Making Lahore Modern: Constructing and Imagining a Colonial City

by William J. Glover

Fifty years after the British annexed the Punjab and made Lahore its provincial capital, the city—once a prosperous Mughal center that had long since fallen into ruin—was transformed. British and Indian officials had designed a modern, architecturally distinct city center adjacent to the old walled city, administered under new methods of urban governance. In Making Lahore Modern, William J. Glover investigates the traditions that shaped colonial Lahore. In particular, he focuses on the conviction that both British and Indian actors who implemented urbanization came to that the material fabric of the city could lead to social and moral improvement. This belief in the power of the physical environment to shape individual and collective sentiments, he argues, links the colonial history of Lahore to nineteenth-century urbanization around the world. Glover highlights three aspects of Lahore’s history that show this process unfolding. First, he examines the concepts through which the British understood the Indian city and envisioned its transformation. Second, through a detailed study of new buildings and the adaptation of existing structures, he explores the role of planning, design, and reuse. Finally, he analyzes the changes in urban imagination as evidenced in Indian writings on the city in this period. Throughout, Glover emphasizes that colonial urbanism was not simply imposed; it was a collaborative project between Indian citizens and the British. Offering an in-depth study of a single provincial city, Glover reveals that urban change in colonial India was not a monolithic process and establishes Lahore as a key site for understanding the genealogy of modern global urbanism. William J. Glover is associate professor of architecture at the University of Michigan.

Genres: History, Pakistan, Cities, India, Asia

280 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[Angbeen · Rating 4 out of 5]

really really interesting mix of history, anthropology, and architecture. loved reading this, even if it was a bit hard to digest in parts. 100% recommend to anyone who is interested in both colonial history and urban geography.

[UrbanPlanner_Shafaat · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lahore, once a thriving city, was noted by several British visitors- in their itinerary of second quarter of nineteenth century visits to the city-as a melancholy of a glorious past. Yet the city was again back to becoming a metropolis at the turn of the twentieth century during the colonial period. This book studies the social and material making of the city in British Rule. In doing so, the city is investigated about its process to become modern. The term ‘Modern’ is simultaneously empirical and imaginative. A city is modern empirically owing to 1. Zoning, 2. Institutionalized Governance, and 3. Capital (money) concentration while the city is modern in imagination due to its open ended future with feelings of, both, danger and promise.
This book studies ‘making Lahore modern’ during the colonial period to investigate what is broadly shared among other cities of similar nature and what is unique to this city. The fundamental premise of the book is that this modernization is not necessarily the westernization but also the impact of other relationships (like the relation of the city to its past). This premise finds its roots in the theoretical discourse on the approach on culture. Among the contesting theories of Social Constructionist and Real, Immiscible Cultural Differences, this books builds on the second. The former supports the claim that any change in culture is an ongoing process and does not require investigation into the events or interventions that could have caused these changes. While the latter tends to investigate the uniqueness of the cultures with aim to meet the challenging task of translating untranslatable cultural practices. In the light of these theories, some scholars writing about the colonial cities took the approach of attributing each intervention as imposed by British while other scholars wrote this part of history to suggest that the real results were indeed a hybrid product of two dissimilar traditions. This book adopts the second approach.
This leads to two important corollaries. First, that material world affects the morality (social norms) as evident from the pedagogy approach of objects/models learning. Second, that if the first corollary has been understood, then the material world can be changed to change a social norm. Building on this argument the book establishes that the British envisaged to build on the social practices of those they rules through significant interventions in the material world.

[Junnade · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an excellent text on the history of Lahore and the manner in which it was confronted by Britain's imperial modernisation project.

If you enjoyed this, I would recommend Jyoti Hosagrahar's book on the same topic (but with an excursus into Delhi), Indigenous Modernities. Hosagrahar's work clearly delineates the modernity purported by British colonialism in South Asia, and is referred to early on in Glover's book.

[Nate Rabe · Rating 4 out of 5]

I lived in Lahore for a few years and am writing a book on the movie industry of the city so I was eager to get this book. While it is top notch scholarly stuff I found it a bit too esoteric and academic for my purposes. Still lots of good information on how the colonial city of Lahore was conceived and how the British used the idea of 'hygiene' to reinforce their imperial worldview and agenda.