 Pak scholar researching on Ranjit Singh’s samadhi
Pakistani scholar Nadhra Naeem at Government Museum in Sector 10, where she spent a day studying Sikh miniature paintings
Chandigarh.For years after Maharaja Ranjit Singh passed away, his memorial stood as a silent spectator to the passage of time, waiting to be touched and felt. It had countless tales to tell, but no one would listen. Now after ages of lusting for attention, the memorial of Punjab’s lion king, located at Lahore, has found a friend, ready to share its history and record it for posterity.
On the job is Nadhra Naeem Khan, a famous graphic designer from Pakistan, also founder-head of the design and visual arts department at the Lahore College for Women University. Credited also with getting government approval for the first filmmaking unit for girl students of the college, Nadhra is nowadays in India to retrace the historical past of Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s samadhi, shared heritage of India and Pakistan. Strangely, not much has been written on the genesis of the memorial, the most significant among Sikh period monuments in Pakistan.
“Most of the research on monuments in Pakistan has been done by foreign historians. I wanted to draw an exception and the memorial was my first choice. It’s a fine specimen of artistic excellence and is loaded with mysteries. I was most intrigued by the fact that where on the one hand Maharaja’s empire was disintegrating, on the other the memorial was coming up. It’s not clear who was patronising it though we know it was state-sponsored. Incidentally, most members of Maharaja’s family had died within two years of his death in 1839. Then who was inspiring his memorial?” asks Nadhra, who was in Chandigarh today to study Sikh miniature paintings at Government Museum.
For her research titled, "Ornamentation of Maharaja Ranjit Singh's Samadhi", she has scanned the collections of National Museum and National Archives in New Delhi and will be visiting Amritsar to locate links between the wall paintings and frescos embellishing the memorial and those found in Indian collections. “I am particularly interested in the Golden Temple, which owes much of its embellishments to Ranjit Singh,” Nadhra told The Tribune, ruing that the literature available is meager.
We know a little about the memorial from the 19th century historians like Latif, Chisti and Kanhaiya Lal, who say it presents a heady mix of Hindu and Muslim artistic styles. “But they leave it at that. They don’t say which section of the memorial is dominated by which style. Also, there is no mention of the artistic scenario of the 10 years of chaos during which the memorial was built. It primarily came up between 1839 when Ranjt Singh died and 1849 when Punjab was annexed,” Nadhra says.
What she does know from primary research is that the memorial was built by a collective of artistes, who converged to Punjab following the victories of Ranjit Singh. “The memorial’s nuances, if researched well, can throw light on the Maharaja’s personality, secrets behind his triumphs and his artistic pursuits,” Nadhra says. She has visited India six times for her research, but every time she comes she feels restrained by the short period of her visas. “I wish I could stay longer. I just don't seem to have enough,” she says.
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