What's in a name? The hidden history of Lahore's streets

Should rose smell as same when we call it by another name, asks William Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet. Toponymic politics has been the recipient of some attentions over the years. scholar Derek Alderman (2008) had argued that names of physical places are not merely geographical tags but "memorial arena".

Streets, thus, are "tombstones of living memory" telling us about how 'placelore' carries the stories, meanings, myths and emotional associations. In Punjab, the politics of street naming is no different where the battle of nomenclature reflects a deeper struggle. The recent decision by Punjab government under its Lahore Heritage Area Revival project to restore pre-partition names in Lahore is a move to showcase how diverse and pluralistic this region is.

Islampura is back to Krishan Nagar and Rehman Gali is once again Ram Gali, amidst public uproar. Tania Mairaj, in her onomastic study of Lahori Gate area (2019), stresses that place names are "core of the culture of Walled City" serving as "signposts of its history". The way Krishan Nagar is the part of intimate vocabulary of the city's residents, Islampura could never be the part of muscle memory.

This duality depicts a condition where residents remember even though the state narrative attempts to make them forget. The restoration drive is a forced reconciliation of city's official map with its folk memory; critics view it as soft power gambit. This is an attempt to project a more progressive, tolerant Punjab especially when it is the province where Basant was officially celebrated last year.

The Lahore debate is not just about signboards; it's a profound conflict over who has the authority to write the nation's history onto its very streets, and whose memory matters. The process of renaming, which begun during the partition, heightened during the Zia regime due to official nationalism designed to forge a singular, national identity based on Islam. Alderman would call it "spatial assertion of sovereign authority" aimed at creating singular national identity.

Streets like Queen's road were named Fatima Jinnah Road, and Lawrence Gardens became Bagh-e-Jinnah constructing a new national pantheon effectively getting rid of non-Muslim signifiers. The 1952 Lahore Municipal Corporation proposal to rename 76 roads including a proposal to change the name of Lahore to Dasht-e-Muhammad.