THE building of the Supreme Court of Pakistan’s Karachi registry is a striking work of construction. Built in 1916, it was originally a museum that contained many an historic artefact. After Partition, as happened in quite a few other fields, things took a turn. The building changed hands and was used as the Karachi Water and Sewerage Board office; now, it serves as the SC’s Karachi registry.

According to a handout released by the provincial culture department, in the early 1970s, material in the museum, including 72 wooden boxes, was shifted to Lahore. In 1977, one account suggests, the boxes were brought back to Karachi and taken to the National Museum of Pakistan situated in the sprawling Burnes Garden. The handout goes on to claim that in the early 1990s, more than half of the 70-odd boxes were opened. On Jan 3, the provincial culture minister, Syed Sardar Ali Shah, after 20 or so years, opened two more of them.

The director of the museum, M. Shah Bukhari, claims that the first box contained woodwork belonging to Sindh that was over a hundred years old. The second, he says, contained terracotta material (jaali, gulab pash, etc). While the museum head is certain about the age of the woodwork, it is the terracotta jaali that he believes needs working on: he has a hunch that it is 600 to 800 years old and may have been used as decorative elements for the exterior of a house. All information found, he says, will gradually be documented.

The question is: why did the boxes go to Lahore in the first place? And secondly, if some of the boxes were opened in the early 1990s, why did it take the museum two decades to open the rest of the lot?

Things get a little baffling when the museum official tells me that the objects found in the boxes in the 1990s were pre-historic, Gandhara and Islamic, as well as ethnographic. Where are they? Well, the stuff that relates to Kashmir gets displayed off and on, but not the rest of it, he replies.

In the years preceding the 18th constitutional amendment concerning devolution, successive Sindh governments did not have enough powers to do as they pleased; nor did they show enough interest in reviving their cultural heritage. But in the post-Musharraf phase, especially after the passing of the 18th amendment, there has been a sudden surge in the interest of these provincial governments (there have been two with the same political party at the helm) to try and relive the past by preserving, and in some cases, restoring it. This is the context which makes the rejuvenated penchant for the terracotta and old woodwork all the more intriguing.

Now, according to Mr Bukhari, the museum will take the lid off two of the rest of the boxes every two to three months. Again, the question is, why not uncover them all?

But here’s a little twist in the story. The director of the State Bank of Pakistan’s museum and art gallery, Asma Ibrahim, served in the National Museum of Pakistan from 1986 to 2006. She was the director of the institution in the 1990s when the boxes, as per the culture department handout, were first uncovered. “We opened all of them back in early 2000,” she says. “Each one of them, not one left unopened. They contained [a variety of] objects, some from the Indus valley and Gandhara periods, to unique sculptures, model boats and houses. The boxes had been closed since the 1950s. They were kept in reserve. They had been transferred to the museum from Frere Hall. No one wanted to take the risk of opening them since they couldn’t find an inventory — nobody can open a museum item just like that. Apart from the objects mentioned, there were botanical and zoological samples and coin collections.”

Ms Ibrahim rejects the notion that the boxes were ever sent to Lahore. “Not to my knowledge,” she clarifies.

Published in Dawn, January 8th, 2017