All kinds of articles for use and ornament are made, such as shields and arms, betel-nut cutters, knives, boxes, plates, inkstands, and so on.

kotliloharan
"Kotli Loharan consists of two large villages of Lohars (ironsmiths) lying about .live miles {() the north-west of Sialkot. All kinds of articles for use and ornament are made, such as shields and arms, betel-nut cutters, knives, boxes, plates, inkstands, and so on. The material used is iron, and gold and silver are used in inlaying. . . . . The Lohars of these villages are now very well off (unlike what was reported by Mr. Kipling in the last Gazetteer

Sialkot

A great deal has changed in Sialkot as the years have passed. Many of the old landmarks are gone. Along with them, some eyesores have also disappeared. But there are fewer trees than there used to be and the roads are potholed, though an effort is now underway, partly with contributions from the local sports and surgical millionaires, to lay new roads, carpeted ones. After all, this is a city that earns Pakistan – or its business elite – money enough to declare war on Portugal and win it.

At first sight, the old city has not changed much, but if you look carefully, you find that it has been crumbling. The streets look narrower than they once were and given the almost vertical increase in numbers in the last twenty-five years, they are crowded at all times of day. Thanks to Gen. Zia-ul-Haq and his successors, the Fugitive Princess not excluded, the country is now beyond the point where the birth rate could be brought down, the dainty efforts of Ms Attiya Inayatullah, perennial minister for such things under all governments that come to office either by accident or design, notwithstanding.

No one has done anything about the open gutters, either. If the residents are lucky, they run but mostly they remain clogged. It is not a pretty sight; nor does it smell very nice. Last time I was in Sialkot, I went to look at Iqbal’s house, but I did not venture to climb the stairs to go up. For one thing, it was rather early in the morning. A friend who was with me and whose own home used to be in the next street recognised one of the men from the neighbourood. “You never come down from Lahore,” the man said to my friend. This being Sialkot and story-telling being one of the known local talents, he told us about a bunch of men he had come upon the other day, standing almost right where we now were. “They were looking up at the house.” Then one of them asked, “Is that Allama Iqbal’s home?’ “Why do you ask? Have you come to burn it down?” answered our friend.

There you have it. Vintage Sialkot.

The Sialkot of our boyhood is now a memory. It is a ravaged city, one of the dirtiest in the country, where few roads are whole and where dust rises from its once green earth. The hills of Jammu still glimmer in the distance on clear mornings but you would have to get out of the city to see them in their isolated beauty because the air is thick with smoke belched out by cars, factories and rickshaws. Most things have crumbled or appear to be crumbling. The feeling of decay and neglect is hard to escape. The residents no longer seem to notice. Truly has it been said that human beings would get used to anything. . Even those who are thrown into solitary confinement have spoken of having got used to the environment after some months. I suppose it is nature’s survival kit with which all of us are endowed.

Some years ago, my friend of college days Muhammad Rafiq, who has lived in England for over thirty years but travels to Sialkot more often than he cares to admit, wrote, “It is a small town of about 160,000 odd (very odd) souls and its length and breadth would give someone trying to swing a cat the biggest cramp in the neck; but it is the largest district in the country – resulting from the addition of Tehsil Shakargarh severed from the district of Gurdaspur at the time of Partition – so that the rail journey to cover its 140 kilometers end-to-end takes all of seven hours and more. It is only about 120 kilometers from the political capital but it has no direct rail link with it; one of the two circuitous routes covering the excruciating journey takes all of five hours. It is an important industrial centre and earns a sizable portion of revenue for the country’s coffers; and yet it has no airport (Zhob, of all places, has one), or a decent hotel for the visiting businessmen and cricketers. It has produced a religious scholar, Maulvi Ibrahim, who was an acknowledged world authority of Hadith, but it has no religious school or centre. Ant to crown it all, right smack in the middle of it all, squats the ugliest man-made structure one can ever witness anywhere on the face of the earth, a so-called fortress which an idiotic ruler built by scratching the earth from around this flat face of the earth … And yet incredibly, for over 2,000 years, the people of this town have walked round this atrocity.” But I am sure Rafiq does not mean all of what he has written. In the heart of his hearts, I have little doubt, back in the green English town where he lives, he must miss this “atrocity”, otherwise why would he come back as often as he does?

There is endless parroting of Iqbal’s name and how proud Sialkot is of its great son. I don’t believe a word of it, because were its people really proud of Iqbal and their city, they would do something to clean up its streets, cleanse its waters and make its air breathable again. If there is a city council, it is doing something else and if there is a health officer, he is probably in bed with one of the infections he must take some responsibility for spreading. Sialkot may never have been and wasn’t perhaps among Punjab’s most elegant cities but it was a highly livable one. It had clean and evenly paved roads where potholes were the exception rather than the rule. The roads were sprinkled with water and swept every morning around daybreak. The drains, open and uncovered though they were, and no Venetian canals by any means, were kept free of blockages. Traffic was regulated and even students took care not to ride their bikes without a light. The air was clean as was the water. Some said it was the sweetest in the Punjab and was only matched by the water of Peshawar. All that is now a memory.

But to go back to earlier times, Murray College it was where Muhammad Iqbal sat at the feet of the revered Maulvi Mir Hassan who taught Arabic and Persian. It is said that when a title was to be conferred on Iqbal, he said, “You should first honour my teacher.” Maulvi Mir Hassan was given the title of Shamsul Ulema. He indeed was the “sun of scholars”. Today, one sees all these fake, largely ignorant, unread and self-promoting Sheikhs and Maulanas and wonders where savants such as Maulvi Mir Hassan have gone. And how has the city honoured Iqbal? Just one example should suffice. The main roundabout is called Allama Iqbal Chowk but it is more popularly known as Drummaan wala Chowk because the roundabout is marked by upside down painted drums (unless they have been removed since I saw them last). In the middle stands an obelisk which used to have an eagle on top but it fell down during a dust storm which was just as well because according to Syed Nazir Hussain Shah, “It looked more like a kite than an eagle.” I am not sure if it has been put back on. One hopes not. The story is that it was supposed to be fashioned out of a precious metal but one of the deputy commissioners of the city felt that the precious metal should better remain with him rather than the bird.

There is a sign in Urdu next to the topless obelisk that warns against the sticking of handbills. However, such is the respect felt by the city dwellers for the Poet of the East that the base of the obelisk is covered by a hundred stickers. Some of them call for the “immediate implementation of Islam” (as if it was a martial law regulation), while others advocate the candidature of this or that person to this or that office. Commerce is not far behind because one finds posters recommending the magical properties of a certain soap, hair oil, herbal remedy for male inadequacy, incontinence or the “mistakes of early youth”. Iqbal lies dead eighty miles away in the city of Lahore, quite unmindful of what the city has done to itself and its residents in his name. No wonder, his son Javed Iqbal has never visited Sialkot in the last half century. One can see his point: Lahore is Lahore, but Sialkot is not what it should be.