DISRUPTED CITY

A historian walks through Lahore, touching on its long and difficult history as a center of Muslim life and rupture.

“Lahore became a city of refugees and migrants in 1947,” writes Asif, “and it has never stopped being that.” A Columbia University historian, Asif offers a bittersweet reflection on his native city—“its history, the role of memory and violence, and the vexed question of nationalism and state control.” He is especially attuned to texts about the city that were written in Sanskrit and Persian, such as the shahr ashob—the poetic form from the ninth or 10th century that means “city disrupted.” He dwells on the Hindustani influence when Lahore was a “vibrant, polysacral” place; the population exploded under the British, and its new institutions and neighborhoods grew largely segregated. Partition violently sundered the golden age of the city in 1947, largely emptied of Hindus and Sikhs and refilled by Muslim “refugees” from other parts of India, such as the author’s own family. The city had to reinvent itself within the new nation-state of Pakistan. Asif also writes of the environmental degradation of Lahore, once a city of gardens like Shalimar, now imperiled by floods from the Ravi River, air pollution, and heat. He wanders areas of Lahore that have been familiar to him since his youth, all the while musing on the city’s vast changes.

A poignant history and personal memoir of a constantly evolving city.