Precious stones

There does not appear to be any national strategy to address issue of how best to be custodians of cultural heritage.

It is no exaggeration to say that Pakistan is a living museum, home to a vast array of artefacts and structures that date back millennia. Museums, if they are to do their job properly, need good curators and successive governments since Partition have been notably deficient in the care and conservation of our cultural heritage. From the Thatta necropolis to the prehistoric rock carvings that lie close to Chilas, to the decaying forts of Cholistan and the battered Buddhist statuary of the Swat valley there is a catalogue of incompetence, neglect and mismanagement. It is even being credibly suggested that the ruins of Moenjodaro be reburied to prevent their further deterioration — such is the desperate state they have deteriorated to.

Azad Jammu and Kashmir is a storehouse of antiquities. A team of archaeologists and researchers recently conducted the documentation of 100 key sites in Muzzaffarabad division and to the surprise of nobody and the despondency of many, what they found matched the national picture. A seminar held at the Quaid-e-Azam University Taxila Institute of Asian Civilisation (TIAC) was told that heritage sites from the Mughal, Dogra and early Sikh periods were all threatened. Some of the buildings surveyed had become havens for stray animals and drug users, others had been ‘converted’ to other uses. Any conservation work or preservation that is done tends to be piecemeal, underfunded and heavily reliant on foreign donors for funding. There does not appear to be any national strategy to address the issue of how best to be custodians of our cultural heritage, and individual provinces have very different priorities when it comes to funding allocation and cultural preservation. Pakistan may not be a rich country and care of antiquities arguably is a lower priority than feeding the neediest, but we hold these precious stones in trust on behalf of the rest of the world, a trust we currently fail to deserve.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 5^th, 2014.

Like Opinion & Editorial on Facebook, follow @ETOpEd on Twitter to receive all updates on all our daily pieces.