A living museum

Fakirkhana, a family-run museum, is something our families can learn from & preserve history when text-books twist it.

Most people think that history can only be learnt and appreciated through books. And most books in Pakistan are written in a bland and ideological way, so that let alone developing an interest in history, these books make people hate history. The disgust apparent on faces at the mention of ‘Pakistan Studies’ is enough to gauge the disdain of people towards history.

The fact that our history books are written with a certain ideological bent and are largely factually inaccurate is something which has been pointed out numerous times. Unfortunately, this phenomenon cannot be rectified easily, and unless there is a clear change of thinking in the government (since most of these awful books are commissioned by the several government-run textbook boards), a majority of our students are doomed to study and rote learn these tomes.

Therefore, the onus is on us, the people, to try and find ways around this predicament. The commissioning, writing and marketing of good books takes time, and since a lot of good authors are based abroad and usually choose international publishers, the cost of such books is prohibitive for the common man. Publishing houses such as Oxford University Press Pakistan, are trying hard to make good academic books cheaply available in Pakistan, but this process takes some time to materialise.

In the meantime, the best resource we have is to educate ourselves about the history of our country and our region by simply walking around, exploring the old parts of our historic towns, by visiting museums, old buildings, old bazaars and the like. Very often we would be surprised by what we find.

A few weeks ago, I made a trip to the Fakirkhana Museum near Bhati Gate in Lahore. Being a historian, I had heard about the museum, but had never visited it. On that a hot Sunday afternoon then, with no electricity, Syed Fakir Saifuddin, the curator of the museum, took a small group of us around the large haveli which houses the nearly 20,000 strong collection. Among the numerous things which fascinated me about this museum, let me highlight just two.

First, the Museum had a collection which ranged from the early days of Islam, to the Mughal period, the Sikh rule, and even had some Far Eastern artefacts. Hence, I saw one of the first written copies of the Kufic and Nastaliq scripts, the clothes of Hazrat Ayesha, Mughal miniature paintings made during the Sikh era, the shawl of the wife of Maharaja Ranjit Singh, and even some early twentieth century Oriental chairs, which were specially carved for each of the sexes. The range of these artefacts showed how the Fakir family treasured the things from the past. In an environment which is obsessed with the ‘new,’ even the keeping, let alone preservation of something old is remarkable. Being a family-run museum, maybe this is something all our families can learn from.

Secondly, the museum was an ‘interactive’ one. I must admit that initially the word ‘interactive’ sounded terribly modern to me, but as Fakir Saifuddin explained, I realised that he was simply referring to what the museum had been since its beginning, and what even the city of Lahore has been for ages. An interactive museum is where you can go and touch the artefacts in their intended place, where the objects are not hidden away in some glass cage and presented as a disconnected exhibition piece. Most of the things at the Fakirkhana were kept where they have probably been kept since they were acquired by the Fakir family when they were court physicians to Maharaja Ranjit Singh in the early eighteenth century.

Every passing second is history, and therefore no place, however new, is devoid of history. Lahore might be more than a millennia old and Islamabad only about forty years, yet both of them have historical significance. All cities, areas, and places, tell us something, something which we can appreciate and learn from. One needs good books in order to reinvigorate the study and awareness of history, but let us not forget the ‘living history’ around us, waiting to be explored, touched, and understood.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 18^th, 2011.