You can demolish Ewing Hall in a day. It took 110 years to build what lived inside it

Dr. Adeel Ahmad Aamir is an Associate Professor of Media and Communication at Forman Christian College (A Chartered University), Lahore. A veteran broadcast journalist with nearly two decades of experience, he writes on politics, policy, media, and international affairs.

In 2013, when bulldozers arrived at the gates of the 500-year-old Hampi ruins in Karnataka, India, the outcry was immediate and global. UNESCO threatened to list the site as endangered heritage. Civil society mobilised. Courts intervened. The machines were stopped not because of legal technicalities, but because a community refused to let its memory be reduced to rubble. A similar story unfolded in Istanbul in 2013, when a plan to demolish Gezi Park a green space with deep historical roots ignited a nation. History has taught us, repeatedly, that when states move against institutions woven into the fabric of collective identity, they are not merely seizing property. They are attempting to sever a people from their own story.

Lahore witnessed its own version of this story in the early hours of a Thursday morning, when the Punjab provincial government forcibly requisitioned Ewing Hall a 110-year old building in Anarkali that is not simply a property belonging to Forman Christian College University. It is a piece of living Pakistani history. And its sudden seizure with barely 24 hours’ notice to remove generators, furniture, and historical artefacts has cut open a wound that will not heal easily.

Ewing Hall was constructed in 1916 the middle of the First World War, two decades before Pakistan existed as a thought in anyone’s mind. It was named after Dr. James Caruthers Rhea Ewing, the long-serving and much-loved principal of Forman Christian College, who helped transform a modest mission school into one of the finest educational institutions in the entire subcontinent.

Its lease was signed in 1915 and renewed multiple times, most recently extending well into the 2040s. FCCU had vacated it as a student hostel out of caution after structural concerns arose, and critically had commissioned and paid for an independent engineering report in March 2026. That report found the building structurally sound. On the basis of that report, the university had already decided to renovate Ewing Hall and reopen it as a hostel for students. This was not a derelict property being neglected. This was a loved institution being carefully restored until the government arrived, unannounced, and took it.

A Dawn journalist who visited Ewing Hall earlier this year described the scene with heartbreaking precision: two charpoys still facing each other in a dormitory room, waiting for students who stopped coming in 2018. Upturned chairs on dining room tables. Dust settled on surfaces as if time itself had paused mid-meal. The lawn was mowed. The veranda was swept. Everything maintained and yet nothing alive.

For those who lived there, the building was not architecture it was experience. One of my Intermediate classmate still remembers his second-floor cubicle room vividly. From his window, he watched Anarkali Bazaar come alive every evening the noise and colour of the walled city performing its nightly spectacle below. He remembers the lawn, the greenery, the long conversations over meals in the mess strangers becoming friends over dal and roti, discussing everything from poetry to politics.

This is what the government seized on a Thursday morning with a phone call and a 24-hour deadline. Not bricks and mortar. Decades of memory. The irreplaceable sediment of shared young lives.

To understand why the seizure of Ewing Hall is not a routine property matter, one must understand what Forman Christian College actually is. Founded in 1864 by Rev. Charles William Forman an American missionary who literally started teaching under a banyan tree in Lahore FCCU has spent 160 years doing something remarkable: holding Pakistani society together through education, even when Pakistani society was trying to tear itself apart.

In 1902, it became the first college in the Punjab to admit women a radical act at the time. It was the first institution in the entire subcontinent where Nobel Prize-calibre research was conducted; Dr. Arthur Compton, who went on to win the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1927, did significant portions of his groundbreaking work on cosmic rays while teaching at FCCU. The university’s motto By Love, Serve One Another has never been merely decorative.

Its alumni list reads like a roll-call of the nation’s history. Two Presidents of Pakistan Farooq Ahmed Khan Leghari and Pervez Musharraf walked its corridors. A Prime Minister of India. The first Chief Justice of Pakistan. Governors, Chief Ministers, Speakers of the National Assembly, Chairmen of the Senate, Generals, Admirals, Foreign Ministers and Ambassadors. These are not the statistics of a university. They are the biography of a country.

At Partition, perhaps the most violent moment in modern South Asian history when 14 million people were displaced and cities like Lahore descended into communal horror, FCCU converted two of its hostels into a hospital for refugees. The institution did not close its gates. It opened them wider. That hospital became the United Christian Hospital, which serves the people of Lahore to this day.

More recently, under the leadership of former Rector Dr. James Tebbe who was awarded Pakistan’s Sitara-e-Imtiaz, the Star of Excellence, by the President of Pakistan FCCU established the Light of Hope School for children of its own campus service staff, ensuring that the sons and daughters of gardeners and guards could access quality education. This is a university that has never confused its walls with its mission.

FCCU has always been a place where Pakistan’s minority communities Christian, Hindu, Sikh, and others found not just safety but dignity. At a time when Pakistan’s national conversation about minorities is already fraught with anxiety, the image of government officials evicting security staff and issuing 24-hour removal orders from a building named after a Christian educational leader is deeply troubling.

Historian F.S. Aijazuddin posed this question when writing about Lahore’s endangered heritage: you can buy new bricks from a kiln, but from where will you buy history? Ewing Hall survived 1947. It survived nationalization in 1972. It survived neglect, political turbulence, and a century of Lahore’s relentless urban expansion. The one thing it may not survive is a government that sees it as an obstacle rather than an inheritance.

FCCU has not been passive in its stewardship. The university commissioned a centennial plaque in 2016, recognizing Ewing Hall as the oldest building in continuous use at the university. It commissioned structural engineering reports. It maintained the lawn and the veranda and the administrative offices even while the dormitories stood empty, waiting for restoration. This is not abandonment. This is custodianship precisely what a civilized society asks of educational institutions in relation to its heritage.

The Rector’s statement, issued through tears and grief, ends with a simple request: that the government reconsider its actions and return Ewing Hall to Forman. That request is not merely institutional. It echoes the appeal of every Formanite like me, who is the third-generation Formanite and who remembers the view of Anarkali from a second-floor window, every student who had their first serious conversation about life in that mess, every Pakistani Muslim, Christian, Hindu, or Sikh who has ever walked into a Forman classroom and found, against the odds of this complicated country, that they belonged.

FCCU is not asking for a favour. It is asking the government to honour what it says it stands for: heritage, education, minority rights, and the rule of law including the law that recognises a lease signed in 1915 and renewed well into the 2040s as binding.

Gezi Park was saved. The Hampi ruins were protected. Institutions and communities around the world have fought back against the erasure of shared memory, and they have won. Lahore deserves the same outcome. Those two charpoys in that second-floor dormitory room, still facing each other, are still waiting. Let the students come back. Let these verandas echo again.