A Historian's Library

Every Sunday, Ahmed Saleem travels to Rawalpindi Sadr, from his house in Islamabad to buy books being sold on the footpath. All the vendors know him by now. Some bring special books for him knowing that he will appreciate them and pay the sellers a good amount. “They don’t keep them for sale. First they show it to me. If I reject [the book], only then do they put it out in the open,” he says. Over the past forty years, Saleem has been following this routine, buying and collecting books for his archive. His focus has been the social sciences, history, archaeology and literature. He now has about ten thousand books in his collection.
Saleem has dedicated the upper portion of his house to his archive. There are several racks here, teeming with books, newspapers, documents and pictures. He lives in a tiny room next to the hall. This is his bedroom, his study, his office, and more. From here he has written over one hundred books, making him one of the most well-known historians of the country. Almost 70 now, he still writes and collects prolifically. “Around 1974 I decided to write a book on the political history of Pakistan. I made a list of all the books that I would need for my research, but sadly there was no library or archive in the country at that time where I could find these books. Some I found from people’s collections, some from libraries, and some from other places. It was a struggle getting them all together. I decided then to make an archive, where researchers and students could come and research easily,” he says. Now his collection is one of the best known private collections of books, newspapers and documents in Pakistan, popular with students and researchers.
Saleem has particularly focused on books that were written and published from pre-Partition India. These books, unlike other books written during the colonial era and published by world renowned publishers, are not available in the libraries of Europe or North America. These were considered too insignificant to be archived at that time. But now, as they have become rare, Saleem’s archive is one of the only places in the world where these books are available. Most of these publishers have ceased to be. The oldest book that he has in his collection is called “Trade with India”. Published in 1711, the text documents Dutch trade with the Indian peninsula. He also has a collection of books written on freedom fighters like G.M. Syed and Abdul Ghaffar Khan, before the creation of Pakistan. He has books, written in regional languages from the pre-Partition era. The collection also includes a compilation of all the sermons delivered by bishops in Lahore.

Photo credit Amarjit Chandan (2009)

“Back in the 70s, cheap books, which are now referred to as chapbooks, were sold on public buses along with eatables. Waris Shah’s Heer was the most popular book at the time, and sold in various regional languages,” Saleem says. These books are no longer sold, as the book-reading trend has nosedived in Pakistan. Once available everywhere, these books have now become a rare commodity. Saleem has been collecting them since then, preserving an entire era and a genre of literature that is now extinct. He has also been collecting newspapers and magazines since 1947; the collection includes some that are even older. “I have a magazine published in 1901 from London, called the Americanization of the World. That magazine predicts how American culture would dominate the world in the next century. How accurate has that prediction been,” he says.

Along with books and magazines, Saleem has been collecting historical documents. He travelled to Peshawar to collect the documents of the Meerut and Peshawar Conspiracy Case of 1922-27, which indicts communist freedom fighters, including Amir Haider, the cousin of the future President of Pakistan, Ayub Khan.

Saleem realizes that his collection is likely to go to waste if not properly managed. Therefore in 2001, connecting a few like-minded people, he established a trust called the South Asian Research and Resource Centre. The trust is currently in the process of cataloguing the collection. About 20% is complete. “I am now relieved that my life’s work will not go to waste after me,” he says.