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Few things are as beneficial for a society as the convergence of wealth and power with ethical vision and good taste, and few things as harmful as the joining of might with vulgarity.
Fortunately, though, there are some moments, some individuals in our story that pass with flying colours even under the strictest version of the maxim above. One such individual is Syed Babar Ali, who reached the grand age of a hundred last month. To celebrate his century, I’d like to focus on a lesser-known aspect of Babar Sahib’s life work: his patronage of the arts and letters. In this realm too, his towering achievements as the founder of LUMS, as well as the creation of the Naqsh School of Arts at Bhati Gate, Old Lahore, are well known.
What I’ll bring to the fore here is a lesser-known, but not less impressive aspect of his work: the publication of a number of very well-produced books under the auspices of Packages. Though spread over Packages’ lifetime, this publication activity reached its climax during the seventies and eighties and includes a number of books published mainly in three languages -- Persian, Urdu and Punjabi.
One of the first books Packages produced was ‘Hayat-e Maratib’, authored by Dr Muhammad Abdul Lateef, a former teacher of Babar Sahib at Aitchison and a scholar of Persian who became close to the family. Published in 1963, this is an Urdu biography of Syed Babar Ali’s father, Syed Maratib Ali, who passed away in 1961, two years before the book’s publication. One of the first things one notices is the book’s aesthetic quality -- its quiet simplicity and minimalism, and, most prominently, the beautiful ‘nastaliq kitabat’ used throughout. This kitabat is the work of the renowned calligrapher Muhammad Iqbal ibn Parvin Raqam. As his name indicates, Iqbal was the son of Abdul Majeed Parvin Raqam, a master calligrapher who invented a special variation on Nastaliq called Lahori Nastaliq and was the only calligrapher the poet Iqbal would allow to write his poetry for publication.
A second similar book, ‘Hayat-e Mubarik’, was published by the same author in 1971; it is the Urdu biography of Babar Sahib’s mother, Syeda Mubarik Begum, who had recently passed away. Aesthetically, it is almost a twin volume to Hayat-e Maratib, displaying the same quiet dignity in an even more delectable nastaliq, this time by the calligrapher Sayyid Saqalain Zaidi.
These two valuable biographies of Babar Sahib’s parents set the scene for a long and auspicious line of books produced by Packages, all of which display the same aesthetic excellence and the same fondness for the long and venerable traditions of Islamic calligraphy. A sensitivity to the beauty of our Arabic-based scripts, and a desire to promote it, is evident in almost all of Babar Sahib’s endeavours, including his Naqsh School of Arts in Bhati Gate in Old Lahore, and his Syedanwala School System near Kasur.
Likewise, almost all of Packages’ books involve gorgeous exhibitions of Urdu and Persian kitabat. Many of these were done by ‘in-house’ calligraphers employed by Packages, such as Sher Alam Sahib, Iqbal ibn Parvin Raqam and Syed Saqlain Zaidi, as well as occasional invited work by the great Sayyid Nafis Shah ‘Nafis-Raqam.’
Beyond the fineness of the script, almost all these books show outstanding aesthetic standards in design and production, often overseen by the company’s art director, Mahmood Rumi, who also has a knack for innovation. A strong example of this innovation is the invaluable set of Punjabi poetry volumes – one volume each for the verse of Bulleh Shah, Sultan Bahu and Mian Muhammad Baksh – produced by Packages. These volumes were produced under the direction of the legendary Dr Nazir Ahmad, and they brilliantly use Punjab-related motifs for their decoration.
For the Bulleh Shah volume, for example, the production team sourced local phulkaris, gudris, khes and pankhis from Jhang, Samana and Lahore, took close-up photographs, and then masterfully used toned versions to grace the cover and margins. Likewise, the Sultan Bahu volume takes its decorative motifs from the shrine of Sultan Bahu. The achieved effect is one of sophistication and elegance, achieved through masterful use of the best of local arts.
In addition to Punjabi, Babar Sahib cultivated a love of Persian throughout his life, and Packages reflects this in its publications in the language. Perhaps the most important among these is the four-volume set of Amir Khusrau’s Persian ghazals, prepared by Muhammad Iqbal Salahuddin (d 2005, not to be confused with Mian Iqbal Salahuddin) under the guidance of the great scholar of Persian Sayyid Vazirul Hasan Abidi and published between 1972 and 1975. It remains one of the best, if not the best, editions of Amir Khusrau’s ghazals available anywhere.
Equally important is the publication of the ‘Kulliyat-e Girami’, or the collected works of Ghulam Qadir ‘Girami,’ a very important if lesser-known Punjabi Persian poet and friend of Iqbal. This work was edited and compiled by Dr Muhammad Abdul Lateef, whose preface alone is 124 pages long, and constitutes a virtual research monograph on the poet. Though Girami's divan was published once before in the 1930s in Lahore, it became very hard to find. Dr Abdul Lateef went one step further and recovered and incorporated manuscripts of Girami’s poetic notebooks too, so that the Packages edition has double the poetry of the earlier edition. One has to be grateful to Syed Babar Ali for taking on this task, to the redoubtable Finance Secretary of Pakistan Mumtaz Hasan for recommending it to Babar Sahib, and to Dr Abdul Lateef once again for doing the actual hard work of recovering the manuscripts and compiling Girami’s poetry, in addition to writing an excellent and comprehensive preface to it.
An important Urdu book published under the auspices of Packages is titled ‘Rang-e Ghazal’, a selection by the well-known Urdu poet Shehzad Ahmad. This is one of the best, most important and wide-ranging selections of post-partition (1947-1988) Urdu ghazal in South Asia, and it played an important part in shaping the poetic taste of an entire young generation of Urdu poets.
Another little gem from Packages is ‘Yak Hazar o Yak Sukhan’, or ‘One Thousand and One Verses’, penned by the eminent poet and man of letters Sufi Ghulam Mustafa Tabassum. Babar Sahib often had the pleasure of Sufi Tabassum’s company, and was astounded by the number of couplets he knew by heart. Babar Sahib asked him to select his favourite thousand verses from memory and write them in his own hand, since he had beautiful handwriting. Packages thus published the resulting selection of Persian and Urdu verses in Sufi Tabassum’s own hand.
The editors and compilers of these books are often the very best in their fields, including giants like Syed Vazirul Hasan Abidi, Syed Sibtul Hasan Zaigham and Muhammad Iqbal Salahuddin. The quality of these scholars and their work is evident in their learned prefaces and the care they take to secure the most accurate textual versions of the works they edit. In addition to Dr Muhammad Lateef’s preface to Girami’s book, Syed Sibtul Hasan Zaigham’s learned preface to his edition of the ‘Saiful Muluk’ is another case in point.
All these books stand as living testimonies to Babar Sahib’s uncompromising excellence, exactitude and refined taste deeply grounded in Indo-Islamic tradition. These productions – and indeed Babar Sahib’s life in general – remind us that business leaders, or more broadly anyone with wealth and power, can be much more than money-making machines.
We have in Babar Sahib, and in Packages, an outstanding model of this: a businessman and a company that thought well beyond money. And there are already more hopeful signs: Getz Pharma’s CEO Khalid Mehmood has been sponsoring the Getz Pharma Library of Urdu Classics, whose little turquoise editions consist of short, delightful stories from Urdu’s vast riches in the ‘qissa’ and ‘dastan’ genres.
The Chughtai Foundation (whose Chughtai Labs we’re most familiar with) has likewise invested substantially in creating libraries across the country, as well as running an excellent digitisation project aimed at Urdu printed material. And Naseer Ahmed Baloch of Topical Printers is currently sponsoring a vast project called the Topical Quran, which mobilises a number of traditional Islamic arts in its creation. One hopes that more business leaders step in, and follow Babar Sahib’s century of pioneering footsteps.
The writer is an assistant professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University.
