estoring the old names of Lahore’s roads is a welcome step. After the revival of Basant, it may well be described as an act of rare courage. Renaming roads and localities has long been treated as a symbolic conquest. This obsession with historical triumphs, whether the conquest of Somnath or the arrival of Muhammad bin Qasim, has come to dominate the public imagination. Day and night, we re-live borrowed notions of past glory while neglecting the urgent realities of the present. In the process, an obsession with both history and the Hereafter has displaced the immediate business of living.

What is the logical endpoint of this attempt to “correct” the present through history? How far back must one go to discover the authentic origins? In India, large-scale academic efforts continue to excavate the past in search of an imagined purity, stripping away what are seen as corruptions and accretions added deliberately or inadvertently through historical processes.

In this search for origins, one could travel back to a time when Lahoris were not yet Lahoris, when communities lived in shifting settlements along the banks of a river whose name may itself have been forgotten. Later came people from the north-west with arms, language, prayer and power. Settlements and mounds were renamed after Sufis, saints and rulers. What was the place called where Data Ganj Bakhsh now lies buried, or where Mian Mir rests, or where Aziz Mian Mozang was laid to rest? Shah Hussain was moved from his original burial site to the one known today. Mandirs, and later gurdwaras, once dotted the landscape, lending their own names and identities to these places.

Some historians argue that Ichhra was the “real” Lahore, linked to the legends of Raja Rasalu and Puran Bhagat, and that the city now called Lahore emerged later. Such claims only deepen the question: at what point in history does authenticity begin?

It is easy to point out changes made in the recent past and attempt to reverse them. Yet the relentless pursuit of ideological purity has repeatedly forced this country, now less than half the size it was in 1947, to wash itself in the harsh detergent of historical revisionism.

Countless villages and settlements were transformed into colonial landmarks. In more recent decades, vast tracts of land have disappeared beneath housing societies, swallowing sites of genuine historical significance.

In this part of the world, attachment to land often ranks below allegiance to personality, dynasty, religion, caste, biradari or language. As a result, belonging itself becomes manufactured. Above all sits the burden of religious ideology, which frequently works against a deeper attachment to place and landscape.

Restoring old names may be a welcome beginning, but meaningful change can only come through a broader reimagining of the state’s ideological relationship with history, land and identity.

The writer is a Lahore-based culture critic.