Museums’ conference: Public urged to take pride in Indus Valley civilisation

LAHORE:

Speakers at the second All Pakistan Museums Conference on Saturday stressed the need for promoting the culture and the history of the region.

Curators and directors of museums from across the country briefed the gathering about the collections displayed at their museums and efforts underway to conserve those.

Museums Association Pakistan (MAP) secretary general Mian Attique Ahmed highlighted the association’s efforts for revamping museums across the city. He said the association had evolved a five-year plan in this regard in collaboration with experts from the COMSATS Institute of Science and Technology.

“Culture evolves over centuries. It belongs to regions and not to religions,” said MAP president Abdul Waheed.

He said it was unfortunate that most people’s knowledge of the country’s history went either as far back as Arab general Muhammad bin Qasim’s arrival in the region or the partition of India in 1947. He lamented the tendency in the country to associate culture with religion. He urged the people to study the region’s history and to be proud of its roots in the Indus Valley Civilisation.

Walled City of Lahore Authority (WCLA) Director General Kamran Lashari was the chief guest on the occasion.

He said the poor condition of most museums was due to a lack of commitment at the social and political level. Agreeing with other speakers, he said that regardless of their religious beliefs people should take pride in the region’s civilisation.

Referring to the museums in the country, he said most of them were only “a little better than graveyards”. “Our museums are dead places. Young people have very little interest in them,” he said. He said museums in most other countries he had visited were full of life.

He urged the museum administrations to promote the lives and works of artists among other local celebrities.

Lahore Museum Director Sumaira Samad briefed the gathering about the collection at the facility and about a project to digitalise official documents, to measure and photograph all artifacts and to carry out renovation work at the museum.

Shabir Naseem Baloch, from the University of Peshawar’s Department of Archaeology, discussed the state of museums in Balochistan. He said the site that was once home to the McMahon Museum in Quetta now housed Serena Hotel. He said the museum had been destroyed in the 1935 earthquake. Around 17, 000 artifacts recovered from the debris had been sent to Karachi for conservation, he said.

Addressing the Balochistan government, he said instead of spending resources on setting up museums at the regional level there was a need to invest in a centralised museum.  Artifacts related to entire province could be displayed there, he said.

The two-day conference is part of events planned under the Pakistan-China Business Forum underway in the city.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 20^th, 2016.