Every now and then I get told a surprising little bit of family history, often fairly inglorious. On my last visit it was about a great-grandfather who was active in the doomed Khilafat movement and one of the founders of what, over a century later, became a radical right Islamist movement. This time around it was a great-uncle who got shot in the eye during the anarchist or perhaps fascistic Khaksar revolt of the 1930s (though I doubt he was himself an anarchist or fascist), and a great-great-possibly-another-great-grandfather who was court physician to Maharajah Ranjeet Singh and was given amongst other properties, an inner city estate with an elephant gate. The latter I’m sceptical about, as the elephant gate suggests a prominent physician, whereas Ranjeet Singh’s best-known physician still has descendants who hardly hide their ancestry under a bushel and are, moreover, a prominent Shia family, which is unlikely to have included my ancestor, unless there was a change of sect at some point. Not impossible, I suppose, since it also happened in two other sides of the family, which are now part Sunni and part Shia, but surely I’d have known there was a family connection and heard grumbling about sectarian differences.
Interesting also that what felt one of the most cataclysmic moments at Partition, the burning of Shahalmi, is now completely forgotten. It was something my grandfather, who witnessed it, could not forget. I would guess most Lahoris today would have no idea about it, and I would even imagine many of those in the new developments haven’t even heard of Shahalmi.