An Ecological Shahr Ashob: Literature, Multispecies Loss, and Lahore's Environment

Abstract

This article argues that South Asian, and particularly Pakistani, vernacular literature constitutes an underused archive for writing the environmental history of Lahore and the wider Punjab. Reading across the marsiya tradition, Qur'anic and Hindu conceptions of the non-human animal, Saadat Hasan Manto's short fiction, Intizar Hussain's novels and essays, and Bapsi Sidhwa's The Crow Eaters, the paper traces how the retreat of animals from Lahore's urban core horses and cattle displaced by municipal ordinance, vultures lost to ecological collapse, songbirds silenced by concrete  registers in literary texts as a record of transformation that municipal and state archives do not preserve. Working within postcolonial ecocriticism, and following Ayesha Jalal's model of literature as historical source alongside David Gilmartin's and Richard Eaton's arguments about the ecological foundations of religious and national identity in the subcontinent, the paper proposes an ecological shahr ashob: a lament in which the fallen order is a multispecies civic arrangement rather than a dynasty. It argues that Lahore's animals have not simply declined but have been serially reorganised, and that literature is the only archive registering the reorganisation rather than merely the loss.

Keywords: Ecocriticism, Lahore, Urdu Literature, Animal Studies, Environmental History, Partition, Shahr Ashob, Intizar Hussain, Bapsi Sidhwa