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| 12/11/1999 |
| OF COURTS AND COLLECTORS (Part 1) |
SLIDE LECTURE GIVEN AT MOHATTA PALACE MUSEUM, KARACHI, 12 NOV. 1999.
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| First of all I would like to say how delighted I am to have been invited to speak to you this evening. For me tonight has a special relevance, for it enables me to pay tribute to two national treasures of Sindh whom we should all revere and value. The first, quite obviously because it surrounds you, is this building – happily continuing with its original name of Mohatta Palace. As you can see for yourself, it has been rescued from oblivion and restored magnificently by the 3 Hs of Karachi - Hameed Haroon, Habib Fida Ali and Abdul Hamid Akhund. |
| There will be many amongst you who would remember the forlorn image this building presented when Madr-i-Millat the late Miss Fatima Jinnah occupied it during the 1960s. To me, and I suspect to many other residents of Karachi, she seemed a curious shadowy figure – a sort of Pakistani counterpart to Miss Haversham, Charles Dickens’ wraith-like character in his novel Great Expectations. Except that Miss Jinnah had not been the prospective bride jilted at the altar. She was a prospective President jilted by history. Like Miss Haversham, alone and dejected, she chose to live the remainder of her solitary life in dusty disarray. |
| After Miss Jinnah’s death, Mohatta Palace, like its reclusive owner, receded from public consciousness until it became an abandoned site, a pile of stones with a history but no future. Today, anyone concerned with the renaissance of Karachi will be happy to see that a resurrected Mohatta Palace has both a past and a future – thanks in no small part to the tireless endeavours of the second national treasure I would like to pay tribute to tonight. And that valuable treasure is not a building but a bureaucrat – Mr Abdul Hamid Akhund. |
| If I say that Hamid belongs to an older tradition of British-trained bureaucrats in whom administrative responsibilities and intellectual curiosity were inseparable ideals, I would not be doing him full justice. Hamid is not a residue of past tradition; he is the prototype of the future. Fifty years from now, Pakistanis will wonder how he managed to achieve as much as he has done, just as today we wonder how the Lambricks and the Sorleys of this world could find the time to administer Sindh and to conduct research into its history. |
| When Hamid Akhund asked me to identify a topic for a talk here at Mohatta Palace, it occurred us both, almost simultaneously, that I could take my cue from the recent Treasures of the Talpurs exhibition, so brilliantly curated by Dr Nasreen Askari. No one is better aware than she is our nation’s past, nor that such a past is not detached from the present nor from the future, for they can never be detached, separate modules. They are in fact one seamless flowing continuum, in which the essence of history, like the essence of matter, never undergoes change. What does alter is simply its configuration. And it is that golden thread of continuity, discernible in different ways, under diverse conditions and over consecutive periods, that I would like to use as the theme of my talk this evening. |
| The subject of my talk is Courts and Collectors, with a sub-theme of patronage. I will touch upon the role of courts as patrons of art and culture, of the place of artisans and artists as the recipients of such patronage, and of the function of collectors as custodians of culture. |
| If I was asked what single quality distinguishes a patron from anyone else, I would be tempted to quote the American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. He once remarked to Ernest Hemingway that “The rich are different from us.” Hemingway’s laconic response to him was: “Yes, they have more money.” |
| Patrons are different from the rest of us, for they all have more money than we do. They have to, for how else could they afford the cost of patronage? How could they afford to pay for the Sistine Chapel or the Taj Mahal or commission the Badshahnama manuscript or those exquisite bejewelled Easter eggs concocted by the Russian goldsmith Carl Faberge? |
| Patronage and wealth therefore go hand in hand, or more appropriately hand in pocket, for patronage without wealth would be, to borrow the jargon of London property dealers, like having champagne tastes but only beer money. Behind every great artistic endeavour, therefore, there has to be a patron with the continuing interest and the means to support that enterprise. |
| It is not necessary for a patron to have the taste to match his means. In fact, if you examine the products of patronage over the centuries, you will notice that, more often than not, patrons have always had more money than taste. What they do possess, though, is the drive and the ability to motivate, to get the best out of others. I was about to use the word inspire rather than the word motivate, but I feel that inspiration is more properly the prerogative of the artist, artisan or craftsman. Without the ignition provided by inspiration, there never has been, nor ever can be, any acts of true creativity. |
| If, therefore, the patron has to supply the means, and the craftsman has to supply the creative talent, what you may well ask does the collector actually do? Well, a collector collects what patrons have patronised previously. In effect, he accumulates the efforts of others. I do not mean to denigrate the role of collectors. I cannot, for I am a closet collector myself. In fact, some of my best friends are collectors. |
| Every collector is at heart a patron manque - one who missed the opportunity to inspire a work at the time of its creation, and who assuages his need by patronising it second-hand. But he is more than simply a custodian of valuable or expensive objects. He is also their trustee, for just as previous generations had ensured that he in a position to possess them, if he is conscious of his responsibilities to history, as almost every collector is, he will conserve, protect and preserve them, and then pass them on to future generations to enjoy, just as the Talpur family has so generously done here at Mohatta Palace. |
| This trinity therefore - the patron, the artisan and the collector – all three are part of a continuous cycle, interacting throughout history, not always in equal proportions, not always moving at the same speed, and working not always in complete harmony. And it is that continuum, as I mentioned earlier, that makes our cultural traditions and heritage so precious and pertinent to every age. |
| In the next half hour or so I shall be discussing with you examples taken from our own rich cultural tradition. I have restricted these examples deliberately to miniatures from our part of the world, for two reasons. The first is that they are obviously beautiful, and the second that we do need to be reminded of our kinship with our rich and diverse past, which we tend to remember only selectively and all too rarely. |
| >When I think of patrons, the first image that comes to my mind is of that dynasty of rulers which elevated patronage to imperial heights – and by saying that I am not referring to the modern monarchs, whether of Bilalwal House or Model Town. I refer of course to the earlier Mughals, and to their progenitor Babur. Although he himself had little time for artistic patronage, he left for his successors an empire which was fertile, rich and artistically re-active. |
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| 12 November 1999 |
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| All Speeches |
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