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When I learned that ‘Getting to Know Pre-Colonial Punjab through Sikh-period Frescoes’ was being offered as an actual course at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) last semester, I was ecstatic.

It was my first encounter with the pioneering woman who has made it her life’s mission to document the largely undiscovered subject.

“I was roaming around the Lahore Fort when I came across the Athdara. I got on top of it and started looking around. I found several features that were Mughal but some were very different – a confusing but intriguing mix of materials and motifs,” remembers Dr Nadhra Shahbaz Naeem Khan. This was the moment when her unique journey to documenting Sikh art and architecture in Pakistan began, which in her words, was “serendipity.”

Dr Khan graduated with a degree in graphic design from the Department of Fine Arts, University of the Punjab (presently the College of Art and Design) and completed her postgraduate in the same. Later, she taught at their Fine Arts Department for a few years before working for an advertising agency, and then joined the Lahore College for Women University, where she set up their Department of Art and Design. In 2002, while Dr Khan was teaching Art and Design, the Punjab University announced a PhD programme in Art History. It was then that she says, she just “dived into it” without a very clear concept of where it would lead her.

A visit to the Athdara at the Lahore Fort triggered her destiny and took Dr Khan to Ranjit Singh’s Samadhi to discover and learn more. “That was the day when I silently told myself that this was it - my dissertation was going to be on the Samadhi!”

Dr Khan’s PhD dissertation was a study of the ornamental program of Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s Samadhi in Lahore. This led her to study other Sikh monuments in Punjab. In the process, she has built an impressive photographic archive documenting some endangered sites –an area that needs more people like her to carry out specialised research given  dire need of preserving and conserving heritage sites in Pakistan.

Performing documentation and research on historical sites in Pakistan is quite an arduous task, considering most of the monuments lie dilapidated, on the verge of being erased from history.

“The day I decided that this was what I wanted to take up as my research topic, I had no clue of what I was getting myself into.” The first difficulties of this long and laborious journey started to surface when failed to find any relevant published or archival work on the subject.

“I did not know where it all started from and except for small accounts by various 19th-century historians who briefly talk about Ranjit Singh; his pillaging of Mughal monuments and his Samadhi being a mix of Hindu and Muslim architectural elements, there was nothing else,” she says, expressing the hopelessness she felt at the time.

All the “desperately needed” material was in Amritsar and getting a visa to visit the land of the Maharaja’s commissioned Golden Temple seemed impossible, until she met Manveen Sandhu and Tripat Bains, two charismatic Sikh women who opened the doors of the city, its research material as well as their hearts to Dr Khan.

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Her voyage of research is a story as unique as her area of research. In the field, she is called the ‘scratching lady.’ Dr Khan says her “scratching project started with Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s Samadhi. The interior has beautiful panels of wall paintings and I was puzzled by the fact that the exterior was completely devoid of any.” This made her think that there was a strong possibility that these white washed walls originally may have had wall paintings. But she says it was almost impossible to pinpoint as to where these paintings might have been. She then came across a late 19th-century black-and-white photograph by Bourne and Shepherd showing male figures flanking the northern entrance of the Samadhi, published by F. S. Ijazuddin in Lahore: Illustrated Views of the 19th Century, which led her to discover them being buried under thick layers of whitewash.