What place does a museum hold in society? Is it merely the preservation of artefacts, or does its mandate extend beyond mere preservation to active dissemination of learning and cultivating cultural curiosity? Does a museum’s purpose transcend custodianship and conservation? Honest answers to these questions decide the socio-educational role museums play in societies.
The Lahore Museum has — for almost two years now — been dynamically re-defining and proactively reconceptualising museums’ role in real time.
It has been curating a spectrum of intellectual engagements, and actively arranging various seminars, workshops, book launches and panel discussions, drawing in scholars, researchers, pedagogues and professors from fields as varied as history, architecture, archaeology and even political science.
Such sessions foster learning among the attendees on a diverse array of topics, enriching global scholarship in the process while also offering students from various universities an opportunity to reclaim their heritage, revisit their past, and reconnect with their own identity.
The Lahore Museum History Society, in particular, is proving to be a potent agent of stimulating intellectual curiosity and ideational engagement among pupils and professors alike, as it arranges discussions on themes as diverse as ‘War, Memory and Identity’, ‘Revisiting Ghazali’ and countless others that touch upon the history of the region and beyond.
By transforming itself into a thriving hub of scholarly discourse and knowledge exchange, the Lahore Museum has set a precedent, demonstrating the vital role that museums can play in the intellectual life of a social collectivity.
QAZI MUHAMMAD AHMAD QASMI
CHINIOT
