You will not find lost cities in urban histories, ethnographies of cities, or in works of architects and town planners, except rarely by accident. You are more likely to find them in shared memories and surviving myths of cities. The natural habitat of lost cities are grandparents’ tales, dated travelogues, local superstitions, and retired caretakers of old bungalows, abandoned palaces, and cemeteries. If you are lucky and have an eye for such things, you may even locate them in less self-conscious memoirs and works of art and literature.
Lost cities can be lost in many ways. Jerusalem is lost in one way, Pompeii and Hiroshima in another. Lost cities can come from lost worlds, too; many of the cities on the silk route fall in this category. So perhaps do the ghost cities left behind by the gold rush in the United States. In the following pages, however, I shall define a lost city narrowly—as a remembered city that has substantial, if not a larger, presence than the existing city in the minds of those staying in the city or in the hearts of those exiled from or cleansed out of the city. Lahore in Pakistan, which seems to have a diaspora larger than its present population, is a good example of such a city.
The lost cities I shall talk about are of two kinds. The first kind are lost to those who are obsessed with an inaccessible city and, yet, weighed down by the awareness that their fading, half-lost memories might die with them, that the city of the mind may not survive except in shared fantasies—in literature or arts. The city they have kept alive by sheer power of will might be doomed. That sense of transience imparts a touch of bittersweet sadness to the imagined city.
In the other common form of a lost city, a sizeable section of a city lives comfortably not with the living city, but with what it once was. Unlike in the case of Lahore, there is a sense of loss, but it is not that sharp. Perhaps because they have never lived in the city or even experienced it directly. There is only a strange, vicarious nostalgia and some vague grudge, tinged with contempt for those unmoved by the hidden grandeur of the city. The targets of such contempt often include their own children and grandchildren.
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Calcutta is a prime example in India of such a city. Visitors to Calcutta are often surprised that many middle-class Bengalis, especially if they happen to be intellectuals, seem to live in Calcutta as it was in the nineteenth century, when the city was the capital of British India and a major theatre where South Asia and modern Europe had their first serious cultural engagement. To them, that was the real Calcutta, and the visible city is a forgettable shadow of its real self. Is this ‘escape’ a way of coping with the hard reality of living in Calcutta or a form of fruitless, stubborn dissent—a live critique of the visible city fighting for survival? Perhaps both. Both versions of lost cities are self-sufficient; while the lost cities influence their visible counterparts, the visible cities do not affect the lost ones, frozen as they are in time. Both versions are also heritable. Here is what a Pakistani poet, Béo Zafar, in her poem ‘Delhi Revisited’, writing of a city she has never earlier visited.
Six decades, and then I stand
On the land of my forefathers.
An hour and a bit
Is all it took
To get me here
A lifetime’s wait Behind me
And in my eyes
The tears . . . I set aside the pain
And just become my parents Going down their memory lane.
Wherefrom come such powerful, addictive, mythic cities? Are lost cities proliferating because massive uprooting and displacement are creating new lost cities? Perhaps. A number of social scientists and philosophers have declared that exile and homelessness have become, by the end of the twentieth century, normal and endemic to modern life. A few have proposed that moderns need not or should not have a home. In India, development itself has displaced, according to one estimate, nearly 60 million over the last seventy years.
Partition in 1947 straightaway uprooted 20 million and created a number of lost cities. Apart from Lahore and Calcutta, there are Dhaka, Lucknow, Hyderabad, Delhi and, for those who have read Sadaat Hasan Manto, Bombay. Many of the inhabitants of these mythic cities are in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Partitions always have their hidden costs, even for those who desperately seek such partitions.
There is another unspoken but weighty reason for the emergence of such lost cities. For a long time, under the spell of a hard, ultra-positivist version of rationality, the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth had tried hard to ensure the final defeat of mythos in human affairs and proclaim the triumph of logos. In that ambience, living in private, mythic cities was a sure sign of mental illness. As it happened, after the Second World War, logos looked tarnished by its own triumphalism, its flirtation with organized mega-violence, its complicity with the Hegelian state, and with a science gone rabid. Explicably, the dying decades of the century saw a semblance of recovery of mythos. The roots of that recovery, however, lay in the interwar years.
There was widespread shock triggered by the psychopathic use of modern science and its faithful adjutant, scientific rationality—not only in the First World War but also in peacetime social engineering (as in the Nazi use of eugenics and public hygiene in their early genocidal projects, the systematic use of social evolutionism to justify imperialism, as well as virtually every theory of revolution). As if in response, there was a turn to the inner world of human beings and scattered attempts to re-enchant the world among many intellectuals. Even Sigmund Freud, who had looked at his earlier work mainly as a contribution to the positive sciences, began to explore more self-confidently the larger mythopoetic domains shaping the darker side of human civilization. The rediscovery of mythos promised new pathways to a deeper knowledge of human self and its role in public life.
Today, this strand of awareness has become a way of resistance to the new forms of rational, scientized violence that commemorate our times. As the urban-industrial vision woven around the idea of a ‘secular city’ seeks to legitimize its power by half-heartedly grappling with the new, more rarefied forms of violence, the mythos of the city has staged a comeback, this time as an alternative framework for envisioning our urban futures. I locate this search for lost cities within that framework, in the belief that living with these cities pushes us into a twilight zone that allows some play with alternative designs of a desirable city and with new forms of cosmopolitanism while, at the same time, acting as a psychological anchor for such play.
At such moments, a known city becomes unknown by casting shadows that may be at times more real than the city. These shadows haunt the ‘original’ the way the djinns of Delhi haunt the city in William Dalrymple’s lovable travelogue on Delhi. Sometimes, as in Shamsur Rahman Faruqi’s marvellous invocation of Delhi, the city of the mind mocks, shames, or challenges the visible city to face its ghosts from the past openly, without fear. It reminds one of the attempts to capture the scintillating intellectual culture of Vienna in the interwar years, fleeting memories that can be read as fragments of a dirge on what is arguably Europe’s best known lost city. Does that dirge invite self-exploration, perhaps even belated confessions of culpability? I have to admit I do not know.
This excerpt from ‘India and Its Intellectual Traditions: Of Love, Advaita, Power, and Other Things’, edited by Vinay Lal, has been taken with permission from Oxford University Press.