Our Depleted Sense Of Heritage

In the madness of meeting timelines, project goals and catching up with loads of office work ,one tends to forget the value of ‘strategic time out’ even if it is for a few days.It is like a relentlessly spinning concrete mixer which disfigures, obliterates and converts into grey puree anything which is poured into it. I too took leave of this mechanical equalizer and was in Lahore the other day to attend a wedding along with my family.A hidden motive also was to take my grandson to historic monuments and let him have a first hand feel of the grandeur of our past, particularly that of the splendid Mughal rule followed by the Sikh Empire of Punjab.Though colonial but British left behind certain very graceful structures like the Government College Lahore, Museum, High Court, GPO, Aitchison College and the Governor House.There also were men and women from the masses who bequeathed to Lahore great works of public welfare like Sir Ganga Ram Hospital , Lady Wellington Hospital and more.

Then there was the other and very humane side of our golden past, of which Data Ganj Bakhsh is the brightest star followed by great saints like Mian Mir, Shah Jamal and many more whose tombs dot Lahore’s urban landscape like pulsating nodes of interminable pilgrimage activity.These sages sowed the lasting seeds of harmony, peace and tranquility in a society badly bruised by wars and large scale plunder. The Lahore that we live in today would have been woefully sadder and much less glamorous but for these powerhouses of serenity.
In fact I had a feeling that the young lad knew lot more about video games, computers, iPod, XBox and PS4. That one thought was fair but he needed to know something more important, which I thought was an introduction to our proud heritage.My aim was to link and plant him into our soil so that from that firm anchor he could go on to conquer any horizons he liked with a unique pride of the one from a great and noble heritage.

So much for the noble intentions to be one with our great past, but the real ordeal started once we began our sentiments pilgrimage.Lahore, as you would know, is an unmitigated traffic mess and what was left had been consumed by mushrooming metro and Orange train dragon tracks which have embellished and mutilated the face of Lahore at the same time. Their prestige value and passenger convenience is undoubted but the city’s historic ambience, memories and affiliations of thousands upon thousands of natives and visitors’ hearts they destroyed in the process is unfathomable. Even that atrocity is acceptable for the sake of progress and modernization but all this must be done sensibly and with sensitivity, that refined feeling is conspicuously and in some cases irreversibly missing in this case.

We started off from the Cantonment and soon decided to follow Google navigation and rightly so.The horror we navigated was a sea of traffic, rubble, sweating swearing humanity and utter mismanagement almost every inch of the way the moment we crossed the Cantonment limits.But for Google’s kind guide we could not have made it to Lahore Fort through that impassible mass of men and vehicles. Google took us to the wrong gate and we decided to switch it off. That inappropriate surge of disgust cost us dearly.We literally got lost in the hopeless maze of fly overs zig zagging over each other going everywhere but the Fort. We dipped and rose as we drove, and on every rise of the fly over glided past the Fort helplessly till re-enveloped by the yawning passage below. Helter skelter we finally made it to the parking.That is where one realized that during the entire running battle on road right upto the Fort gate there was not a single road sign indicating which way to turn for the Fort, Pakistan Monument, Shahi Mosque or Ranjit Singh’s Tomb. It is strange but not quite. Why? we will come to that later.

The squalid environment and battered optics starting right from the approach through the entire visit of the four neighbouring national heritage monuments was a one single horrible frame of official disinterest, distressing unconcern of a disrespectful illiterate and disgusting neglect placed side by side with petty commercialism.

Fort and its fellow monuments are simply disintegrating due to lack of repairs, neglect and disuse.Shish Mahal has turned into a pathetic, disfigured ruin, smeared and scraped indiscriminately and chipping all over the place.Its walls smudged by names scratched over them of those who can never hope to make it into history. There are strange shabby looking characters swarming these imposing royal compounds posing as guides, watchmen and what not. One even noted a pair of donkeys leisurely munching their fodder under a crumbling arch opposite the Shish Mahal. Inside the Diwan e Khas they had posted two sentries just below the emperor’s terrace poorly dressed as ancient guards who had no interest in acting their role except beg money from the tourists. Shahi Mosque is no better. Its floor is pitted, under the dome walls are filthy and carpets are dirty. Chambers of the Holy Prophet’s relics are more like dark dungeons most unbecoming of their supreme dignity. The mosque is in a state of criminal disrepair like the Fort, Ranjit’s Tomb and the Pakistan Monument. Every where there is evidence of apathy, weariness, and pitiable wastage. To add insult injury there are mounds of garbage around the place. Decorum of these priceless jewels of our heritage is the foremost casualty.

People still visit these places in their thousands and go back saddened by their dilapidated condition. The monuments are ancient but the real cause of their horrible decay lies elsewhere. It is those who are ruling Punjab since last thirty years who should have been the custodians of our heritage. The difficulty is that these mechanical minded alien men do not belong to Lahore, therefore have no emotional attachment with its past or present.Their heart and origins lie in a nondescript village of East Punjab and of no consequence ever in history. Why would one expect any sense of history or its invaluable heritage from these Bohemians raiders? They were perhaps pounding horse shoes for the invader’s mounts out of molten iron when battle was raging below the walls of Lahore Fort under siege. History is prestigious and is made by men of consequence, not camp followers.

They are merely interested in iron, cement ,concrete and hyperbole with which they have piled the entire city. How many universities, libraries, museums, art galleries, theatres and stadiums have they built? Those who have no sense of their heritage can have no perception of future nor will they make history. No question of taste, grace and self esteem either. Meanwhile the imposing concrete structures snaking all over the metropolis would continue to obstruct open skies with their crude underbellies staring down at us.