Daily Times

Tucked away in a quiet narrow street of Mohalla Chain Pura inside the Bab-e-Muhammad neighbourhood of Jhang in Southern Punjab, a small 400 square feet house is designated as a national monument.

This is the family home of Dr Abdus Salam, who was the first Nobel Laureate from Pakistan in theoretical physics, where he was born in January 1926.

The locality of Bab-e-Muhammd gate is known as Jhang City. In fact, it is the old city of Jhang, which is gated like old neighbourhoods in many other cities and has its particular architecture and lifestyle. Bab-e-Muhammad leads into a straight lane called Bazaar Noor Shah.

Walking a few steps into this cluster of shops, looking for the true picture of life in old Jhang, you can ask any passer by or a shopkeeper about the house of Dr Salam. Turning to the left at first U-turn which separates the Bazaar Noor Shah in two parallel streets, and walking a few more steps in this direction you would come across a small house having a small inscription on its brown painted main door.

The house is not different by any physical means to the houses in its surrounding. But from this 1.5 marla house comprising two small rooms, a breakthrough comes in physics, a new page of science begins and the whereabouts of Muhammad Abdus Salam are found.

Before reaching this place, I was wondering it might be a crumbling structure, abandoned and left to its fate with its permanently closed entrance. Surprisingly, there was a sound and properly conserved building, paved like government schools and hospital buildings.

As I knocked, a middle-aged man promptly came to open the door with a welcoming smile on his face. That was another surprise. Muhammad Ismail has been deputed here by the Archaeology Department, Punjab and he is serving there for the last 10 years.

There is nothing special about architectural characteristics in this small house. It’s a building of a very basic style with two rooms side by side and a staircase in front of a room beside the courtyard.

Turning left at the first U-turn and walking a few more steps in that direction you would come across a small house with an inscription on its brown painted door

According to Ismail, the main structure of the house was intact but the wooden roof wrecked some time ago, so the Archaeology Department restored it with a new roof in late 2016. No major alterations were done inside except plaster and paving the walls.

Ismail informed that around 10 to 20 people daily come to visit the family home of the great scientist. Most of the visitors are from Jhang or surrounding towns. Local schoolteachers often bring their students there for a visit. But one thing, which I noticed missing there was an inscription. Although there was an iron board put down inside the house but there was not any printed or written material available on Dr Salam and his family.

Close to this locality of Mohalla Chain Pura, the elementary school of Dr Salam is located outside Bab-e-Muhammad. The Government High School Jhang City was a middle school in 1934 when Dr Salam, son of Chaudhary Muhammad Hussain took admission there in grade four.

The alma mater has preserved his classroom and an old register of admission and withdrawal, which shows the record of those four years, which he spent at this school.

He studied there from April 3, 1934 to March 31, 1938.

As a token of honour, the governor of Punjab bestowed upon this school a replica of the Nobel Prize won by Dr Salam, which is placed on the principal’s table.

After completing his middle school, Abdus Salam went to Degree College, Jhang for FSc.

The principal informed that in 1979, Abdus Salam was still completing his graduation, when the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to him. “The people of the city were immensely delighted. The first time when he stood first in matriculation exam in 1940, the news of his achievement was carried by local newspapers with his pictures and cheering crowds escorted him on the way to his house,” he told.

“It was the second time when the people of Jhang were proud of the great achievement of Dr Salam, who made Jhang famous overnight,” he added.

There are a few relatives of Dr Salam, still living in Jhang. One of them is a nephew of Dr Salam, Muhammad Naeem Akhtar who has a history to tell about him. According to Naeem, Abdus Salam was born at his maternal home in Santokh Das village District Okara. He also informed that after receiving the Nobel Prize when Dr Salam came to Pakistan, he also visited Jhang and came to his home where he met him for the first time.

The article originally appeared in PakVoices.pk. The writer is a Lahore-based photojournalist with an interest in cultural heritage

Published in Daily Times, July 24^th 2017.