Pakistan Customs’ seizure on
Friday of two Buddha statues bound for China once again brings to light
the recurring issue of historical artefacts’ smuggling out of the country. The
statues were reportedly booked from Islamabad
and intercepted, mercifully, at the international mail office in Karachi on a tip-off.
Though the museum authorities have yet to authenticate the items as genuine
antiques, it can be safely argued that for every illegal shipment of historical
relics thus stopped, there will be many that make it to their destinations
abroad. Gandhara antiquities of the 2nd century BC to 6th century AD and those
of the pre-historic IndusValley, in particular,
form the mainstay of this illicit trade. With every one piece of national heritage
smuggled out, the country is poorer. Yet, there is little visible effort made
to safeguard historical treasures, whether they are housed in museums or left
exposed to the elements at excavation sites across the land. Why this neglect
of a heritage that is the envy of the whole wide world is the question.
The answer lies partly in the attempts made by the Ziaul Haq dictatorship in
the 1980s to disown Pakistan’s
pre-Islamic history. Textbooks were rewritten with the aim of purging them of
any pride this nation took in its ancient civilisations; a past so rich that
many great nations today cannot claim to have enjoyed. Buddhist monasteries and
seats of learning dotted the vales of Gandhara as did centres of great
pilgrimage, to which stand witness the dozens of carved rocks along the
Karakoram range; the Puranas, the Ramayana and the Rigveda were written in the
valleys along the Indus; the noble dictates of Asoka were etched on giant
stones and placed at transit points here, to state only some facts. History may
be disowned through a vile state mechanism; it cannot cease as a process that
seeps through to the present and the future. National heritage harking back to
millennia must be owned and preserved. This requires more vigilance and action
today when forces of obscurantism are flexing their muscles, as in Swat, for
instance, which is an ancient cradle of the Gandhara civilisation. It is also
time to engage with foreign governments to help stop the theft of Pakistan’s
national treasures which reach distant shores all too often and are allowed to
go under the hammer, for grabs by private collectors and even state
institutions abroad.