A Novelist Visits the Museum

I look at what is here despite the clear paucity of funding, the external threats, the impossibility of creating a single national narrative for a country as divided about its reason for existing as Pakistan. An elderly relative who was already an adult when Pakistan was created in 1947 often remarks that at the moment of its birth the country had two opposing claims whispered into its ears: “you are a sovereign nation”, and “you are part of the Muslim world”. In this museum, both those claims are given space, and it is for those of us who wander from the Muslim Room to the Gandhara Room to the Hindu Sculpture Room to the Coin Room to the Quran Gallery to see if we can knit a single narrative out of them or if we wish to privilege one over the other. Is a nation bound by geography or ideology? If the National Museum is forcing me to think again about these questions, to which as a novelist I’ve already given so much thought, isn’t that a mark of its success?