Get the latest news and updates from Dawn
In Lahore, food is never merely food. It is memory, migration, performance, class, longing and history carried on the tongue. Few places embody this truth more vividly than Gawalmandi, the dense and storied neighbourhood in central Lahore whose narrow streets, smoky grills, old facades and crowded eateries became inseparable from the cultural imagination of the city. To speak of Gawalmandi is to speak of Lahore itself: a city built through displacement, improvisation, coexistence and reinvention.
Until recently, Gawalmandi has been celebrated primarily for its famous Food Street, for sizzling kebabs, fragrant hareesa, fried fish, doodh-jalebi and late-night crowds that gather under strings of lights. Yet reducing Gawalmandi to a culinary destination alone would flatten its layered historical significance. The neighbourhood is also a site through which one can understand urban modernity in South Asia, the social consequences of Partition, and the transformation of everyday life in postcolonial cities. Through the writings of historians and theorists such as Gyan Prakash, Ash Amin and Arjun Appadurai, Gawalmandi can be read not simply as a neighborhood but as an urban text — a space where memory, mobility, intimacy and commerce converge. The literary recollections of A. Hameed, Ahmad Shuja Pasha and Pran Neville further illuminate how Lahore’s cultural worlds were built through ordinary people, shared spaces and everyday encounters.
