A Book Culture reading celebrating the recent release of Manan Ahmed Asif’s new monograph, Disrupted City.

About the Book

A stunning history of Pakistan’s cultural and intellectual capital from one of the preeminent scholars of South Asia

The city of Lahore was more than one thousand years old when it went through a violent schism. As the South Asian subcontinent was partitioned in 1947 to gain freedom from Britain’s colonial hold, and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan was formed, the city’s large Hindu and Sikh populations were pushed toward India, and an even larger Muslim refugee population settled in the city. This was just the latest in a long history of the city’s making and unmaking.

Over the centuries, the city has kept a firm grip on the imagination of travelers, poets, writers, and artists. More recently, it has been journalists who have been drawn to the city as a focal point for a nation that continues to grab international headlines. For this book, acclaimed historian Manan Ahmed Asif brings to life a diverse and vibrant world by walking the city again and again over the course of many years. Along the way he joins Sufi study circles and architects doing restoration in the medieval parts of Lahore and speaks with a broad range of storytellers and historians. To this Asif juxtaposes deep analysis of the city’s centuries-old literary culture, noting how it reverberates among the people of Lahore today.

To understand modern Pakistan requires understanding its cultural capital, and Disrupted City uses Lahore’s cosmopolitan past and its fractured present to provide a critical lens to challenge the grand narratives of the Pakistani nation-state and its national project of writing history.

Speakers

Manan Ahmed, Associate Professor in the History Department at Columbia, is a historian of South Asia and the littoral western Indian Ocean world from 1000-1800 CE. He also directs the Heyman Center Fellows at SOF/Heyman at Columbia. He is the author of A Book of Conquest: Tne Chachnama and Muslim Origins in South Asia (Harvard University Press, 2016), Loss of Hindustan: The Invention of India (Harvard University Press, 2020) and, most recently, Disrupted City: Walking the Pathways of Memory and History in Lahore (The New Press, 2024).

Gaiutra Bahadur is an associate professor in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media and the Department of English at Rutgers University. She is an essayist, critic and journalist who writes often about literature, history, memory, migration, and ethnicity. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The Nation, The New York Review of Books, The Boston Review, Dissent, The Guardian, Foreign Policy, Lapham’s Quarterlyand, and many other publications across the globe. Her book Coolie Woman, a personal history of indenture, was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize, the British literary award for artful political writing. It won the Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Prize for the best book about the Caribbean in any language from the Caribbean Studies Association in 2014. The Chronicle of Higher Education included the book in its round-up of the best scholarly books of the decade in 2020.

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