Primary Materials: Reading Lahore's Disobedient Landscape

Raw Materials as Archives of Improvement

On January 20, 1864, the Punjab Exhibition of Arts and Industry opened in a rapidly constructed single-story gable-roof wooden building in the neighborhood of Anarkali in Lahore. Beneath its ceiling of wooden trusses and rafter beams, the exhibition halls contained an impressive presentation of local products acquired from different districts of the Punjab. Although it was officially called the Punjab Exhibition of Arts and Industry, alongside its display of crafts, manufactured products, and machinery was a wide selection of raw materials including metals, minerals, wool, silks, as well as "products of the vegetable kingdom" such as tea, spices, medicinal plants, grains, and specimens of fruit and vegetables. Some had been gathered from Punjabi farmers and merchants, others sent by European cultivators, amateur gardeners, and botanists from across India.¹ Besides enlisting these materials into the growing repository of official knowledge about India, the curators understood their work as part of the state's agenda to bring Punjab—still the new province of Britain's empire in India, despite having come under company rule in 1849—into the fold of the central administration. In searching out, classifying, and systematically displaying these specimens gathered from around the province, the exhibition aimed to provide "a great stimulus" for local farmers and to help drive efforts to improve the region's resources.² Improvement, in this context, built on a longer history of reorganizing and revaluing land and resources through the enclosure of agrarian spaces and agricultural development, botanical research, and urban and sanitary reform³—weaving together economic and political motivations with moral and aesthetic tropes of fecundity and abundance, as well as deficiency and decay.⁴ However, this elite-directed spectacle in Anarkali also carried out the important latent task of gathering a set of animate and inanimate remnants of the lives and labor of its participants—making an archive through its catalogue of plants, seeds, and soils.

This article explores how these raw materials operated as aesthetically distinct, traceable objects and thus as archival agents, within the socio-environmental transformations in Punjab and its capital city during the final quarter of the nineteenth century. In this sense, recovering material agency as a historical lever means moving beyond a reading of colonial gardens as repositories and symbols of imperial power, to consider how material actors not only shape the built environment, but also produce knowledge about it in ways that may affirm but also complicate official narratives. It argues that, within efforts to develop botanical knowledge and enhance regional agricultural productivity, these material agents helped transform the built landscape, achieving long-lasting legibility in Lahore. It follows the work of the Agri-Horticultural Society of Punjab, established in Lahore in 1851 to spur agricultural production in the newly colonized region soon after the annexation of Punjab by the East India Company. The article asks how material actors, along with the localized spaces and practices for making them cultivable and productive, were enrolled in transforming deserts into gardens—terms framed by colonial discourse.⁵ Specifically, it investigates the development of the urban gardens of the society in Lahore, demonstrating how plants, seeds, soils, and other nonhuman actors helped shape them as a model for the regional landscape, a test bed for horticultural practice, and an ornament for the growing provincial capital, capturing through their form, structure, and growth a memory of a wider regional and global history. Approaching raw materials—indeed quite mundane and often unruly plants, seeds, and soils—as archival actors, provides an alternate historiographical route to colonial gardens—which sees them not as models of regional improvement or stable symbols of colonial rule and power, but as disobedient landscapes. Reading the architecture of landscape through the primary materials that compose and resist design offers a path to history—as suggested in Anooradha Siddiqi's introduction to this special section—which insists on the partial perspectives and reorientations offered by staying close to the ground. In turn, following ground-level materials, whose aesthetic traces remain spectacularly and descriptively embedded in primary sources, sparks new historical understandings and narratives.

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