surprised for they are, like bureaucrats, human too.

So on to Tibbi I went. Incidentally, the word ‘tibbi’ comes from the word ‘tibba’ – a mound. Today mention of the word titillates the imagination. The food street also titillates as it slowly converts into a brothel as we had predicted after the young buck of the ruler got it made. I have nothing against the world’s oldest profession, and would probably want them to be licensed and restricted. But among the illiterate morality swings both ways.

As I walked along the western side, I knew that this was knocked down by the British for defence purposes after 1857. They feared sieges like the one that took place at Delhi. So back to Bhati Gate, onto Mori and back to Lohari Gate I came. Luckily my car was still there. So I completed my walk to see the wall that is no longer there. The poverty is unwatchable. The original inhabitants have all fled, their ancestors and their traditions no longer exist.

Can we save our old ‘walled city’ yet? The answer is a massive ‘No’. Our trader-politician class forced an organisation like the Aga Khan Trust for Culture out of Lahore. The government even sent a bill for the security provided to the Aga Khan, mind you our guest, when he came visiting. Might as well have slapped the man for caring so much for Muslim culture.

There is only one solution, and this might excite the rulers who love to build expensive infrastructure. Might as well give the rulers more grass to chew. Let the government build a New Walled City on the other side of the river between the Saggian and the Motorway bridges. Let all the markets and traders go there. Shift the truck and bus stands there, join it with the Metro Bus plan. Let this be the New Lahore Walled City.

In this way the original city will be vacated and conserved for tourists, who will bring in more money than the traders can imagine, as well as providing the city a soft image and a lot of business. It will give the poor a chance. If this happens, then mind you the rich will want to buy property in the old ‘walled’ city again. There is no harm dreaming something positive. After all we dream of Lahore and do nothing about it.

Most older people in Lahore recollect this Sikh leader as the man who stood on the stairs of the Punjab Assembly in 1947 and pledged that he would never allow Pakistan to be made, drawing his ‘kirpan’ in the process. The result of that defiant gesture was that hundreds of innocent Sikhs were butchered the next day. That is the abiding image of the man in Lahore. But then he was a much more serious politician. It would be interesting to trace his life and see how he fared, for after 1947 little is known of his ways.

Born to a Hindu Malhotra family in 1885 in the village Harial in Rawalpindi District, his childhood name was Nanak Chand. His father was Bakshi Gopi Chand the village ‘patwari’. His was a religious family, but tolerant as all Punjabis once were of other religions. Having passed his primary examination from a school near his village, he moved to Rawalpindi to join the Mission School. His interest in the Sikh faith resulted in him, during holidays, going to listen to a well-known Sikh ‘saint’ Attar Singh at Dera Khalsa.

In 1902 Baba Attar Singh initiated him into the Khalsa order and named him Tara Singh – ‘the star with the love of the Almighty in his heart’. The following year he passed his matriculation and joined Khalsa College, Amritsar. At college he organised a few strikes over trivial matters and soon was known as a rabble rouser. In 1907, Tara Singh joined the peasant movement in Lyallpur (now Faisalabad) against the passage of the Colonization Bill.

Strangely, he concluded that people were trying to portray the Sikhs as anti-British. In an amazing flip, which would be the hallmark of his life, he supported what he set out to oppose. But then he sought solace in educating Sikh farmers of the benefits they stood to gain. It was, by any measure, a progressive leap of faith.

After graduating in 1907 he decided to become a teacher and joined the Teacher Training College, Lahore. In 1908 after completing his teacher training, he opened the Khalsa High School, Lyallpur. From this school he rose to become a national leader, preaching that Sikhs educate other Sikhs for free. He formed ‘The Lyallpur Group’, which brought out a magazine called ‘Sach Dhandhora’.

In 1914 he returned to Lyallpur as headmaster for his own school when the Gurdwara Reform Movement started. He was thus called Master Tara Singh. Elected to the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee, his life as a progressive religious politician had started.

In 1921 took place the infamous Nankana Sahib massacre. It all started with complaints of immoral practices in the Janam Asthan Gurdwara at Nankana Sahib by the Udasi mahant (priest) Narain Das and his companions. The Sikhs resolved to take the management of the gurdwara in their own hands. A group of 150 Sikhs entered the gurdwara as ordinary pilgrims, unarmed and peaceful. But the priest, apprehending a takeover, had hired a few armed Pathans, who opened fire on the ‘peaceful’ posse. According to an official report about 130 devotees were massacred inside the gurdwara.

The next day Master Tara Singh joined a group of over 1,000 Sikhs and after negotiating with the British administration took over control.
He was truly into active Sikh religious politics, which he would pursue for the rest of his life. Leaders like Gandhi, Maulana Shaukat Ali, Saifuddin Kitchlew, Lala Dhuni Chand and Lala Lajpat Rai visited the scene of the tragedy and expressed sympathy for the Akalis.

This exposure Master Tara Singh had never experienced, and he pledged before the Sikh community to devote his whole life to the cause of the Sikhs. He was immediately invited to become the secretary of the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee at Amritsar. Master Tara Singh had truly arrived.

He immediately was engulfed in a dispute over possession of the Golden Temple, and after a brush with the local administration was arrested under the provisions of the Seditious Meetings Act, tried and sentenced to rigorous imprisonment. He immediately resigned from his job as a headmaster and devoted himself to the Akali Dal. The Sikhs resolved to not cooperate with the British and soon everyone was released. Mahatma Gandhi sent a telegram which said: “First battle for India’s freedom won, congratulations”. Master Tara Singh was propelled to a much higher pedestal.

In March 1922, Master Tara Singh was again arrested alongside 1,400 others for wearing extra long swords publicly. In this he again emerged an even bigger Sikh leader. Then followed a series of Sikh related issues, and every time he was arrested his stature grew. Very soon he was to be dubbed ‘Sole Spokesman of the Sikhs’. The ‘patwari’s’ son from Rawalpindi had made it to become a headmaster in Lyallpur, and from there to a national leader in Lahore, all in a matter of 15 years.

The rise and rise of Master Tara Singh saw him, in 1923, take on the authorities after they deposed the Maharajah of Nabha, who was viewed as an Akali supporter. Master Tara Singh organised a ‘shaheedi jatha’ – suicide squad – and went to Nabha. In the tragedy that followed over 40 Sikhs were killed.

The whole of Punjab was alight. Master Tara Singh was at the centre of this dispute. Leaders of the Indian National Congress, led by Jawaharlal Nehru, who demonstrated in support of Master Tara Singh, were also arrested. It had become an All-India affair. The Khilafat Committee and the Muslim League also expressed their sympathies with Master Tara Singh. The situation had the colonial rulers reconsider their position and the rabble rouser had won yet another victory.Barely had the matter been resolved that the Punjab governor, Sir Malcolm Hailey, was willing to pacify the Sikhs by assisting them in taking possession of all the important gurdwaras in the province through a five-member committee. A draft of a new Gurdwara Bill was sent to the Akali leaders imprisoned in the Lahore Fort. The leaders let the ‘headmaster’ read the complicated piece of legislation, who within minutes ruled that it was fine. It was passed into law in November 1925. Thus ended what came to be known in Lahore as the ‘Third Sikh War’.

Master Tara Singh moved to a house in Shahdara. As the Freedom Movement gained pace, the Nehru Report on the abolition of communal provisions in elections was opposed by the Sikhs, who felt that this would mean that the Muslims of the Punjab would gain ascendancy over the Sikhs. He wrote: “As Congress wants to please the Muslims, so it is ignoring the Sikh interests”.

The seeds of partition of Punjab were being sown. From then onwards he always spoke of ‘majority despotism’, a phrase, ironically, the Muslim League used much later when demanding Pakistan.

When Gandhi launched his Civil Disobedience Movement in 1930, Master Tara Singh extended his support and a conference of Congress, Muslim and Sikh leaders was held in Lahore. He got 5,000 Akalis ready to fight it out. All over Punjab strikes took place. In April 1930 in Peshawar’s Qissa Khawani Bazaar, people protesting against the arrest of their leaders were fired upon, killing 300 persons. Master Tara Singh, as a mark of sympathy, led 100 suicide fighters to Peshawar. It was an impressive march by all accounts and he was arrested in Lahore and sent to Gujarat Jail.

The Simon Commission of June 1930 issued an award which favoured separate electorates and reservation of seats and recommended only 19 per cent representation to the Sikhs in Punjab. The Congress and the Sikhs rejected the report. Sikh agitation was brewing and he was interned in his house at Shahadra.

Master Tara Singh realised that they would have to struggle against the Communal Award on their own. A split occurred as many Sikhs realised that their demands were unfair. The end result was that an angry Master Tara Singh was asked to quit politics as he was driving them into an unacceptable position. In anger he left for a self-imposed exile to Burma, bidding farewell to politics and promising not to return. “When I return you will have forgotten me”, he said. But how could Lahore forget such a colourful person.

In January 1935, he learnt of the death in Patiala Jail of his companion Sewa Singh Thikriwala. He rushed back and the leaderless Sikhs immediately passed a resolution expressing full confidence in his leadership. He accused the maharajah of betraying the Sikhs. The Maharajah of Patiala even sent a gang of killers to finish him.

The 1937 elections of the Punjab Assembly resulted in a clear-cut majority for the Unionists. In an astute move Sikandar Hayat Khan sought the cooperation of the Khalsa National Party. Sunder Singh Majithia became a minister in the Unionist government. Master Tara Singh condemned him as a traitor.

In the first year of his rule in July 1937 Sir Sikander called a ‘Unity Conference’ of leaders from all political parties for the purpose of maintaining communal harmony in the province. Master Tara Singh decided to take part. On the question of playing music before mosques, Master Tara Singh and Sardar Sunder Singh Majithia exchanged hot words and the conference ended in total failure. After years of success, now his position was more and more confused.

The Sikander-Jinnah Pact led Sikhs to believe that Sir Sikander was basically a communal politician. It forced Master Tara Singh to start favouring the Congress Party. The complexities of the situation meant that Sikh aspirations could not be met. After the Second World War as freedom neared, Master Tara Singh fiercely argued against the partition of India. The reality was that no district has a Sikh majority.

The fact that they would have to leave behind Nankana Sahib, Hasanabdal, Lahore and their other holy sites was, in human terms, a massive tragedy for the Sikhs. After all they belonged to the land. It was in this rage of utter hopelessness that he stood on the steps of the Punjab Assembly of Lahore in 1947 and waved his ‘kirpan’. The result was death and destruction.

In the new East Punjab State he demanded that ‘gurmukhi’ be the official script. In a way his politics ended up with a Sikh majority East Punjab where the Sikhs lived their lives as they wished. But then the divided Punjab was further sub-divided in November 1966 into three parts. One a Sikh-majority Punjab, and two Hindu-majority states of Himachal Pradesh and Haryana. The rabble rouser from Harial and Shahdara had had his final say. He died on Nov 22, 1967 always longing to return to die in his native village.

— File Photo

Have you ever heard of Col Hallard? My guess is a massive ‘No’. But then Col Gordon H. Ramsey Hallard came to Lahore almost a century ago, and his legacy is still with us, little that we know. Ask any SHO if he knows who designed his standard operating procedures, and you will surely get a blank stare.

For that matter ask any policeman in London, or the entire British Isles, where his standard operating procedures and training manual came from, and he would, save the odd history buff, give a blank stare, or better still tell you to ‘be on your way’. But when Col Hallard started the legendary Hendon Police Training College, in London. In 1934, he set out to modernise the British Police. His first goal was to convert a coercive force into a strict, yet friendly and very competent, force, one people trusted, and still do. The first thing Col Hallard did was to enforce the training manual of the Punjab Police. “If you want to police, look towards Lahore,” he used to say. Amazing words for a force we have grown up to fear and, to be honest, despise for very good reasons.

But who was this amazing Col Hallard? I happened to come across his personal files in the archives of the University of Cambridge, where I am researching on Lahore. It all started when I was searching, on the internet, the various medals that were granted by the British in India, and came across an auction of seven medals belonging to Col Hallard – the OBE, CIE, BWM, Delhi Darbar 1911 Medal, two coronation medals and a jubilee medal – put up for sale by his family. They went for a mere £850.

After reading his achievements I felt sorry for those disinterested in family history. Other medals on auction were of those who died in the Battle of Sobraon 1846, in Waziristan 1894, Indian Mutiny 1857, Relief of Chitral 1895, and so on. It was history on sale galore. But such are the doings of time. So back to Col Hallard.

Born on April 13, 1888, in the village of Witham-on-the-Hill in South Lincolnshire, he grew up loving the countryside, horses, tradition and good books. Connected to the famous Luard family of Cambridge, he, as the trend in those days was, wanted to seek his fortune in India. It is the reverse these days. He opted for the Indian Police Examination, and after doing well opted for Punjab. So it was that he was asked to report at Lahore. To India he set off in 1908, and after a long journey he reached Lahore on the first of January, 1909.

The Jan 1, 1909, was a holiday and there was no one to receive him. So he took a ‘tonga’ and asked the happy driver to take him to the police chief of Lahore. Off this merry ‘tonga-driver’ sped and arrived at the house of the DSP of Lahore, who quickly put up a tent for him in his garden to sleep the night. The population of Lahore then was 282,000 persons. The next day, he met Inspector General of the Punjab Police C.G.W. Hastings, who sent him for training to the Police Centre at Phillaur. There he excelled in every subject, as a very keen cricketer and horseman. Col Hallard mentions that the reason his first posting was Lahore was because new IG Sir Lea-French liked cricket, and he would strengthen the Punjab Police team.

It stayed in the Lahore Gymkhana Club, and in 1923 played cricket with Wilfred Rhodes, the famed England cricketer. But his sports included polo, hockey, cricket, fox-hunting, tent pegging, not to speak of bridge. So began his career. He modernised the Roberts Club, having the world’s largest fingerprint collection then of over 200,000. It was Hallard who forced the British police officers to get friendlier with the local population, respecting their intellect which he thought “was grouted in thousands of years of wisdom”.He was heading the Punjab Police Intelligence Bureau in Lahore when the terrible Jallianwala Bagh incident took place. He immediately rushed to Amritsar where he met Brig Gen Dyer. The version given by Dyer “left a bad taste in the mouth” is how he described their meeting. He did not like the order to force the people of Amritsar to crawl under barbed wires if they wanted to use the major roads. He returned to Lahore and met Gen Beynon, the station commander, but found that he did not want to interfere with the freedom granted to Dyer.

A frustrated Hallard went to his Cecil Hotel room on The Mall and typed out a detailed report. Using a confidant in the Telegraph Office, opposite the GPO, he sent a report to the commander-in-chief at Delhi. The result was that Gen Beynon was ordered to Amritsar and the ‘crawling order’ was withdrawn. Many of Brig Gen Dyer’s admirers, who thought he had saved India, did not like the rumours that Hallard had ‘disciplined’ Dyer. But then Hallard had used his Sikh constables to get a graphic picture of what had happened. From that moment onwards, he was like a ‘demi-god’ to every Punjabi. The detailed report of the Jallianwala Bagh incident is given in his own words in the documents he handed over to the University of Cambridge in 1980, a year before he died. I certainly do not claim to be the first to read his graphic description, for he was a man who kept to himself, but the condition of the sealed files do point in that direction.

In 1911 when the Delhi Darbar took place, he was trusted as bodyguards of ‘His Majesty’ as he terms them, never by name. When the First World War broke out, he was seconded to the Punjab Regiment’s intelligence cell and posted to the General Staff Headquarters in Delhi from 1915 to 1919. By the end of 1919 trouble broke out in China, and Hallard took his entire Punjab Police intelligence team to Shanghai, where he soon cracked the Chinese mafia who were in the forefront of the troubles. He always called his Punjab Police men as his ‘eyes and ears’ and very level-headed.

He returned with his team and was made head of Delhi Police. But then his ‘Punjab Team’ soon cracked the Delhi gangs and found British officers on the take. Barely had he started his work there that he was made head of Punjab Police Training at Phillaur. His men, all of them, were sent back to Lahore. They were always known as “Hallard Sahib kay Deewanay”. He saw to it that all of them were promoted and decorated, and till they retired, and even afterwards, he kept in touch with them.

At Phillaur he brought about amazing and revolutionary changes that transformed the Punjab Police into the most modern in the world, as he liked to believe. In 1931, he returned to England where he was made Chief Constable of Lincolnshire Police. The old man was back on home turf. His heart was always, as he writes, ‘in Lahore’.

In 1931, the British government decided to modernise the British Police, and who better than Gordon Hallard. He immediately called over Lt-Col Reggie Senior, seconded from the Indian Police Service, from Lahore. They set up Hendon Police College, which still functions as the premier police training centre. In his first address to the college, he asked everyone to “look towards my brothers in Lahore if you need to learn anything. That is where real men live”. I would grant the man a little emotion, especially if he loved my city.

Col Gordon H Ramsey Hallard died in 1981, the most decorated police officer of the British Empire, an intelligence genius, a kind-hearted officer, an amazing problem-solver, and a man who loved Lahore and its people. I have not been able to trace any family member. But what I do know is that all his medals were auctioned on May 12, 2005, for $850. I took an immediate liking for this man, who I had myself never heard of before I opened his tightly sealed personal file last week.

The blaze that has completely destroyed the largest and best-known Lahore bookshop has taken with it the memories of hundreds of thousands of book readers over several generations, all of whom grew up searching for books along its numerous aisles. This institution in the famous Ghulam Rasool Building, a colonial-era masterpiece, is a far greater dent to Lahore’s psyche than most are willing to accept. On Monday afternoon, eight days after the fire started, smoke still billows forth from numerous holes made in the cellars roof. Above the entire building has collapsed. All around are charred remains of what was once, to us, ‘nirvana’.

Let us take a look at three aspects of this great loss to Lahore. One, the building and its history. Second, the bookshop and its history. Thirdly, the circumstances surrounding the biggest fire to hit Lahore after the terrible events of 1947. In the end we can muse about the future.

The Ghulam Rasool Building was completed in 1916 and was the property of one of the richest tycoons of the city. His full name was Haji Chaudhary Ghulam Rasool Tarar. He belonged to the village of Koulo Tarar in Hafizabad district. In the events of 1857 he played a major role in assisting the British overcome his own countrymen. In return he was amply rewarded. He acquired a major landholding in his village, and to Lahore he came with a mission, to rebuild the mausoleum of Shah Meran Zanjani. On his way to the city he lost the four lakh rupees he had brought along. He went to the shrine of Ali Hajweri, known as Data Sahib and prayed for forgiveness, and, so it is claimed, he found his lost treasure.

With this treasure he built the five-domed mosque of Data Darbar, as well as the main green dome over the saint’s grave, the one that still stands. In return he had a dream that he would be rewarded in this world as well as the next, and would be allowed to be buried on the right side of the saint himself. When Ghulam Rasool Tarar died in 1925, he was buried to the west of the ‘chilla’ of Hazrat Moinuddin Chishti next to the grave of Ali Hajweri.

In life he acquired great wealth and was the major donor to building the pavilion and statue of Queen Victoria at the Assembly Square. He also, from his own money, built the building on Queen’s Road – Fatima Jinnah Road – donated to St.

John’s Ambulance, which became the Red Cross and is now known as the Red Crescent Building. It was decreed to remain in perpetuity ‘rent-free’. He acquired a major portion of The Mall and owned 50 kanals of Victoria Park. But his masterpiece was the building named after him. The architect remains unknown, though it is classified as a ‘protected’ monument and a classic colonial-era building.

The design is unique in that it has five modules, each with a 36 inch wall separating them. This makes each module fire-proof in case one does occur in any of the five modules. The central module holds the staircase. Ferozsons is located in the fourth to the right module. Today it is completely burned down, its wood beam roof in ashes, the ground floor destroyed and the strong cellar still not being penetrated even by experienced firemen. The millions of rupees of books still burn away.

Now about Ferozsons. This family of booksellers started business in 1894. The origins of Maulvi Ferozuddin are a wee bit obscure. It is said that he worked in the Royal Mint as a printer. Another version says he managed to acquire a sack full of fake banknotes during the revolutionary era that preceded the events in which Bhagat Singh was hanged. Fake money was seen as a means of destroying the local economy. But then each story is juicier than the last.

What we do know is that they started work in Kashmiri Bazaar in a small shop that specialised in handcrafted and leather-bound book produced in the Mosque of Wazir Khan. It must go to the credit of Maulvi Ferozuddin that he and his sons managed to set up a book shop that today has five branches in Lahore, one in Karachi and yet another one in Rawalpindi. Their main one on The Mall was the largest in the country, a place where every student just had to visit once to find their favourite books.

The circumstances surrounding the fire have given rise to wild theories. The rescue men at the site claim that a generator placed on the roof exploded and its oil trickled down to the ground floor getting into the cellar, which is a massive three kanal hall full of hundreds of thousands of books. Another theory is that the generator was in the cellar, and given the heat it exploded. The starting point is the generator. If it was on the weak tin roof, or in the cellar, in both cases it was a very irresponsible act and an awkward place to keep it.

Then we know that given so much paper and glue, and given the bone-dry conditions, and given the dark inaccessible cellar, it was the ideal conditions for a fire to keep blazing for weeks on end. That is exactly what has happened.

Now comes the ‘mystery fire’ theory. Most people think the fire was deliberately started. I immediately contacted to top insurance friend from my school and college days, and he informed me, much to his satisfaction, that his company had not insured Ferozsons. It was insured with Jubilee to the tune of Rs50 million. I immediately contacted an employee of Ferozsons, who informed me in confidence that books well over Rs250 million were stored there.

But this was not enough. I contacted a printer friend who analysed the loss and said that the cost price of the probable store, which he has seen for himself, and mind you he is an expert in book costing, and his view was that the entire loss in book alone was well over Rs170 million. But then he says that the collection of classic pens alone must be over Rs20 million. So here we have a confirmed insurance of Rs50 million, and a probable loss of well over Rs150 million. My insurance expert says the owners will have to take a loss of well over Rs120 million. So the ‘mystery fire’ theory is absolute bunk.

Given all this information I went to meet Mr Akram Chowdhry on Monday afternoon. He has an amazing resemblance to his two famous brothers, the actor Aslam Pervez and the famous painter Moin Najmi, all grandsons of Haji Chowdhry Ghulam Rasool Tarar of Koulo Tarar, Hafizabad, and one of the richest men of his times. The properties of Ghulam Rasool are all locked in a ‘Waqf-ul-Aulad’ and cannot be sold. The entire family of this famous property owner enjoys the rent of the property.

How will the post-blaze era play out for Ferozsons? Will they compensate the building owners for the immense loss to a ‘protected’ property? Will the damage be conserved? Will Ferozsons continue to pay a mere Rs45,000 per month in rent (so claims the owner) against a reasonable market value of at least Rs500,000 a month? Will this blaze lead to litigation? The future promises to be murky, of this there is no doubt. But Lahore has lost an institution of considerable merit. It makes sense for the authorities to sit down with all the parties to avoid lengthy litigation and restore the bookshop to its old glory.