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A review by amoghsinha
Lahore in the Time of the Raj by Tahir Kamran, Ian Talbot
challenging
informative
slow-paced
2.5
This book read more like a thesis, and not a readable one at that. This book had so much potential. Instead of explaining the story and history of the city, it's mostly just a list of famous people and places who had some association with the city and it's boring. They barely spent a para or two on most people so you couldn't really care about the people as well.
While reading this book, all I could think about was the infinitely better stories that were waiting to be told had the authors narrowed their objective. The history of the walled cities, the works of the Ghadr party, the wrestling culture, and the connections Muslim revolutionaries made with 1920s Afghanistan and the Soviet Union were stories that in themselves would've been a great topic for a book. But all we got were snippets of each of them.
They also seem to use an admirable number of books as sources, as seen from its bibliography but at certain moments, it felt the authors picked the details of other books without the context so it felt a bit jarring, and while reading, I often thought how better it would've been to read one of the books mentioned in the bibliography.
That said, I did really like the history of the Ghadr party and it shines a new light on the freedom struggle from the POV of emigrants and also introduces absolutely eccentric but important and sadly forgotten freedom fighters. Also, this chapter was the least about Lahore so that may or may not be the reason behind my liking ;)
While reading this book, all I could think about was the infinitely better stories that were waiting to be told had the authors narrowed their objective. The history of the walled cities, the works of the Ghadr party, the wrestling culture, and the connections Muslim revolutionaries made with 1920s Afghanistan and the Soviet Union were stories that in themselves would've been a great topic for a book. But all we got were snippets of each of them.
They also seem to use an admirable number of books as sources, as seen from its bibliography but at certain moments, it felt the authors picked the details of other books without the context so it felt a bit jarring, and while reading, I often thought how better it would've been to read one of the books mentioned in the bibliography.
That said, I did really like the history of the Ghadr party and it shines a new light on the freedom struggle from the POV of emigrants and also introduces absolutely eccentric but important and sadly forgotten freedom fighters. Also, this chapter was the least about Lahore so that may or may not be the reason behind my liking ;)