Behind Closed Doors: Archives and Archiving in Pakistan

Archives are the repositories of official and public knowledge. For the historians, scholars, and journalist archives provide the primary sources of information to write about the past. The scale of conservation and level of access to the sources of primary information are two of the fundamental conditions for the original research in social sciences as well as investigative reporting and can be read as the indicators of the state of social sciences research in Pakistan.

National Archives of Pakistan, Islamabad is the central organisation responsible for the collection, preservation and holding of all official records of the state of Pakistan. It claims to contain the official records of the government, all official publications, newspapers, periodicals, press clippings on selective subjects, T.V and radio news bulletins, rare books, manuscripts, oral archives, microfilm holdings and private collections. However, the official rule that ministries and divisions should send all their records to the Archives for permanent preservation is observed more in breach.

Despite the fact that constitution of Pakistan recognises the access to public information, various laws on the statutory books, such as Official Secret Act of 1923, promote the culture of secrecy, where by breach of loosely defined ‘official information’ is construed as criminal offence. Moreover, the military records have been kept separate from the records of civil administration and public access to those records such as PAF record office is rather limited. The international rule that official records of the state administration should be made public after a span of 30 years, though adhered to, is never strictly followed in the country.

Besides its collection, the National Archives maintains an active repair and conservation unit. Despite limited resources, it is the only organisation officially responsible for the training of the archives staff in the country. However, starting in as late as 1975 the number of training courses have been few and participant restricted to the key state departments. The training in conservation and restoration of archival material of private individuals or non-government organisations and public bodies remains outside the purview of the National Archives.

Visit to Archives should not be for the sole purpose of writing, lecturing or research. The pleasures of looking at old manuscripts, reading about forgotten families of the note and for the general pleasure of learning about the past are sufficient reasons for visiting an archive. However, it is an irony that provincial archives in Lahore, kept at the Anarkali tomb, are located in the civil secretariat, where access to the secretariat itself is scheduled to deter as many visitors as possible in a day. Even the interested scholars, leave aside the casual reader or observer have to face long hours of waiting before they could get to consult the archives. The facilities for photocopying are sometimes, denied even to seasoned scholars, on the humble pleas of precarious nature of archival material. Various categories of public records are randomly placed as classified documents, thereby depriving the scholars from an important source for writing the history of the region.

It has been rumoured that students and scholars from British and American universities working on the colonial Punjab prefer to go to Indian Punjab given the difficulties faced in accessing information from the Punjab Archives, Lahore. There seems to be some credence to it, given the disproportionate references to the pre-partition Pakistani Punjab in the mounting bibliography of Punjab Studies, compiled by a British historian Ian Talbot in 2000. Much damage seems to have been done in terms of adequate representation of the historical experience of the region in colonial and postcolonial period in the South Asian history.

As an evidence of the past, which is textual, visual and oral, the archives form a part of collective social memory and is constrained or enabled by the discourse on national cultural heritage, which is inextricably linked with the time of the nation. It is a landmark on the national calendar, times check on the growth of a nation. The notion of national cultural heritage imposes an economy of violence on the imagination, exploration and conservation of the past. One dimensional view of the past, build on the singularity of the idea of an imagined community, defined by the exclusive parameters of the monotheistic religion, is what that is considered useful for the social reproduction and consumption by the state. I have used the word violence instructively. Any attempts to transcend the borders of national imagination bring the wrath of the nation state. Even in the days of much hyped Pakistan India peace, the themes of ‘common cultural heritage of pre-partition Punjab’ are strategically deployed by the two states. An unrestrained communication between regions poses a threat to the integrity of national body.

As a signpost to the ideological control over the definition of what constitutes Pakistani culture and deserves to be conserved as the ‘national’ heritage, the official website of the Government of Pakistan under the title ‘Cultural Heritage of Pakistan’ cites the evidence of archaeological remains of 14 million years old fossil, identified as ‘Suvapithecus Pakinnisis’ , to produce a link between ancient civilisation and national culture as well as providing ancestral roots to the historical genealogy of an imagined community. The singularity of meaning over objects to create national heritage is imposed through a bizarre periodization of history, emphasizing the centrality of religion: ‘So rich and diversified is this heritage that Pakistani nation can be proud of its glorious past, be Islamic, Post-Islamic and Pre-Islamic as far as pre-historic times’.

Therefore the conservation and maintenance of the archives in Pakistan, is indicator of a set of priorities, which may not overlap with the order of preference of various social groups in a society. The selective indifference of the Pakistani state towards private archives is also graphically illustrated by the fact that Quaid-a-Azam papers forms one of the largest and perhaps only part of private collection of National Archives to date.

Given the narrow concerns of the state managed archives, and restricted access to public records, the records of social and political groups in Pakistan becomes critical to the writing of alternate histories that seeks to challenge the state authorised history. As Ahmad Saleem, who has been dubbed as the ex-officio keeper of citizen’s records, largely through his personal efforts for saving private archives, has illustrated the loss of records of leading political parties and their leaders, largely through confiscation or its threat by the state. All those records of events and activities that sought to challenge the political orthodoxy of the state were scraped. Each successive government vandalised the records of the political parties, sitting in opposition, thereby leading to serious breaches in the historical reconstruction of the political and social history of the country.

Unlike in most of western world and in Asian countries like India, the conservation of archives and ready access to scholars has been high on the state agenda. In recent years, in collaboration with thriving IT industry, Indian institutions has been able to keep up their presence on the cyber space and cater to much wider international audience by building interactive websites. In contrast, the national and provincial archives in Pakistan do not, in principal, aim to advertise their collections; rather they tend to restrict them to most die-hard visitors and scholars! Lack of adequate funds and lack of prospects for professional growth adversely affect the working of archives in Pakistan. In the era of privatisation of public services, it is reasonable to expect that present government will bring state archives, within the mandate of private public partnership. With prominent members of civil society on the Board of Governors, along with representatives of the state, who could raise funds from the private sector, the present crisis in the conservation and access to information can be addressed.