TAJ MAHAL IN PAKISTAN

NEWS ABOUT BEAUTIFUL HISTORY OF PAKISTAN

The highly controversial nature of how history is constructed in Pakistan allows for multiple competing narratives.

This is an absurd question. How on earth could the Taj Mahal be Pakistani and claim a nationality which was only imagined 400 years after the mausoleum was constructed and one hopes that no one in their senses would ask such a preposterous question.  

When in a class of undergraduate students at one of Pakistan’s best universities, precisely this question was animatedly debated during a session on Pakistan’s history, with some students stating that the Taj Mahal was part of Pakistan’s history, and others implying that it was Pakistani.

These students had all taken a course in Pakistan Studies prior to starting their undergraduate degree. Clearly the highly controversial and contested nature of how history is constructed in Pakistan, given the numerous possibilities of framing a history of Pakistan, allows for multiple competing narratives, including a claim to the Taj Mahal being Pakistani.

Pakistani history has been a contentious topic where different sets of narratives give differing accounts of what Pakistani history is and hence how one imagines Pakistan.

Given the eventual partition of British India and the creation of Pakistan, some historians have claimed that Pakistan was created in 712 AD when an Arab invader came to what is now part of Pakistan.

This incorrectly called the beginning of Muslim contract with what is now referred to as South Asia, yet it supports one of the many official narratives of when Muslim consciousness and identity were created in this region.

Other competing narratives look to the Delhi Sultanat, or the Mughal Empire or events in the 19^th century and 1857, crystallizing into a separate Muslim identity which inevitably led to Muslim separatism and to the ration of Pakistan.

The question about the creation of Pakistan, when was Pakistan created, is one  which simply works around a Muslims are different from Hindus discourse, culminating in a separate homeland.

Hence if the history of Pakistan is the history of Muslims in India and just as Mohammad bin Qasim can become part of a certain legacy and heritage and can be caricatured as the first Pakistani, so too can the Taj Mahal as being Pakistani. Pakistani history and a history of Pakistan’s people and their land become two conflicting narratives.

as a consequence, Pakistani history, ignores the history of the people who live in what was Pakistan (West and East) and what is left of it. Mohenjodaro, Harappa, and the history of the people of Pakistan is dominated by a north Indian (largely Hindustani) Muslim history and that too only of kings and their courts.

The Pakistan freedom movement of course and not the movement for independence from British colonialism for all Indian peoples – shapes this discourse more teleological once politics dominate undivided India in the 20th Century.

The actors, or at least the heroes are almost always Muslim, and students seldom hear about the role Nehru, Gandhi, Ambedkar, Patel and Bose played in bringing about freedom for the 300 million Indians under colonialism.

One only hears of a handful of Muslim men who brought about freedom for Muslims from a Hindu majority. The British imperialists are inconsequential in this narrative, and are only responsible for making a mess of partition by not giving Pakistan many of the districts which are claimed on the basis of them being Muslim-majority areas.

Moreover, if this claim that Pakistan’s history lies outside its borders’ is valid and indeed in many critical ways this is certainly the cases, it also implies that the country which came into being called Pakistan in this hegemonic notion of history really has no history of its own. The so-called freedom movement was fought in a foreign land the land of the Taj Mahal not the land of the people who inherited a country called Pakistan where their ancestors had lived for millennia.

Ascribing a status of nationality to brick and mortar even the Taj Mahal poses numerous challenging epistemological questions yet the question of what Pakistani history is remains unaddressed in a land still searching for  understanding. Depending on how one answers this question, one is led through many ideological labyrinths and some geographical ones as well.

If Pakistan is imagined ideologically then all one has to do is determine when Pakistan came in to being, clearly so easy task, and limiting oneself to a history of the Muslims in India, or a history of Islam in South Asia. If Pakistan is imagined geographically, the connotations of how the history of the peoples and lands of Pakistan is taught and under stood varies hugely.