LAHORE: A poet, novelist, author of dozens of books, historian, chronicler and dedicated political activist Ahmed Saleem, who died on Sunday at Islamabad, was laid to rest here on Monday at Miani Sahib Graveyard by a large number of friends and admirers.
Muhammad Saleem Khwaja, as his parents named him, in 1945 when born in Mandi Bahauddin, he became better known by his pen name Ahmed Saleem as he ventured into almost entire range of human intellectual activity in his 78-year life.
“It is really hard to measure his contribution in any one genre; he was a researcher par excellence, he was one of the most influential political activists of the Left, he had developed library of more than 50,000 books, authored dozens of books, translated books, wrote poetry and fiction. His entire life of 78 years is contribution to literature, politics, language rights and activism,” says Sharjeel Mirza, a poet and a friend of Ahmed Saleem.
Given his multi-dimensional personality, it is really hard to see where he contributed more. He excelled in every field he touched and did so silently – avoiding the world of media glamour.
For the last two decades, he was attached to Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI) and had been involved in research work, along with all other intellectual activities. He suffered from a chronic liver disease and had to have implant, which restricted his travel to Lahore – and was largely limited to Islamabad.
Mushtaq Soofi, a long-time friend of Ahmad Saleem, thinks archival efforts deserve special praises. He had a huge compendium of English, Urdu, Punjabi and Sindhi newspapers, starting from 1947 to date. He had almost all the copies of Pakistan Times, Dawn, which are now part of his library. So are papers like Imroze, Mashriq and Paisa. He just finished cataloguing over 50,000 books in his library. He had copies of three most celebrated magazines of the Left – Surkh Parcham (red flag), Alfatah and Mayar (standard) – even those stencil copies when they were banned by the late dictator Ziaul Haq and not allowed to be distributed. He, as a committed researcher, kept all those copies for posterity and are now part of his heritage.
As a Punjabi language activist, he was the one who stayed connected with other smaller languages (Sindhi and Baloch) and earned a lot of respect. He was one of those activists, who openly spoke in favour of Bengali language and people during Bangladesh crisis.
His funeral was attended by a number of intellectuals from Sindh as well, validating his struggle for the language. He went to jail many times for his political activism – a price he paid happily and never wavered from his commitment. All of these contributions go far beyond his even those contemporaries, who chose a single field, Soofi says.
“He was the one and only public archivist who attained excellence as a “one-man institution” in Pakistan and that too with a pro-people orientation. One can imagine that he invested his lifelong material, intellectual and human energies and resources to incrementally develop and preserve his “knowledge repository.”
Hundreds of national and international students, researchers and scholars have benefited from his generosity to share these materials. Besides citizens’ gratitude his contributions were acknowledged by the President of Pakistan through a Pride of Performance Award,“ writes Zafarullah Khan, a journalist and a personal friend.
Published in Dawn, December 12th, 2023
