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Lahore

Lahore is a city on the Ravi in Punjab, Pakistan, a Ghaznavid provincial capital from the eleventh century, a Mughal capital under Akbar, the capital of Ranjit Singh's Sikh empire, and now the capital of Pakistani Punjab.

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Early Lahore

Lahore's origins are obscure; a local tradition attributes its foundation to Lava, son of Rama. It appears in records from the late first millennium, and in the tenth century it was held by the Hindu Shahi kings. Mahmud of Ghazni's campaigns brought it under the Ghaznavids in the early eleventh century, and when the Ghaznavids lost their western lands to the Seljuqs, Lahore became their second capital, the main city of their Indian territory, with a Persian-speaking court culture. The Sufi Ali Hujwiri, author of the Kashf al-Mahjub, one of the earliest Persian treatises on Sufism, settled there and died in the later eleventh century; his shrine, the Data Darbar, is the most visited in the city.

The Ghurids took Lahore in 1186. Qutb al-Din Aibak, the first sultan of Delhi, died there in 1210 after a fall from his horse during a game of polo. The Mongols sacked the city in 1241.

The Mughal city

Lahore flourished under the Mughals. Akbar made it his capital from 1585 to 1598 while he dealt with the north-west, and rebuilt the fort in brick. Jahangir and Shah Jahan added palaces, and Shah Jahan built the Shish Mahal, a hall of mirrors, within the fort and the Shalimar Gardens outside the city in 1641–42. Jahangir is buried at Shahdara across the Ravi, in a tomb built by his son. The Wazir Khan mosque, built in 1634–41, is covered with brilliant tile mosaic, and Aurangzeb's Badshahi mosque, completed in 1673, was for a long time the largest mosque in the world.

The fifth Sikh Guru, Arjan, died in Mughal custody at Lahore in 1606, an event central to Sikh history.

The Sikh capital

After the Mughal decline Lahore was fought over by Afghan invaders and Sikh chiefs. In 1799 Ranjit Singh took the city and made it the capital of the Sikh empire. His samadhi, the memorial built after his death in 1839, stands beside the fort. After the Anglo-Sikh wars the British annexed Punjab in 1849.

Colonial and modern Lahore

Under the British, Lahore became the provincial capital, with the Mall, government buildings, colleges, the railway and the museum, and grew into the intellectual centre of Punjab. The poet Muhammad Iqbal lived there. On 23 March 1940 the Muslim League adopted at Lahore the resolution calling for independent states for Muslims, later known as the Pakistan Resolution, commemorated by the Minar-e-Pakistan. At Partition in 1947 the city was assigned to Pakistan, and it saw heavy violence as its Hindu and Sikh inhabitants left and Muslim refugees arrived. It is now Pakistan's second-largest city and the capital of its Punjab province.

Further reading

  • Asher, Catherine B. India Before Europe. Cambridge University Press, 2006
  • Grewal, J. S. The Sikhs of the Punjab. Cambridge University Press, 1998
  • Richards, John F. The Mughal Empire. Cambridge University Press, 1993

See also

  • Punjab — Punjab, the "Land of Five Rivers" straddling the India-Pakistan border in the northwestern subcontinent, has been a corridor of invasion, empire, and religious innovation from the Indus Valley Civilization through the founding of Sikhism to the 1947 Partition.
  • Ranjit Singh — Ranjit Singh was the founder and ruler of the Sikh Empire, who unified the Punjab from the misls, took Lahore in 1799, and held the north-west against both Afghan power and British expansion until his death in 1839.
  • Sikh Empire — The Sikh Empire ruled the Punjab and the northwest from Lahore between 1799 and 1849, the last major Indian state to fall to the British and the only one to take Peshawar from the Afghans.
  • Mughal Empire — The Mughal Empire was a Persianate Muslim dynasty of Timurid and Chagatai descent that ruled most of the Indian subcontinent from Babur's victory at the First Battle of Panipat in 1526 until the deposition of Bahadur Shah II following the 1857 rebellion, reaching its territorial and cultural peak under Akbar, Shah Jahan, and Aurangzeb.
  • Akbar — Akbar, born Jalal-ud-din Muhammad, was the third Mughal emperor, who ruled from 1556 to 1605, expanded the empire across most of the Indian subcontinent, and restructured its administration and religious policy.
  • Aurangzeb — Aurangzeb (reigned 1658–1707), known also by his regnal title Alamgir, was the sixth Mughal emperor, under whom the empire reached its greatest territorial extent while sustained warfare in the Deccan and religiously restrictive policies strained its finances and cohesion.
  • Jayapala — Jayapala (r. c. 964–1001 CE) was a Hindu Shahi king of Kabul and Punjab whose decades-long resistance to the Ghaznavids ended in defeat, capture, and self-immolation.

This entry was last revised on 12 November 2026.