Chris Moffat is Senior Lecturer in South Asian History at Queen Mary University of London. Born and raised in Canada, he has been based in London, UK, since 2008. In 2019, Chris was Visiting Faculty Member in the Department of History at Government College University, Lahore, during which time he was also involved in a collaborative research project on Lahore’s Bradlaugh Hall with colleagues and students in Architecture and Cultural Studies at the National College of Arts. Chris is currently completing a book on postcolonial architecture in Lahore. He has recently edited the book The Time of Building: Kamil Khan Mumtaz and Architecture in Pakistan, published by Folio Books in 2023 and available for free online at ArchitecturalArchives.pk
ARCHI TIMES (AT): Before starting please tell us about your educational background.
Chris Moffat (CM): I am trained as a historian. I completed my first degree in Canada at the University of Waterloo and a master’s degree at the London School of Economics. I wrote my PhD from 2010-2014 at the University of Cambridge. My thesis was a study of the anti-colonial revolutionary Bhagat Singh and the way he is remembered in twenty-first century India and Pakistan. It was this research that first brought me to Lahore, the city that has been the focus of most of my work since.
AT: Can you take us back to your early years, and how your upbringing influenced your path towards becoming an Architecture Historian?
CM: I have always been interested in cities. I grew up in the quiet suburbs around Toronto, and so the city was always a place of adventure, surprise and strangeness for me. I became interested in architecture through an attention to details (the shaded veranda at my grandparents’ home on Falcon Street, the cluttered alcoves and makeshift stalls of Kensington Market) and an attraction to spectacle (the glass, and aluminium extension exploding from the Royal Ontario Museum, the Ontario College of Art and Design’s twelve-legged, checkerboard complex crouching over the city off Queen St West). Moving to London in 2008 allowed me to cultivate these interests on a much grander scale, and I have enjoyed exploring so many corners of this sprawling city. But it was not until after I finished my PhD that I began to think about architecture seriously as an historian. Rather than simply appreciating architecture for its details or as part of urban spectacle, I began to approach buildings as richly textured archives for understanding both the past and the present.
AT: Are you a full time faculty at Queen Mary University and what subjects are you teaching there?
CM: I am Senior Lecturer in South Asian History at Queen Mary University of London. I teach undergraduate courses on the histories of India and Pakistan, as well as modules on intellectual history, histories of decolonisation, and critical heritage studies. Based in East London, Queen Mary’s student body includes many young people with South Asian heritage, and I always learn so much from our discussions in the classroom.
AT: What kind of education and skills do you need to be successful as a historian?
CM: History rewards those who are good at asking questions. The successful historian never takes anything for granted. They are always ready to ask: how did we get here? Why do we understand politics or economics or society in this way? How have people in other contexts, in other times, thought or acted differently? Historians understand that the present moment is not ‘destiny’, and that alternatives are always possible. As someone who is interested in radical politics, I find this extremely powerful: history is full of destruction, violence and exploitation, but it is also full of people who refused to accept the status quo and fought to change the world for the better.
AT: Why are you more interested in South Asian History and particularly focused on Pakistan cities?
CM: My interest in Lahore started with Bhagat Singh. As you may know, this was the city where Bhagat Singh spent most of his political life and it is where he was executed by British colonial authorities on 23 March 1931. In India, Bhagat Singh is widely celebrated – he is an icon of the freedom struggle and hailed as an example of courage and sacrifice for a just cause to this day. But in Pakistan, Bhagat Singh is remembered only by a few – mostly left-wing students and cultural activists. Every 23 March, there is a gathering at Shadman Chowk (built on the site of the old Lahore Jail where Bhagat Singh was hanged) to demand a memorial for the revolutionary. I became very interested in this dynamic of memory and erasure in Lahore, a city transformed by partition and by rapid urbanization. This struggle to define which histories matter – and which do not – extends to the study of architecture, from debates around what buildings really count as Pakistan’s ‘heritage’ and the extent to which local ‘traditions’ should inform new architecture in the country.
AT: What are your research and observations about Pakistan’s Cultural Heritage and History?
CM: Pakistan’s architectural histories are very rich and filled with creativity and innovation on the part of local architects. This is especially true of the early decades after independence, when there was much critical reflection on what architecture could and should contribute to Pakistani society. And yet there is surprisingly little written or recorded about the work of architects during these years. My research has tried to collate materials related to architects of this first, properly ‘postcolonial’ generation: figures born around the time of partition, who grew up in Pakistan and who established their practices in Pakistan in the 1960s. Many were trained abroad but have completed most of their work in Pakistan and have invested heavily in educational and campaigning work in the country.
AT: What inspired you to write a book on Kamil Khan Mumtaz?
CM: The collaboration with Kamil Khan Mumtaz is related to the project above. It was born out of my sense that the work and thought of this postcolonial generation needs to be properly documented – both for the historical record but also for future architects to consider. So, in The Time of Building, Kamil sahab’s oral history is illustrated with rare archival documents, photographs and drawings. It is a ‘portable archive’, one that I hope will be a useful reference for architecture students in Pakistan.
AT: In this book what type of contents have you covered?
CM: The book is organised chronologically in relation to Kamil sahab’s life and career. But the overarching question is this: what are the particular opportunities and obstacles that shape the profession of architecture in Pakistan? It is intended to be read with a mind to the present moment, the world we live in, and the contexts of building in Pakistan today: from rapid urbanisation to climate change.
AT: When you’re writing the books do you do a lot of interviews?
CM: Oral history work has been central to my research, in part because documents related to the history of architecture in Pakistan are difficult to access. They are usually dispersed across personal collections or office storehouses. Many drawings and plans from the 1960s and 1970s simply don’t exist anymore: they have been thrown away or have crumbled with age. So yes, interviews are essential for historical work of this kind. Historians are trained to be critical of such sources, of course – memory is unreliable, and the accounts collected should always be seen as personal and subjective rather than objective.
AT: What should be the role of an Architects in the society for the preservation of history, cultural and traditional values?
CM: This is something that Kamil sahab has thought long and hard about, and which he describes in detail in our book. I express my reservations over the category of ‘tradition’ in the book, and I would be wary of defending the preservation of ‘traditional values’ – the phrase you have used in your question. The question for me would be: whose values are encompassed by this notion of ‘tradition’? This category can easily be used to dress up regressive ideas about gender, caste, religion or other mechanisms of distinction. What appeals to me about Kamil’s position is the way he thinks about the past from the perspective of the present. His aim is not to return us to some lost ‘golden age’ but to revive specific practices from the past, with the ethically informed understanding that they might help us live better and less destructive lives today.
AT: Having worked on diverse projects, could you share some memorable experiences and insights gained from these endeavors?
CM: One of the great joys of my research has been spending time with residents and users of the buildings that I am studying. In Kamil sahab’s case, I spent a lot of time at the mausoleum he designed for Baba Hassan Din in the Baghbanpura neighbourhood of Lahore. I write a bit about this in my introduction to The Time of Building. For me, getting to know the people who inhabit and interact with buildings is essential for understanding how architecture works in the world. I learn about how spaces and materials are experienced and the activities they are successful (or not) in facilitating. Because the caretaker at Baba Hasan Din had lived on the site since he was a child – long before Kamil’s building was commissioned – he was in a position to share some wonderful reflections on the neighbourhood, its change over time, and on how the new Mazaar fits into that environment.
AT: What are your future plans?
CM: The Time of Building is one part of a much larger project on Lahore and its built environments. I am currently finishing an academic book on the postcolonial generation of architects in Pakistan – people like Kamil sahab but also Yasmeen Lari, Nayyar Ali Dada, Habib Fida Ali, etc – that focuses on their work in Lahore. I am also co-editor of a book on the Orange Line, which brings together twenty-six writers, each reflecting on the areas around a different station on the new metro. My collaborators for this project are the anthropologist Ammara Maqsood and the geographer Fizzah Sajjad, and the book will be coming out soon with UCL Press.
AT: What advice would you give to a student who’s an aspiring historian?
CM: History is not just about the ‘old’ or the ‘ancient’. When I tell people that I am researching architecture in Lahore, they often assume that I mean Mughal buildings, or that I am interested in the Walled City. But every building tells a story – it just depends on the questions you want to ask of it. A new home in Bahria Town can tell us as much about a historical moment – the time in which it was designed and built – as Lahore’s GPO can tell us about the colonial period and the Mubarak Haveli about the Mughal period. The 2021 report on ‘Modern Apartments of Karachi’ by Marvi Mazhar and students at Karachi University captures a sense of the richness of Pakistan’s recent architectural history. The video interviews conducted by ARCHI TIMES and presented on YouTube are another example of how much there is to learn. Such efforts must be commended and continued.
