LAHORE: Two sessions on the Faiz Festival’s concluding day on Sunday, dedicated to discussion on the heritage and values of Lahore and Punjab veered into nostalgia, with panellists lamenting the loss of traditional values and the changing ambience, feel, and history of the city, as well as of east and west Punjab.

People concerned with the well-being of Lahore turned up at the session on “A city besieged and its artistic, architectural, and literary toll,” with Dr Arfa Syeda Zehra, Kamran Lashari and Zulfiqar Ali Zulfi as panellists and Amina Ali as moderator.

The inaugural comments were delivered by Mr Zulfi, an artist and the executive director of the Lahore Arts Council. He walked the audience through the streets of the walled city, cautioning them that his depiction was from a period when the city was less populous, smellier in the mornings, and filled with a spicy aroma in the afternoons and nights.

Dr Arfa, an educationist and poet, observed that while the waste making the mornings of the walled city streets uncomfortable was the failure of the government, local women worked hard to make the evenings pleasant with the aroma of Desi food.

Mr Zulfi then went on to describe the wrestling rings, deras of local dons, music, culture, sounds, and artist families—all parts of the walled city.

“The evening meetings of locals along the roads would round up the whole national and international affairs, making Naya Pakistan and demolishing old Pakistan with witty, unwitting arguments,” he said, adding that the gradual migration of the residents had given space to Afghan traders in the walled city.

He said the walled city required a major overhaul, for which more than a dozen of Kamran Lasharis were needed.

Dr Arfa added her wit to Mr Zulfi’s remarks that wrestlers’ rings had been replaced with TV talk shows where politicians tried to pin each other. She said Lahore traditionally had 13 gates, but she had discovered the 14th one; Lahore’s openness, love and carefree mood. But contemporary Lahore could only bask in its past glory; having a rich history and culture was not an ordinary feat. She said values could be revived through empathy and dialogue.

Lahore Walled City Authority Director General Kamran Lashari put aside the bureaucrat in him and turned the session into a laughter class when he described the conduct of local Lahoris. He narrated several anecdotes when his childhood buddies would gatecrash his office, with little complaints or for favours.

He said Lahore could be seen from thousands of angles, as its openness, politeness, and warmth were matchless. He said the walled city’s heritage revival did not end the task, rather it opened new challenges. He said he preserved that heritage so that it would be accessible to the visitors. He regretted that Pakistan had become an ‘NOC-infested’ state, where every new idea required bureaucratic permissions.

PUNJAB AT 75: The session titled “Punjab @ 75” was equally jam-packed where Munish Singh, Bobby Sachdeva, Asma Hamid Awan and Mazhar Abbas dissected the historical values of Punjab.

The moderator, Indian writer and poet Arvinder Chamak, consumed a lot of time narrating his anecdotes. He said undivided Punjab was part of the old civilisation, but then the Partition occurred. The border divide, however, failed to divide the sentiment and love on either side of Punjab.

He said the digital world opened up a way of making the borders meaningless. He said whenever he encountered the people who were born before the Partition, they never talked about violence, rather they talked about the streets, farms, and Havelis where they were born, but now they were on the other side of the border.

Dr Asma Awan, head of the political science department at the Kinnaird College for Women University, stressed the need to rewrite history to cleanse it of hatred and distortion.

She said just like farmers weed out unwanted plants from their crops, history required to undergo such practice as well so that pure history could be passed on to the new generations. She said the textbook history on either side of the border had its versions of heroes, whereas Dulla Bhatti and Bhagat Singh were the real heroes. History was mostly written by men and the ruling class, which were mostly inclined to war-like fantasies, she added.

“Let women try their hands as historians, and they will write love rhymes, instead of war songs, in history,” she said.

Indian author and film producer Boby Sachdeva stressed the need to promote talk on love and peace and thanked Lahore for showering love on them.

Dr Mazhar Abbas from the Government College University Faisalabad said the history books did not talk much of the pre-Partition era Punjab Kissan Tehrik. He said the colonial rulers called this region a modern Punjab, which was a derogatory term. He said Punjab had never been backward, while the British rule plagued Punjab with sectarian and ethnic strife, which was never a part of it.

Another guest from Indian Punjab, Munish Singh, said violence was deliberately taught in school. He said hatred was manufactured in the mind of the people.

The session was a conscious effort to put the history on the right track.

Published in Dawn, February 20th, 2023