Colonial Lahore: A History of the City and Beyond

摘要

By mining the archives and interpreting materials through the lense of imperial globalisation and international urban modernism, this immensely rich history finds new ways to challenge the stubborn orthodoxies of a presumptuous inward looking British imperial gaze, by firmly placing the city of Colonial Lahore within a longer cosmopolitan history of trans-regional transnational trade, political, religious, artistic, literary and creative influence and connections. These connections problematise the boundaries of the region we call the subcontinent by disrupting the view of a 'backwater' waiting to be opened to urban commerce by an interlude of British rule (p. 9); they also reveal a dazzling palimpsest of European and wider influences on the city, from Chinese, Armenian, to Belgian and Swiss, stretching from AD 630 through to the 1881 British Census which recorded Lahore having the highest percentage of "strangers" in All-India (p. 21). The core of the book lies in the challenge these encounters pose to the imperial encounter with Lahore's inner heart, its walled city, which stood as an Orientalist metaphor for enclosure and isolation—and for a restrictive view of a city which would putatively become "more English than Bombay" (p. 15). The opening chapters unfix this gaze—perpetuated in colonial and postcolonial writings and by Indian imitators including Syed Abdul Latif-— through the extensive documentation of the shifting tides and movements of urban settlement, building and expansion. Here the erection of Civil Lines, Charing Cross Mall, Lawrence Garden and Cantonment stratified a new colonial geography of class and hierarchy outside the walls, with the city's Indian elite occupying the new suburban bungalow area of Civil Lines (p. 23) and Pashtun labourers squatting in a city now zoned not only physically but also in historical-political time—one which favourably served British efforts to establish stability in colonial India's "sword arm" and "bread basket" (p. 37).