Lahore (Pakistan): The MAO College campus seems to be stuck in time. The white-washed building is located on the Lower Mall in Islampura, once named Krishan Nagar. Many in Lahore still address the area by its old name. The structure is colonial in design, with arched verandas and blue-grey latticed windows. The plain, symmetrical façade is still intact. However, the campus carries a quietude shaped by routine and time.Students tread a narrow pathway enclosed between a vast garden and the archaic building of the college. Girls in uniform move past, some clad in burqas, others in scarves. Most of the low chatter that drifts across the campus is initiated with Muslim greetings. Prayer mats are neatly wrapped and placed along a wall. A newly-built mosque stands on the ground besides the parking lot.A dilapidated temple stands right next to the mosque. The ‘Om’ symbol is inscribed in the jaalis above the doors. One building is named the Sardar Patel Block. The laboratory is called Raja Ban Bihari Kapur Bahadur. A plaque mentions Mul Raj of Buria from District, Ambala.The ‘Om’ on the building. Photo: Muhammad FaizanThe campus gives off the air of a staged performance of continuity; life moves on amid names, plaques and symbols whose meanings have diminished with time. The buildings speak one language; the daily life unfolding within them tells another.A dusty, crumbling staircase in the admin block leads to an empty hall, where old discarded chairs lie stacked and forgotten. Through narrow corridors, one reaches the MAO College library, which still houses a significant number of Sanskrit and Hindi books. The volumes are not so well preserved. The words have eroded with time, and the air carries the familiar scent of old paper and dust. A shelf of Hindi texts stands beside a rack labelled Islamic books. Dr Shahid Rasheed, the only Sanskrit teacher in Lahore, pulls out a book and flips through its yellowed pages. A faded stamp on the front page reads: Sanatana Dharma College Library, Lahore. The name feels momentarily unreal, as if it belongs to a city that no longer exists. The campus casually absorbs its contradictions, yet this detail sparks a deeper curiosity.Atif Butt, a professor of Urdu at MAO College, our host on the campus, draws on a series of anecdotes from memory about the Sanatan Dharma College. We are told that the college was established in Lahore in 1916, when Rai Bahadur Lala Ram Saran Das donated his ‘Peeli Kothi’ (yellow mansion) for its campus, just across from what is now Punjab University’s sports field. Pandit Raghuvar Dayal Shastri became its first principal. After Partition, the college was forced to relocate to Ambala Cantonment, carrying the suffix Lahore like a wound that refuses to close. The building it left behind was taken over by Mohammadan Anglo Oriental (MAO) College, an institution founded in Amritsar, which itself crossed the border in the opposite direction.Dr Shahid Rasheed. Photo: Muhammad FaizanThis rare exchange reveals how Partition displaced conflict rather than resolving it. Renaming places on both sides of the border – like Krishan Nagar becoming Islampura, or Allahabad becoming Prayagraj – also follow the same pattern of historical erasure. Such gestures sought to fix identity, to overwrite what came before. But names cannot erase essence. The past lingers, sometimes resurfacing, sometimes returning as spectres in the present.It is this very lingering that has emerged in the Sanskrit book Rasheed is holding – “Bhoomika”, a borrower’s name, carefully handwritten and dated 1927.Nearly a century later, we are gathered in this library, where history rests, enclosed between the shelves and the books themselves. Apart from me, Rasheed and Butt, Afiya, Rasheed’s daughter, is also present. As we turn the pages of the Sanskrit books, relics we can touch with estranged letters we can now read, I am struck by the small yet enduring accomplishment of our time together in the first batch of the Sanskrit course at Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) last December – the first Sanskrit class in Lahore since the Partition.The course was held at the Gurmani Centre in Gulberg, Lahore, in a room actually reserved for Arabic lessons. The walls were lined with teaching charts in Arabic script, alphabets and phrases. Sanskrit, in this space, felt almost surreal, as if surfacing from a layer of memory just not in reach any longer.Eight students sat in the room, each carrying their own journey into Devanagari, mostly self-taught. Familiarity with the script was a prerequisite for the course.One mentioned having taken a Hindi course at LUMS. Another said they wanted to read the Mahabharata and Vedic texts in the original language. Yet another shared that learning German had sparked their interest in Sanskrit. The mix of motivations was strange, yet undeniably fascinating. My own reason was simple. I enrolled because I already knew Devanagari, which I had taught myself after a trip to India in 2015. More than anything, I wanted to demystify the disbelief that Sanskrit was being taught in Lahore at all.The first day unsettled me. It challenged my own leftist-progressive bias. How could a scholar of Arabic and Persian, devote himself to teaching Sanskrit? My rational mind searched for an explanation, as if such choices were inherited rather than chosen.However, there he was. A bearded, traditionally dressed, middle-aged man. A figure that seemed to embody every stereotype one may have of a Muslim scholar but paradoxically, a Sanskritist. The contradiction was compelling and made me question some of my preconceived notions.On the first day of the classes, Rasheed stood by the whiteboard, drawing Sanskrit letters slowly and deliberately, as if he was sketching with reverence for each word. Watching the script take different shapes and forms, we began to notice its visual beauty – it seemed almost like a work of art.Rasheed spoke about language in ways that questioned familiar boundaries. Sanskrit, he claimed, did not belong to a single religion or nation. In Europe, he explained, intellectual traditions often trace themselves back to Greek and Latin. In the Islamic world, Arabic and Persian occupy a similar place. Chinese civilisation continually draws upon Confucius. In South Asia, the lineage leads us to Sanskrit, Pali and Tamil. Every civilisation, he said, is rooted in a wisdom tradition and those traditions live on through their classical languages.He often discussed the question of self and other. Once, pausing mid-lecture, he quoted a saint whose words he carried with him: “There is no ‘other’. The division between self and other is an illusion.”Then he turned back to the board and carefully wrote a Subhāṣita in Devanagari, asking us to copy it down:अयं निजः परो वेति गणना लघु-चेतसाम् ।उदार-चरितानां तु वसुधैव कुटुम्बकम् ॥“Small-minded people say, ‘This is mine and that is yours,’ but those of noble character see the whole world as one family.”Rasheed’s teaching methodology consisted of the same philosophy. He often drew connections between Sanskrit, Persian, Urdu and Arabic. Students listened closely as he demonstrated how ideas, sounds and vocabularies converged across languages – asti in Sanskrit aligning with Old Persian hast, or words like chand and sitara finding their way into Urdu through Sanskrit roots. “Learning these connections,” he told us, “is not just linguistic. It teaches us that human culture is shared and interconnected.”The temple at MAO College. Photo: Muhammad FaizanMuch of the course focused on Sanskrit grammar, guided by two primary textbooks. During the classes, Rasheed spoke about the difficulty of acquiring books from India due to the ban on postal services. He possessed a deep fondness for Sanskrit books. Over the years, he had collected volumes from across Lahore. Once, he recalled visiting a book collector near the Sufi shrine, Daata Darbar late at night, specifically to get a hold of Hindi and Sanskrit books. Many of these had old stamps from Forman Christian College where Rasheed is an Associate Professor of Sociology. These volumes now form the core of a modest Sanskrit collection at the FC College Library. “Without these books, teaching would be impossible,” he lamented.Limited access to Sanskrit books in Lahore is often attributed to the language being foreign to this side of the border. In reality, the problem is political. Postal delays, customs restrictions and the absence of functional local publishing and distribution networks continue to make access to texts strenuous. These factors are by-products of nation-states and do not indicate an intellectual absence. In fact, the teaching of Sanskrit, though institutionally new to Pakistan, can be traced back to a much older historical engagement of Muslims with the language.As part of the lectures, Rasheed spoke about Muslim scholars across history who showed keen interest in Sanskrit. Al-Biruni, whose path he claims to follow, mastered the language and translated foundational texts such as Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras into Arabic. Dara Shikoh rendered the Upanishads into Persian as Sirr-e-Akbar, searching for shared metaphysical truths across traditions. Literary works such as the Panchatantra travelled even further, becoming Kalila wa Dimna in the Abbasid world, later re-entering South Asia through translations by writers like Intizar Hussain.Rasheed hopes to continue the Sanskrit lessons at LUMS, where his teaching has already formed a small but committed group of students. He also plans to introduce a similar course at Forman Christian College, where he envisions a Department of Classical Studies introducing Sanskrit learning along with Persian, Arabic, Latin, Greek and Hebrew. Yet he worries that in a time of hardening religious identities, his work may be misread. For Rasheed, teaching Sanskrit in Lahore is neither a political gesture nor an ideological project, but a refusal of the belief that languages belong to particular identities.Lahore, however, has never been a stranger to Sanskrit. The city itself carries older linguistic imprints, and the campus we are standing on quietly bears witness to them. The first principal of Sanatana Dharma College – whose stamp still surfaces from inside the covers of books – was Pandit Raghuvar Dayal Shastri, a Sanskrit scholar trained in the classical tradition. He was not merely an administrator but a practitioner, part of a scholarly milieu in which Sanskrit was taught, read and debated in Lahore as a living intellectual inheritance.A statue of Alfred Cooper Woolner. Photo: Muhammad FaizanJust across the road from MAO College stands the Oriental College, another living memory of Lahore’s long engagement with Sanskrit. It was here that Alfred Cooper Woolner – one of the most influential Sanskrit scholars of colonial India –taught and worked. Woolner devoted his life to Sanskrit grammar, producing influential works such as Introduction to Prakrit and his translations of the plays attributed to Bhāsa, while also teaching generations of students in Lahore. He also played a central role in assembling what later became known as the Woolner Sanskrit Manuscript Collection. At his suggestion, the Oriental College Library was merged with the Punjab University Library in 1913, bringing with it a vast body of manuscripts. Today, the collection comprises over nine thousand manuscripts across Sanskrit and related languages, including more than two thousand palm-leaf texts – material evidence of a scholarly world that once flourished in this city.Also read: Past Haunts the Present in Pakistan’s Only Hindi DepartmentLahore’s relationship with Sanskrit extends even further back. Panini, the great grammarian whose Ashtadhyayi established the foundations of Classical Sanskrit, belonged to the Gandhara region, in present-day Pakistan. Later, scholars teaching in Lahore, at institutions such as Government College, Forman Christian College, and Oriental College, kept this intellectual lineage alive as part of the city’s academic life.The Sanskrit material traces still exist, though unevenly cared for and awaiting Rasheed and his students’ efforts to digitise and preserve them as part of the city’s quiet but growing Sanskrit renaissance. While the manuscripts at Punjab University’s new campus are relatively well preserved, the old campus – where Hindi classes continue – lies in shambles. The picture is grimmer at Punjab Public Library, where Sanskrit collections deteriorate with little intervention. In stark contrast, Dayal Singh Library houses an impressive collection of Hindi, Sanskrit and Gurmukhi texts. The Gurmukhi texts are carefully maintained, with plaques mentioning Sikh patrons and funding bodies that have supported their preservation for decades.The Sanatana Dharma College stamp. Photo: Muhammad FaizanAn absurd anecdote shared by Naeem Virk, a professor at Oriental College, captures the uneven politics of preservation. A Sikh foundation in the United States once donated a specialised machine to Punjab University, Lahore, to conserve old Gurmukhi manuscripts. The machine arrived but remains unused, stalled in customs by a bureaucratic insistence that “Punjab University” itself must come to collect it. Unlike Gurmukhi, Sanskrit faces a deeper problem. There is an absence of institutional will. These archives fall outside the priorities of both the Pakistani state and international Sanskrit preservation bodies, threatened not by opposition but by neglect.The neglect mirrors the Partition’s legacy, as both India and Pakistan have repeatedly chosen erasure over the preservation of shared cultural and intellectual pasts. Until governments decide the fate of these manuscripts – or until an organisation recognises the urgency of the task – the books continue to sit in silence, staring from behind the glass of locked cupboards.I think of how, once, in the library of Sanatan Dharma College, these books did more than sit. They were more than pages and ink. They were perhaps points of connection, forming bonds beyond religious barriers through the simple acts of handling, borrowing and returning. Now, their spines bowed, their pages brittle, they wait, watch and remember the quiet afternoons when they were cherished, unbound by borders or fears.Sehyr Mirza is a Lahore-based author and journalist, writing on memory, history and culture. She can be reached on socials at @sehyrmirza.