As a young medical student in 1970s Pakistan, Nasreen Askari had an encounter that would shape her for ever.
After asking the mother of a sick boy routine questions about his family history, the woman looked outraged. Marching Askari outside, she took off her colourful shawl and laid it on her lap. “Most of the answers to your pointless questions are here,” she said, pointing to intricate embroidery that symbolised everything, from the woman’s community, to her marriage status and her number of children.
“I know my son is very ill and he will die,” the woman told Askari. “When he is gone, I will go home and unravel one of these black flowers here on my shawl.”
This was Askari’s first brush with the ornate fabrics of Pakistan’s south-east province of Sindh and the stories, biographies and histories woven within them. It awoke her curiosity, which grew into a lifelong passion for collecting unique textiles crafted by the diverse communities of Sindh and her attempt to understand the narratives documented in the cloth.
Fifty years later, Askari’s almost 1,000-piece collection – the largest of its kind – has formed the basis of Pakistan’s first dedicated textile museum, which she and her husband, Hasan, a former British Museum trustee, opened in Karachi in December.
“The hope is that people will come here to engage, and possibly even marvel, at the possibilities our artistic traditions can offer,” said Askari.
She said the textile traditions of Sindh were among the oldest in the world, dating back centuries to the ancient Indus valley civilisation of south Asia, which was centred in the province. In a reflection of the geography of the region, which has a long history of being an east-west trade crossroads, she said the Sindhi fabrics she had collected represented a unique synthesis of traditions spanning not only Pakistan but China, India, Iran and central Asia.
Most of the fabrics in her collection have been woven on a handloom and are made using natural dyes from roots, leaves and flowers, traditions that continue in the smaller rural and nomadic communities of Sindh, even if diminished in the face of modernity.
Askari, who lives between the UK and Pakistan, established herself as a pioneering ambassador for Pakistan’s rich, but often neglected textile traditions in 1997, when she was invited to curate one of the first international exhibits of Pakistani fabrics at the V&A. The exhibit, Colours of the Indus, drawn from a collection endowed to the museum by a Pakistani benefactor that had lain forgotten until Askari dug it out from the archive, was a huge success. She has since published several books examining the region’s diverse textile history.
Askari had considered donating her own collection, which for years had accumulated in boxes at her home, to the V&A but had a change of heart.
“We knew if we gave to a museum like the V&A it would likely sit in the vaults for years, and be brought out into daylight maybe once in a decade,” she said. “So we thought, why not just open our own museum in Sindh, which can enrich people’s understanding of their own heritage. It’s our way of repaying a debt to all those who have played a part in contributing to this collection.”
The museum, named the Haveli, features five galleries showcasing different kinds of embroidery Askari has collected from some of the remotest corners of Pakistan, ranging from ceremonial cloths traditionally sent from a groom to a bride before a wedding, to dowry purses and vibrant animal adornments worn by camels.
The couple hope to send a powerful message with the opening exhibit of the museum, titled “A coat of many colours”, which pointedly celebrates the contributions of minority Hindu communities to Sindh’s fabric traditions.
Before partition and the creation of a separate India and Pakistan in 1947, Sindh, which now borders the Indian states of Gujarat and Rajasthan, had been 30% Hindu. However, in the decades since, the number of Hindus living in Pakistan, an Islamic republic, have dwindled in the face of sustained intolerance and persecution.
Hasan said: “At a time when so much of south Asia is dominated by sectarian strife, and religion has become so weaponised for division, we wanted to make a statement of unity. We desperately believe in recognising contributions that minority groups have made to textile traditions in Sindh to show they have not been forgotten.”
The museum was, he emphasised, “not just about showcasing crafts, but also to make a humanistic statement”. He added: “We hope to show that when it comes to craftsmanship, these religious and sectarian divides become meaningless – these textiles are, and historically have been, all part of one collective.”