THERE’S nothing quite like a library to bring one face to face with mortality: so many books, so little time. This sense of time slipping away is overwhelming here at the directorate of archives and libraries in Peshawar, if only because it is not just the present but also the past one can endlessly pore over, preserved in historical records dating back to 1849. In here, silence manifests itself not just as an essential to avoid disturbance but as an expression — of awe, reverence. The archived record thrusts you into unexpected intimacy with history and all its crushing weight.

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Turned brittle by time, longhand accounts as old as 160 years provide a rare insight into the individual and collective preoccupations of Raj officials as they mulled expeditions on the Frontier, dictated terms to the tribes and fought wars in Afghanistan. And if the Great Game doesn’t stir the scholar in you, perhaps the Cold War will: the directorate has just received official record from the home department dating back to the Afghan ‘Jihad’ years. It is all here, just as grave men in government offices planned, and plotted.

“The official record dating back to 1849 forms the nucleus of the archives,” says Zahirullah Khan, director of archives.

“That is when the British took Punjab from the Sikhs. The NWFP (now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) was part of Punjab. After an organised government was established in Punjab, government affairs were documented and an official record was maintained. We have all that and some manuscripts and royal orders from the Mughal era.”

Embalming history

The directorate, with some ten million documents, is constantly battling with the enemies of paper: worms, termites, dampness and disaster. Fluctuations in temperature and humidity set alarm bells ringing. Records are regularly monitored for acidity and alkalinity that turn paper brittle, and elaborate processes are undertaken to neutralise them.

The directorate is digitising the record but the process is slow and the originals still need to be preserved.

Based in a grand brick edifice designed by Nayyar Ali Dada, the directorate also houses a public library, a reference library, a section for old, out-of-print books, another where private libraries donated to the directorate are shelved, and one dedicated to women and children.

Public libraries do not usually cater to research but this one does. With dedicated sections on diverse disciplines, research scholars and browsers can access digital libraries such as the Library of Congress, downloading books and documents for free through an arrangement with the Higher Education Commission.

“If we want literacy to grow, schools and colleges alone won’t do,” says Khan. “Public platforms for the dissemination of knowledge and informal education are key to awareness about self and the world.”

The directorate is out to achieve this through creating model libraries in district headquarters all over Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, complete with a print and digital library, internet access and a dedicated building. Bannu, D.I. Khan, Swabi, Haripur, Swat, Timergara, Abbottabad and Mardan have operational public libraries now. Next in line for the model public libraries, each of which costs about Rs70 million, are Chitral, Kohat and Lakki Marwat, followed by Karak, Buner and Mansehra.

Conflict and the reading culture

Conflict in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa has robbed the libraries of their readers in recent years. The general public is increasingly wary of public spaces. In educational institutions, students restrict themselves to textbooks and notes.

For the last few years, candidates from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa appearing in competitive exams have performed poorly, a trend that worries Fasihuddin, a police officer who has established a private research library in Peshawar to promote a culture of research and inquiry.

“The conflict in the region has undermined the culture of seeking knowledge and education,” says Fasihuddin, who has been managing the library affairs remotely from duty stations in Khuzdar and Quetta lately. “There is little peace of mind. Books are expensive. Leading booksellers like Saeed Book Bank who started from Peshawar have closed shop here. So have libraries like those of the British Council and the American Centre.”

A platform for public discourse

Fasihuddin set up the Research Library, Peshawar, with a little help from his friends who donated books. He hauled up his personal library — some 7,000 books — from his village of Takhtbai to a ten-marla house on Warsak Road, which also serves as the office for the Pakistan Society of Criminology that he helped found.

“I was in Karachi recently and was quite amazed that despite the law and order situation, there is a vibrant library and reading scene,” he says. “People don’t go home when offices close. They go to libraries, of which there are many. When a library closes down, another opens somewhere else.”

The Research Library is meant to serve as a model that, says Fasihuddin, cannot be sustained without public patronage. Among other things, it is meant to focus on the social sciences and languages — the Urdu and Persian collection is quite extensive — and serve as a forum for public discourse.

“We have reached out to foreign missions like the British High Commission that funds the education sector in Pakistan to provide us encyclopaedias, and we have asked the PTI government to give us space,” says Fasihuddin. “I have been very fortunate to learn from books and libraries. Now it is time to give something back.”

Published in Dawn, August 3rd, 2014