Almost 50 years ago my oldest school and college friend Asad Rehman and I set off to hitch-hike to London and back. Daft kids we were, probably still remain so. The trip took six months on the road and the learning was massive. We saw sights, had experiences galore and fights, only to learn that people the world over are, generally, good and kind human beings.

While in Belgium we saw the India Trench Museum, which is officially known as the Flanders Fields Museum in Ypres. As we walked through the scary trenches we came to a room where on the walls were the 1915 to 1919 letters and postcards, and what surprised us most was that they were all from Punjabis to their dear ones back home. One I can never forget, for it said: (English translation) “My Ma, the black pepper bites, and just pray it does not take my life away, for I have lost a lot of friends”. The British Army censors had blocked that letter.

There were hundreds of other similar heart-wrenching postcards, all censored and stuck up on the walls of Ypres. I took down a few addresses of the old walled city and will mention two in this piece. We both walked the streets of Ypres with our rucksacks and saw a massive Menin Gate Memorial to the martyrs and missing, and on one wall were hundreds of names of Punjabi soldiers. Far away from home in a cold alien salient they laid down their lives. They never returned home. That experience one can never forget for the very thought brings tears.

But let me take the story ahead in time. Last Wednesday the London daily ‘Guardian’ ran a story about how British researchers had extracted from the archives of the Lahore Museum the record of 320,000 soldiers from the Punjab who had served in the First World War. My mind ran to Ypres, and to scores of other lands, what to mention thousands killed protecting the opium trade to China. Imagine from our land they took our opium (never tried the thing) and then our soldiers died defending the trade against rebelling Chinese. They doped the entire population. Mind you they also made Punjabi soldiers capture Mecca from our Turkish brothers. Oh, the stories are endless, and sadly never researched. The archives are there, but still hidden.

The First World War archives are to go online after lying unread in Lahore for almost a century, 97 years to be exact. Just why the people of the Punjab are not allowed to extract those archives and analyse them is a puzzle. That is an important part of our history. The Punjabi soldiers’ archives are organised by village names, and the newspaper story says often 40 per cent of a village was forced to join the Army, forced by landlords who were repaid for the service in the shape of land and titles. If you scan the names of our political leaders today, the connection might seem uncanny.

Before narrating other similar connections, let me tell you about two families I visited inside the old walled city of Lahore. In Mohallah Maullian, inside Lohari Gate, lives Mian Chiragh who has a shop in the Shahalami area. As the address matched his house I went there and found a confused old woman, who a neighbour called Massi. The old lady told me that her great grandfather was in the army in the ‘pahli vadi jang’ (WW1) and his name was Sadiq and everyone called him Paa Sadiq. “We were told they took him away by force and he never returned”.

As she opened up she said that her grandfather was given a pension for five years, but it then discontinued. Paa Sadiq used to send messages. “Imagine disappearing for sending messages”, she added. My guess is that Sadiq was in the Signal Corps, and that was probably caught up in the scores of attacks and counter-attacks in that most gruesome of wars. At Menin Gate are mentioned several soldiers by the name of Sadiq of Lahore. Exactly which one was our signals man is difficult to make out unless a deeper research is carried out.

The second Lahori was from Tehsil Bazaar and his name was Lance Naik Karam Elahi who was also part of the 3rd Lahore Division. He was killed at Ypres Salient in a major frontal attack. His body was reported as missing. From information gathered over the years I located his house thanks to the late Sheikh Mubarak Ali. His house was the one next to the Jain Temple in Tehsil Bazaar, which is off Bazaar Hakeeman inside Bhati Gate.

At his house a young man told me that Lance Naik Karam Elahi was his great grandfather and that he was a very brave soldier who was killed in Europe. When I told him he was killed in Ypres he was astounded. It is true that old soldiers never die, they merely fade away. Besides a connection to the name the young man knew nothing. I narrated the broad contours of the battle and how thousands perished in that war, and what was the end. But the connection now was weak. He was truly an ‘Unknown Soldier’.

Let us return from the micro details of humans to the macro archives that lie in various archives, libraries and museums. Lahore has more such treasures than any other city of Pakistan, but like ‘unknown soldiers’, these treasures are in the possession of humans with small minds. They seem to have very little concern about the value of these archives.

The Lahore Archives which lie at several places within the Lahore Civil Secretariat, from the tomb of Anarkali to the stinking filthy floors of the old Sikh-era horse stable, is a treasure beyond belief. The time period it covers is from the era of the Mughal emperor Akbar to modern times, including the entire Sikh and British periods, engulfing an area from Kabul to Delhi and Kashmir to Multan. This treasure is matched only by the British Museum Library. Yet we are asleep, Yes Sir, fast asleep.

This newspaper has for many years been advocating the setting up of a Punjab Archives in the Freemasons Hall, but the only response is for those in power to claim that they are busy digitising it. A world authority archivist who heads Cambridge University’s archives effort, informs that digitising is only a small part of the total effort to make the actual archives easily accessible. In the end the archives themselves have to be preserved and kept in special conditions.

But then digitising itself has to be repeated every ten years as technology changes and old computers cannot handle new records. “That itself is one third of an archivist’s effort, the other two thirds is handling the original record/archives”. That is why a grand new Punjab Archives Building is needed. There is just no other solution. Naturally, bureaucrats and politicians do not have time for such pastimes. They would rather, like old soldiers, let it fade away.

Published in Dawn, November 14th, 2021