Lahore: City of Gardens, Emperors, and Eternal Poetry

Introduction

To enter Lahore is to enter a city that seems to breathe history through every pore. From the towering red sandstone walls of the Badshahi Mosque, whose minarets have stood as landmarks of Islamic architecture for over three and a half centuries, to the gleaming mirror-work of the Sheesh Mahal inside the ancient fort, to the fragrant canopy of the Shalimar Gardens where Mughal emperors once strolled among fountains and rose-beds, Lahore is a city whose past is inseparable from its present. It is the cultural capital of Pakistan, the intellectual and artistic heart of the country, and the capital of Punjab Province, the fertile river-watered heartland of the Indian subcontinent. With a population of approximately 14 to 15 million people, it is one of the largest cities in South Asia, a roaring, vibrant, contradictory metropolis that is also, simultaneously, one of the best-preserved collections of Mughal architecture anywhere in the world.

Lahore does not wear its history lightly. Every street in the walled old city tells a story; every gate of the ancient fortifications bears a name that echoes dynasties and battles across a millennium of turbulent governance. The city has been capital of the Mughal Empire, capital of the Sikh Empire, and capital of British Punjab. It has been a center of Islamic scholarship, Sufi devotion, Urdu poetry, classical music, and the literary tradition of the mushaira, the poetry gathering at which the great masters of the Urdu language competed and dazzled audiences who could judge a couplet's merit with the sophistication of the most exacting connoisseurs. It is the city that shaped the childhood of Rudyard Kipling, whose father, Lockwood Kipling, served as the first curator of the Lahore Museum — "the Wonder House" as it is called at the opening of Kipling's novel Kim, the brass cannon outside the museum doors serving as the young protagonist's favorite perch. It is the city where the incomparable Sufi musician Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan was born, and from which the tradition of qawwali, devotional music of the Sufi orders, was carried to concert stages across the world. It is a city of mosques and shrines, of poets and saints, of spiced meat cooked in vast cauldrons at open-air restaurants that have operated continuously for generations, and of a civic pride so fierce that Lahore's residents — the Lahoris — have a reputation throughout Pakistan for regarding themselves as citizens of the one true city, everything else being mere provincial backdrop.

The Lahori sense of place is rooted in something real and tangible: the accumulated weight of a history in which Lahore has repeatedly been the center of world-historical events. When Akbar moved his imperial court here from Fatehpur Sikri in 1584, Lahore became the de facto capital of one of the richest and most powerful empires on earth. When Ranjit Singh captured the city in 1799, it became the seat of the only major Sikh political power the subcontinent has ever seen. When the British annexed the Punjab in 1849, Lahore became the showcase city of one of the most contested and strategically vital frontiers of the British Empire. And when partition came in 1947, Lahore was at the epicenter of one of the most violent and consequential mass migrations in human history. To understand Lahore is to understand much of the history of the Indian subcontinent itself.

The food culture of Lahore is itself a form of civic identity, inseparable from the city's character. The old food street of Gawalmandi and the food lanes of the walled city have served generations of Lahoris dishes — nihari (a slow-cooked meat stew of great richness), paya (trotters simmered overnight), haleem (a thick porridge of meat and lentils), kulfa (a dense reduced-milk ice cream served with vermicelli noodles in earthenware pots) — that carry in their preparation and their social ritual the accumulated memory of the city's cosmopolitan history. To eat in Lahore is to participate in a culinary tradition as serious and as layered as its architectural one.

Origins and Legend: the Founding of Lahore

The question of Lahore's origins is entangled, as is often the case with very ancient cities, with legend as much as with verifiable history. The most widespread traditional account holds that Lahore was founded by Loh — also spelled Lava — who is described in Hindu tradition as a son of the god Rama and his wife Sita, the central figures of the Ramayana, the great Sanskrit epic. According to this tradition, Loh founded the city as "Loh-awar," the fort of Loh, from which the name "Lahore" derives through gradual linguistic evolution. A companion tradition holds that the nearby city of Kasur was founded by Kush, Loh's twin brother. This legend gives Lahore a divine pedigree of considerable antiquity and connects it to the mythological fabric of Hindu civilization. A temple dedicated to Loh was said to have stood in the old city for many centuries; the location is still identified by tradition, though the structure is long gone.