On Friday evening, hundreds of Christians gathered on the Mall, the grand artery at the heart of colonial Lahore, to protest a seizure that has shaken one of Pakistan’s oldest educational communities. Days earlier, the Punjab Enforcement and Regulatory Authority, the powerful new agency Chief Minister Maryam Nawaz launched in 2024 to clear encroachments and tame the markets, had taken over Ewing Hall, a heritage building belonging to Forman Christian College. A force built to pull down illegal structures had, the protesters charged, turned on the lawful property of an institution founded in 1864.

The hall stands near the Nila Gumbad, in the old Anarkali quarter, on the college’s former downtown campus. Built in 1916 as a boys’ hostel, it carries the name of Sir James Caruthers Rhea Ewing, the American missionary who led Forman for three decades and gave it international standing. In continuous use for most of the past century, it has sat largely empty in recent years, tucked away down a narrow walkway along the wall of King Edward Medical University. The wider Nila Gumbad area, named for the blue-tiled tomb of Sheikh Abdur Razzaq, is already being remade: an underground car park has been dug in front of the hall, and old trees and roadside shops cleared in the name of progress.

Forman Christian College is no ordinary institution. Founded in........

© The Friday Times