Lahore: Syncretic past, troubled present

In recounting the more contemporary history of Lahore since Partition, Haroon Khalid also offers a sober commentary on the tortured politics of Pakistan

Imagining Lahore: The City That Is, the City That Was

Haroon Khalid

Penguin Viking

304 pages 

Rs 599

This is a rare book by a young Pakistani writer that seeks to transcend the political, ideological and religious barriers that the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 entrenched in its physical geography and, more tragically, in the consciousness of its people. He tries to reconnect the interrupted stories of the city of Lahore as a place of fabled legends, of imperial grandeur, of revolutionary fervour and, more lately, of genocidal horror. Every landmark, whether lovingly preserved or lying forgotten in