Jain Journal 1976 01

Author(s): Jain Bhawan Publication
Publisher: Jain Bhawan Publication

Page 12

100
JAIN JOURNAL
he was a member of a great many Oriental and Indological Societies in India and abroad."
Puran Chand Nahar was a man of multifarious interests and for such a man, the legal profession was too small a place. He had an inherent hankering for literary pursuit and archaeological collections. These are the two fields which claimed him most because he had an innate love for them. In these two pursuits, he took great pains, made many sacrifices, courted hazards and lavishly spent money. There were many Zamindars and moneyed men in the country, as there always are, but how many have the taste and how many have the requisite eye for things of beauty, for art objects? “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever” a poet has said, and Puran Chand revelled in this joy. He was a widely travelled man. He travelled throughout the length and breadth of the country, and, almost everywhere, his searching eye could find something to collect for his storehouse. In this, he was not discriminatory. His collection included the most precious like archaeological pieces, coins, rare books, etc., as well as the most trifling like match box labels, objects produced in far-off Europe as well as domestic things. Some of these you can always find in any fairly good family museum, but not some others which were the result of Puran Chand's fanciful imagination. Take, for instance, wedding cards with multifarious prints, cover page of old journals, domestic seals, letters of invitation, picture cuttings, and many other such things. And he did not dump them. He himself arranged them with meticulous care and displayed them before his visitors. What a colossal time and energy must have gone for these odd jobs! All this was a singlehanded effort and nothing was done shabilly or in a slip-shod manner. A man of any generation would wonder, time apart, wherefrom he derived so much patience and skill. The whole lot is housed at the Nahar Museum in the Kumar Singh Hall. The vast library having many manuscripts and rare books is named after his mother, Gulab Kumari Library, which had also a free reading room attached with it. Puran Chand's collection of match box labels is simply amazing. The best part of his life was spent between the Swadeshi movement and the Constitutional Reform of 1935. In between, there were many great events like the Coronation of King George V, Home Rule agitation, Gandhian movements, to name a few. All these are reproduced with great imagination on match boxes, the most ingenious way of popularising current events. Puran Chand not only collected all these match box labels but also arranged them in proper order and harmony so that in wending leisurely through the pages of his precious album, one gets a complete panorama of Indian History between 1900-1935. One wonders how much interested even our match