Rawalpindi’s Beloved Tour Guide

Hassaan Tauseef was only 11-years-old when he began feeling a pull towards local history and culture. Drawing a series of sketches of antique doors inspired by Lahore’s Badshahi Mosque, in Pakistan, and Jaipur’s City Palace, in India, Tauseef was fascinated by historic heritage sites and their long-forgotten stories.

Born and raised in Rawalpindi, in Pakistan’s Punjab province, 21-year-old Tauseef currently moonlights as a tour guide, taking groups of local and foreign tourists through his city’s old, ancient spots, unearthing Rawalpindi’s hidden, albeit, crumbling gems.

“Rawalpindi used to be a Sikh and Hindu majority city in pre-partition times. During the week of partition, almost the entire population exited the city, leaving behind a ghost town where there were many buildings but no stories to be told about them,” Tauseef says. “Pindi Heritage Tours became a way of unearthing these stories.”

Having launched his tour guide platform in January 2021, the young architecture student and activist has hosted over 700 tourists from over 43 countries in a short span of time.

But Tauseef had never planned to become a tour guide. It happened by chance during his architectural research, under his Rawalpindi Heritage Project, a project that revolved around the history of the city’s pre-partition buildings.

“Before I knew it, the research quickly turned into a cultural research and an exploration of Rawalpindi,” he says, “At the time, Pindi Heritage Tours wasn’t really something that was a concrete idea, but during my research I realized that my city’s history had either been deliberately erased – or hidden – and how so many people often feel such a disconnect to its history. That’s when I decided that I wanted to make a platform for people to come together and share stories about Rawalpindi’s past.”

Starting off with taking groups of students to historical sites in the city, he mentions that during the tours, conversations wouldn’t just focus about the buildings, but would also branch out into an aspect of partition and colonization.

“Pindi Heritage Tours manifested as an initiative to educate our youth about the city’s architectural, cultural and diverse religious heritage,” Tauseef states, who runs the platform as a one-man show, from the research to the tours.

“These tours have given me a chance to have beautiful conversations with some older tourists who used to live in Rawalpindi during the 50s and the 60s. They have so many fascinating anecdotes to share about the city and it amazes me every time. Those are the moments I live for.”

Interviewing partition refugees during his research work, Tauseef states that he wanted to “immortalize” their stories for the future generations, apart from bringing back a “cultural context” to his beloved city.

From reading books, articles, research papers, analyzing colonial documents and photographs, Tauseef is on a mission to create an archive of oral stories and anecdotes through his platform.

“Within the research some stories have really hit hard,” he says, “A woman I interviewed once told me that she was 16-years-old during partition. She narrated a very sad story about when the temples in Rawalpindi started getting attacked during the riots and how people began forming human chains around the temples to protect them. But the attackers were undeterred and began shooting at the temples. If you see any of Rawalpindi’s temples today, you’ll still see the bullet holes on almost all of them. It’s one of the most shocking things to witness. It makes you relive history.”

While hopeful about the conservation and preservation of Pakistan’s heritage sites, Tauseef mentions that he has comes to terms with the fact that the process may take a long time.

“The first step towards conservation is documentation. To be honest, we haven’t done much of it in Pakistan. For instance, there are currently over 40 abandoned Hindu temples in Rawalpindi that are badly neglected. Only by documentation can you begin registering the sites and raising awareness about them. The next step is restoration. I do find peace in the fact that people in Pakistan are working tirelessly on the country’s architectural history so that the stories are never forgotten.”

Presently, Tauseef is pushing for the restoration of a beautiful temple in Rawalpindi and is hoping the local government approves of the project.

“I want to move towards compiling all of this research together in the form of a book so that the stories of Rawalpindi can be remembered for a long time,” he says, when speaking about his plans for the future. “However, one of the things that I’m really looking forward to continuing is my partition stories oral archive. I want to put more time towards it because this is the last, disappearing generation who experienced partition. And it has to be archived quickly.”