Create 2024-10-22-slow_burn_lahore_ends.md

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+---
+layout: post
+title: Slow Burn Lahore Ends
+author:
+  display_name: sepoy
+date: '2024-10-22 08:22:17 -0400'
+categories:
+- homistan
+---
+
+![DC Book Cover]({{site.baseurl}}/img/uploads/2024/DC_cover.jpeg)
+The journey is over, gentle readers. Today is the publishing birthday for *Disrupted City: Walking the Pathways of Memory and History in Lahore* from *The New Press*.
+
+This book answers (to my satisfaction, if no one else) the question that I posed in my graduate school application in 1998. Why did the memory of a Syrian teenager become my history in the mid 1980s Lahore? My path to becoming a historian is tied intimately to this question--a version of this quest (on early Islam) prompted me to get a second BA in History and another version became the contours of my training. The answer took me all these two decades and stretch across an unpublished dissertation and three monographs--*A Book of Conquest* (2016), *The Loss of Hindustan* (2020), and now *Disrupted City* (2024).
+
+Along the way, the order of the books changed but I kept to the intuition that the question did not have an answer just in history, nor History, nor memory, nor nationalism but a synthesis of all above. I will not belabor the point but I want to just bask in the relief that it is all done. This singular question that has haunted me for so long is finally off my shoulders and I can think of something else, and write about the US empire again.
+
+I hope you get to read this book (you do not need to have read the others, really) because I believe in the process and the ethics of what I have done in here. There are many people, intimate and distal, who have carried me this far and to them: Much Love.
+
+Here is a blurb and <a href="https://bookshop.org/p/books/a-city-disrupted-walking-the-pathways-of-memory-and-history-in-lahore/20314719?ean=9781595589071"link </a>to purchase the book:
+
+>> A historian walks through Lahore, touching on its long and difficult history as a center of Muslim life and rupture. “Lahore became a city of refugees and migrants in 1947,” writes Asif, “and it has never stopped being that.” A Columbia University historian, Asif offers a bittersweet reflection on his native city—“its history, the role of memory and violence, and the vexed question of nationalism and state control.” He is especially attuned to texts about the city that were written in Sanskrit and Persian, such as the shahr ashob—the poetic form from the ninth or 10th century that means “city disrupted.” He dwells on the Hindustani influence when Lahore was a “vibrant, polysacral” place; the population exploded under the British, and its new institutions and neighborhoods grew largely segregated. Partition violently sundered the golden age of the city in 1947, largely emptied of Hindus and Sikhs and refilled by Muslim “refugees” from other parts of India, such as the author’s own family. The city had to reinvent itself within the new nation-state of Pakistan. Asif also writes of the environmental degradation of Lahore, once a city of gardens like Shalimar, now imperiled by floods from the Ravi River, air pollution, and heat. He wanders areas of Lahore that have been familiar to him since his youth, all the while musing on the city’s vast changes. A poignant history and personal memoir of a constantly evolving city.
+--- *Kirkus Review*
+
+Previous writings on Lahore on CM: <a href="https://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/slow_burn_lahore_ii_meeting_old_masters.html">Slow Burn Lahore II</a>, <a href="https://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/archives/homistan/slow_burn_lahore_iii_this_is_my_culture.html">Slow Burn Lahore III</a>, <a href="https://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/slow_burn_lahore_iv_see_through_cement.html">Slow Burn Lahore IV</a>, <a href="https://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/slow_burn_lahore_v_archeology_of_space.html">Slow Burn Lahore V</a>, <a href="https://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/slow_burn_lahore_vi_a_footnote.html">Slow Burn Lahore VI</a>), and finally, <a href="https://www.chapatimystery.com/archives/slow_burn_lahore_redux.html"> Slow Burn Lahore Redux</a>.