Return to AIPS-Funded Projects
Two different teams of the Private Library and Archival Survey Project (PLASP) in Pakistan have now visited some fifty collections in several cities and villages of the country's three major provinces. The first body of data concerning more than forty of these is already at hand. Libraries surveyed include those in Hyderabad, Tando Thoro, and Sann in Interior Sindh, and Attock, Peshawar, Bahawalpur, Muhammadabad, and Faisalabad in the Punjab and Frontier. The famous private collection in rural Vihari near Multan, the Jhandair Library, has also been surveyed now. Jhandair is considered to be the largest private library in the entire country. In late September, Project Director Nomanul Haq personally led a survey team to the private collection of G. M. Syed-the well-known, highly vocal and controversial Sindhi nationalist leader of Pakistan. G. M. Syed died in 1995 at the age of 91. He was a seasoned political leader of Sindh and maintained a rich library of published volumes and periodicals including integral files of relatively little known newspapers. But more, he also organized his personal correspondence and archives fairly systematically, placed in folders held dust-free inside custom-designed bookcases. In his collection is to be found sensational archival material, including unpublished letters addressed to him by top South Asian leaders such as Gandhi, Nehru, and Jinnah.
Publication of collected material remains a central PLASP concern. The Project has set as one of its primary aims the availability in a published volume of the entire body of the initial bibliographic data that have been gathered. But there is also this important question of archives and manuscripts that have been discovered and identified in the survey process. Nomanul Haq, who has now been named AIPS's Scholar-in-Residence, is keen to have a selection of these discoveries published too, a corpus that he feels has the promise of altering dramatically and fundamentally some of the long-held impressions and views in Pakistan Studies. To this end, PLASP has been negotiating a publication program with Oxford University Press (OUP) Pakistan.
In September OUP's Managing Director Ameena Saiyid visited Haq at the Islamabad office of AIPS to discuss the PLASP publication proposals.�Also present at this first of a series of meetings was Fath Muhammad Malik, Chairman of Pakistan's federal government agency, Muqtadira Qaumi Zuban (Urdu Language Authority), an agency with its own publication resources and activities. Following these meetings, OUP has in principle agreed to publish the basic PLASP data gathered throughout Pakistan. This would be a kind of a critically edited catalogue of country's private libraries, with an extensive introduction, description of holdings, annotations, and analytical indices.
In the most recent third meeting in Karachi, Ameena Saiyid enthusiastically received Nomanul Haq's proposal for a quick publication of PLASP identified rare and unique documents.�The proposal is to begin an OUP series of elegantly produced volumes on Pakistan's archives, and this to be done under the advise of PLASP and with due credit to it. OUP has in principle accepted this proposal too. Ameena Saiyid has now assigned the Press' academic editor Muhammad Arshad to this task. Already, Nomanul Haq has prepared the groundwork for the acquisition of some exciting material from four sources. Most prominent among these are the literary archives of Mushfiq Khwaja, a rare document collection that happens to be unique in South Asia both in volume and value. Mushfiq Khwaja, the universally respected veteran scholar of Urdu literature, has now in principle consented to the public exposure of some of his jealously protected literary documents. Haq met him in late September along with Anwar Moazzam who is leading the Urdu Documentation Center in India and who happened to be in Pakistan at the time.
The collection of G. M. Syed remains yet another accessible archival source and Haq has negotiated the possibility of its publication with the holding's administrator. The private library of Pakistan's senior literary figure Jamil Jalibi, a library already surveyed by PLASP, has been found to contain a good deal of rare material. Jalibi, a former Chairman of the Muqtadira Qaumi Zuban, himself happens to be a member of the Advisory Committee of PLASP. His archives have in this way been opened for publication to PLASP. The fourth archival source that is now, in principle, PLASP accessible is the large collection of Sindh Archives. This public corpus contains one of the richest stores of rare material about Sindh in the Sindhi language. Its Director Kaleem Lashari too is a member of the PLASP Committee. PLASP and the Interest of the Library of Congress PLASP-Private Library and Archival Survey Project-was launched in the Summer of 2003 aimed at making Pakistan's rich private library holdings better known and more accessible to the research community. It has the additional aim of supporting Pakistan's participation in the recently established Center for South Asian Libraries (CSAL).
Conceived as a three-phase undertaking, the Project is currently in its first phase-that of identifying Pakistan's private libraries, and collecting initial data on the nature of holdings in terms of four bibliographic entities of archives, periodicals, manuscripts, and published volumes. These data also containing information on the number of these entities, their language, their physical condition, mechanical arrangement, and their catalogue records. Survey teams are currently working in the private libraries in Balochistan and Azad Kashmir, as well in different regions of the Punjab and Interior Sindh. William Tuchrello of the Library of Congress, who is Field Director for Northeast Asia, recently met Nomanul Haq at the AIPS office in Islamabad. Tuchrello's aim was to explore the possibility of the participation of the Library of Congress in PLASP. After a detailed exchange, it was decided to discuss the matter more formally and concretely in Madison during the 2004 South Asia conference. The discussion is to take place between Tuchrello, the AIPS President Brian Spooner, Chicago University's Director of South Asia Center Jim Nye who is leading similar projects in South Asia, and Nomanul Haq.