Pakistan has a very rich and varied history, including but not limited to one of the oldest known settled societies, the Harappan Civilisation. However, the state of historical archives in the country at present does not seem to reflect this fact.

Awareness about existing archives and access to them is very limited, they are generally in a state of neglect and too narrowly focused, and even their importance often escapes most of those in positions of power.

To understand this present situation, one has to understand the historical context first.

STARTING WITH A DISADVANTAGE

Pakistan’s documentation of itself was handicapped from the very start due to two factors.

Firstly, the British colonisers appropriated a significant amount of important archival material and manuscripts that belonged to the Indian Subcontinent. Most of the Arabic, Persian and Urdu manuscripts held in the British Library were taken from colonised India.

The Royal Library has records that no South Asian was allowed to access until very recently, including the crown jewel of Indo-Islamic manuscripts, the Padshahnamah, the illustrated record of the reign of Mughal emperor Shah Jahan.

Pakistan has multiple albeit often inaccessible and under-resourced repositories that collect and preserve our historical archives. Do Pakistanis not really understand their importance? And can we take steps to make historical documents more accessible?

Secondly, although the Partition Council (formed to aid an equitable divide in assets) had provided clear instructions that Pakistan be given the record of its past, India did not hand over Pakistan its share of the historical archives.

Thus, the new country had to start from scratch to build up the cache of its historical archives.

In 1948, the Pakistan Historical and Archives Commission was set up with Dr Ishtiaq Hussain Qureshi as its first president and, in 1951, the Commission set up a Directorate of Archives and Libraries. The ensuing struggle in setting up a national archive mirrored the struggles of running the fledgling country, as there was a severe lack of existing infrastructure, trained experts and qualified bureaucrats.

In the 1960s, the directorate microfilmed 600,000 pages of archival records and more than 1.8 million copies of old records, historical documents and valuable manuscripts were distributed to various relevant organisations. It also set up an Archival Museum and Archival Library for use by scholars and researchers of South Asian history.

However, the pace of progress was very slow and the lack of a national awareness about the archives did not help. One likely factor was the nature of the nascent Pakistani national identity. While the state tried to forge an identity based on the ‘Two-nation Theory’ and Urdu as the national language, it did not have an appetite for wide access to the archives.

THE NATIONAL ARCHIVES

Predictably, the turning point for the state’s interest in archives was the publication of the Archives of the Freedom Movement. In 1970, the Ministry of Education established the Quaid-e-Azam Papers Cell. This led to the full establishment of the National Archives of Pakistan in 1973. The charter of the Archives reflected the issues previously mentioned.

The function was to preserve records of “national importance”, such as those of the founders and freedom fighters.

The National Archives were housed in different houses and bungalows in Rawalpindi and Islamabad until 1988, when a separate building was finally constructed, covering 150,000 sq feet of floor space. They contain more than 700,000 files of official records from the federal government. Furthermore, they contain records of legislative debates, census reports and gazetteers, newspaper bulletins, radio and television reports.

The National Archives also have 40 private collections, including its flagship Quaid-e-Azam Papers. Other private collections have been donated by eminent individuals, particularly those associated with the Pakistan Movement.

The lists of all the private collections and media repositories are available in soft copies on the National Archives website. This is massively helpful for all researchers and is essential for every archive in the digital era.

The National Archives has plans to digitise its collections but they are not available yet. Researchers have also noted that physical access to the archives is torturous, since it’s located in Islamabad’s ‘Red Zone’. Even after gaining access, there isn’t a system designed to help researchers procure the documents they need.

Moreover, the National Archives are mostly focused on the Pakistan Movement, although the country has an ancient history that warrants further study.

Pakistan is home to the mighty Indus that gave birth to multiple civilisations and their study should not be limited to the museums in Taxila or Harappa. Since these are the National Archives, there needs to be an attempt to represent more religions and cultures of the country and its past, not just the dominant Muslim one.

There must also be a move away from colonial forms of archival science, towards more modern methods. A nation’s past is more than just the documents of its government and collections donated by the elite members of society. The vernacular history that represents 99 percent of the populace should also be documented.

In this respect, the provincial archives fare better.

THE PUNJAB ARCHIVES

The oldest among these is the Punjab Archives, established in 1924 and housed in the magnificent tomb of Anarkali. It contains around seven million documents and more than 70,000 rare books.

Among them are many unique documents from the Mughal, Sikh, British and post-Independence eras, including miniatures and seals. It is a treasure trove of history. There is a museum too and it displays fascinating documents and artefacts from all the eras mentioned.

The Punjab Archive’s plan for the digitisation of 500,000 documents is under way in the first phase, which started in 2018. The plan is to ultimately digitise all the documents. Their website states that the world of archives has reached the digital age and they are committed to ensuring people do not have to physically visit the archives. However, despite the passage of five years, the digital archives are very cumbersome to access and the physical ones are very elusive.

To get digital copies of these archival materials, one needs to order them from a catalogue with a short description, pay money and go through some red tape. Only 14 of the whole digitised collection were available for free, which somewhat defeats the purpose of an easily accessible digitised collection. There are no catalogues of the archive collections available.

Therefore, to get a list of the rest of the archives an in-person trip needs to be made. When I went there, the research officer was not present and they asked me to come some other day. The website does not list email addresses for the archive and any prospective researcher has to send a message in the “Contact Us” box on the bottom right hand corner of the webpage.

All of these issues are a serious impediment to the process of research. Academics and students already work on limited resources and the archives should do more to facilitate them.

THE SINDH ARCHIVES

The Sindh Archives have a much more helpful website. Their services for researchers are also laudable and writer Salman Rashid wrote in glowing terms about his experience with the archives.

They have 850 oriental manuscripts in Arabic, Persian, Sindhi, Urdu and Saraiki. Sindhi and Saraiki are vernacular languages of Pakistan and their manuscripts are a welcome addition to any archive. The website provides a list of six ancient manuscripts but they should publish the full list of the manuscripts.

There are more than 40,000 books and the website gives the number of books according to subject but not a list of the books. A thousand of these books are in Sindhi.

The Sindh Archives contain government records from the 19th century onwards as well as 764 old maps of Sindh. A list is provided of 100 of these on the website. They also house a full collection of old journals, including the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society and others from the British era. These are a valuable source for research into British knowledge collection in South Asia. The list of all these journals is given on the website.

THE BALOCHISTAN ARCHIVES

The Balochistan Archives have an exceptional website with detailed catalogues. Like the Sindh Archives, they also contain extensive material related to the history and culture of the province, apart from the usual government records and gazetteers.

There is a vast catalogue of British colonial knowledge produced on Balochistan; a detailed catalogue of political books and reports on Pakistan and its surrounding regions, especially Iran, Afghanistan and the Soviet Union; of World and Indian History books; of pre- and post-Partition Railways; of Indian races and Baloch classics; and of travelogues on India and its regions.

While this is all very helpful to researchers, coupled with their new and updated website that has easily accessible information, the logical next step is digitisation of their collections so they are logistically available. In a vast province such as Balochistan, this is essential.

OTHER LIBRARIES

There are also some other libraries which merit a mention. The Punjab Public Library was established in 1884 in the 17th century baradari of Wazir Khan, later being moved to a newly built structure next to it. It houses 1,100 manuscripts, mostly in Arabic and Persian, including the works of historian Abdul Qadir Badauni and Persian translations of the epic Mahabharata.

It also has collections of old journals such as Indian Antiquaries and Royal Asiatic Society. There are other periodicals and magazines, both English and Urdu but not much in Punjabi, which isn’t ideal for such an important institution in the capital of Punjab. Their e-catalogue provides search access to help locate material from more than 40 libraries all across Pakistan. This is a very valuable resource.

The Punjab University Library in Lahore is home to 24,000 manuscripts in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Urdu, Sanskrit and Punjabi languages. It contains some gems from more than 500 years ago, with a particular highlight being manuscripts of the Holy Quran in Kufic, Bahar and Naskh scripts.

The Dyal Singh LIbrary in Lahore contains similar holdings to the other libraries but with the important addition of Sanskrit and Gurmukhi manuscripts. This should be the norm for every archive and library in Pakistan.

India gets a great amount of research interest as they hold a sizable number of Indo-Islamic manuscripts. There is no reason Pakistan should not collect archives related to its non-Islamic history. Following the opening up of the Kartarpur corridor for Sikh pilgrims, Pakistan should work on acquiring documents on Sikh history since a major bulk of Sikh holy places are in Pakistan.

A STATE OF NEGLECT

The state of archives in Pakistan is in neglect. Despite having been disadvantaged from the very start, by this stage the country should have been much farther ahead than it currently is.

The issue that undergirds all the others that plague the archives in Pakistan is a lack of funds from the state. Considering that our archives already started on the backfoot as they were plundered by colonial powers, we must do our best to keep access to the existing archives open and digitise them on an emergency basis.

To achieve this, a much greater share of resources has to be allocated towards the preservation of documents, their digitisation and the hiring of adequate manpower to undertake these tasks.

Additionally, it should be ensured that archives are politically and socially neutral. Denying public access to knowledge is anti-democratic. Students from developing countries such as Pakistan would be lost without resources such as the Internet Archive which provide free access to vital sources of knowledge.

For a region rooted in oral folklore, there is also a real dearth of such sources. Local languages are neglected and the rich folklore of the country is not preserved in the way it should be. For researchers of subjects other than colonial rule and the freedom movement, archival materials are hard to find.

The archives are generally not up to date with developing trends in history and historiography. Modern journals are severely lacking and they do not seem to have gone beyond colonial methods of archiving history.

To iterate, the issue is not that there is a dearth of data that can be archived in South Asia, but rather the negligence archives face, the selective bias in choosing archives and, lastly, their inaccessibility seem to be factors that must be seriously addressed in order to enrich our archive repositories.

The writer is a historian of South Asia and can be reached at azeemkhan1489@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, EOS, July 23rd, 2023