Disrupted City

"[An] engaging book . . . evoking a rich cast of characters who have called Lahore home for more than a millennium."
-The New Yorker

"A poignant history and personal memoir of a constantly evolving city."
—Kirkus Reviews

"In this marvelous blend of scholarship and personal memoir, Manan Ahmed Asif paints a vivid portrait of a thousand-year-old city. This beautifully written book is an apt tribute to a great literary metropolis."
—Amitav Ghosh, author of Smoke and Ashes and Sea of Poppies

"Lahore is a city of many selves, and Manan Ahmed Asif guides readers among them with unique insight and erudition. He parses Lahore's layered literary and cultural history in rich, evocative (yet determinedly un-nostalgic) terms, while keeping squarely in view the pressures of imperial and state power, dislocation, and erasure. Lyrical and formally innovative, Disrupted City expands the possibilities of what an urban history can be."
—Maya Jasanoff, Coolidge Professor of History at Harvard University and author of The Dawn Watch

"A learned and lyrical elegy—or shahr ashob—for the great city of Lahore: a book that is both nostalgic and scholarly, nuanced and cosmopolitan yet deeply rooted, sharpened by a sense of belonging, and at once weighed down and informed by the anchor of memory and attachment. This is a unique and sophisticated work, the Ravi viewed through the rearview mirror of the Hudson, written by one of the most outstanding historian-flaneurs of our time."
—William Dalrymple, author of White Mughals and The Anarchy