KARACHI: Ink is spread across a printing block, a sheet of paper placed over it and a heavy lever pulled down by hand.

With enough pressure, words appear on the page, one impression at a time.

At a museum in Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city, the laborious process offers visitors a glimpse into a technology that helped record nearly two centuries of profound change in the region, from British colonial administration to the creation of Pakistan and today’s digital age.

The Sindh Government Printing Press Museum houses 56 historic machines used for printing, binding, cutting, stitching and other stages of producing the written word. Among them is a press dating to 1830 that visitors are allowed to operate themselves.

For Faheem Qureshi, controller of the Sindh Printing and Stationery Department who led the museum project, the collection tells a story that began soon after Britain conquered Sindh in 1843 and Karachi emerged as an increasingly important administrative and commercial center.

“This goes back to the year 1847,” Qureshi told Arab News during a visit to the museum on Tuesday.

“When the British East India Company was ruling the subcontinent, they brought printing machines here. The practical work, the commands and the orders they had were printed and gazetted here.”

Archival records support the printing press’s early place in Sindh’s modern administrative history. The British Library holds publications produced by the Commissioner’s Printing Press in Karachi dating to the 1840s, including reports on the region’s economy, roads, canals, agriculture and administration.

The arrival of printing technology coincided with a transformation in how information circulated in Sindh. Newspapers were appearing in Karachi by around 1850, while the development of printing in the Sindhi language helped move knowledge beyond handwritten manuscripts and enabled literature and other texts to reach wider audiences.

Over successive decades, presses became instruments not only of government but of journalism, education and literature, helping create a printed record of a city and region undergoing rapid political and social change.

MACHINES THAT MADE HISTORY

The machines preserved by the museum continued to serve government after Pakistan was created following the partition of British India in 1947.

Historic machinery at the Sindh Government Printing Press was used to produce documents associated with some of the defining events of the country’s early history, including the appointment of Pakistan’s first prime minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, and the notification of the death of the country’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, according to previous reporting on the collection.

The museum, formally inaugurated in October 2025, was developed around machinery preserved from the government press, decades after much of the equipment had become technologically obsolete.

Qureshi said the collection includes not only printing presses but machinery for binding, cutting, stitching and making envelopes, along with accessories that reveal how many separate processes once went into producing a finished document.

One of its most striking exhibits is a press Qureshi said dates to 1830 and remains in its original condition.

“When we go to a museum, we usually look at things from a distance,” he said. “But we have provided a facility here where we practically let visitors use the 1830 machine ... to print.”

Visitors apply ink, position paper and operate the press by hand, experiencing the physical process once required to produce a single impression. The museum also demonstrates block printing.

It also preserves some of what the machines produced.

A government publications section contains gazettes, manuals and other official records. Qureshi said the collection includes a government gazette from 1857 and gazettes dating from 1922 onward, while older material has been transferred to archives for preservation.

Such records were once central to how governments formally communicated decisions. The Sindh Government Gazette continues to serve that function today, publishing official laws, rules and notifications.

“BACK IN THE DAY“

The exhibits also trace changes in the mechanics of printing. Qureshi said older presses could produce only one color at a time, requiring paper to pass through the process repeatedly to add additional colors, while modern machinery can print several colors in a single run.

Documentary screenings and digital displays take that history forward for visitors, particularly school, college and university students.

The contrast is deliberate: screens are now being used to explain machines that once represented the fastest available means of reproducing information, allowing visitors to see how dramatically the process of putting words on paper has changed.

For visitor Ahsan Majid, seeing the machinery made the ease of producing words in the digital era more remarkable.

“Today it is completely at our fingertips, printing has advanced so much,” Majid told Arab News. “But back in the day ... hats off to those people.”