[Extract …] The argument that values and belief systems are imprinted in various ways in material culture is now a commonplace. It is generally based on the premise of a single cultural origin, however, and so it presents some problems when we try to apply it, as this chapter will do, to understanding the adaptive reuse of buildings in a colonial context. It goes without saying that reuse of preexisting structures has been widespread in cultures throughout history, especially in the wake of conquest.

However, the topic has remained almost entirely unstudied in the context of British India, and investigation shows it to provide both a useful framework and a focal point for examining changing cultural interrelationships from new perspectives. Colonial adaptations, it might be argued, are the hybrids of material culture, occupying a continuum of time and space that falls between societies. So how are we to interpret the relative values in reused buildings from a cultural landscape that would, by one definition, have been understood as that of the colonized “other”? We might pursue this problem by asking why some buildings, not others, were singled out to be put to new uses. What does their location in a changing landscape – one whose spatial logic is now often no longer easily discernible – have to tell us now about the layered ways in which interactions between colonizers and colonized were constructed and negotiated?1

In north India, there are a number of well-documented examples of the appropriation of standing Mughal monuments for domestic, residential use by the British. This chapter takes a single, representative example in Lahore for analysis, an early seventeenth-century building that began life as the tomb of a Mughal noble- man, possibly Qasim Khan Mir Bahr. Over the centuries Qasim Khan’s tomb and the land surrounding it were occupied first by Sikh soldiers and then by British officials. The tomb was built about and added to, layer upon layer, until it evolved into a grand Edwardian mansion. It served the highly public, political functions of a British Government House, and it is still used today by the establishment of the Governor of the Punjab Province of Pakistan (Figure 8.1). The central tomb chamber, at the core of the house, was never really changed. In the course of reuse, its Mughal- period painting on stucco was restored in an orientalizing, Arts and Crafts style. The land surrounding the house was laid out as a large, informally planned garden, yet retained features that linked it back to its Mughal origins. Because of the good state of preservation of the house today, and because it is well documented in both public and private papers, Governor’s House, Lahore is an important site for the study of the complicated ways in which the British actively participated in an ongoing interaction with the built forms of India’s past. From it we can read an alternative to the assumption that the British sought separation and distance in their architectural settings. This house also links the past of India to the future in Pakistan.