Pakistan: a land of contrasts. This is not unique to Pakistan, but it is an accurate characterisation of a place that has both beauty and depravity. Since 9/11, Pakistan has presented as a bit of a dubious ally in the fight against terrorism, and as a result, people not from or connected to the region often tend to look at the country with disdain, at the very least, if not contempt. But there is a human side to this country, one that is filled with warm and hospitable people and that has hurting people due to the oppression of various freedoms and rights and the consequences of a socio-political structure that does little to alleviate the widespread poverty. It is for the hurting people that my mom and her husband have stayed there so long, to do what good they can for the people they meet.
So, after finally having sufficient restrictions lifted for international travel, we were able to go visit my mom in Pakistan. Not only was it exciting to visit her and her husband, but also to have my husband experience the country for the first time. He has been on work- or tourist-organised trips to other developing countries before, but this would be the first time he experienced one from a local perspective. He loves adventure and learning as much as I do, so I knew that Pakistan would not disappoint in these types of experiences.
We arrived in the middle of the night and enjoyed sleeping in the first day we were there. I had brought some good quality British and Swiss cheeses with me for my mom, as their access to imported cheese there is pretty limited, and she had made some walnut bread to have it with, so we enjoyed her baking while she really enjoyed good quality cheese after a long time of not getting to have any! We rested the first day, mainly, and I started taking a lot of bird photos right off the bat because they had moved to a more rural area just outside Lahore, and as a result, there were many more birds than I would normally have seen than if they were in an apartment like last time I was there 10 years ago. But after this day of rest, we began to head out to explore and see some sights.
The first day out was more to get some things done. My husband wanted to get some custom-made shirts, and I wanted to buy some fabric to get some salwar kameezes made (aka "suits") that would be a little more suitable when the weather is cool as all of my other ones are light cotton for hot weather. That also meant going to the tailor so that I could get those made but also get some other suits altered as I had gained weight since getting them many years ago, so we were able to get all of that done. The next day was more sightseeing.
Lahore Museum
I went to the museum last time I visited Lahore. With some new exhibits added to the museum this time around of Chinese artefacts as well as a Sikh section, along with a display of women artists for International Women's Day, there was something new for me to see. But even with the old stuff, I don't mind seeing it again. It's just such an excellent collection. In 2012, I mentioned in my post about the museum that it's on par with the National Anthropological Museum in Mexico City, and I maintain this is still the case. (My old blog links to photo albums no longer work thanks to Google's dumb changes to Blogspot, and I haven't had time to update access to those, but the text is still there.) I really enjoyed seeing the old wood carved doors, Persian calligraphy and Persian translations of Punjabi text written in Gurmukhi as even those were done so artistically. The section on women artists was also interesting. My favourite artist of them all was Professor Anna Molka Ahmed, who as I later learned was actually a London-born, Polish-Russian Jew who converted to Islam and married a Pakistani man who had been studying in London. She evidently moved to Pakistan with him and created what is now the fine arts department at the University of Punjab. Her style is somewhat like van Gogh--thick paint with brushstrokes full of emotion. It would have been nice to have some additional biographical information provided about the artists, but I still appreciated that the museum tried their best; and that's actually one failing of the museum in general is that sometimes years or info about the epoch is missing from some of the artefacts as well. It could benefit from having a museum expert pass through to fix up a few things, but overall, the museum is quite wonderful. Apparently I can't include videos in my slideshows, so see this video of wooden carvings here.
What I appreciate the most about the museum is that, despite a lot of pro-Islamic and nationalist rhetoric in the media and, from what I'm told, in the education system in the country, this is one gem of a museum that documents the pluralistic society that once flourished in the Indian subcontinent, a place that, after all, was on the Silk Road route and brought together people from different religions, cultures, and ethnic groups, who were all involved in trade and commerce. It also showcases that at one time, the region was sophisticated, as far as civil infrastructure is concerned. I remember learning about the Indus Valley civilisations in anthropology class 25 years ago and learned that some anthropologists consider them to be the birthplace of modern civilisation, in part because they developed a sewage/waste-management system. The beautiful ancient to recent history displayed in this museum is contrasted, outside its walls, to contemporary Pakistan, which never let go of the feudal system after Partition, and with powerful landlords in control of a lot of the country, coupled with extremist beliefs running through society, some might say that the country put itself back into the Dark Ages, on a developmental scale. The other tragedy is that since the country isn't the most tourist-friendly, there are millions of people in the world who will miss out on accessing this amazing museum! (Due to the limits on captions in the photo album, I've had to include descriptions of some of the texts after the book or manuscript photo is shown to describe what is there.)
Lahore Fort
This is another place I had visited before, but it is well worth going back to as it is so large that you can't possibly see everything in one day, and it's also a place I wanted my husband to see because it's part of a group of Mughal forts, the majority of which are in India and are much easier to access since I still have a lot of family there to visit, and it seemed like we should take advantage to see this fort while we can. Lahore Fort (along with Agra Fort in Agra, India) was built by Akbar the Great, considered the greatest of the Mughal emperors of India, in the 1600s. Akbar's grandson, the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan later built upon it, adding various rooms and structures. You might not be as familiar with the name of Shah Jahan, but you'll undoubtedly know his other creation, the Taj Mahal; he also built Red Fort in Old Delhi. So, Lahore Fort is a key structure in the region's history and is good to visit when you get the opportunity to do so. In fact, it was owned and/or occupied by the various waves of rulers in the region since it was built. from the Mughals to the Sikhs, then the Brits, and then it became a national monument after Pakistan was formed. Bhuvesh Arora has posted a helpful graphic with a timeline of rulers in the Indian subcontinent.
My mom's husband had arranged a tour guide this time around, and he was really good. He actually used to work for the BBC in Pakistan and had a good knowledge of the history, an ability to take well-composed group photos of us, and was able to get us into a room that is otherwise closed off to the public so that we could appreciate the architecture of the place, such as the way it was designed with natural cooling systems and acoustics so that people wouldn't have to raise their voices to speak. We also learned how in addition to the mosque and Sikh temple (gurudwara) on the fort site, there was also a church installed because Akbar had supposedly married a Spanish woman named Maria (in addition to other women in his harem). We didn't get to see the church, but I believe it to be there, and follow-up research on the existence of this Spanish wife has revealed some controversy as to whether she was Rajput or Portuguese (not Spanish). We also learned that the Badshahi Mosque on the site can hold up to 100,000 people between the mosque itself and the courtyard leading to it. One of the other things I learned was about all the renovations Shah Jahan made in honour of his wife Mumtaz, such as heart-shaped stones on the ground surrounding a stage for dancers to perform on and "stars" being created by how the ceiling of a room was designed to let the light in, as Mumtaz loved the twinkling of the stars and wanted to see them all the time. She never got to enjoy the finished products of these projects as she died in childbirth, and that's when Shah Jahan set about making the tomb for his wife, the Taj Mahal, a project 22 years in the making. What it says to me is that this guy's love for his wife was deep and perhaps a little over the top! A video of the "stars" in the ceiling is above.
One part of the fort that I was surprised I never noticed last time is actually quite a huge structure, and it is the mural wall leading into the fort. The guide claimed that it's the largest mural wall in the world, and that may be true, but as you'll see in the photos, it's not one giant mural but a series of murals across a large expanse. It's quite beautiful, and you could spend a while looking at all the different paintings, though you'd need binoculars to see many of them up close as they are quite high up. The guide also pointed out a banyan tree to us, and I may have seen them before without knowing what they were, but I finally had a chance to see and appreciate how large these trees get and why my dad speaks of them so fondly. They are enormous trees that provide a welcome respite from the sun, and they are also just beautiful to look at! It was a lovely visit to the fort.
Pakistan Day
Driving around the previous day, we had noticed a lot of decorations with lights being set up around the city. It turned out we were there for Pakistan Day, celebrated on the 23rd of March each year. It began as a celebration of independence and democracy, but apparently today, a lot of it is intended to show military might. Where we were, that might have happened in the parade that we weren't able to see on that day, but in the evening, we went out to look at all the lights. We had hoped to go out and get back before the fireworks began so we wouldn't get stuck in traffic, but no such luck. When the fireworks began, the road became a parking lot, with everyone stopped to watch the show. We had a great view from where we were, at least!
Army Museum
This is a relatively new museum in Lahore, having been opened just 6 years ago, in 2016. The Pakistani army is both wealthy and politically powerful in the country, and they have created a really well-designed museum that also displays good English in their write-ups. You may have noticed that the Lahore Museum doesn't always have the best English! Outside the museum, the yard surrounding it contains assorted vehicles and machinery that were captured in various wars, mostly Indian and Russian equipment.
There was a small section on women in the army, including some that have made it to the rank of General, but the main failing here is that no information about them was provided, even though there was a completely empty panel below the display that could have been used for that purpose! It's a start, at least. It was also interesting to learn that the current chief of army staff in Pakistan did some of his training at the staff college in Canada. There are a few in Pakistan's history who have, in fact!
The museum teaches the public about the army and some of the activities they do or have done, but the majority of the museum is dedicated to more historical components such as Partition (1947), the India-Pakistan War (1965), the Indo-Pakistani war (1971) in which East Pakistan became Bangladesh, and a bit of pre-history during the Indo-Greek period. One thing we learned was that we were going through the museum with an English speaking, western mindset. We went clockwise, and so we went from most recent history to earliest, which is the wrong way if you want to start at the beginning. Every room we were in, and indeed the museum itself, was structured to go counter-clockwise, because of course, when you read right to left like they do in Urdu, that's of course the more natural way to organise a set of rooms chronologically.
I expected a fair amount of nationalist sentiment in the museum--something I would expect from any military museum since the point of them, in part, is to build national identity through the glorification of their nation's military achievements. But there were really subtle ways in which the museum was using heavily biased language that made references, for example, to Pakistan's glorious military history over thousands of years--the problem with this being that Pakistan didn't actually become a country until 1947 to claim such a millennial history! It was part of India before, but referring to pre-Partition India's glorious military history or the Indian subcontinent's history in what is now Pakistan doesn't quite build national identity the same way, does it? There were also some interesting interpretations of events, such as India creating a state-sponsored terrorist group to commit acts of genocide during the 1971 Indo-Pak war, the first I've heard that there was a genocide in this war; that Sikhs and Hindus were the only ones committing atrocities during Partition, as if Muslims did not (my dad remembers seeing the dead bodies when fleeing Pakistan at the time); and that it's because of terrorism problems and issues over Kashmir that Pakistan has the social and political problems that they do today. They themselves are innocent in everything and the problems they have today didn't exist before the rise of terrorism. So it made it all the more surprising to me to see included in the artefacts a copy of the original speech Jinnah made when he became the first Prime Minister of Pakistan after Partition that spoke about equality, pluralism, and liberalism. According to my mom's husband, the history books he grew up with in school shared this history, but the ones today have altered Jinnah's speech to be pro-Islamic and pro-nationalist. So I've taken a photo as proof! Again, this is what Jinnah hoped the country would become, and I wish he would have achieved that goal, as I'm sure many people suffering today do, as well.
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