UK society pitches in to save Bradlaugh Hall in Lahore

Vishav Bharti

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, June 7

A campaign to save the crumbling Bradlaugh Hall in Lahore got a fillip after a UK based society started a campaign to save the historic building.

The hall is named after English Parliamentarian Charles Bradlaugh, who hailed India’s freedom struggle. Freedom fighters like Lala Lajpat Rai, Bhagat Singh and Jawaharlal Nehru have been associated with this hall.

Chris Pounds, Secretary, The Charles Bradlaugh Society based in Northampton, has written to the Punjabi diaspora to help save the historic building. The society also announced that the annual Bradlaugh commemoration event in Northampton on September 25 will be to ‘Save Bradlaugh Hall’.

The society has also involved two MPs, Michael Ellis and David Macintosh, in the UK for saving the hall. Pounds in the communication termed Bradlaugh as the most illustrious figure to have represented Northampton.

“He took personal interest in the affairs of the Indian nation and the plight of its population…Consequently, Charles is probably better known and remembered in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh than in the town he represented and the country of his birth,” he said.

He also said that the hall has great historical, social, political, cultural and architectural significance but it has been inaccessible for many years.

Earlier last year historians and activists from India and Paksitani Punjab had come together and started an online campaign, including a Facebook page, to save this historic hall which is in a shambles. They had also called the hall a secular shrine of the Punjab.

The building is located at the Rettigan Road which remained an important symbol of resistance against British colonial rule from 1900 till 1947. The then Congress president Surendranath Banerjee had inaugurated the hall on October 30, 1900.