Disrupted City: Walking the Pathways of Memory and History in Lahore

by Manan Ahmed Asif

Overview

A stunning history of Pakistan’s cultural and intellectual capital, from one of the preeminent scholars of South Asia

The city of Lahore was more than one thousand years old when it went through a violent schism. As the South Asian subcontinent was partitioned in 1947 to gain freedom from Britain’s colonial hold, and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan was formed, the city’s large Hindu and Sikh populations were pushed toward India, and an even larger Muslim refugee population settled in the city. This was just the latest in a long history of the city’s making and unmaking.

Over the centuries, the city has kept a firm grip on the imagination of travelers, poets, writers, and artists. More recently, it has been journalists who have been drawn to the city as a focal point for a nation that continues to grab international headlines. For this book, acclaimed historian Manan Ahmed Asif brings to life a diverse and vibrant world by walking the city again and again over the course of many years. Along the way he joins Sufi study circles and architects doing restoration in the medieval parts of Lahore and speaks with a broad range of storytellers and historians. To this Asif juxtaposes deep analysis of the city’s centuries-old literary culture, noting how it reverberates among the people of Lahore today.

To understand modern Pakistan requires understanding its cultural capital, and Disrupted City uses Lahore’s cosmopolitan past and its fractured present to provide a critical lens to challenge the grand narratives of the Pakistani nation-state and its national project of writing history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781595589071
Publisher:	New Press, The
Publication date:	10/22/2024
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.96(d)

About the Author

Manan Ahmed Asif is associate professor of history at Columbia University. He is the author of A Book of Conquest, The Loss of Hindustan, and Disrupted City (The New Press), and founder of the Chapati Mystery blog. He lives in New York.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Disrupted City:

"[An] engaging book . . . evoking a rich cast of characters who have called Lahore home for more than a millennium."
—The New Yorker

"A poignant history and personal memoir of a constantly evolving city."
—Kirkus Reviews

"In this marvelous blend of scholarship and personal memoir, Manan Ahmed Asif paints a vivid portrait of a thousand-year-old city. This beautifully written book is an apt tribute to a great literary metropolis."
—Amitav Ghosh, author of Smoke and Ashes and Sea of Poppies

"Lahore is a city of many selves, and Manan Ahmed Asif guides readers among them with unique insight and erudition. He parses Lahore’s layered literary and cultural history in rich, evocative (yet determinedly un-nostalgic) terms, while keeping squarely in view the pressures of imperial and state power, dislocation, and erasure. Lyrical and formally innovative, Disrupted City expands the possibilities of what an urban history can be."
—Maya Jasanoff, Coolidge Professor of History at Harvard Universityand author of The Dawn Watch

 

"A learned and lyrical elegy—or shahr ashob—for the great city of Lahore: a book that is both nostalgic and scholarly, nuanced and cosmopolitan yet deeply rooted, sharpened by a sense of belonging, and at once weighed down and informed by the anchor of memory and attachment. This is a unique and sophisticated work, the Ravi viewed through the rearview mirror of the Hudson, written by one of the most outstanding historian-flaneurs of our time."
—William Dalrymple, author of White Mughals and The Anarchy

 

From the Publisher

2024-09-14
A historian walks through Lahore, touching on its long and difficult history as a center of Muslim life and rupture.

“Lahore became a city of refugees and migrants in 1947,” writes Asif, “and it has never stopped being that.” A Columbia University historian, Asif offers a bittersweet reflection on his native city—“its history, the role of memory and violence, and the vexed question of nationalism and state control.” He is especially attuned to texts about the city that were written in Sanskrit and Persian, such as the shahr ashob—the poetic form from the ninth or 10th century that means “city disrupted.” He dwells on the Hindustani influence when Lahore was a “vibrant, polysacral” place; the population exploded under the British, and its new institutions and neighborhoods grew largely segregated. Partition violently sundered the golden age of the city in 1947, largely emptied of Hindus and Sikhs and refilled by Muslim “refugees” from other parts of India, such as the author’s own family. The city had to reinvent itself within the new nation-state of Pakistan. Asif also writes of the environmental degradation of Lahore, once a city of gardens like Shalimar, now imperiled by floods from the Ravi River, air pollution, and heat. He wanders areas of Lahore that have been familiar to him since his youth, all the while musing on the city’s vast changes.

A poignant history and personal memoir of a constantly evolving city.

Kirkus Reviews