The walled city

People have always been proud of the unique features of their cities, giving rise to popular sayings such as ‘All roads lead to Rome’, ‘See Naples and die’, and ‘Paris is worth a Mass’.

Lahore, too, has received its share of florid compliments. According to the Punjabi saying, ‘He who hasn’t yet seen Lahore hasn’t been born’. I have already mentioned that the ideal city for the South Asian Muslims was Iranian Isfahan. Yet, Lahoris doubt the well-known Persian saying ‘Isfahan is half the world’ and extol their own city saying, ‘Isfahan would be half the world if Lahore were not there’ (agar lahur nabud isfahan nesf-i-jahan bud). Lahore’s residents go further in asserting the superiority of their city, over the ideal of Isfahan, by claiming that ‘Isfahan and Shiraz together wouldn’t equal half of Lahore’.

Still, the most popular saying is ‘Lahore is Lahore’ (lahaur lahaur hai). Locals utter it every time they hear another city being praised: yes, New York is enormous, London is convenient, but Lahore is Lahore — it is unlike anything else, and this needs no proof.

The well-known Pakistani satirist, Patras Bukhari (1898-1958), wrote ironically about the blusterous Lahori patriotism in his humourous short story “Geography of Lahore” (Lahaur ka Jughrafia):

‘By way of introduction, I wish to submit that it is now many years since Lahore was discovered, thus there is no need to prove its existence through argument and demonstration. Nor should it be necessary that the globe should be set in motion from the left till the country called India comes to a stop before your eyes, and on which you should start searching for the intersecting point of the longitude and latitude where Lahore is to be found. Suffice it to say that wherever you spot Lahore that exactly is where Lahore is. This research has been briefly but comprehensively summed up by our elders who state that ‘Lahore is Lahore’. If you are unable to find Lahore where it is supposed to be, then your education is below par and your intelligence is of a lower order.’

Indeed, a comparison of Lahore with other South Asian cities shows that it is quite unlike Delhi, Agra, Lucknow, Hyderabad, and the other former capitals of the Muslim states in the subcontinent. Despite its inevitable architectural similarity to the Mughal cities of Delhi and Agra, Lahore stands out thanks to its unique preserved urban nucleus — the Inner or Walled City (Anderoon Shehr).

The Walled City is the second belt of urban development around the historical centre of the fort (Shahi Qila), as in many other old cities in the world. In Lahore, as in Delhi and Agra, the fortress’ walls still stand today, while the walls of the Inner City survived until the 19th century before being destroyed soon after the British annexation of the Punjab in 1849. The walls were initially replaced by a ring of parks, and then by the Circular Road.

The names of the historical parts of many of the world’s cities, such as Innere Stadt in Vienna, Ichan Qala in Khiva, and Icheri Sheher in Baku, mean ‘inner city’. These areas of the cities formerly housed the ruler’s residence and administrative buildings, along with the related infrastructure; in our day, they are home to the principal historical monuments and other tourist sites.

‘Inner cities’ usually have small populations: the Anderoon Shehr of Lahore has less than 500,000 inhabitants, in comparison to its total population of about nine million. In some European and American cities, such as London, New York, and Toronto, the term ‘inner city’ has a well-defined meaning: it is the oldest part of town in which the poorest social strata and non-white emigrants live, while the well-off inhabitants reside in the fashionable suburbs that they moved to during the ‘white flight’.

The inhabitants of the Walled City of Lahore, too, are not rich: unskilled and semiskilled labourers, petty vendors, craftsmen, and some members of the artistic intelligentsia that use the old buildings as ateliers. The narrow medieval streets in this part of town house no banks, luxury hotels, offices, or other places where money circulates. The traditional bazaar is the Walled City’s main economic entity, determining the work patterns of the local inhabitants. The Walled City’s state of sanitation is also quite medieval: frequent power outages, a poor sewage system, and a water supply that is unfit for consumption. In spite of its around-the-clock din and commotion, the Anderoon Shehr is slowly but surely dying.

The Walled City is essentially a relic of the pre-industrial era that must try to survive in the post-industrial world and society. ‘The city consumes a host of post-industrial goods and services — from transistor radios to World Bank projects — but it must pay for them with pre-industrial commodities. In this exchange, it is caught in a predicament comparable to a man who gets the iron lung he needs to survive, but has to pedal it going’.

Satellite television has been available in Lahore for a long time now, yet television sets are still delivered to the Walled City on carts drawn by pairs of oxen.

On the whole, the Walled City still retains the medieval ‘zoned’ trading system that is identified by the compact settlement of groups of tradesmen and craftsmen, and by specialised bazaars connected to these groups. Modern supermarkets, in which different types of goods are sold under a single roof, are only found in the fashionable modern suburbs, such as Model Town, Gulberg, or Defence. The inhabitants of the Walled City buy kitchen utensils at Bhanda Bazaar near Shahalami Gate, woolen shawls at Kashmiri Bazaar near Kashmiri Gate, second-hand clothing at Landa Bazaar, bamboo ladders at Bansa Bazaar, paper at Kaghazi Bazaar, etcetera.

Muhammad Qadeer, the modern scholar of Lahore wrote about the city’s traditional structure:

‘Lahore is a city that perhaps can be described more appropriately as a federation of neighbourhoods, markets and special districts, each highly individual in character. Functionally as well as architecturally, these neighbourhoods reflect consecutive historical stages of the city’s growth … Cities were divided into quarters or districts, each inhabited by a tribe or clan or a guild fraternity under the patronage of a noble family. These neighbourhoods were villages of a kind wherein rich and poor were knit together through customary obligations and privileges. There were also commercial districts and market bazaar specialising in commodities such as jewels and spices.

Lahore was also organised along these lines. Within the walls of Lahore there were, originally, nine such quarters and, according to an estimate, 27 quarters of varying sizes constituted suburbs towards the east-southeast of the city’.