Making Lahore Modern: Constructing and Imagining a Colonial City
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00 Front.qxd 14/08/2007 12:14 PM Page i MAKING LAHORE MODERN 00 Front.qxd 14/08/2007 12:14 PM Page ii 00 Front.qxd 14/08/2007 12:14 PM Page iii MAKING LAHORE MODERN Constructing and Imagining a Colonial City William J. Glover University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis London 00 Front.qxd 14/08/2007 12:14 PM Page iv Portions of the introduction, chapter , and chapter are reprinted in revised form from “Objects, Models, and Exemplary Works: Educating Sentiment in Colonial Punjab,” Journal of Asian Studies ,no. (August ): –; reprinted with permission from the Association of Asian Studies. Chapter is reprinted in revised and expanded form from “‘An Absence of Old England’: The Anxious English Bungalow,” HomeCultures ,no. (): –; copyright William J. Glover; reprinted with permission of Berg Publishers. Maps, photographs, and drawings not otherwise credited were created by the author. Copyright by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Published by the University of Minnesota Press Third Avenue South, Suite Minneapolis, MN - http://www.upress.umn.edu Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. 00 Front.qxd 14/08/2007 12:14 PM Page v CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii Introduction xi 1 An Urban Palimpsest The Precolonial Development of Lahore 1 2 A Colonial Spatial Imagination British Knowledge of the City and Its Environs 27 3 Collaborations Building an Elite Landscape in Lahore’s Civil Station 59 4 Changing Houses Rethinking and Rebuilding Townhouses and Neighborhoods 99 5 Anxieties at Home The Disquieting British Bungalow 159 6 Thinking with the City Urban Writing in Colonial Lahore 185 Notes 203 Bibliography 233 Index 255 00 Front.qxd 14/08/2007 12:14 PM Page vi 00 Front.qxd 14/08/2007 12:14 PM Page vii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS It is a pleasure to express my gratitude to the many people and insti- tutions who helped bring this book to fruition. Research would have been impossible without generous financial support from the University of California, the American Institute of Pakistan Studies, the Social Sci- ence Research Council, the University of Michigan Rackham Faculty Grant Program, and the Department of Architecture at the University of Michigan. I rewrote most of this book while I was a faculty fellow at the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities, whose staff utterly spoiled me and my colleagues. All of us who had the fortune to be at the institute that year are indebted to Daniel Herwitz, its director, for establishing an intellectual environment with true interdisciplinary vitality. I thank Salima Hashmi, former principal of the National Col- lege of Arts in Pakistan, who provided me with professional affiliation and the opportunity to teach a course while I was conducting disserta- tion research on this project in Lahore. Thanks are due also to the staffs of the Punjab Provincial Archives in Lahore and the Oriental and India Office Collection in London, who were always helpful. I owe a special thanks to Muhammad Abbas Chughtai of the Punjab Provincial Sec- retariat in Lahore for his assistance in negotiating the records housed at that institute. I would also like to thank the staff and directors of the Dyal Singh Trust Library and the Punjab Public Library in Lahore, the Dwarka Das Library in Chandigarh, the Municipal Corporation of Lahore, the Board of Revenue offices in Lahore, and the District Com- missioner’s Office in Lahore for their assistance. Work on this project began while I was a student at the Univer- sity of California–Berkeley, where I was fortunate to have wonderful teachers and mentors. Dell Upton has influenced me most. Through his scholarly example, intellectual curiosity, and rigorous but construc- tive criticism, Dell has pushed me to ask harder questions, to recognize unsatisfying answers, and to remain both circumspect and happy in vii 00 Front.qxd 14/08/2007 12:14 PM Page viii viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS those rare moments when understanding begins to unfold. Thomas R. Metcalf helped me in numerous ways on this project, not least by opening so many important questions and insights into the colonial history of India in his own masterful work. On a more personal level, Tom has been extraordinarily generous with both encouragement and criticism at every stage of this project; I have benefited from his lucid and affectionate engagement with my work in more ways than I can adequately thank him for. In addition to asking me the hardest questions of anyone, Barbara D. Metcalf gave me perhaps the greatest gift a teacher can give to a student: She believed in me and expected me to believe in myself. Her cre- ativity and openness to a project whose questions and approach were not her own made Barbara an extremely valuable interlocutor throughout. The late Allan Pred lived a com- mitment to creative and critically effective scholarship that inspired warmth and profound respect from all of us who were fortunate enough to come into close contact with him. I thank Allan, wherever he may be smiling down on us all, for giving me the initial encour- agement to pursue this project in a way I could make my own and for modeling an ethics of attentiveness toward his students that I hope I can pass on to my own students in some small measure. Donald Moore has been a rigorous intellectual interlocutor and a valued personal friend; I thank him for so often setting aside his own struggles in life to help me bring clarity to my own. My friends and fellow travelers at Berkeley are now spread far and wide, but I still think of us as a community. My life would not have been the same without the warmth, friendship, and intellectual sustenance I found in the company of Arijit Sen, Sharad Chari, Steve Thorne, Anand Pandian, Kavita Datla, and Emily Merideth. Among those I will always consider my teachers are two people whom I would espe- cially like to thank. Gurinder Singh Mann literally walked me through the Punjab, helped me understand what was there, and shared his wisdom on less tangible things in ways that have shaped my life for the better. David Gilmartin provided valuable commentary during several stages of this project; I have not always been able to make good on his comments, but they helped me in a multitude of ways. Both David and Gurinder are living proof, for me, that genius, humor, and human kindness can all be found in the academy—and some- times all in one person. Friends and colleagues in Ann Arbor have challenged, inspired, and sustained me. I especially want to thank Arun Agarwal, Sunil Agnani, Kathryn Babayan, Tom Buresh, Scott Campbell, Kathleen Canning, James Chaffers, Caroline Constant, Nondita Correa, Geoff Eley, Rich Freeman, Danelle Guthrie, Rebecca Hardin, Rima Hassouneh, George Hoffman, Nancy Hunt, Webb Keane, Douglas Kelbaugh, Lisa Klopfer, Jayati Lal, Rama Mantena, Rahul Mehrotra, Christie Merill, Barbara Metcalf, Jonathan Metzl, Gina Morantz-Sanchez, Nadine Naber, Sumathi Ramaswamy, Hubert Rast, David Scobey, Parna Sengupta, Carla Sinopoli, Lydia Soo, Miriam Tiktin, and Jason Young for their friendship, support, and enabling in- sights. I thank Adela Pinch, Kali Israel, and Andrea Zemgulys for inviting me to present work in progress at the Nineteenth-Century Forum. I especially thank both Thomas Traut- man and Robert Fishman for generously reading portions of the manuscript in an early draft and providing constructive criticism. Finally, I am grateful to Pirasri Povatong, Itohan 00 Front.qxd 14/08/2007 12:14 PM Page ix ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix Osayimwese, Omar Bagdadi, Sanjeev Vidyarthi, and Marty Baker for sharing the inspira- tion and discoveries of their own emerging research projects and for placing their confi- dence in me. Friends in India and Pakistan extended their hospitality and intellectual generosity in measures too full to ever repay. Two remarkable gentlemen in particular, Najm Hosain Syed and Nadir Ali, sat with me for many long sessions and helped me make sense of Lahore’s past. Members of Punjabi Sangat in Lahore introduced me to the wonders of Shah Husain’s poetry, suffered through my readings in Punjabi, and graciously provided me with good company on numerous Wednesday evenings. Samina Choonara, Saida Fazal, Lala Rukh, Rabia Nadir, Shahid Mirza, Beatte Terfloth, Ayesha Nadir, Risham Syed, Sara Ahmed, Khizar Ahmed, and Sheik Abdul Waheed and his family all made me feel at home in Lahore; Khalid Mahmood, Naila Mahmood, Iftikhar Dadi, Elizabeth Dadi, and Khalid Nadvi did the same for me in Karachi. Amita Baviskar showed me around Delhi with great patience and humor, and a year or so later (on a snowy evening in Charlottesville, Virginia) she helped me understand a basic argument in this book in an entirely new way. Pieter Martin at the University of Minnesota Press has been an ideal editor. The con- fidence he placed in this book right from the start made completing it that much easier. Anthony D. King read a draft of the entire manuscript and gave me precise and detailed comments that helped improve the book. Swati Chattopadhyay, from whose own schol- arship I have learned tremendously, did the same thing. Whether standing next to her kitchen stove or coming to the end of her list of critical comments, I have benefited more than once from Swati’s formidable talents. Diana Downing provided valuable assistance preparing the manuscript at a penultimate stage, and Kathy Delfosse did a superb job of final editing.