Lahore’s roads are not just routes from one place to another. They carry memories, old habits and many layers of history. A name may change on a signboard, but people often continue to use the name they have inherited from the city itself. The current review of Lahore’s historic names should therefore not be reduced to a narrow identity dispute or a sentimental exercise. It is a chance to ask a more important question: what should Lahore honour, what should it keep as part of its historical record, and how can the city remember its many pasts without erasing one to make space for another?
A useful way into the question is through memory rather than slogans. Scholars of urban memory have long argued that streets, monuments and routes are among the most ordinary ways in which power enters daily life. Ann Laura Stoler’s idea of “colonial aphasia” is helpful here, not because Lahore’s experience is identical to that of other colonial societies, but because it captures something familiar: the difficulty not of remembering the past as such, but of speaking plainly about the violence, hierarchy and authority built into it.
The colonial imprint on Lahore was real. British rule did not simply inherit the city’s geography. It reorganised it. William Glover has shown how colonial Lahore repeatedly reused older structures and placed new institutions upon an already layered city. H. R. Goulding, writing from within the colonial world itself, recorded how Lahore’s roads became a roll call of imperial worthies: commissioners, lieutenant-governors, engineers, soldiers and administrators. These were not neutral labels. They were part of the grammar through which the empire made itself visible, respectable and durable in everyday space.
Goulding is especially useful when he moves from general observation to Lahore’s actual topography. He notes that the Mall was first aligned in 1851 by Colonel Napier as “a direct road from Anarkali to Mian Mir”. He also reminds us that what later became the Upper Mall was shown in maps before 1876 as Lawrence Road, while the road now called the Lower Mall had once been simply the Mall. This is more than antiquarian detail. It shows that even Lahore’s best-known colonial boulevards were products of change, adjustment and administrative ambition. They were not timeless features that dropped from the sky fully named.
The rest of Goulding’s list makes the politics of naming even clearer. Abbott Road recalled Sir James Abbott. Beadon, Brandreth, Cooper, Cust, Lake, Hall and Nisbet Roads perpetuated former deputy commissioners and commissioners of Lahore. Durand, Davies, McLeod, Egerton and Montgomery Roads honoured former lieutenant-governors.
Temple Road remembered Sir Richard Temple. Edwardes Road, Napier Road, Lawrence Road, Mayo Road and Lytton Road all carried imperial biographies into daily circulation. Goulding even notes that Maclagan Road was named not after the governor himself, as many later assumed, but after Major-General Maclagan, his father. The point is not that every old name must vanish. It is that none of these names was politically neutral. They were instruments of imperial honour.
If a road name survives because it marks a historical layer, then it should be accompanied by a plaque explaining who that person was, what he did and how he figured in colonial rule
Yet the postcolonial politics of renaming was not simply a clean act of decolonisation. Ali Usman Qasmi’s Qaum, Mulk, Sultanat: Citizenship and National Belonging in Pakistan is important here because it shows that, in Pakistan, the politics of nomenclature often became less about removing colonial traces and more about giving an Islamic orientation to urban space by renaming places associated with non-Muslim residents, notables and memories.
Qasmi records that soon after independence, the Lahore Municipal Corporation began planning “Islamic names” for seventy-six roads. In 1952, one member, Malik Muhammad Akhtar, even proposed changing Lahore’s name to Dasht-i-Muhammad, partly to free the city from its association with Loh, the son of Ram. He also suggested naming roads after Muslim scholars, Sufis and martyrs who, in his view, had defended the city and made Lahore an abode of martyrs, or ganj-i-shuhada.
Qasmi’s research is valuable because it shows that the debate was neither simple nor one-sided. Some suggestions were sharply exclusionary. Guru Tegh Bahadur Street, for instance, was proposed to be renamed Aurangzeb Street because Tegh Bahadur was described as an enemy of Islam and Aurangzeb. Another councillor suggested that Muhalla Ram Garh, now populated by Muslim migrants, should become Mujahid Abad, and Ram Garh Colony should become Mujahid Colony. After the 1965 war, Councillor Mian Muhammad Sharif proposed that all roads named after non-Muslims should be renamed after the martyrs of that war.
The resolution was passed, and a subcommittee was constituted. The government, however, advised that it would not be wise to change all names at once. Major roads were to be changed first, while housing schemes, buildings and parks could be renamed later. A list of sixty major roads was prepared, including McLeod, Nicholson and Lawrence Roads.
The proposed new commemorative field included not only martyrs of 1965 but also Muslim notables such as Hamid Nizami, Malik Barkat Ali, Hafiz Kifayat Husain, Hussain Shaheed Suhrawardy, Ata Ullah Shah Bukhari, Gama Pehalwan, Aurangzeb, Sultan Salahuddin Ayyubi, Sheikh Ahmad Sirhindi, Shabbir Ahmad Usmani, Ashraf Ali Thanawi, Maulvi Abdul Haq, Hazrat Bilal, Amr bin Aas, Imam Malik, Imam Shafi, Imam Abu Hanifa, Imam Bukhari, Imam Hasan, Imam Husain and Imam Muslim.
But opposition also existed within the same municipal culture. In an earlier discussion in 1955, Malik Ghulam Nabi and Sheikh Rafiq Ahmad argued against changing names. They called it a cheap publicity stunt and emphasised the need to preserve history. If heroes were to be honoured, they argued, schools and parks should be built and named after them. Rafiq Ahmad also warned that if India adopted the same logic, Muslim names in India would also be removed. This is a strikingly mature position because it separates honour from erasure. It recognises that a city can celebrate new heroes without pretending that earlier histories never existed.
Not all renaming demands were driven by a narrowly religious or exclusionary logic. Some proposals were practical or civic in nature. Cooper Road was proposed to become Bijli Ghar Road, Katchery Road to Alberuni Road, Beadon Road to Mina Bazar Road, and Circular Road to Gol Sarak. Montgomery Road was proposed as Shahrah-i-Rumi to mark an international conference on Rumi studies attended by scholars from Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey. Later, renaming also entered electoral politics. The reported promise to rename Tilak Nagar as Data Nagar in the 1970s, associated with Dr Mubashir Hassan during an election campaign, shows how names could become instruments of popular mobilisation, neighbourhood identity and political appeal.
In the Mughal period, especially under Akbar, Lahore’s urban structure was organised through named passages and neighbourhoods shaped by profession, lineage, movement and memory
F. S. Aijazuddin records another important stage in this process. In September 1981, the Lahore Municipal Corporation notified new names for several major roads. Abbott Road became Iftikhar Hussain Mamdot Road; Beadon Road became Maulana Mohammad Ali Jauhar Road; Brandreth Road became Sardar Abdur Rab Nishtar Road; Charing Cross became Faisal Square; Cooper Road became Khwaja Nazimuddin Road; Durand Road became Sir Syed Khan Road; Egerton Road became Khalifa Shujauddin Road; Empress Road became Shahrah-i-Bin Badees; Fane Road became Justice Kayani Road; Ferozepur Road became Shahrah-i-Roomi; Hall Road became Bahadur Yar Jung Road; Jail Road became Ghous ul Azam Road; Lawrence Road became Liaquat Ali Khan Road; McLeod Road became Maulana Zafar Ali Khan Road; Maclagan Road became Jamaluddin Afghani Road; the Mall became Shahrah-i-Quaid-e-Azam; Nabha Road became Sir Muhammad Shah Road; Nicholson Road became Bakht Khan Road; Queen’s Road became Fatima Jinnah Road; Race Course Road became Hussain Shaheed Suhrawardy Road; and Temple Road became Hamid Nizami Road. The scale of this notification shows that renaming was not occasional or accidental. It reflected a systematic effort to reshape civic nomenclature through official language.
Popular usage, however, tells us something equally important. Lahoris often continue to use older names long after official changes are made. A city can be asked to say “Maulana Zafar Ali Khan Chowk”, but ordinary speech may still instinctively reach for Lakshmi Chowk. Names such as Krishan Nagar, Sant Nagar and Dharampura never really disappeared from popular memory. Dual signboards, the continued use of names such as Temple Road and Jain Mandir Road, and the persistence of both Lakshmi Chowk and Maulana Zafar Ali Khan Chowk on the ground show the gap between official nomenclature and lived language. This gap is not a nuisance. It is evidence. It shows that lived memory often survives beyond formal changes. If you stand beneath a newly named board and still need the older name to be understood, the city is telling you which memory has truly endured.
For that reason, Lahore should resist two equally shallow impulses: imperial nostalgia on the one hand, and historical oversimplification on the other. Replacing every awkward name with a saint, nationalist or contemporary hero would repeat the same commemorative habit in a different register. The wiser distinction is between preserving a record and conferring honour. If a road name survives because it marks a historical layer, then it should be accompanied by a plaque explaining who that person was, what he did and how he figured in colonial rule. A plaque does not glorify. It teaches. It converts silence into context.
This is especially important for the roads tied to 1857. Names such as Nicholson and Chamberlain cannot be read only as quaint relics of another age. They belong to a language of colonial triumph. If Lahore wishes to remember honestly, those roads should be interpreted alongside the violence through which empire preserved itself. The sepoys of Mian Mir who rose in July 1857, the pursuit that followed, and the mass executions at Ajnala under Frederick Cooper’s authority should form part of Lahore’s public memory. Historical plaques at Mian Mir, near Anarkali and on roads named for colonial officers would not erase the imperial chapter. They would place it in its fuller historical context.
But Lahore’s problem is not only that colonial names survive. It is also that colonial construction often overwrote older sacred and garden landscapes without acknowledging what stood there before. Government House, now the Governor’s House, did not arise on neutral ground. It grew around the tomb of Muhammad Qasim Khan. The Lahore High Court stands in a landscape associated with the shrine of Shah Chiragh. Dai Anga Mosque was converted into a residence and later used by the railway administration. These are exactly the places where historical plaques are most urgently needed, because the visible building and the buried memory no longer match.
Nor should Lahore be narrated only as a Mughal city, as it is often conventionally imagined. Its pre-Mughal layers also require public recognition. The work of Mufti Tajuddin, preserved in the Punjab University Library, contains names of Lahore’s old mohallas and urban localities. These names should not remain trapped in catalogues and specialist memory alone.
They belong in the city itself. The same is true of the old guzars, mohallas, koochas and galis of the Walled City. In the Mughal period, especially under Akbar, Lahore’s urban structure was organised through named passages and neighbourhoods shaped by profession, lineage, movement and memory. Later rulers, including the Sikhs, inherited and adapted those patterns rather than inventing an entirely new city. Plaques should mark this older urban vocabulary before it disappears from living usage as well.
The same chronological honesty is needed for Lahore before the Ghaznavid period. No standing monument in Lahore can confidently be presented today as a surviving Hindu Shahi structure. But that absence should not become silence. The 1959 excavation at Lahore Fort uncovered pre-Muslim strata, including a mud-brick wall, pottery, terracotta objects and animal figurines, all pointing to a much older urban past beneath the later monumental city.
These findings have already been recognised in official heritage accounts as evidence that Lahore’s urban history extends beyond the Muslim period and reaches into earlier archaeological layers. Lahore Museum could therefore consider a small permanent gallery devoted to the 1959 excavation and the city’s early archaeological layers. This would not be antiquarian decoration. It would help scholars, students and the wider public understand that Lahore’s history did not begin only with the eras whose monuments happened to survive above ground.
This principle should guide not only archaeological interpretation but also the way Lahore names its institutions, roads and public spaces. Lahore can honour its national heroes while also preserving older histories as part of the city’s record. If Fatima Jinnah deserves a great medical university, and she does, her memory need not depend on effacing the earlier story of Balak Ram Medical College.
The same principle should guide the city as a whole. New universities, parks, research centres, scholarships and cultural institutions can be named after those whom Pakistan wishes to celebrate. At the same time, older names, sites and layers should remain part of the city’s historical record. A city as old as Lahore does not become nobler by becoming forgetful. It becomes nobler by learning to speak all its pasts, clearly, honestly and in public.