Lahore is not an easy thing to hold. It arrives layered, with memory, contradiction, romance, grief, and noise…and it resists being simplified. The Lahore Heritage Club (LHC) understands this instinctively. It does not try to explain the city. It lets it speak.
At the heart of this space is Zarafshaan Tahir: curator, cultural practitioner, and a psychology graduate from the University of Kent, whose work sits at the juncture of memory, material culture, and human connection. After studying and working in England during her undergraduate years, she returned to Lahore not to distance herself from the past, but to sit closer to it. For over four years, she has been shaping the LHC’s residency programmes, international collaborations, and mentorship initiatives, continuing a legacy that began long before it was hers to carry.
The LHC was founded in 2000 by her late father, Tahir Yazdani. A collector of antiques, an educator, and a deeply relational thinker, he envisioned heritage not as something preserved for admiration, but as something activated through people. Under his leadership, LHC became a living, multidisciplinary space – home to baithaks, poetry sessions, musical collaborations, participatory archives, and heritage tours that treated the city as a shared text rather than a curated spectacle. His work emphasized inclusivity at a time when heritage preservation was increasingly becoming exclusive, academic, or aestheticized.
“During his presidency, my father cultivated an active online community and introduced participatory initiatives such as photo walks and breakfast heritage tours across Lahore, Kasur, and North Punjab. His work emphasized inclusivity and dialogue, which led to interfaith community events in Lahore with Sikh, Hindu, and Christian communities, including annual celebrations like Nowruz,” Zarafshaan states.
“He also contributed to select architectural projects, hosted international residents and AIESEC interns, and collaborated with organisations such as ICOM, ASG, and Rotary. But beyond all of this, his real vision was to mould his students, club members, and clients to take the work forward. That is something we have truly achieved. When I see the tours he once conducted – at the dhobi ghat, railway station, or the caves near Islamabad – now being followed by tour guides, or institutions using workshop modules we developed years ago, even for international residencies, I feel his vision coming to life. He was deeply committed to ensuring heritage was not preserved only for the elite. He would sit with Sunday bazaar merchants to teach them how to identify first-edition books, or guide those painting enamel on balconies and ceilings in Androon Shehr about safer varnishes, helping them understand the significance of the heritage around them. Many homes in the Walled City, beyond the usual tourist sites, still have sheesh mahal–like ceilings and frescoes…features I have seen this year that he fought hard to help households preserve.”
Growing up inside that world, Zarafshaan did not experience heritage as instruction. It was atmosphere. It was behaviour. It was time spent listening to others. “For me, it was a very lived-in experience, not something imposed or actively taught,” she says. What shaped her most was not what was said, but what was modelled: respect for people, for place, and for the consequences of cultural work.
After his passing, Zarafshaan stepped into LHC not as a replacement, but as a listener. The space, she realised, was far larger than its walls. “I’m still learning about the LHC…it isn’t just a physical space,” she reflects. People arrive carrying stories of how the club shaped their sense of self, musicians who found international audiences, storytellers whose work travelled far beyond Lahore, visitors who rediscovered a relationship with their language or history. The work her father began had already taken root, spreading into institutions, tour formats, and workshop modules that now exist independently of the club itself.
What distinguishes Zarafshaan’s stewardship is the way she allows the space to remain emotionally porous. The LHC does not feel institutional because it was never meant to. It was built on love and empathy during a time when Pakistan itself was negotiating a crisis of identity, when speaking Urdu could invite penalties in elite schools, when Western minimalism and muted palettes quietly displaced local aesthetics. The LHC became a refuge: a place where people could explore who they were without defensiveness or shame, where warmth was not a branding exercise but a way of being. Much of that ethos came directly from her father’s personality, his charm, generosity, and ability to make people feel immediately at home.
Zarafshaan’s background in psychology subtly shapes how she carries this forward. Her curatorial practice is deeply attuned to human behaviour: how people learn, what makes them feel safe, and how knowledge becomes meaningful. This is most visible in LHC’s hands-on workshops – fresco painting, tile work, embossing – where history is encountered through the body as much as the intellect. Making becomes a method of inquiry. Through materials, participants uncover stories of trade, symbolism, spirituality, and sustainability. Knowledge is not delivered; it is discovered, owned, and carried outward into dinner conversations and community spaces.
Her relationship with Lahore itself remains central. She believes the city is still waiting to be heard on its own terms. Too often, its history is filtered through colonial frameworks that flatten its complexity.
“We just have to stop focusing on colonialism and structuring our educational sessions from a Western lens and make space for Lahore to roar,” she says. On her tours, often stretching well beyond five hours, stories emerge organically: from descendants of freedom fighters to poets, architects, Sikh leaders, and families who have lived inside the city’s layers for generations. The conversations move both ways, refusing hierarchy.
“If I have any curatorial instinct at all, it is because I live here,” Zarafshaan says. The city shapes everything, from the colour palettes she uses in her classes to the unhurried rhythm of the LHC itself. Even endings resist closure. A simple Khuda Hafiz often opens into another hour of conversation, mirroring Lahore’s refusal to be efficient where connection is concerned.
Community at the LHC is intentionally fluid and intergenerational. Students, elders, artists, historians, musicians, and first-time visitors share space without pretense. Safety and inclusivity are actively held, allowing moments of rare intimacy to surface: a spontaneous poetic exchange between strangers during a bazm-e-sher, or a Valentine’s Day folklore session where women reclaimed stories of Sassi, Heer, and Sohni without irony or apology. These moments affirm the emotional labour behind the work…and why it matters.
The club’s most sustained impact has been on younger Lahoris through its volunteer and mentorship programmes, which operate more like fellowships than placements. Participants go on to create cultural festivals in their own institutions, secure competitive international grants, and extend the idea of the baithak into diasporic spaces across the UK, Europe, and North America. In a rapidly reshaped city, Zarafshaan sees independent cultural spaces as anchors, places that hold memory while allowing growth. “The role will be similar to a tree and its members its roots in Lahore,” she reflects.
When asked about the future, she resists definitive answers. The LHC, she insists, is shaped by those who pass through it…their ideas, feedback, even criticism. Her role is not to direct, but to hold space. “I am a vessel facilitating their ideas.”
In doing so, Zarafshaan Tahir is not simply preserving her father’s life’s work. She is allowing it to evolve, rooted in love, attentive to people, and alive to the city it continues to serve.