KARACHI: The National Museum of Pakistan has a treasure trove of archival material. Built on the far side of the sprawling and historic Burns Garden, which has trees older than Pakistan, the building has been storing — for preservation and display — invaluable artefacts and manuscripts representing a wide variety of subjects, ranging from religion to literature and from the Pakistan movement to rare artworks.

While going through old copies of this newspaper, one comes across interesting nuggets of information. One of them, for example, is that in 1964 a chair used by the greatest Urdu poet Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib was to be given to the museum by an archaeologist from Delhi, Dr Iftikhar Ahmed. One is not sure whether that chair was ever handed over to the museum; and if it was, it’s still there. But one has seen rare manuscripts of Mir Taqi Mir’s collections.

Talking to Dawn, National Museum curator Omar Qureshi dispelled the notion that exhibitions don’t take place at the facility as often as they should.

He said, “We hold exhibitions regularly. In fact, a few television channels cover it. We held one show on Women’s Day, one on March 23 which can be seen on the first floor of the building.”

Shedding light on rare objects that the museum contains, he said, “With respect to archaeology, we have a huge collection. We have 100,000 artefacts. They are prehistoric pieces as well as those from Gandhara times etc. Every six to eight months we change displays. We have 11 galleries. We have a big number of manuscripts, too.”

The ongoing exhibition with reference to the holy month of Ramazan has a beautiful and rare collection of the Holy Quran. It’s a must-see, soul-enriching display.

About the show Mr Qureshi said, “There are rare nuskhey of the Holy Quran. Then we have one made with dhaga (thread). The Holy Quran collection belongs to the museum. But some of the exhibits are borrowed.”

Published in Dawn, April 5th, 2024