Photo of the Day: Paintings from Shalimar Gardens

Malik Omaid

From my recent visit to Shalimar Gardens I saw these paintings on doors on the rooms at the entrance of the garden. These paintings of Mughal period are still safe from visitors who write their names with phone numbers and many who literally destroy frescoes. I think these should be preserved in a manner that these are still in their place but safer from vigilantism of people.

Photo of the Day: The Shalimar

Photos by @ghalibwaseemimagery & @areeshzubair on Instagram.

Lahore: Blossoms, bricks, bravura

Salma Mahmud recalls the beauty of Lahore’s past (The Friday Times)

	Maharaja Sher Singh after a royal bath
	Raja Dina Nath was granted the title of Diwan by Ranjeet Singh in 1826
	Ranjit Singh holding a darbar
	A malang dancing at Shah Hussain’s mazaar
	The demolished Shivala used to be a gathering place for Kashmiri pundits
	” align=”justify”>Some felt that Raja Dina Nath’s falseness was the means to his success, for he never hesitated in deserting a losing party or a falling friend. There were others who testified to his generosity towards faqirs and orphans
	If one is to be unbiased, then one must admit that The Lion of the Punjab was a great lover of natural scenery and greenery. He passed an order that not a single spot of barren land should be visible along the five miles between Delhi Gate and Shalimar. The GT Road was thus lined on both sides by eager courtiers and noblemen vying with one another to plant trees, gardens, parks and green fields … Lahore was in truth turned into a city of gardens

FFor those who love Lahore there is a mystical connection between themselves and the city. Regardless of its current ravaged and bereft condition, it continues to tug at the heartstrings with its lure and lustre.

And as you drive along the old Shalimar Road, the mist is thick, grey, smoky. You can almost eat it. This ancient road is withdrawn, remote, secretive, compressed within itself, surrounded by its dreary new townships.

Yet it is still full of magic, the magic of things half-seen in a dream, the magic of the barely visible or the partly remembered, which is the very stuff of dreams. Wily Raja Dina Nath’s legendary garden exists in this dream to the east of the old road, laden with fragrant blossoms, fruit trees, fountains, pleasure domes and pavilions. And the ruins of Shah Bilawal’s Baradari lie crumbling along the way, where Ranjit Singh’s heir Maharaja Sher Singh and his seven year old son and his retainers were brutally murdered by the Sandhanwalia conspirators. Surely all that blood must still exist somewhere under the earth? And perhaps it will cry out one day against the Qabza group’s encroachments on the Sher Singh family samadhs. Latrines have been constructed through the retaining wall, into the mound atop which stand the sacred chatthris. What further desecration could be possible? Recall the exquisite painting of the young Sher Singh after his bath, sitting with his curling hair spread out over his shoulders, and recoil from the current morass.

‘Nadiyon paar Ranjhan da thaana,

Mintaan karaan malah dey naal

A turning to the left off the Grand Trunk Road takes you to the tomb of Shah Hussain, the 16th century Sufi saint, whose festival of lights Lahoris celebrated at the end of March. The entrance is marked with a gateway of brick composed of a multi-foil of several leaf-shaped curves, and a simple cusped projecting archway through which a few steps lead you into an elevated court. The enclosure of the tomb is large, with a small graveyard located on the east side. Somewhere here lies Ustad Daman, one of Lahore’s beloved icons, who spent the last years of his life in Shah Hussain’s Hujra, situated below a mosque near Heera Mandi.

A well adds ambience to the area, and large old trees provide shade and tranquility. Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s beautiful Muslim wife Moran, a former Amritsar courtesan, whom he affectionately called Moran Sarkar, built a small mosque in the environs of the tomb as a token of reverence for the saint. Unfortunately this entire structure has been demolished and rebuilt.

Ranjit Singh, apart from giving lavish donations to the shrines of Hazrat Mian Mir and Baba Farid, was a great devotee of Shah Hussain, and a sincere believer in his powers of performing miracles. Two of these are worthy of mention, the first being his reputed ability to change wine into milk and then back again into wine. He is alleged to have performed this miracle at the court of the Great Mughal, Akbar Badshah.

The second miracle was his supposed power to transport human beings from one place to another. He is said to have achieved this for his beloved disciple Madho, who expressed a wish to be with his parents at Haridwar, where they were performing their pilgrimage. His parents saw Madho bathing in the holy waters of the Ganga, which was considered adequate proof of Shah Hussain’s supernatural powers in this regard.

Maharaja Ranjeet Singh’s intensely controversial figure still permeates the area between the Fort and Shalimar. He used to celebrate both Basant and Mela Chiraghan with great enthusiasm at Shah Hussain’s mazar as well as at Shahjehan’s romantic garden. On Basant all his courtiers were ordered to wear yellow clothes, and much of the food served during the festivities was yellow in colour. His cavalry stood at attention on the route from Delhi Darwaza to Chah Miran, as he wended his way along the GT Road, with Moran riding beside him on an elephant. Dancing and singing and carousing were the order of the day on both occasions.

His forty year rule was a strictly secular one, and two of his most trusted advisors were the celebrated Faqir brothers, Nuruddin the Hakim who cured him of a severe eye infection, and Azizuddin his Foreign Minister. Of the latter’s tact and diplomacy there can be no greater proof than the celebrated anecdote when the Governor General of India, Lord Aukland, asked him which of the Maharaja’s eyes was the blind one. His reply was, ‘The Maharaja is like the sun, and the sun has only one eye. The splendour and luminosity of his single eye is so much that I have never dared to look at his other eye.’ The Governor General was so impressed by Faqir Azizuddin’s reply that he presented him with his gold wrist watch. (Incidentally, the left eye was the blind one.)

Of Ranjeet Singh’s Hindu advisors, the most intriguing is surely Diwan/Raja Dina Nath, of the large deep-set eyes and neatly clipped white beard, referred to as the Talleyrand of the Punjab. Dina Nath was a Kashmiri Brahmin who came to Lahore in 1815 and soon rose to prominence at the court due to his diligence and brilliance. In 1826 Ranjeet Singh gave him the title of Diwan and granted him many jagirs.

Revolutions in which his friends and patrons perished passed him by, and in the midst of bloodshed and assassination his life was never endangered. Some felt that his falseness was the means to his success, for he never hesitated in deserting a losing party or a falling friend. He maintained his position during the years of anarchy following Ranjeet Singh’s death, and in fact his prestige and power continued to rise. This clearly depicts the strength of his extraordinary talent and tact. Eventually the British made him Raja of Kalanaur in the Jullundhar area.

On the plus side he has been described as physically brave and morally courageous when the occasion demanded it, and thereby he was one of the most successful courtiers of the Lahore Durbar. Nur Ahmed Chishti in his ‘Tehqiqaat-e-Chishti’, praises his boundless generosity towards faqirs and orphans. Chishti’s father Ahmed Bukht Yakdil was tutor to Dina Nath’s family, so this information comes from the horse’s mouth so to speak.

The two elegant havelis that he built near the Wazir Khan Mosque still survive, with several families living in each one. However, the beautiful Shivala or temple complex that he constructed in 1835 near the junction of Vachchuwali and Mohalla Sareen was demolished in 2006 by the Pakistan Evacuee Trust Property Board, in order to make way for a commercial building. This Shivala was a gathering place for Kashmiri Pundits, all of whom worship Lord Shiva, and their celebrations at Shivratri used to be exceptionally grand. It was two storeys in height, containing a large central courtyard, in which stood a five foot high Makrana marble statue of Shiva in the celebrated Nathraj pose, placed on a large pedestal. The Shivala was constructed of red sandstone, with the main door being of engraved Burma teak. The inner walls

The Deceptive Web of Tunnels

By Salman Rashid

Who hasn’t heard of the tunnel that connects Lahore Fort with say, the Shalamar Gardens in Baghbanpura and the other garden by the Dal Lake in Srinagar? Or the tunnel that leads from under the fort in Lahore all the way to the Red Fort in Delhi and to several other places all over the world.

We all know of them. My earliest memory of being told of these incredible super-secret subterranean passageways goes back nearly a half century. I must have been five or six when I and my siblings with several other cousins and relatives took what in my memory is the first grand tour of Lahore. One warmish Sunday we took them all in: fort, mosque and Shalamar. The evening was wrapped up with a mad adventure of getting lost somewhere on the banks of the Ravi — which was then a beautiful river, not a sewer like today.

Moorcroft, Shalimar Gardens and the Great Game

A forgotten page from history —Salman Rashid

The thought that Moorcroft was to die broken and bitterly disappointed brings a pang of grief. The mitigating factor however is that it did not take his country long to realise the worth of the man. Today he is acknowledged, and rightly so, as the forebear of Himalayan exploration and discovery, and one of the earliest heroes of the Great Game

In the northeast corner of the first quadrangle of the Shalimar Garden in Lahore, right next to the fountains, there is an unpretentious yellow-washed rectangular room on a high plinth. Entrance to the ground floor is through a door in the east wall, while in the west is a door and staircase leading down to the basement. The remaining arched alcoves all around are closed by masonry filigree.

The west wall bears a plaque commemorating the sojourn in this room of the ‘famous traveller William Moorcroft’ in May 1820. Despite the hundreds of visitors daily, few would have noticed this plaque; even fewer would have known who this person was. But for those who have any interest in the history of the Great Game, that epic struggle between Russia and England for the possession of Central Asia, Moorcroft’s name shines bright.

Lahore: Conservation and Religion

Conservation and religion
By Ahmad Rafay Alam
(The News)

Just a few months ago, in the shadow of the archaeology department’s devolution to the provincial government, a minaret in the Lahore Fort collapsed, revealing to all just how effective official conservation measures are. A decade ago, citizens of Lahore stood flabbergasted as construction workers felled hundred-year-old trees to bring the shoulder of the G T Road within inches of the entrance of Shalimar Gardens. In the intervening years, the only notable bit of urban conservation was the restoration of the Tolington Market, where, as an illustration of the quality of restoration work, only a few weeks ago, anxious NCA students exhibiting their thesis feared exposure and dripping rain would ruin their work. The PHA’s “new” billboard policy – ostensibly for the beauty of the city – can only find 12 sites of historical importance worth protecting from the ugliness of its advertising hoardings. This in a historically and culturally rich city over a millennium old.

It isn’t just Mughal Lahore that needs to be, and isn’t, properly conserved. Colonial Lahore is also fast fading from view. Behind the mosque next to Fortress Stadium in the Cantonment lies a memorial in honour of the commissioned and non-commissioned officers of the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Sussex Regiment who lost their lives in Lahore just before World War I. The monument is now surrounded by dust and is passed by an un-metalled road. The 19th century buildings that once lined the nearby road, all splendid examples of the architecture of the period, have been brought down to make way for a “General’s Colony” housing scheme. Only one barracks remains, dating back to 1864. The Civil and Military Gazette, where a galaxy of writers and intellectuals interned after Partition, and where Rudyard Kipling – one of Lahore’s two Nobel laureates – cut his teeth, was razed to the ground in the 1960s and turned into a shopping mall, Panorama Centre – Lahore’s first, incidentally.