In Lahore be sure that for every story you hear there will be another version. A guidebook will trace the city’s origins to ‘‘Loh’’, son of Lord Ram. Another will deny that vehemently, arguing that the root is from loha, a reference to the impregnability of Lahore’s fort. Someone will repeat the received story about Akbar catching a reflection of Salim and Anarkali in a mirror, enraging him enough to taking extreme steps to snap those romantic bonds. Another will dismiss it as ‘‘vicious fiction’’. And beware. Hire a guide at Lahore’s fort to take you through Shah Jahan’s Diwan-I-Aam or Jehangir’s sleeping quarters, and you will be asked to hold more stories than can be coherently wielded. In this city of stories, aka Faiz’s city of lights, linear narrative is at a premium. Perhaps that is why it reminds one so much of Delhi — Lahore too is many cities in spatial and temporal coexistence. Like its Mughal other, Turning back the clock Lahore too seems to be forever seeking its yesterdays to know itself. As Professor Saajida Vandal, principle of the National College of Arts, Lahore, introduces the NCA’s new venture to find archival material about the city and put it in the public domain: ‘‘Lahore is still in the process of understanding and rediscovering itself.’’ The volume at hand this time is J.L. Kipling’s 1860 classic Lahore As It Was. Lahore for centuries has been a coveted citadel for invading armies and expanding empires. Each regime, it would seem, gave the city another way to look within. Books like Kipling’s cannot be accepted as the unchallenged truth — it is after all, another victor’s version — but in interrogating the archives lies self-understanding. The endeavour is not limited to publishing. The Dawn group of newspapers is organising an exhibition of Lahore under the Raj. It is a twin attempt to complete its highly successful Karachi presentation. The cut-off date will, of course, be 1947. The Enigma of Arrival To round off the self-inquiry, conversations of visitors from India are being scanned for reflections. Lahore Lahore aye (Lahore is Lahore) has been the city’s confident statement. But it is the estranged, returning to city till now present only in memory and imagination, who are perhaps most authorised to judge Lahore’s Lahoreness. An editorial in The Friday Times perceives the city to be the biggest beneficiary of this restarted peace process and attendant cricket diplomacy. Sikhs and Hindus, it notes, are using the opportunity accorded by cricket visas, ‘‘to return to their homeland in search of their ancient roots rather than lost properties’’. Not only could this render Lahore a boomtown, it hopes, but those whose families migrated in 1947 would be certain to want to revisit the sights and smells of their pasts. ‘‘The cry of Lahore Lahore aye will echo everywhere’’, it envisions, ‘‘and the city may yet regain its composite secular culture of yore.’’Call it the enigma of arrival.
