NO LONGER ON HER MAJESTY’S SECRET SERVICE
ENGLISH POODLES IN LOVE WITH PRESIDENTS

LAHORE ABOUT TO HOST MOST ADVANCED SPY CENTER

All the stuff that makes up James Bond is coming to Lahore. But espionage has changed in our century. Now the cool stuff is no more. Nor the hot stuff. Only the stupid stuff is left. The aim mutual destruction of the world. And what spurs it? Not the National Security. Just the NEO CONS version of PURE GREED.

We all know what happens in the world? Media wars are the rage of the modern world. Even James Bond was pitted against a Media King in one of the charades of life.

Politicians who have no stake in the future of Pakistan specifically allow such activities with full of love for their Masters. One can hear them sing FROM PAKISTAN WITH LOVE all the time by crushing all the aspirations of the people of Pakistan. Their souls have no room for shame for they sold their souls long ago.

All the chatter of Pakistan is going to be on record. Massive computer jobs will be created as well as room for translators, while computers pick up words from conversations, key words, which will supposed to hit a hammer on the head of all with diverse views. No one is going to be allowed to bark, or for that matter sing. Much robotic banter would be allowed. The world predicted by analysts long ago is going to be here in full spread.

Will we be crushed? Will we survive? We are told that those who dig graves for others, are actually digging their own graves. Will we see such people buried in response too? Who knows? One thing we know, we will continue to believe in Allah, and we will all be prepared to die for Allah. Straight to heaven, promises the Quran. For us it matters more, that we acquit ourselves well.

SIR HENRY LAWRENCE AND POSSESSION OF LAHORE
CRITICAL CHANGES AND MULTIPLE MURDERS

Sikh to British rule over Punjab

Three brothers, John Lawrence, Henry Lawrence and G. Lawrence, and their association with the Punjab. At a durbar in Lahore, the Governor General John Lawrence addressed the native Princes in Persian/Urdu language. Remarkable? All three brothers knew Punjab as the back of their hands and were instrumental in the British policy making here. One of them wanted the Sikh rule to continue, while others were in favour of British possession of Punjab. Henry Lawrence even submitted his resignation against the British policy here.

There is so much material on the Lawrences that books were written and books could be written but for us to repeat the obvious, is not the aim of our writing. We like to present fresh information wherever possible and we are certain that on our blog you will find things you will find nowhere else. That is why we like what we write,. We love Lahore, and we love Punjab, but we are not parochials. We are Pakistanis in letter and spirit. We speak Punjabi but we are happy with Urdu as our National language. We do not carry prejudices on our back. For us all Muslims are one and the same thing. We are Pakistan.

Here we present two images of the Lawrences, rarely seen, and one never on internet and never published. It is by Imam Baksh Lahori, and we will write about Imam Baksh Lahori in the near future. Till then, enjoy one of his rarest work of Lawrence on horseback. Well done!

POLISHING MIRRORS IN LAND OF BLIND PEOPLE
M.A. RAHMAN CHUGHTAI’S ASSERTIONS ABOUT ART

Exposure to Art hurts the common man more than it helps him

Absolute disappointment was in the air. The opening of the Lahore Museum as well as the Mayo School of Arts had revealed an inherent weakness here. Somehow or the other the aesthetic sense was not there at all. The visitors to Lahore Museum did not know what to look at and how to look at Art itself. Nobody wanted to send their working children to Mayo School of Arts. John Lockwood Kipling was in big trouble. Inducements were given for enrollment n college and when even that did not work, Kipling Sahib hired children of prostitutes in the Hira Mandi to attend school. This is a documentary fact about art at that time. Lahore Museum published a small booklet which was used for decades there and it was entitled ‘How to look at Art?’ The Dev Samaj founder Brahman Dewtva was teaching Art at Government College Lahore as a Drawing Master. English teachers were there at the Central Training School of teachers. The English recognized that most of the Indian audience were literally DANGARS about art, and ‘dangar’ meant literally ‘like animals’.

This takes us back thousands of years when the Central Asian marched into India. Obsessed with wall painting related to their Buddhist culture, the finest paintings were being made in Central Asian and on the Silk route to China, where they still exist on walls of ancient caves. Ajanta was the first revelation of paintings in this God forsaken region. And after Ajanta there was no painting in the region for something like 800 years. The armies of China and Mongolia spread the art again. The Muslims brought their own version of painting into the region. The Mughals excelled in this art to all counts. Not only did they excel in it, they created the art into their Hindu subjects, who were quick to learn an art which was alien to their own tradition.

The lack of aesthetic sense is even literally there today. We do not know how to look at Art. We have no patience that Art requires for analysis. We have no patience to stop at traffic lights, for all the time we are trying to enter gaps and holes in the traffic. So how can we have any patience for viewing Art in general? The VIPS of our life are senseless about Art, not having the faintest sense for its intricacy. Malik Shamas, one of the foremost art critics of Pakistan, once said that although we have acute sense for poetry and can interpret complex verses easily, we have not even a basic cue about Art.

The task before M.A. Rahman Chughtai was not only to create Art or collect Art, but also generate in people a love for Art. For that he did whatever he could. He wrote articles, he addressed people in functions as well as on radio, took out magazines in local language and promoted Art at all spheres. He imposed on writers and scholars to have dustcovers for their books designed by him, to inculcate aesthetics in people. Today the situation should have been better.

When the Government of Pakistan forsakes Art and Culture, it was not possible for it to go forward. Have we ever heard of a Government sponsored show in Pakistan or abroad? Have we ever heard of the Government buying some Art works of poor artists? Not at all. Have we not heard of land grabbing activities of both Federal as well as provincial governments of places related to the Arts. We are one example ourselves. But that is a story for another time, another place.

DEV SAMAJ MOVEMENT IN LAHORE
A SEX SCANDAL ROCKS THE SERENITY OF LAHORE

Sexual harassment of a nurse of Aitchison Hospital

Tirith was a Hindu boy of Lahore, studying with the future legend M.A. Rahman Chughtai. They were very close friends and both were aspiring to be painters in the future. At that time there was a Drawing Mater at Government College Lahore, whose name was Bhagwan Devatwa (Shri Satyanand Agnihotri). Originally an engineer from Thomson College Roorki, he was associated with reformist movement in Hinduism. Divorcing himself from other events, he founded the DEV SAMAJ movement in Lahore on 16th February, 1887. They had a lot of property in Lahore which was left here as they moved in 1947 to other areas of the Punjab, including Bathinda and Chandigarh. Dev Samaj movement is still there in Punjab, India.

Dev Rattan was an important member of Dev Samaj. His eyes fell on a couple, who were living outside Lahore. Enamoured by the woman, Dev Rattan suggested to her husband to send her to Lahore for education and progress. He would take personal care of her and she would work in his own house. Dev Rattan declared the young beautiful girl as his own daughter. ‘Moon boli beti’. His designs were different. He was caught in compromising sexual episodes with her, and various people came up with complains against the Dev Samaj administrator, including the wife of Dev Rattan as well as the girl herself. When Bhagwan Devatwa heard of this, he kicked Dev Rattan out of Dev Samaj.

If things had been left there, it would have receded into nothingness. But Dev Rattan was obsessed with the girl and would not let go. On 16th September 1913 he wrote an article in the newspaper professing his innocence and telling the world she was a daughter to him. The Lahoris reacted very badly to this denial for there was first hand proof against the man. In march 1914, Shriman Amar Singh wrote a pamphlet against Dev Rattan. The fight was in full swing.

The girl used to work in Lady Aitchison Hospital Lahore and boys used to go to look at her., She was the headline in Lahore. Tirith and M A Rahman Chughtai on way home from Mayo School of Arts used to pass the hospital in an attempt to see the lady of the scandal. A sex scandal which started around 1906 and culminated around1914. The details really do not matter. But the affair brought a very bad name to the reputation of Dev Samaj itself.

It is interesting that DEV SAMAJ and DEV BAND have similar kind of histories of reformation. A link between the two movements may be there somewhere.

EPISODES IN LIFE OF CHUGHTAI MUSEUM
GOVERNMENTAL APATHY AND ANIMOSITY

Few would believe what we have suffered from 1975 to this day. Daily we hear of governmental tirade against the people of Pakistan, but there is so much more. The Ideology of Pakistan is in itself under attack from a long time. A mischievous form of government has taken over from the last many decades. Loot and plunder is the name of the game. But the attacks on Chughtai Museum were phenomenal in all ways. Every year survival zero is presented to us on different plates. And every year we embark upon a fresh jehad against the tyranny of a political structure, allowed to rape Pakistan, by presenting their own self on cushion lined beds. Get humiliated at one place, and you are allowed to humiliate the entire country.

Of course we have written about many of these things in the past, and a big book is in order, for the historian buffs who will study this in future courses of art history. Our aim would be only to touch important episodes in the history of Chughtai Museum. A Pakistani origin artist in Canada, Ahmad Humayoun once told me, you were able to do many things, but you were not able to generate a following for yourself in Pakistan. For us the inspiration is the life of the Prophet. With a single woman who trusted him, to millions of followers today, the story of the Prophet is a beacon light for us. And we also remember the saying of one of our ancestors, when he wrote the verse:

“Our sad plight is due to ourselves and ourselves alone;
For we chose the profession of mirror polishing in land of blind people.”

There is indeed sadness in the state of our aesthetics. So called analysts like Qadu Gujjar rail us about our Identity all the time. Central Asian artists brought art and culture to this God-forsaken place. Now we are being inspired by artists who lost their own Identities a long time back. Our people do not have the capacity to look or appreciate art, so how can we evolve a package of analysts and critics from such a dumb crowd? Countries revolve around identity. Without identity, no nation comes into being or can sustain itself.

This region owes it to the Buddhist Masters from Central Asia who laid the basis of art like Ajanta. And the Sultans of Lahore and Delhi who patronized painting inspired from Chinese Masters. The Mughals who took the art of painting to newer heights, distinct from the Persian Masters themselves. One must keep in mind that the history of art as manufactured by foreign lobbies is as twisted as the history of civilization they have manufactured for us. They have hired our own soulless Mir Jaffers of Art to make us lose al our confidence in ourselves as well as Identities. All that is a separate story in itself. We will start the history of Chughtai Museum as episodes in our life.

DEMONIZING PAKISTAN
GOVERNMENTAL SHIT ON HONEST PEOPLE

Outlaws making impracticable laws for Pakistan

I live in Pakistan but my house is the world itself. I get in touch with all kinds of people everywhere. I am not isolated in an way. And what do I see, so called educated and civilized people, lacking even basic common sense to analyze the world in any dispassionate way. These civilized people of world rely on a twisted MEDIA of their own, which continuously feed them shit about the world. When someone should rise and ask the question TELL US THE TRUTH not your SHITTY VERSION OF IT. I have seen foreigners from all over the world, entering our premises and telling us simply that Pakistan is not at all like what the bigoted and racist media was telling us. And these people included diplomats from many parts of the world.

The Government does not give a crap about the citizens of Pakistan. But Pakistan does not give a crap about these planted bastards on us. Surely when an American said many years back that Pakistanis will sell their own mothers for money, he did not mean Pakistan or Pakistanis. He meant the people in the Government of Pakistan, for that is all the Pakistanis such people deal in usual routine.

The Britishers controlled this region with their inhumane laws. The present Governments are even more ruthless than their previous Masters. They are not even willing to give people to the right to breath as honest and free men and women. That is why laws are made to freeze the people of Pakistan as eternal slaves. A typical morning starts with the traffic choked for some concept of some body’s life as being more sacred than wastage of our time, and ridiculed by the police foce for being merely citizens of Pakistan. Camera speed traps abound on the canal, and yet the cavalcade of these people pass at supersonic speed, unchecked. A police man is busy driving his car or motorcycle in any direction. If somebody else does it, he is caught there and then. The authotrities like LDA are hounding people by foreclosing their businesses. The Parking vendor on Parking lot is giving his own hell to us. Then enter any governmental office and see whether you can even make it in, without greasing the palms of the pariah standing at the Gate. Count any day, it is hell. Count any day of these people, it is non stop bliss for them.

Our law-makers and administrators are daily thinking of passing new laws of harassment for the people. Computerize things, making new licenses, new registration books, and what not? Not to facilitate people, but to get bribes from people in trying to correct the mistakes in the process in doing these things. Politicians are busy getting into new ventures to take KICKBACKS, sell their products (though their industrial agents). Declare an industry unfit and then sell it at a cheap price, to buy it back, and then sell it again. A vicious circle of corruption. Who will stop it? We thought of Imam Khomeini as an extreme, now even the Khomeini revolution seems sensible o us.

No existing facility gets corrected. There is no money in same. Broken roads all over the country, or no roads, and yet super highways are planned,. Acquisition done of poor people’s land without giving any money to them. Injustice at its height and the hype of judicial activism being played to our broken eardrums. Yes we do know now what ANDHER NAGRI CHOPAT RAJ means.

The Law of Mukufat will catch up with them. Yes, that is our faith. But the time gap is not in the programme of Allah. We can make the gap shorter, if we unite as a nation. And that is what the foreign lobbies are trying their best to prevent. Divide us into small groups, armed to the teeth, at each other’s throat. Thanks heaven for those who do not think like that. Oh Allah save us from the wrath of our own absonders!

INFLUENCE OF ISLAMIC AESTHETICS
ON WESTERN ART AND ARCHITECTURE

Images speak louder than only claims

A survey of Western pictorial heritage makes it very clear to us. The rising advent of Islam on Europe was not only affecting its science and philosophy. It was also directly influencing its aesthetics. Scholars of the old Western world freely acknowledged it, and it became unfashionable in a wave against Islam to mention these things. But facts do not go away, by wishing them to evapourate. We need not write books for same. A few images can be enough for elucidation.

When the Madonna herself is cloaked in Islamic dress, what does that mean? It shows that the idea even penetrated the most rigid clergy of the beauty of Islamic traditions. The most sacred icon of the Madonna can be clothed in Islamic terms mean total belief in the supremacy of the new aesthetics. Various artists had their inspiration in different ways. All this is well known, nothing new here. At times repeating is essential to remind us that we are one on Planet Earth.

The romance of Islamic Art and Architecture is even there today as western circles try to emulate the splendours of the Sultans as well as the Mughals in duplication of projects today, all over the world. We will touch some of these projects soon.

ONE COMMON SENSE IS KNOWN TO ALL
PAKISTAN ARMY IS CUSTODIAN OF IDEOLOGY AND GEOGRAPHY

Politician’s dossiers are self evident of Mir Jaffers

If we the people of Pakistan know it, obviously the men in power know it too. The Pakistan Army is not an army of nincompoops, they know it very well too. The hidden agenda is no longer hidden. It is all in the open. The script to end Pakistan by 2015 is in full play. The speeches of leaders in 1947 and those of leaders in 2014 are self evident in the depth of thought of two extreme groups. For self progress, everything can be sacrificed, but these fools are putting themselves in the highest danger possible. The Masters can offer bribes only, no one comes to the rescue of Mir Jaffers in the end. TUM APNI KOM KA NAHI BANA, HAMARA KEYA BANAY GA.

This is Pakistan, dear world! Our people are forged on the anvil of blacksmiths. Hardened beyond possibility. Knowing life is a trust given by Allah to us, and by Divine command, we are always ready to give our life for our country and our way of life. The more you try to divide us, remember DIVIDE AND RULE does not work anymore. At that time you were dealing with two nations, now there is only ONE NATION. However much you try to foment discord, our Love for ALLAH and love of the QURAN unites us as ONE NATION. And when it comes to attack on our Identity, we lose our rationality and are emotionally charged to defend our homeland against all cost. So stop this charade. Hearing President Ayub’s speech on the eve of 1965 war, refreshes us even today. It is the heartbeat of Pakistan.

06 September 1965 Historical adress by Ayub… by f100002407930063

WOODEN HOUSES OF LAHORE
A LOST TRADITION

Remnants remain here and there

The tradition of wooden houses was everywhere in Indian region and craftsmen excelled in designs and wood use both in front facades as well as inside the rooms. That is why extensive houses existed all over the region. Even today when another old house falls, inside reveals wooden structures. Brackets with wide range of animals, including lions, horses, ducks and even mermaids existed here. Arches and sitting spaces for viewing of lanes.

In the Mohalla Khawajan in Bhera, there existed many houses like this made in the British period but even those were subject to decay, fall, as well as sale to unsuspected buyers thinking of them as from ancient times.

Our research spree started n the 1977s era. But there were people before us. Lockwood Forest, an artist from New York came here and met Lockwood Kipling and together they surveyed the houses of Lahore and held an exhibition in the Lahore Museum in 1885. The love for local craftsmanship was so much, that Lockwood Forest took many local craftsmen to New York in 1885 and built a house for himself there, looking exactly like a house of Lahore. Even all the inside was wooden. Lockwood Forest offered these services to others and this antique house existed in New York for a long period of time. We do not know exactly what happened in the end but fashion magazines reported their existence for a long time.

A prestigious book DOMESTIC INDIAN ARCHITECTURE along with a lot of advertisements was published by Lockwood Forest and it itself is an antique item in the world of art. John Lockwood Kipling took many of these wooden structures, and after a flooding in Lahore, deposited some of them in the British Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum as well as in Lahore Museum. The doors in Lahore Museum were removed by him. Percy Brown included an image in his phenomenal book on Indian Architecture. Certainly an extensive documentation exist for some of these houses to this day in the world of Art and Architecture. Well done everybody!

AMANAT KHAN SHIRAZI
CALLIGRAPHER OF TAJ MAHAL

Not much known or remains

When partition happened the lines were drawn regardless of the position of places. The BRB canal took the Eidgah and Sarai of Abdur Raheem Khan Khanan to our side, and the Serai of Amanat Khan Shirazi to the other side. I was standing and photographing the Serai of Abdur Raheem Khan Khanan, when an ex-ranger offered that he could take me on the other side. The Serai was something we were eager to see. But rational sense always prevails. I would never break any international laws for my enjoyment of a Mughal monument. As a little boy, I had stood on the second storey of the mausoleum of Ittemad ud daula in Agra, and recited the English poem of ‘Bundle of Firewood’ loud and clear, for my mother and father on the down floor.

My father used to repent that nobody paid attention to the life of artists and architects and we know hardly anything of those people. So little is known about these important people. Amanat Khan Sherazi has left his writ for us rarely. The inscriptions on the Taj Mahal are there, as well as writings on the tomb of Akbar himself. An inscription in Aurangabad on a mosque. A beautiful manuscript. A Quran written in his own hands in 1050 AH. And multiple books with his SEAL on it, as librarian of the Mughal’s kitab-khana.

Amanat Khan Sherazi lies buried in a small mausoleum near the Serai which he made in the memory of his brother. He loved his brother so much, that after his death, this calligrapher retired from life in total, and spent the rest of his life in prayers. Love and dedication surrounded his life. It seems working on a monument of love for the Emperor Shah Jahan, he worked on a monument of love all his own. Sincerity and passion was part of their lives. After the death of his brother, he chose to retire to Lahore. Just outside Lahore he built a Serai in the name of his brother and it is known as the Serai Amanat Khan. Unfortunately the canal has separated us from the Serai and mausoleum of one of the greatest calligraphers of all times. Certainly his decision to retire to Lahore was due to the presence of his friend, Ustad Ahmad Lahori in Lahore, the architect of the Taj Mahal. Lahore is the greatest city of art and culture of the entire region.