A City in Time Urban Imaginaries in Colonial-era Historiography of Lahore

Abstract

Syad Muhammad Latif’s Lahore: Its History, Architectural Remains and Antiquities, with an Account of its Modern Institutions, Inhabitants, their Trade, Customs, &c. published in 1892, provides extensive documentation of Lahore’s history, buildings, culture, and the lifestyles of its residents. In this essay, I undertake an analysis of Latif’s Lahore to understand how he constructs Lahore as a modern city through its historical narrative, imagining the city to be a temporal entity rather than a spatial one. Though he describes the spatial features of the city like its buildings and monuments, he remains more concerned with the city’s place in the scheme of time, from its ‘ancient’ period to its arrival at ‘modernity’—a movement enabled through the narrative logic of colonial historiography. The paper contrasts Latif’s work to that of his contemporary Noor Ahmad Chishti to understand what alternative temporalities could look like in the historical imagination of Lahore.