‘Disrupted City’: Reading a Lahore of the imagination, flesh and blood, a city exiled from itself

Lahore, Manan Ahmed Asif tells us in Disrupted City, his magnificent account of the city, has always been kind to him. In this book, he repays that debt through an achingly beautiful rendition, at once celebratory and wistful, of the many lives of Lahore. Asif’s Lahore is conjured from walking the city for countless hours and from reading a staggering number of literary, historical, administrative, and theological texts, in English, Arabic, Persian, Punjabi, and Urdu, in which the city finds mention, whether as protagonist or spectral presence. The city of ten or 11 million people has “no official archive” nor a museum that preserves a record of its long history. Lahore is also “a city in exile from itself”, in which a monocultural identity forced on it by the Pakistani nation-state sits agonistically with its richly diverse, multi-layered and palimpsested reality.

It is into this vast, ungraspable world, which he left more than 30 years ago, that Asif immerses himself. In a tour de force that combines history, memoir, and literary rumination, he explores how Lahore has been made and remade through violence, migration, politics, its diverse communities, and the ebbs and flows of time. Asif writes with a gorgeous immediacy, inviting the reader...

Read more