In 2010 Neil MacGregor, then Director of the British Museum, ran a series of fascinating radio programmes called A History of the World in 100 Objects. Each programme featured a single object chosen from the museum’s vast collection to narrate the unfolding story of human endeavour. The objects ranged in age from a million-year-old stone chopping tool from Tanzania to a credit card issued in 2009 in Dubai. The purpose was to highlight objects - everyday things as well as rare works of art - from around the world that encapsulated a breakthrough in human thought, making possible a new way of being, at different points in history.
The programme aired every weekday at the exact time that I returned home from dropping my children to school. Without fail, I’d listen in my car to that morning’s enthralling discussion. To my delight, several Sub-continental objects featured on the programme: a 2000-year-old Indus seal from Harappa; fragments from a pillar erected by Ashoka in Meerut in 238 BC; a Buddha from Gandhara (100-300 AD); a miniature of a Mughal prince (1610 AD).
Syed Nadir Shah (seated), with his two sons, on the day of their admission to Aitchison College, Lahore, circa 1886
I was reminded of the series when I recently watched ‘Innocence of Memories’, a documentary about Istanbul by Orhan Pamuk in which he posits the idea that every home is a mini museum. It got me thinking that my home too narrated my story through the things I have accumulated over the years. Some are utilitarian items like my laptop on which I’ve written three books. Other objects, some expensive, others not, are freighted with great emotional significance. The Ladybird book I won as a prize for English in Class One at the Convent of Jesus and Mary, Lahore. A tribal necklace my father bought my mother on their honeymoon in Swat. A silk rosette with five interlocking circles my great uncle received when he won a gold medal at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. Two Daniel lithographs, the first art my husband and I bought for our home. A giant box containing my children’s photographs, paintings and exercise books from kindergarten. My bachelor’s degree from university.
These objects are significant because they symbolise important points in my history. But if I were to choose a single object that was the game changer in my story, that defined a radically different path to what could have been, it would be a black and white photograph taken in Lahore in 1886. It shows a group of three people; a bearded, turbaned man flanked by two turbaned boys, probably aged ten and twelve. Crucially, the boys carry books. The seated man is my great great grandfather and the two boys his sons, who both became my great grandfathers. (The daughter of the elder brother married the son of the younger.) The photograph marks the admission of my great-grandfathers to the recently established Aitchison College, a boarding school run along the lines of a British public school. It was a novel concept then for the gentry of the Punjab, whose sons were traditionally schooled at home. Typically, private tutors were engaged to teach Persian and Urdu literature, the Koran, Muslim and Indian history and some basic maths. The women of my paternal family were just taught to recite the Koran, if that.
The Great Teacher - Among the 100 objects from the BBC programme is one of the first known depictions of the Buddha, a statue from Gandhara in modern-day Pakistan, from around the 2nd or 3rd century AD
The game-changer in my story is a photograph taken in Lahore in 1886
My father’s family comes from a village in Okara district. In the 1880s they would probably have qualified as rural gentry. They farmed inherited lands and lived in havelis behind the high walls of which their women observed strict purdah. Punctuated by monsoons and harvests, religious celebrations and hunting seasons, the rhythm of life was undisturbed for centuries. It was a radical step, therefore, for Nadir Shah to break with custom and admit his young sons to a British school, for he was not to know then how his experiment would pan out. Indeed the school was set up by the government to breed a class of Anglicised native chiefs loyal to their British rulers. But he knew his sons would receive modern education there and believed they would profit from it. And so they did.
Finishing at Aitchison, my great-grandfathers returned to the village as young men to farm as before. But their exposure had wrought deep changes within. They educated their daughters at home and settled property on them - unheard of in rural Muslim families then. They sent their sons not just to Aitchsion but also to Government College - Punjab’s premier institution of higher learning - for their bachelors and masters. The next generation’s women were schooled in Lahore. My grandfather sent my father to Cambridge and in the generation after, my sister and I followed.
Had Nadir Shah not taken a leap of faith that day in 1886, (he died shortly after) had his confidence faltered, I would have been like many women of my family who were never deemed worthy of a quality education. That’s why this easily missed photograph is the most significant object in my story.
Moni Mohsin is the creator of the bestselling Diary of a Social Butterfly
