Veiled behind long, thorny bushes and untrimmed grass, and surrounded by houses stacked onto one another, a four-sided domed kiosk showing faded red nanakshahi bricks casts a spell on those who wander into the streets of what once was a royal Mughal neighborhood in the north of Lahore. Its four archways invite towards multiple entry points, bemoaning a story forgotten to time.

Commonly referred to as the “unknown tomb”, some locals call it a mandir, while others think of it as a gumbad. What sounds like a paradox echoes the interwoven layers of Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh influences in Lahore. With no major architectural patterns left, it is difficult to discern its exact date and purpose of construction; a site for a historian’s conundrum.

Unlike most historical sites that remain walled off, their inner corners inaccessible to ordinary folk, this humble structure houses an ailing disabled person, whose neighbors pour household rubbish into the mandir/gumbad, despite being told not to do so several times by the authorities. People come inside, and without meeting the old man’s gaze, dump their trash. It does not stop here. People also steal his stuff.

Nonetheless, the old man thinks of this place as a castle, the only place that allows him residence because he cannot afford rent anymore. His wife used to work in people’s homes for the last fifteen to twenty years to pay rent. Now, she, too, had become too old to carry on the work. But his condition demanded he needed a room of his own, which their landlord did not allow. So the dumpster site near their rental house provided him with this roof. For him, this was God’s blessing, saving him from the wrath of the landlord. History did not evaporate from this place. It lives on, providing this old man with refuge.  

This mandir/gumbad is in Begumpura, a small neighborhood created during the time of Mughal suhbahdars of Lahore, first Nawab Abdul Samad Khan, and then later his son Nawab Zakaria Khan under Shah Jahan’s rule in the eighteenth century. It is believed to have been founded by Begum Jan, Zakaria Khan’s mother. This compound’s gateway has a curved roof pavilion that offers a small glimpse into the past where this walled complex, now a low-income neighborhood for migrated families of Partition, once hosted Mughal royals.

This old man residing inside is part of that history; engagement with the mandir/gumbad would be incomplete without including his experience. While local people do not know about the Nawab’s history so much, nor about the Mughal significance of this area, they remain part of a similar historical continuity. In fact, people’s rupture with the past is also a type of relation they share with it. This relationship is an important part of this area’s history as it unfolded, one that is considered only for the books, the armchair, the flaneurs, but remains severed for the common people, those who live it every day. The common folk perhaps have never had access to the same history because they have never received history like the ones writing it. The exclusive conditions made to understand and be a part of history barricade it off for the common folk.

There is another way to understand this rupture, by observing two types of silences: one silence created by the absence in the archive, the other silence created by the chaos of noise so loud and complex that it becomes difficult to hear. The mess of everyday is the second silence. Hence, this rupture can be a connecting thread to understanding a history so complex that it falls outside the range of our hearing frequency.

In fact, people’s rupture with the past is also a type of relation they share with it. 

A few streets across, towards the Begumpura gateway and near the Nawab’s Haveli, Lahore’s Khoji, a fitting title for the city’s local historian Faizan Naqvi, who has written and researched extensively on it, reveals that the graves of the Nawab’s family do not lie in the elaborate cemetery nearby, but are situated at the back side of the Haveli on the walkway. They remain without any gravestones or demarcations; people step onto them without knowing what lies underneath – a jolting metaphor for history.

History can fool us, and can even deceive those who spend long years engrossed in its power. Unlike the promise of the Enlightenment, while we might “dare to know”, our mortality means we cannot ever fully know. It is this acknowledgment that allows any genuine understanding. In other words, our limitation is our possibility.

History does not just speak to one person and close itself off for the rest. It is, in fact, spread out and reaches all. It moves constantly, always active and waiting for interpretation.

Located in the north of the Dai Anga Tomb in Begumpura, Saruwala Maqbara/Gumbad or Cyprus Tomb is the resting place of Begum Sharf-un-Nisa, the sister of Nawab Khan Bahadur, an Amir of Mughal Emperor Akbar. This place was built during her lifetime in the early eighteenth century. Begum Sharf-un-Nisa would come here every day, using a ladder to enter the room where she recited the Quran after her evening prayer. Following her recitations, she would go back to her home but would leave the Quran and her sword inside the Gumbad. She was also buried inside it along with her Quran and sword, as per her will.

Moved by Sharf-un-Nisa’s personality, Allama Iqbal wrote about her in Javid Nama: