t was a rainy Saturday in Lahore in 1870; the evening grew darker as Julia A Stone, the wife of an American consul, reached the city as part of her long tour of the East. She describes her long drive to the dak bungalow at Anarkali, which was a European suburb in the late Nineteenth Century. The next morning, it was still raining. On Sunday, she attended the church service and found the sermons unintelligible, as if they had been delivered in Punjabi.

However, the following week proved eventful enough for Julia A Stone to include a chapter on Lahore in her famous Illustrated India: Its Princes and People, published by Harford, Conn, USA, in 1877. This account is considered one of the most elaborate narratives of Lahore by a Nineteenth-Century woman.

Stone’s description of Lahore is somewhat sentimental and subjective. The opening sentences in her journal about Lahore read as follows:

“An hour and a half of railway travel from Umritzer [Amritsar] through an interesting and populous country brings one to LAHORE. This is one of the most ancient cities of India. It was populous and flourishing at the time of Alexander’s invasion, who penetrated only as far as the Sutlej, where the murmurs of his army compelled his return.”

She wandered through the city with amusement and astonishment, which shaped her feelings and later surfaced in the writings she drew from memory. Her visit to the tomb of Maharaja Ranjeet Singh occupies a pivotal place in this chapter on Lahore. She describes the tomb as a pavilion of marble and silver containing Ranjeet Singh’s ashes, with statues of Hindu deities such as Vishnu, Shiva and Kali standing around it. Within the vicinity, the funeral urns containing the remains of his sons, Kharak Singh and Sher Singh, and grandson, Naunehal Singh, were placed unceremoniously.

Julia Stone calls it a tomb of family murders, as none of the three died naturally. Whether it was poison, an accidentally falling beam or gunfire, the catastrophic incidents were veiled in scepticism and conspiracy, suggesting assassinations. No official court record of that era offered the immediacy one can read and grasp in this journal, written as a revealing chronicle of the Lahore court after Ranjeet Singh’s death and what followed.

Julia Stone is not mentioned as the official artist of the illustrations presented in the illustrated journal, nor is any other artist’s name recorded. Since the journal is attributed to her, the credit for these wood engravings is generally assumed to be hers, providing a detailed view of the places she visited. The plate, Tomb of Ranjeet Singh, is a unique illustration that showcases the exterior opulence and Mughal-inspired architectural patterns of the mausoleum.

She openly describes the contemptuous treatment of the Badshahi Masjid, highlighting the structural assault on the building and the violation of its spiritual significance for Muslims and accuses Ranjeet Singh of converting it into a garrison.

“The Sikhs have visited it [mosque] with insults heaped upon it with frantic zeal; and the late Maharaja converted it into barracks for his soldiers, and slaughtered swine in the sacred place of prayer.”

(Stone, Illustrated India: Its Princes and People, 1877, p. 496)

Further, she reports that this was an act of retribution in response to the allegedly same kind of treatment of conquered temples by Aurangzeb. Her eyes were set on the marble pavilion of Hazuri Bagh, which she suspected had been constructed or rearranged using structures taken from other Mughal monuments in the city.

Reading Stone’s narrative about Lahore feels like wandering through the city; her pen becomes a brush, turning her words into ekphrastic prose that presents the reader with an image of the ‘Lahore of great Mogul’ as Milton describes it in Paradise Lost.

In this quest, she crosses the River Ravi and reaches the mausoleums of Jahangir and Nur Jahan in Shahdara, painting a picturesque image of their ornate beauty through her eloquent writing. Julia Stone is mesmerised by the white marble floral and arabesque designs, mosaic patterns of fruits and flowers and the ninety-nine attributes of Allah inscribed on the sides of the marble cenotaph.

On the other hand, she describes the Wazir Khan Mosque in a jubilant and elaborate manner. Instead of recounting stories of damaged minarets and misused prayer halls, she is captivated by the blue-and-gold tile work, which she compares to the silky patchworks of bed quilts.

On her last day in Lahore, Julia Stone visits the Shalimar Gardens. She counts four hundred and fifty jets of fountains amid marble pavilions built on three distinct platforms at different elevations. Next is the tomb of Anarkali, once a Mughal-style edifice, converted into St James’s Christian Church. She records the legend of Anarkali as an event of flirtation, smiles, barbarity and conspiracy that led to an execution when:

“…the king saw smiles pass between the couple and he ordered the youth to be enclosed alive in a brick cell which was built around him…”

It cannot be established as a fact whether Julia Stone was an artist or not; nevertheless, the illustrations in her journal are generally attributed to her. Who provided these wonderful sketches is a researchable question. However, she paints a large canvas with words; like a realist painter, she captures what she sees or what people tell her, without digging deeper.

Julia A Stone closes her account of the city with a famous old proverb: “If Shiraz and Ispahan, two Persian cities, were united, they would not together make one Lahore.”

The writer is an art historian, a critic and a curator teaching at the College of Art and Design, University of the Punjab, Lahore. He may be reached at [email protected].