This archive offers a unique entry into an ecosystem centred on a community of artists, gallerists, writers, and collectors in Karachi, Pakistan, and extending to the wider South Asian region from the 1970s to mid-2000s. Jaffer built a formidable personal library and artwork collection focused largely on paintings by artists of South Asian origin. He collected correspondences and writings on, as well as documentation of, exhibitions and events of many artists he befriended. A feature of the archive—F.N. Souza’s numerous visits to Karachi—also reveals connections that transcend and complicate national framings of art history.

Wahab Jaffer is a Karachi-based businessman, collector, and artist. Over the course of four decades, he gathered and organised ephemera and documentation for his collection—most of which now belong to the Rangoonwala Trust in Karachi.