On Monday last this newspaper carried an excellent story that has interested every scholar, no matter where they be in the world, that the magnificent Punjab government is going to digitise its over half a million rare archives. This is a colossal and unique collection and any positive move needs lauding.

The sheer scale of the task at hand is daunting to say the least. As these columns were the first to report that these archives were being dumped in a horse stable using gardeners wheel-barrows, it created a lot of problems for the Archives Department. This correspondent personally witnessed the event, and even picked up a letter written by the great poet Mirza Ghalib from the floor of the horse stable as it lay in a stream flowing from a nearby urinal. The letter pertained to his pleading with the East India Company to restore his pension.

But such happenings seldom ruffle bureaucrats, who kept promising to build a special building for the huge rare archives collection. Both sites officially claimed as under consideration proved to be hoaxes. Now that finally a slashed budget has been approved it is time to be positive and to point in a direction where justice can be meted out to our finest treasure.

How is a rare archive saved? Here four steps are critical, with no step being missed. All steps have to be in order and sequential. If you miss one, the rest, in the ultimate analysis, are of no use. So here we go.

Step One: Every document has to be listed and recorded manually. They have to be sorted in categories, which depends on subject, or era, or type. From this will flow the computer design for the website, not the other way round. If the computer program is designed before any knowledge of the contents, it will create massive future problems. This is the experience of Harvard, Cambridge and Tokyo. All these great universities had to redesign their programmes at a colossal cost. As an expert of the subject commented on reading the story: “If you put the cart before the horse it will take a lot of trouble to undo it”.

An appropriately-designed computer program is an effort independent of the rest of the work. At this stage it would be useful to point out that the experience of archives the world over is that computer programs tend to become outdated every five years. So as new computers are put in place, which is technologically understandable, the entire exercise has to be redone. This makes the need to understand the other aspects of archive treatment.

The Second Step: Archives all need to be conserved. Paper and fabrics, as also ferrous archives, tend to react to its environment, and as it is a natural fibre it has an ageing process at work. That is why each and every piece of paper needs attention. It must be digitised before the conservation process. This is the most laborious task at hand. Merely digitising and throwing them back in the ‘horse stable’ would destroy an irreplaceable treasure.

The Third Step: Once the conservation part is achieved then it is time to preserve them, and for that a suitable environment is critical where the three elements of light, humidity and temperature have to be at a constant. For this there is a need for a high-quality premises, not a horse stable. Light tends to ‘bleach’ even the finest printed material, while humidity hastens the decay, while temperature works on both these elements. There is a need for premises that guarantee all these things.

The Final Step: So what else is needed for the Punjab Archives to be a world-class institution where scholars from all over the world come to research? It goes without saying that the finest place in Lahore for this massive and rare treasure is the old Freemasons’ Hall on The Mall. When ZA Bhutto took it over it was a totally unnecessary step. The hoax that Freemasons were foreign agents – mind you all well-known Pakistanis - did bring the ‘pious’ supporters on the streets, but it was an incorrect assertion. Amazing theories about their connection to the Crusaders of old were printed in newspapers. This was, and remains the world over, an organisation dedicated to charitable campaigns. Yes, it was and remains an elitist organisation like so many others.

The day it was taken over this correspondent was assigned to cover it as a newspaper reporter. Rare and valuable books were thrown on the outside pavement and sold off as ‘raddi’. A few friends picked up a few rare books. An excellent library was destroyed forever. It was like Genghis Khan had visited Lahore. The walls were redone in light purple colour and the chief minister of the Punjab moved in. The huge office they left in the GOR area still remains empty.

My suggestion has always been that the chief minister be largehearted and return to his original office. Let the old Freemasons Hall become the Punjab Archives building. It has large basement areas where a ‘controlled’ environment can be created effectively. Its old libraries can provide space for a lot of books. It is the ideal location in Lahore.

Mind you they will be dealing with hundreds of thousands of pieces of old paper which covers the area from Kabul to Delhi and from Kashmir to Multan. The timeline is even more awesome, for from the Akbar the Great era to present Pakistan times. The Mughals, the Afghans, the Sikhs and the British era records, almost all of them, are present in the archives.

This is a task that will consume the finest minds. The cut in the planned budget, so one learns, is a cut in the preservation side. This will prove costly in the end. It would not be a bad idea for the government to plan the computer programme according to the nature of the task at hand, not the other way round. This is a one in a lifetime opportunity, and this government should not let the credit for this slip from its fingers.

Published in Dawn, September 29th, 2019