Theorizing monuments

Theorizing monuments involves addressing their role for the nation-state and its functionaries, commemorating the past, present, and future. Minar-e-Pakistan memorializes the Lahore Resolution of 1940, the first significant public demand to establish Pakistan. Many modernist architects and planners in Pakistan, such as Murat Khan (the architect of Minar-e-Pakistan), disdained classical styles, such as the use of minarets, but still incorporated these aesthetics. In Monuments and Memory, Made, and Unmade, Robert Nelson and Margaret Olin explore the historical memory and making of nation-state monuments such as Minar-e-Pakistan. Instead of exploring the “rhetoric” and functioning processes of monuments, however, the authors ask, “How does the monument come into being? How does it serve to coalesce memory, both personal and corporate? Once created, how does the monument affect society?”Footnote ⁵ Nelson and Olin explore the dialectic between remembering and forgetting that subconsciously distorts the past and guides the present.

Another work that deals with similar questions in the context of nation-state projects is Andrew Ivaska’s Cultured States, which deconstructs the “imagined and real rupture” of decolonization in a study of Dar-es-Salaam, the capital of Tanzania, which became the contested site of Tanzanian nation-state cultural projects in the 1960s and 1970s. While located in disparate regional contexts, Pakistan and Tanzania both experienced decolonization and orchestrated their nation-state projects at similar times. Ivaska locates Tanzania’s cultural projects in the milieu of struggles that emerged when the nation-state intervened in citizen subjects’Footnote ⁶ “everyday lives.” In the 1960s, Pakistan, like Tanzania, acted as a “cultured state.” Both decolonized states imagined their respective nation-states through modern art and architecture in a postcolonial context. Ivaska’s analysis of debates about starting a university campus to train Tanzania’s future leaders is comparable to the establishment of national monuments, museums, and parks in Pakistan. In the more globalized context of decolonization, one can interpret debates about Pakistan and Tanzania as nation-state-making cultural projects.

In addition to scholarship by Nelson, Olin, and Ivaska, Chris Moffat’s research provides insight into constructing monuments. Focused on architectural history, Moffat offers a nuanced analysis of Pakistani architecture, addressing how narratives of loss and mourning, possibility and adaptability, animate architectural history in Pakistan.Footnote ⁷ Moffat analyzes how modernism and tradition inform Pakistan’s architectural history, noting how elites frequently favor modernist styles over traditional and how this preference excludes Pakistan’s less privileged populations. Moffat also stresses that such exclusions produce tensions that result in creative projects of possibility.Footnote ⁸ Similarly, this article is influenced by the writings of Pierre Nora and Walter Benjamin.Footnote ⁹ Nora’s work centers “sites of memory” that tend to be fractured, plural, commemorative, scripted, performative, and employ languages of emotions. In contrast, Benjamin analyzes the world of images through the lens of “cult value,” which is religious, selectively viewed, and distributed, as opposed to “exhibition value” or the mass commodified reproduction of images. These authors collectively point to how monuments have social, cultural, surveillance, and aesthetic purposes. Visitors often have specific “fantasies” about monuments, which, if not fulfilled, can cause these sites to lose value because they exist in contexts of sociocultural praxis. Such contexts are crucial to monuments’ existence. This article focuses on the iconic Minar-e-Pakistan, other monuments in the Greater Iqbal Park, and the Quaid Mausoleum in Karachi to fill a gap in the study of Pakistan by examining the nation-state’s techniques, processes of cultural production and distribution, and memorialization of monuments.

The early history of Minar-e-Pakistan

In 1909, Lord Minto, the Viceroy of British India, inaugurated the memorial park to himself in what had formerly been the Mughals’ Badami Bagh (the Almond Garden). The Minto Park included modern British amenities such as a swimming pool and football and cricket fields. In the Mughal era, Badami Bagh was a place for Muslim worshippers to rest after praying at the nearby Badshahi Mosque (Royal Mosque). This “empty” space joined Old City Lahore to the fort, creating a space for recreation and picnics for Lahori residents of all faiths. Indigenous sports, such as wrestling, historically thrived in the area.

In the 17th century, the Sikhs defeated the Mughals in Punjab and established their royal court and a temple adjacent to Lahore Fort, using Badami Bagh as a ceremonial space. After the 1849 British defeat of the Sikhs, the British stationed their army in the Lahore Fort and renamed Badami Bagh as Parade Ground, using the area for drills, military displays, and as a political space for rallies and industrial exhibits. As part of their broader political and civilizational project in South Asia, the British transformed Parade Ground’s symbolic and sacred geography by renaming it Minto Park and establishing sports facilities in 1909.

After independence from Britain, the Pakistani state renamed Minto Park as Iqbal Park. In its new postcolonial iteration, the park was located at proximity to the mausoleum of the nationalist poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal, strategically located at the Lahore Fort gate.Footnote ¹⁰ The mausoleum memorialized Iqbal as a key Muslim League leader responsible for imagining the nation-state of Pakistan during the first half of the 20th century and stands at the well-known site of the Lahore Resolution, which demanded the creation of Pakistan for the first time on 23 March 1940. Muhammad Iqbal passed away in 1938 and funds for building the mausoleum came from members of the Muslim League and the Unionist Party, both critical political parties in Punjab. The Muslim League also used this fundraising as a coalition-building strategy to enhance its influence in Punjab.Footnote ¹¹ It could use the influence to win the next elections. The renaming of Minto Park to Iqbal Park in 1947 represented an act of decolonization; a triumphal gesture to celebrate the newly independent nation-state of Pakistan.

Debating Minar-e-Pakistan

In the 1950s, after independence, the Pakistani nation-state spent much effort settling and distributing property among displaced refugees as a result of the division of its two most populous provinces: Punjab and Bengal. Similarly, to counter threats of war from India, Pakistan prioritized military infrastructure spending over resources for civilians. This spending priority furthered an emerging military-civilian imbalance in Pakistan, eventually leading to the declaration of martial law by General Ayub Khan, who declared himself president in 1958. Ayub Khan utilized memorialization projects to legitimize his undemocratic takeover and ease the trauma of Partition. In 1958, he formed the National Monument Planning Committee to oversee the construction of a national monument to commemorate the Lahore Resolution.Footnote ¹² The planning committee held a competition for designing the monument, but this did not yield conclusive results. Subsequently, the committee approached a government architect in the Public Works Department, Nasreddin Murat Khan, who migrated to Pakistan as a result of marriage. Born in 1904 in Dagestan, Murat Khan was a subject of the Russian Empire by birth. He received his professional training at the University of Leningrad and was member of the Union of Soviet Architects, to which he received a membership card in 1940 (although the card verified his membership from 1937). As part of Stalin’s purges, Murat Khan was arrested in Leningrad and transferred to the Caucasus to work on development projects. Immediately after World War II, he moved to Germany and enrolled in a camp in Mittenwald for displaced persons under the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. While working as an architect and engineer at the camp, he met and married a Turkish woman of Pakistani and Austrian descent (Figure 1), creating the possibility for this displaced family to move to the newly established nation-state of Pakistan. When Murat Khan applied for citizenship, he proved his links to Pakistan through documents that included his professional qualifications and his father-in-law’s Pakistani citizenship. In a letter dated 25 May 1959, the committee invited Murat Khan to present plans for the monument.Footnote ¹³ Murat Khan also donated his salary for designing the monument to the Pakistani government as a gift to his newly adopted homeland.Footnote ¹⁴

Figure 1.

Murat Khan with his family outside the minar (Vintage Pakistan).

After selecting Murat Khan’s plan for a minar (tower), Ayub Khan placed the foundation stone on 23 March 1960. Following the ceremony, the construction of Minar-e-Pakistan began. In 1964, however, construction was stalled due to lack of funds, as the committee’s attempts to garner support from business and entrepreneurial leaders failed to produce the necessary sums. Politicians also opposed a public funding bill, as they viewed the project as symbolic of Ayub Khan’s undemocratic rule and deemed the construction of Minar-e-Pakistan as illegitimate.Footnote ¹⁵

Even supporters who acknowledged the monument commemorating a significant Pakistani nation-state event considered collecting public funds for it, by taxing cinemas and racecourses, problematic. One politician declared: “Posterity will judge us if we pass this [funding] bill.”Footnote ¹⁶ Some cinemas and racecourses, introduced by the British, were deemed “un-Islamic” institutions. Critics maintained that cinemas and other entertainment venues also objectified female bodies. Similarly, gambling at racecourses was “un-Islamic,” and commemorating the Lahore Resolution, with its “sacred” and “Islamic” ideals, should not be done with “un-Islamic” financial support. A chief opponent of the public funding bill, Mian Abdul-Lateef, member of the Provincial Assembly, argued that the ideology advocated by Pakistan’s founders had yet to be upheld. As a result, Minar-e-Pakistan was not an ideal way to represent an Islamic state: “The pillars of stone and brick cannot convey the ‘high’ ideals and foundations of the Pakistani nation-state.”Footnote ¹⁷ While the Minar-e-Pakistan project was described as a futile attempt to represent the “unrepresentable,” debates raised questions about whether and how to memorialize an Islamic nation-state. One politician pointed out: “Memorials represent memories of the past, and the state of Pakistan was itself the living monument.”Footnote ¹⁸ Historical examples cited by Abdul-Lateef, among others, included two South Asian Muslim emperors: Qutb-ud-Din Aibak and the Qutb Minar, from the 12th-century Delhi Sultanate, and the Mughal Emperor Jehangir and his 17th-century Sheikhupura Minar. Abdul-Lateef generally dismissed these examples, as he interpreted the goals of the two monuments (a victory tower and memorial for Jehangir’s pet deer) as secular and selfish rather than Islamic.

Interestingly, debates about Minar-e-Pakistan also included references to the Lincoln Memorial in the United States. Such references reflect how local monument-building could be interpreted through global processes as well as illustrate politicians’ anxiety with the emerging and close alliance between Ayub Khan and the United States. Pakistan joined the Cold War as a member of Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) and Central Treaty Organization (CENTO) in the 1950s, accepting financial aid from the United States for industrialization and modernization. Another example of the Pakistan-United States collaboration is the Harvard Advisory Group and Ford Foundation, which planned and designed industrial towns on the outskirts of Karachi (the capital of Pakistan in the 1960s).Footnote ¹⁹ Within the context of the costs for such development projects, politicians complained about a lack of funds and suggested public funding for Minar-e-Pakistan equated to mismanagement.Footnote ²⁰ While the two million dollars needed for Minar-e-Pakistan was meager compared to other projects, Ayub Khan still received criticism. Critics pointed out that, because of the developing nature of the young Pakistani nation-state, it had already burdened itself with debt and demands to publicly fund the monument were extravagant and frivolous. When framed as an attraction, politicians declared that Pakistan’s debt-ridden and newly decolonized nation-state did not need “touristy” monuments.Footnote ²¹

Staging Minar-e-Pakistan

Murat Khan submitted three plans for the proposed monument, but Ayub Khan and the monument committee picked the one that most resembled the Islamic-style tower known as a minar (Figure 2 showcases one of the plans proposed by Murat Khan). Not only was this plan the cheapest, but the committee also thought it would resonate with the public due to the ubiquity of existing minarets in Pakistan. In the medieval Islamic world, minars emerged as an Islamic architectural practice frequently connected to mosques, mausoleums, and palaces. Depending on the site, minars functioned for prayers by a muezzin (the person responsible for prayers), capital punishment, road distance markers, and light displays on religious and royal holidays.Footnote ²² The proposed plan for Minar-e-Pakistan, as a stand-alone tower, reflected the dilemma of linking the old and the new. As much as they may have wanted to, planners could not choose a monument form unfamiliar to the region’s aesthetics. Debates referencing the Qutb Minar and Hiran Minar also showcase their anxiety around the possibility that Minar-e-Pakistan was too “secular.”

Figure 2.

One of the minar plans proposed by Murat Khan (Google Arts & Culture).

Throughout the 1960s, Minar-e-Pakistan was introduced via English and Urdu daily newspapers. On national holidays, special commemorative newspaper sections depicted the monument’s stages of construction, including depictions of the minar under construction (Figure 3). Minar-e-Pakistan’s detailed significance, countless photographs, and multiple hoisting of flag ceremonies before its completion served as didactic techniques of commemorative nation-state practices embraced by the press. Sensational stories even advertised its panoramic views at 120 meters, where citizens could experience the “freedom” the new nation-state granted them. However, not everyone shared in the celebration of the picturesque landscapes experienced at Minar-e-Pakistan. On 5 July 1968, Kam, from Lahore, wrote in the “Letters to the Editor” section:

Figure 3.

Minar-e-Pakistan under construction. Photo Archives of Pakistan.

I have great regard for memorials, but in a developing country like ours, had there been a Pakistan Day memorial hospital, university, college, home for the destitute, prostitutes, and the invalid, or a residential colony for the poor, we would have derived much greater benefit than from the present memorial. We cannot afford the luxury of concrete pillars and towers.Footnote ²³

Alongside echoing politicians’ concerns, Kam also contextualized his apprehension as a worry for “prostitutes” by narrating an eyewitness account of a parade of them in the red-light district of Old Lahore. In this critical public voice, the connection drawn between seemingly disparate public displays—commemorative ceremonies and prostitute parades—stands out, highlighting that memorials should be sites for social services, where public resources get distributed, rather than public displays of power. Similarly, representations of memorials in the press conceptualized the construction of the new capital, “Islamabad,” as a monument to the new nation-state’s self-actualization. In this interpretation, two similar memorializing projects were compared: one constructing older memories as a memorial, like Minar-e-Pakistan, and the other building new foundations in areas with no memories, like the new capital of Islamabad.

Like the new capital, insistence on establishing a museum at Minar-e-Pakistan should be read as the nation-state’s search for new spaces to define itself. This fact is evident in a newspaper report that appeared after the opening of Minar-e-Pakistan entitled “Can the Monument Speak?”Footnote ²⁴ The article discusses, in detail, a governmental report expressing pessimism about the monument’s ability to effectively communicate the significance of national memories to the Pakistani public. Establishing an on-site museum would ensure the monument’s didactic role, and such a space could also celebrate Ayub Khan’s development of Pakistan. Like several other monuments, museums, and memorial parks in Lahore, Islamabad, Karachi, and Dhaka, Minar-e-Pakistan could commemorate Pakistan’s modernization successes. Like Islamabad, it too could reflect the new nation-state of Pakistan. This nation-state, its sponsorship, and its attempts to attract citizens could unite and animate memorials, monuments, and museums in Pakistan, commemorating selective episodes of history while celebrating events, personalities, and places.

Comparisons: the Quaid-e-Azam mausoleum and Wazir and Ziarat mansions

The 1960s was an important era in the Pakistani state’s construction of monuments in the major cities of West and East Pakistan. Alongside the foundation and construction of Minar-e-Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s grave was also transformed into a mausoleum as part of Ayub Khan’s broader memorialization project. Although Pakistan’s founder was dead and his body long buried, the nation-state generated institutional practices to govern and manage populations by classifying bodies (dead or alive).Footnote ²⁵ As such, the Quaid-e-Azam mausoleum, like Minar-e-Pakistan, illuminates the functioning of nation-state power.

However, while Minar-e-Pakistan commemorated a national event, the Quaid-e-Azam mausoleum memorialized the death of the nation-state’s founder. Both monuments—initiated by Ayub Khan in the 1960s, as Pakistan emerged from a decade of reflection on being a postcolonial nation-state—helped the Pakistani public visualize and imagine the narrative of a nation-state. Like the location of Minar-e-Pakistan, the British also called the site of the Quaid-e-Azam mausoleum “Parade Ground.” It was strategically located at the highest vantage point in Karachi, where the British could have a panoptic view of the city. As the name indicates, the area also served as a place for British military drills.

Muhammad Ali Jinnah—the founder and first Governor General of Pakistan—died in 1948, a year after the birth of the new nation-state. Millions attended his funeral, and his dead body was paraded to Karachi’s highest point in a procession. This commemorative event allowed the grieving nation-state to unite through a burial ceremony. The Parade Ground choice was also a strategic one by pragmatic nation-state actors, ensuring a vast enough space to gather and organize millions of Pakistanis. After Ayub Khan took over in 1958, he laid the foundation stone of the Quaid-e-Azam mausoleum in 1960. Jinnah’s sister, Fatima Jinnah, was consulted in choosing a plan for the mausoleum. Although modernist design, an Islamic dome—a familiar regional aesthetic—was also selected to communicate with the public’s sensibilities. From the planners’ perspective, the Quaid-e-Azam mausoleum, as a national monument, differed from its Muslim predecessors. The plan included an on-site museum (like at Minar-e-Pakistan) for displaying Jinnah’s belongings. It would also incorporate the graves of Jinnah’s sister and other political leaders.

In 1973, the Pakistani government established the National Book Foundation, which published national histories and educational materials at a subsidized rate. Like in the 1960s, when the government taxed the public to construct Minar-e-Pakistan, in the 1970s, the government subsidized books and photo albums in order to disseminate knowledge about the nation-state and make monuments better tourist attractions. One good example is the National Book Foundation photo album, The Quaid-e-Azam Mausoleum in Pictures.Footnote ²⁶ Rather than merely presenting the mausoleum to promote nation-state legitimacy, the album contains posed photographs aimed at making national bodies legible through classification. The album’s black and white pictures are divided into multiple sections: “Visitors,” “Exterior,” “Guards,” “Mausoleum,” “Ceremonials,” “Relics,” and “Graves.” In the “Visitors” section, most photographs represent children, except for one of a senior couple. These photographs divide and classify young bodies from older ones. The photograph depicting the body of a young girl taking off her shoes on the stairs of the mausoleum (Figure 4) represents the site within the realm of sacred spaces. The caption beside the photograph reads: “A young visitor respectfully removes her sandals.”Footnote ²⁷ Besides depicting disciplinary practices, the photograph guides visiting nation-state citizens on “performing” tourism appropriately. Now familiar to visitors, this performance links to disciplinary regimes in sacred spaces, such as mosques and Sufi shrines, where worshippers remove their shoes out of respect.

Figure 4.

A young visitor at the mausoleum. Quaid-e-Azam Mausoleum in Pictures.

The photograph depicting a guard at the mausoleum (Figure 5) showcases the disciplinary mechanism, as it divides and makes bodies visible through a central surveillance spot constantly monitoring the movement of bodies. This mechanism also functions through the self-regulation of bodies due to fear of the omnipresent gaze. The setting of the mausoleum gives it a panoptic character. The guard also constantly monitors visitors based on his focal location. Visitors self-regulate themselves due to their visible bodies in the asymmetric mausoleum, preventing the possibility of being rendered invisible. Discipline at the Quaid-e-Azam mausoleum is generative due to the relational power between visitors and guards in uniform, further enhanced by an architectural setting that divides and makes bodies visible as objects and subjects of surveillance.

Figure 5.

Photograph depicting a guard at the mausoleum. Quaid-e-Azam Mausoleum in Pictures.

While prisons, schools, hospitals, and asylums are centers of surveillance, I read the Quaid-e-Azam mausoleum as a nation-state surveillance regime. The photo album demonstrates this mechanism. Enacted and subsidized by the National Book Foundation, the photographs showcase the use of personal memories projected onto the canvas of the nation-state. While the first two photographs represent the historical role of the nation-state in building a body of citizens, others showcase citizens’ architectural memories. The aim is to utilize different actors’ memories and contrast nation-state didacticism and authority (in the form of police guards) with citizens who are incorporated into images of the monument in their everyday lives. Images of monuments on photographs, paintings, and car number plates become representative sites of aesthetic practices that the nation-state’s construction of monuments enables; the process also allows a world of possibilities.

While the Quaid-e-Azam mausoleum memorialized the death of the nation-state’s founder, the Wazir and Ziarat mansions, the official house and summerhouse of Muhammad Ali Jinnah where he died, were converted into museums. They contained the personal archive of Muhammad Ali Jinnah and were opened to the public to educate citizens about the life of Pakistan’s founder. In 2013, two extremists detonated bombs in the Ziarat Mansion, located at the hill station of Ziyarat, about 300 miles from Karachi. While the house remained intact, the archive, library, and exhibition rooms were heavily damaged. According to reports, the attack ruined or destroyed unique photographs. In the context of terrorism, the nation-state has since doubled its surveillance apparatus at other sites of memory, including placing barbed wire around Minar-e-Pakistan and the Quaid-e-Azam mausoleum and closing the two monuments to the public. This example shows how monuments are not isolated sites, but instead belong to a more extensive nation-state regime of memorialization. It illustrates how occurrences at one memorial site can impact other monuments as well as showcases the fragile nature of memories and how traces can be erased. Similarly, this example illustrates the limits of the desire for a “tourist” nation-state and its consumers. The nation-state owns the memorial sites, including Minar-e-Pakistan, the Quaid-e-Azam mausoleum, and Wazir and Ziarat mansions, and approaches them as property; one good example of this phenomenon is the construction the Greater Iqbal Park Project in Lahore. The state’s rigid nationalist policy, quite apparent in the Greater Iqbal Park Project, is what unites these monuments and memorialization projects.

The Greater Iqbal Park Project and its memorialization

Minar-e-Pakistan opened its gates to the public in 1968. The park was open to the visitors without tickets; Iqbal Park was not a gated park. The residents of Old Lahore used to escape from their congested alleys to picnic at Iqbal Park and, in the five decades after the construction of Minar-e-Pakistan, youth were frequently found playing cricket in the park. The park was also used for political rallies, and foreign dignitaries were often taken to the monument to mark relations between the two countries; for example, the visit of Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee in 1999. At times, the park fell into despair and became a ruined site due to state neglect.

Iqbal Park’s symbolic and material significance led the Nawaz Sharif government to expand and develop it into a mega-park, inaugurating the over 125-acre Greater Iqbal Park on 17 December 2016. A project of the Lahore Development Authority (a public-private conglomeration of the Lahore Parks Authority), Greater Iqbal Park symbolizes the latest manifestation of the Pakistani nation-state. In its new expanded form, the ambitious park incorporates seemingly disparate memorials, mausoleums, playgrounds, and landscapes near the historic Mughal-era Lahore Fort and Badshahi Mosque. The park’s new features include a soft rail track (i.e., buggy track), a carriage track, an on-site museum, an auditorium, a library, food courts, an open-air gym, new memorial monuments, and an artificial lake with dancing fountains. Incorporating dancing fountains for commemorative holidays showcases the nation-state’s ongoing priority of inventing new ways to communicate with the public. Increasingly, the state evokes sensorial registers to communicate and connect. What is different about the park’s new Minar-e-Pakistan museum is that it is a collaboration between the nation-state and the Citizens Archive of Pakistan, a non-profit established in 2008 to collect oral histories. Besides offering an aural experience to visitors, the collaboration showcases civil society’s shifting involvement in Pakistan’s memorial projects.

The highlight of the Greater Iqbal Park opening ceremony was a spectacular fireworks display at Minar-e-Pakistan and fountains dancing to Pakistan’s national anthem. This new iteration of the memorial emerged as part of a nationwide commemoration of Pakistan’s 70th anniversary. The new park also includes the grave of Hafeez Jalandari, the composer of Pakistan’s national anthem. In the 1990s, the nation-state shifted Jalandari’s resting place from his hometown to Iqbal Park, near Minar-e-Pakistan, but renovations by the Greater Iqbal Park project fully incorporated Jalandari’s grave into it the park (along with security guards). The tomb is now a tourist location where the buggy track stops. During the park’s inauguration, Prime Minister Sharif declared: “We should post a sign in the park that it is not a place to hold sit-ins, as protestors are often on the lookout for such venues.”Footnote ²⁸ This statement makes visible a tension inherent in the idea of a “national memorial park” as it evolved in postcolonial Pakistan, one that entails decoupling nation-state sites of memory from their use as sites of protest. The statement also reflects political anxiety about controlling the protestors who contested Sharif’s premiership.

The Greater Iqbal Park Project can be theorized and analyzed using Pierre Nora’s framework. In the aftermath of World War II, the unified and cohesive narrative of western progress lost meaning and potency. Nora theorizes that only fractured and dispersed memories remained at sites of memory. As he asserts:

Following Nora’s theorization, I identify three sites of memory: the Minar-e-Pakistan monument, the Jafeez Jalandari mausoleum, and the National History Museum, all in Greater Iqbal Park.

In the case of the Minar-e-Pakistan monument, the script offered to visitors (in the form of inscriptions) includes the Lahore Resolution in English, Urdu, and Bengali. The national monument does not represent other Pakistani languages, such as Pushto, Sindhi, and Balochi. The fractured memory at the site exists in the form of the separation of Bangladesh from West Pakistan. Even though the script points to the existence of East Pakistan, by incorporating the language, Bengali, East Pakistan became Bangladesh in 1971. Decades divide the event of 1940 from its commemoration and hence the fractured element of the memory. The process of memory at the site includes plural memories as experienced by those who witnessed the Lahore Resolution. Such a “sites of memory” framework centers locations as repetitive/commemorative, scripted, performative, and employing languages of emotion. The site’s repetitive/commemorative element is represented by the declaration of 23 March as a national holiday commemorating the passage of the Lahore Resolution, in which the idea of Pakistan was first proposed. The scripted element is represented by the inscriptions in three languages. Besides these texts, other inscriptions include Allah’s names and Muhammad Iqbal’s poetry. The names represent the creation of Pakistan based on religion, and this assertion connects visitors to its religious script. The site is performative, as visitors are expected to engage with the scripts offered. Visitors fluent in the national languages perform by reading the scripts. Finally, visitors connect with the site by embracing the language of emotion manifested in the poetry of Muhammad Iqbal, which moves visitors through its message of hope and revival.

In the case of the Hafeez Jalandari mausoleum, the site’s memory is fractured by the grave’s relocation from its original place in the Gulberg neighborhood of Lahore. The process of memory at the site includes plural memories as experienced by those who witnessed the burial and reburial of Hafeez Jalandari. The site of the mausoleum is repetitive/commemorative, as it commemorates the death of the poet/writer of the national anthem. The scripted element of the site is represented by the playing of the national anthem each evening closer to the mausoleum; a script that connects with visitors who have memorized the anthem in their national training at schools, colleges, universities, national events, and institutions. The inscription of Hafeez Jalandari’s name on his grave establishes him as a critical figure in the pantheon of national genealogy. The site is performative: those who visit the mausoleum recite Surah al-Fatiha, connect with the inscription on his grave, or indulge in the sensorial experience of the national anthem and dancing fountain. The site employs the languages of emotion, as the death of the national figure evokes sadness and grief but gestures that his legacy lives on, as represented by the national anthem he composed.

The National History Museum is a third site of memory in Greater Iqbal Park, curated by the Citizens Archive of Pakistan. The museum’s exhibit on Partition represents fractured memory at this site. Partition and its ensuing violence resulted in the fracturing of the uninterrupted narrative of the Pakistan movement. As represented by exhibits on Partition and the creation of Pakistan, memories of Pakistan’s creation are plural. All exhibits present the repetitive/commemorative element, as they commemorate Partition, the creation of Pakistan, and the roles of nation-state founders. The scripts employed include interacting with the oral archive of Partition. Though three partitions took place in 1947 (i.e., Punjab, Kashmir, and Bengal), only voices from Punjab are included. A highlight of the oral archive includes the representation of female voices and survivors. Visitors can also take pictures with a photograph of Muhammad Ali Jinnah; this script includes a photographic element and showcases hero-worship. Through taking photographs, visitors venerate the most crucial figure of the Pakistan movement. Other scripts include interacting with exhibits on the history of the subcontinent. The museum’s performative element includes not only taking pictures with a Jinnah photograph but also interacting with the oral archive through audible means and the documentary archive and photographs through visual means. The exhibits employ languages of emotion, as visitors interact with an archive of Partition through sadness, horror, fear, and resilience. The exhibit on Partition becomes a site of mourning, while those such as “Founders of Pakistan” and “History of the Subcontinent” evoke happiness and anticipation.

The first and second sites commemorate events, while the third combines a bricolage of events, histories, national genealogies of critical figures, and individual and collective memories. What unites these sites of memory is the fact that even though the unified and totalized memory of events is constructed, the sites and their memories are experienced partially by visitors. As there has been decades of time between the events and their commemoration in the present moment, the current memory is fractured, emerging as a prosthetic memory, due to the events impacting its history. The first two sites do not include women’s voices or representations, while the third site (the museum) includes female figures, such as Fatima Jinnah, and women’s voices from Partition. All three sites have their own distinct histories and identities (a reason why they make a good ride on the buggy track). The memorial park’s setting assumes the uninterrupted narrative of the sites present there, creating a unified experience for visitors. However, the sites’ imagined claims to national genealogy and commemoration of events, people, and experiences within the nation-state framework is what unites them. The state tried to create a “master narrative” by establishing monuments, memorials, mausoleums, and museums, which were fractured by the student revolt of 1968–1969 and the creation of Bangladesh. As Ali Usman Qasmi points out, the “master narrative” of the history of Pakistan was created in the 1960s, when the Pakistani state hired professional historians to write histories and create narratives of the Pakistani nation-state.Footnote ³⁰ Histories were also written by imposing structures onto the political landscape.

Death and commemoration

Incorporating Hafeez Jalandari’s grave into Greater Iqbal Park memorializes the death of the composer of the nation-state’s national anthem. Similarly, on 22 November 2020, the massive funeral of Khadim Hussain Rizvi, leader of Tehreek-i- Labbaik Pakistan Party, took place at Greater Iqbal Park in front of Minar-e-Pakistan. Thousands of mourners attended the event.Footnote ³¹ Seemingly different events—the move of Jaladari’s body and Rizvi’s funeral—are similar in commemorating death at the site of a monument, which has a long history in Pakistan. The moving of Hafeez Jalandari’s body from Model Town to Greater Iqbal Park is, in the context of dead-body politics, a retrieval of “memory.” Historically, revisiting a body being moved retrieves memory and points to how monuments differ from graves: the latter are above ground, while graves are below. This difference applies to Greater Iqbal Park, which, in its new iteration, incorporates monuments, museums, and fountains above ground, while Hafeez Jalandari’s grave is located below ground. As Katherine Verdery writes in The Political Lives of Dead Bodies: “And I see the rewriting of history that is obviously central to dead-body politics as part of a larger process whereby fundamental changes are occurring in conceptions of time itself; these are the kinds of things I mean when I speak of analytically enlivening or enchanting politics.”Footnote ³² Jalandari’s grave in Greater Iqbal Park animates visitors, as it is a stop on their buggy ride and reminds them of the poet/composer of the national anthem, placing Hafeez Jalandari in the national genealogy of figures to be memorialized and remembered. A dead body is not in itself significant, but how it is culturally constructed and the importance of its construction is important. By placing Hafeez Jalandari’s dead body in the memorial complex, the body’s significance to the nation-state is increased, culturally constructed through reburial and by placing it on a buggy stop. In other words, the reburial attempts to reorder visitors’ world and sense of space and time.

The reburial was also an attempt to mark Hafeez Jalandari as a “cultural treasure.” His reburial and incorporation in Greater Iqbal Park makes it a site from which he will protect and preserve the nation. As Verdery posits: “On this reading, to rebury a dead person is not simply to reassess his place in history; it is to revise national genealogies, inserting the person as an ancestor more centrally into the lineage of honored forebears.”Footnote ³³ Hafeez Jalandari’s reburial was thus an attempt to incorporate him into a national genealogy that also included other national leaders, such as Muhammad Iqbal. Such sites should be considered emotional, as they induce grief, loss, and happiness. This memorialization illustrates how dead bodies, such as that of Hafeez Jalandari, have afterlives that highlight how nations never die but are always ongoing projects.

Photography, historical memory, and the visitors’ icon

As represented in the photographs of the minar and mausoleum, black and white photographic images were a tool to bridge history and memory. In Jay Winter’s study of memory and World War I, the photographs are images, but once situated within the milieu of the photographer, they reveal and preserve a 20th-century visual culture of remembrance.Footnote ³⁴ Thus, photography freezes time and marks the process of memory, as its images, in time, serve as sources for proof marking events, people, and places that can be later retrieved for different purposes. In the case of Pakistan, photographs of the Greater Iqbal Park monuments were appropriated as postcards, postal stamps, and posters. In addition to such memorabilia, monuments such as Minar-e-Pakistan (and the Quaid mausoleum in Karachi) appear in street art. A contemporary and interesting example includes a student-painted mural on the city walls of Lahore.Footnote ³⁵ The students’ composite depiction of Minar-e-Pakistan with other monuments also offers a glimpse into the nationalist curriculum of many Pakistani schools. Other contemporary examples depicting the minar include one on the back of a truck and a car number plate.

Minar-e-Pakistan stands out in terms of the proliferation and remembrance of its image. Ubiquitous mobile minars (such as those on cars and trucks) are incorporated by the public in their everyday lives, and the widespread consumption of these minars reflects their aesthetic power. This power can be theorized by distinguishing between “cult value” and “exhibition value.”Footnote ³⁶ Cultic value refers to the tension between the value of religious images and the exhibition value of secular images reproduced for public consumption. The exhibition value of Minar-e-Pakistan is manifested by public art, truck art, and car number plates that supersede other sites of memory—consumers reproduce its image without religiously ritualizing the minar itself. Historically, minars appear at religious worship sites, but the secular/religious nature of Minar-e-Pakistan oscillates between its cult and exhibition values. As a nation-state icon, Minar-e-Pakistan has religious elements represented by the presence of the names of Allah inscribed at the site, centering the fact that Pakistan was created based on religion. Regarding the quantification of commodification of images, Kajri Jain asserts:

Jain makes a convincing case for the quantification of images due to a commodification that oscillates between cult and exhibition value. Replicas of Minar-e-Pakistan have multiplied over time in different neighborhoods of Lahore (e.g., Defense and Bahria Town), along with other increasingly widespread mundane appearances. This multiplicity of quantification can also gesture to the centrality of Minar-e-Pakistan’s statistics, which, at the height of seventy meters (230 feet), creates an aura for its visitors. The state also augments such aura by restricting access to Minar-e-Pakistan and similar sites through the use of barbwire, not allowing applications by political parties wishing to hold rallies or funerals, and charging entry fees. Such sites are now more part of a gated community than a park: before the development of the Greater Iqbal Park Project, spaces were accessible to the public without gates and tickets. This change, despite Minar-e-Pakistan mostly lying in the orbit of “exhibition value” by allowing public access, permits the state to behave like gatekeeper priests, restricting people’s access.

Coda

After the 2013 elections, many middle-class youth who were part of a newer political party, Tehreek-i-Insaf (Movement of Justice), held dharnas (demonstrations/sit-ins) advocating for accountability in Pakistani politics. A new development of these protests was the tremendous visibility of girls and women and the accompaniment of dance and popular music, historically repressed in Pakistan. Using Minar-e-Pakistan as a site for mass protests, rallies, and dance performances seemed revolutionary to this new generation. However, people also used the monument’s location to host political rallies during the colonial period, e.g., the historic Lahore Resolution rally in 1940. Conventionally, the Minar-e-Pakistan monument has represented a site for celebrating and staging national holidays in Pakistan; its celebratory and sentimental memory can thus erase its contentious history.

On 9 February 2022, the Progressive Students Collective and Progressive Youth Alliance protested the ban on student unions in front of the Punjab Assembly. The government refused to negotiate on this issue. In retaliation, the students held a dharna outside the Punjab Assembly, building a camp decorated with red carpets, blankets, cushions, and the banner of Bhagat Singh, a young revolutionary involved in the anti-colonial movement against the British. The sit-in lasted for two weeks to abolish the thirty-eight-year ban on student unions. During this time, poets, intellectuals, and activists discussed the history of student politics and the urgent need to embrace emancipatory and liberatory politics. The sit-in took place at Faisal Chowk (formerly Charing Cross), which stands at the intersection of the Punjab Assembly and Summit Minar, the latter of which commemorates the 1974 Organization of Islamic Countries conference in which thirty-eight Muslim countries participated. As Chris Moffat points out in “Third World Historical: View of Summit Minar, Lahore, Pakistan,” the Summit Minar showcases a “postcolonial intervention” in colonial space.Footnote ³⁸ The use of a symbolic and postcolonial space, with monuments and monumental buildings, for making political demands is striking. As these examples illustrate, these monumental sites are frequently used as protest sites. In the winter of 2014, I visited Minar-e-Pakistan. At that time, the Greater Iqbal Park Project had not yet started. Due to the 2014 Army School massacre, barbed wire was around the minar. Despite this, however, families were still picnicking in the park and, at that time, there was no visitor entrance fee. This visit made me reflect on what might propel visitors to sites of memory and, like in this article, reflect more deeply on them.

National monuments, memorials, and museums are understudied in Pakistan. Memorialization projects are too often considered everyday sites with no impact on society or too inconsequential. This article begins to fill this gap in the research. The processes of monument-building analyzed in this article involve both construction and reception. While the nation-state wants to allure its citizens through didacticism, citizens have developed several uses for monuments that challenge the nation-state through pleas to politicians and the press. Nation-state memorialization projects are works in progress. The recent renovations of the Greater Iqbal Park Project and the construction of the Pakistan Monument and Museum in Islamabad under General Musharaf’s government—completed in 2007—reflect this insight in their attempts to complete unfinished plans first envisioned in the 1960s. This article has argued for a critical approach to studying cultural heritage and commemorative practices by highlighting the multifaceted processes of memorializing the Pakistani nation-state, particularly the roles of different actors in this collective process.