Lt. Gen. Mian Ghulam Jilani Khan wanted to build public squares, or chowks, with identity, symbolism, and history. The Punjab governor, an art school student and a great champion of parks, gave me the example of Italian piazzas. Lahore had Kim’s Gun, Safanwallah Chowk, and Chauburji, but nothing new had been created in years. In developed countries, such spaces are built after years of the finest minds debating the design’s relation to the city and its people. But Gov. Jilani wanted to waste no time.
The early 1980s were an oppressive time, and we obviously could not employ the human form in our design. So I asked calligrapher Ahmad Khan to write the kalma, which he did in beautiful Kufic script. This we put on each of the seven washed-terrazzo walls of increasing height and arranged them in a circle for what Lahore came to know for several decades as Kalma Chowk, a serene structure in the middle of road-rage central.
Except that Kalma Chowk was meant for the Liberty Market square. Doing the foundations at the originally intended location would take too long, so city planners moved the project to a much narrower space, the Ferozepur Road–Main Boulevard intersection. I was aghast. The traffic there was pretty bad; if you tried to read the calligraphy you could end up smashing your car. The structure would have no breathing space. “What have you done?” my architecture students would ask me. I would then have to launch into the whole story. I wouldn’t call Kalma Chowk a masterpiece, but the design was a critical success. The only problem was location, location, location.
Until it was demolished recently to make way for a flyover, Kalma Chowk had become not only an important marker, but part of the city’s humor and urban legends. Many thought it had been commissioned to honor glamorous singer Tahira Syed who would arrange her fingers in a Kalma Chowk-like swirl to emphasize particular verses. But that’s monuments in Pakistan. If they don’t get polluted by apocryphal storytelling, they get redesigned by some bureaucrat who thinks sticking a peacock, pigeon, gun or sword is the only right flourish to really complete the work. Our chowks are monuments to bad taste.
Our original design featured “lailaha ilallah,” based on a popular slogan. Religious leaders objected to this, saying this was just half the kalma. So we incorporated it in full. Surprisingly, there was no uproar from them when Kalma Chowk was finally razed.
As told by Nayyar Ali Dada to Qasim Nauman