rof Ahmad Saeed is catering to our intellectual needs even though he is no longer with us. He passed away a couple of years ago after a life of a hardworking scholar. Research seemed to be the principal motive in his life. Now the second volume of his book, Lahore: Ek Shehr-i-Bemisal is out and has been noticed by everyone interested in the social history of the city.

The book provides us with a window to peep into the socio-cultural aspects of the city he loved and admired. It will not be an exaggeration to state that the book puts Prof Ahmad Saeed in the same league as Syed Muhammad Latif and Kanhaiya Lal because it offers a huge corpus of factual details not available elsewhere.

The book came to fruition after hard work for ten years. It illustrates the level of commitment Prof Saeed had to the book and its central theme. He was undoubtedly an extraordinary person, a scholar to the core and a man who expected very little from the people around him.

After retirement, Prof Ahmad Saeed had become particularly disgruntled. Truth be told, we Pakistanis treated him like King Lear was (mis)treated at the hands of his daughters, with “ingratitude unkinder than the winter’s wind”.

Saeed was one of the rare people who devote their lives to scholarly pursuits. He was passionate about the freedom struggle and themes pertaining to micro history or history of institutions and organisations. Later in life, he had turned his gaze to the city of Lahore, its history and socio-cultural landscape.

Being the cultural capital of Pakistan, Lahore reflects a measure of cultural advancement the entire country makes. The relationship between urban growth and national progress has occupied an important place in every system of socio-cultural and epistemic flowering, from Aristotle to Jean-Paul Sartre, Badiou and Habermas.

While the diversity of interpretations is less marked among more recent writers, we are still far from a consensus. The interest of these philosophers, as of the people of ancient Greece and Rome, centred on the city. Beyond its limits, life was stunted and incomplete. Similar thinking has pervaded the consciousness of the residents of Lahore, who exclaim with pride, Lahore Lahore ae.

A thorough look at the second volume of Lahore: Ek Shehr-i-Bemisal, reminded me of the author of The City in History, a book published in 1961 that is still considered a classic when it comes to social history of the cities. Here, I think a couple of lines on Mumford are warranted.

Lewis Mumford (October 19, 1895 – January 26, 1990) was an American historian, sociologist, philosopher of technology and literary critic. Particularly noted for his study of cities and urban architecture, he had a broad career as a writer. Mumford made signal contributions to social philosophy, American literary and cultural history and the history of technology.

What I really appreciate about Lewis Mumford who “argues for a world not in which technology rules, but rather in which it achieves a balance with nature,” is his vision of what can be described as an “organic city” where culture is not usurped by technological innovation but rather thrives with it.

Mumford contrasted such cities with those constructed around wars, tyrants and poverty, etc. However, The City in History as well as the book under review do not launch an attack on the city; rather these evaluate its growth, how it came to be and where it is heading.

Mumford notes apologetically in his preface that his “method demands personal experience and observation,” and that therefore he has “confined [him]self as far as possible to cities and regions [he is] acquainted with at first hand.” The same is true of Ahmad Saeed who has a special relationship with the city whose several features he explored in his work. About those features, the information howsoever primary or basic, is severely lacking.

The chapters: Lahore kay Mehman, Anjuman-i-Arbab-i-Ilm, Punjab Literary League and Lahore kay Mashroobat are unique because not much is known about these aspects. The factual details about the guests who visited Lahore in the 20^th Century have been dug out meticulously. After accumulating these facts, arranging them in a sequential order and making a narrative accessible to the general reader is laudable.

Another remarkable trait of Prof Saeed is his frugality with words. In both the languages in which he wrote (Urdu and English) he makes the historical facts talk instead of deploying his own exegetical skills and projecting his own opinions.

Prof Saeed followed the classical method in his works: Husool-i-Pakistan, Trek to Pakistan and his history of Islamia College, Lahore. There was a great deal of editing.

Here, it is pertinent to point out that Prof Saeed had a typical inclination when it came to organisations like Progressive Writers’ Movement. Lahore had been quite an important place for the production of revolutionary literature. People like Rajinder Singh Bedi, Krishan Chander, Faiz Ahmad Faiz and Chiragh Hassan Hasrat had a formidable presence on Lahore’s literary scene during the 1930s and 1940s.

In writing Lahore’s social history, theatre and films should have been covered. Lahore was the third largest centre of film-making in the 1930s. This would have made the book a more comprehensive narrative.

The Department of History and Pakistan Studies, University of the Punjab, should be felicitated for the publication. It is a beautifully produced and scrupulously composed book with hardly any typos. An index at the end of the book would have made it better. I hope that this inadequacy will be taken care of in the next edition.

The writer is Professor in the faculty of Liberal Arts at the Beaconhouse National University, Lahore