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 19th 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.
