My great-aunt died the other day. She was old just how did would be difficult to guess exactly. She had been a presence in the family ever since I or my father or even my grand father before him could remember. Granite, weather-worn and indomitable, she had become like some public monument whose foundation-stone inscription has blurred into illegibility over the years, but remains an enduring landmark for each successive generation.

She was fond of talking about her youth and of the changes she had witnessed in society viewed from the seclusion of an elegant widowhood. I would listen to her, invariably with an adolescent’s impatience, while she recounted stories of our ancestors who had been ministers at the court of the Sikh Maharaja Ranjit Singh in the early part of the nineteenth century. I narrowed my eyes with suspicion when she claimed that she used to ride from her haveli in the old city of Lahore to her lands in Rajwind, over twenty miles away, before breakfast, and of course I could have yawned with ennui whenever she lapsed into a Persian couplet to emphasize a point. She was, I had decided privately the rather dusty residue of a distant, disparate past.

Governor’s House

All of a sudden, about eight years ago (I recall it was a winter afternoon), she stopped being an undated anachronism. I had returned from the Governor’s House in Lahore where I had gone to have tea with the Governor. My grand-aunt was waiting in her room, smoking a hookah while her maid arranged the quilt on the bed. She asked where I had been I told her, edging my account with a trimming of glitter which often adorns invitations to such mansions. She drew smoke from the pipe raucously and exhaled it silently.

“I have also been to Governor’s House, once,” she said. “Oh, when?” I asked.

“It was in the year of the Basra war. Yes, it was on the eleventh of the first month, 11 January. I had gone with your grandmother, our sister was with us. We three had asked to meet Sir Edward Maclagan in connection with some property.

“Do you remember what the House looked like in those days?” I enquired, in a faintly gauche test of her memory. “Well, we drive there in a horse-drawn phaeton. Each of us wore Kashmiri pashmina shawls costing about Rs.100 apiece.

“We alighted at the main entrance, were escorted up a wooden stair-case, turned left into a small ante-chamber hung with swords and shields. That too was paneled in wood. Then we were taken into the Drawing Room which over-looked the gardens. Lady Maclagan was waiting for us by the windows. Tea was brought. Soon afterwards Sir Edward Maclagan entered the room from a different door and as we observed purdah he sat behind a screened was served his tea there. I asked us various questions ways through the screen and when we had finished the business of our visit, we took our eave and returned the way we had come. Is the layout still as have described it?” it was her urn to ask.” “Yes,” I admitted softly “It’s just as you described it.” Her recollection of a meeting half a century ago and of the geography of the House had been faultless.

After that day, whenever she spoke of her past I did not regard it as something antithetical to my present or if she referred to someone long since dead I did not instinctively dissociate them from my life. She had coalesced persons and events into a single elastic continuity. A fading photograph taken at the turn of the century of an elderly bearded figure dressed in a chogha his walking stick clamped in his left hand staring defiantly at the cyclopean camera lens was no more sinister to her than she was to me. He was her own grand-uncle and grandfather her father having married his cousin).

“He was Fakir Qamaruddin” she explained. “My grandfather and your great-great-grand father. He was born in 1827 while Ranjit Singh was still on the throne. He was only nineteen, he told me when he accompanied his father Fakir Nuruddin on his appointment in 1846 as a member of the Regency Council constituted by the Governor-General, Lord Hardinge.”

To her the names Ranjit Singh, Fakir Nuruddin or Lord Hardinge were familiar as smooth as river stones burnished by the flow of time; to me, they were still embodied in historical reprints of the Oxford University Press. I wanted to know more, to learn more, not just about the history of our family, but more particularly of that sepia age from which her recollection arched across time like some uninterrupted rainbow.

Research Material

I must be honest and admit here for as I have said she died only the other day, I saw little of her in her closing years. Her capacity to meet people decreased, while my obligations to meet them increased. The interest in history though sown by her, germinated and flowered into a spring-time of research and collecting. My wife and I began modestly, acquiring first a small but significant library of some rare first editions accounts of soldiers, travelers and administrators and other source material on the history of the province of Pakistan during the nineteenth century. Later, we were able to amplify this by obtaining pictorial material—sketches, watercolours and prints, views of the topography of Pakistan as it existed over a century ago. We were of course fascinated to see how much it had changed and at times started to notice in fact how little it had altered.

Most of the material we discovered consisted of lithographs drawn on stone printed and later hand-coloured to reassemble a watercolour. They were essentially reproductions by professional artists built up from sketches made on the spot by British travelers, administrators and soldiers. Through, keen, precise and sensitive observation, this breed of amateur artists provided through their endeavours a unique panorama of Pakistan, its cities and their forts, its mountain details and historic passes. Through the lithographs of James Atkinson we could see Roree and Sukkur as they existed in 1841. poised as sentinels on either wide of the Indus; through Lt. William Edwards we could reconstruct the grandeur of the massive Round Tower of the fort at Hyderabad of glimpse the tomb of Lal Shahbaz Qalandar at Sehwan Sharif as they appeared to a visitor in the same year; and through the slightly inaccurate but extremely picturesque recollections of the Hazuri Bagh pavilion and the Fort at Lahore sketched by Lord Hardinge’s son and A.D.C., Charles Hardinge, we could return to March 1846, when Charles Hardinge, twenty-two years old and Fakir Qamaruddin, five years younger, both accompanying their fathers, became immature witnesses to the expansion of British authority into the Punjab which followed the signature of the Treaty of Lahore. Both Hardinge and Qamaruddin were to mature, each in his own way, as reliable and trustworthy historians of their time. By coincidence, therefore, we found ourselves pupils to both.

When my wife and I decided to share our interest in our collection with the general public through an exhibition, it seemed natural that we should do so in conjunction with the British Council at Lahore, for apart from the important role the British Council plays in promoting education, its Lahore office particularly has a fascinating cache of research material, a special collection of books published in English on Pakistan and its neighbouring countries. This was the perfect complement to our pictorial material. The result of this temporary confluence is an integrated and stimulating presentation to the viewer of Pakistan—of its scenery, its geography, its topography, its social history through the written word and the imprinted visual impression.

“If she had only lived to see this exhibition,” my wife sighed. “There was so much that would have interested her. Who do you think will come to see it?”

“Every one who should have listened to his great-aunt.”

Published in The Pakistan Times, Lahore 06 September 1978