Though Rudyard Kipling lived only five of his 70 years in Lahore, they were the most crucial years of his development as a writer. This rich confection of a city, whose great Mogul buildings and street life evoke the deep hues and sensuality of a miniature painting, was where the teen-aged Kipling cut his teeth as a newspaperman. Lahore provided the setting for some of Kipling’s greatest stories, as well as the raw material for his somewhat misunderstood view of East and West, Robert D Kaplan of the New York Times writes.
Though now obscured as a tourist destination due to its location 15 miles inside Pakistan, Lahore was the heart of Kipling’s India. Between 1882 and 1887, he worked there as the assistant editor of The Civil and Military Gazette, combing the back alleys of the old, walled city for stories and material for his later fiction. Like the Irish street urchin, Kim, the hero of his greatest novel, Kipling used Lahore as a base to explore the rest of the subcontinent.
Armed with the Penguin edition of ‘’Kim,’’ I set out for the Lahore Museum, where Kipling’s father, John Lockwood Kipling, had been the curator and where the first scene in ‘’Kim’’ takes place. The novel opens with Kim sitting ‘’astride the gun Zam-Zammah on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher – the Wonder House, as the natives call the Lahore Museum.’’ It was while astride the gun that Kim meets a Tibetan lama, whom the boy then escorts into the Wonder House.
The Zam-Zammah (Urdu for lion’s roar) is known in Lahore as Kim’s gun, and, except for the brick platform that has been replaced by marble, the copper and brass cannon looks exactly as Kipling described it; a massive icon of imperialism over 14 feet long, mounted on wooden wheels that are well over six feet in diameter. And the Wonder House opposite is just that; in my opinion one of the world’s great underrated museums.
Pakistan’s oldest and largest museum is a red sandstone masterpiece of Anglo-Indian Gothic with a white marble facade that unlocks a treasure chest of southern Asian artifacts.
I walked into the main vestibule under a high, frescoed ceiling, listened to the hum of the wall fans, and immediately felt at home. This was as I had always imagined the perfect museum to be, with just enough clutter and disorder to create a feeling of intimacy, but not so much as to distract from the individual works of art.
Kim and the lama had gone into the ‘’Wonder House to pray before the gods there.’’ The lama was especially awed by the collection of religious statues from Gandhara, a Buddhist culture that flourished in northwest Pakistan in the first centuries A.D. There are also Hindu and Jain sculptures, Persian, Turkoman and Kurdish rugs, Islamic glazed tiles and calligraphy, Tibetan furniture and votive paintings, and a main gallery filled with Persian and Mogul miniatures. Visually, it is like being glutted with a spicy, multi-course subcontinent meal.
In the novel the ‘’Keeper of the Images’’ – a figure based on Kipling’s own father – inspired the lama in his spiritual journey across India in search of a sacred river. The wealth of this collection speaks volumes about the encyclopedic knowledge of Asian culture that the curator, Lockwood Kipling, must have possessed; knowledge that evidently rubbed off on his son to judge by the lavish descriptions in ‘’Kim.’’
Kim procured food and lodging for himself and the lama in Lahore’s old city. ‘’The hot and crowded bazaars blazed with light as they made their way through the press of all the races in Upper India, and the lama mooned through it like a man in a dream.’’ The crowds are as dense now as they were then (‘’Kim’’ was published in 1901). But unlike bazaars in India itself, there are no beggars and few of the hustlers who make life miserable for tourists in places like Delhi and Agra. Despite the press of humanity, you can have a measure of solitude in Lahore’s old city.
And you can see women too: after visiting so many Middle Eastern bazaars where women were just bobbing black tents, I was dazzled by the number of poor and lower middle class Lahori women with hauntingly beautiful faces, highlighted by eye kohl, gold jewels in their noses, and the flowing saris and trousers-and-tunics outfits that give the bazaar its dash of primary color.
I had entered the old city through the Delhi Gate, the most impressive of the portals that are still standing. Under the Mogul emperors Akbar the Great, Jehangir, Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb, Lahore reached a zenith of splendor. The old part of Lahore is the greatest medieval architectural spectacle between Delhi and Isfahan, rivaling the former if not quite the latter.
After a few minutes of walking I came to the Mosque of Wazir Khan, which gets its name from the Governor of the Punjab who built the mosque in 1634 during the reign of Shah Jahan. In an Oct. 1, 1887, dispatch in the Civil and Military Gazette, Kipling wrote that the area of the mosque was ‘’full of beauty even when the noonday heat silences the voices of men and puts the pigeons of the mosque to sleep.’’ I removed my shoes and walked into the courtyard at midday, sat on a rush mat under an archway and admired the thin wafers of red brick, the kashi tiles and the frescoes painted in various shades of yellow and orange, the very colors of the ground curry sold in the market nearby. The crazy geometry of the bazaar buildings towered over the courtyard, making it seem even smaller than it was. But, on account of the courtyard’s silence and the lovely reflecting pool in the center, I felt far removed from the city.
I walked out of the old city through the Kashmiri Gate, not far from where Kim and the lama spent their first night on the road together in the stable of an Afghan horse trader. The stables are gone, but the transient atmosphere of the caravansary persists in the form of tented tea stalls and rows of jute beds. For the equivalent of 50 cents, I took a three-wheel auto-rickshaw for the five-minute ride to the Badshahi (King) Mosque, farther along the collapsed old city wall. Completed in 1674 by Aurangzeb, the last great Mogul emperor, the Badshahi Mosque is said to be the largest single-unit mosque in the world, and is arguably second only to the Taj Mahal as an example of Mogul architectural genius.
The courtyard, within four inches of being a perfect square, is almost twice the length of a football field. The linear sweeps of red and pink sandstone clash majestically with the three white marble domes that appear as planets floating in space, around which smaller, white marble satellites, resting atop the turrets and minarets, revolve. Though the scale is grand, it isn’t alienating. Under the stucco tracery of the prayer hall, men were relaxing and praying on the carpets. Nobody talked to me, or stared either. I could have read several chapters of ‘’Kim’’ without being interrupted.
