[Work in progress] Error iii, Graphite on paper, 22 x 30 inches, Imran Channa, 2015, Lahore.

Reclaiming Pakistaniat
Sadia Bajwa

In October 2014, the Higher

Education Commission (HEC)
to the heads of institution of all Universities
issued1 a letter
directly or indirectly hosted or sponsored by”
these universities and institutes were “contrary
to the Ideology and principles of Pakistan.”
and Degree Awarding Institutes in Pakistan,
“In view of the above,” the letter ended, “we
the subject line reading: “Adherence to
would solicit your kind support to remain very
Ideology and the Principles of Pakistan.” The
vigilant and forestall any activity that in any
letter “observed that a few activities that are

Winter 2015 Tanqeed 138

 manner challenge the ideology and history-writing have become excellent
1 Find a link to the letter here: https:// and principles of Pakistan, and/or avenues to study the official imagination of the
pbs.twimg.com/media/B1LNrtOIcAENyFS.jpg
perspective of the Government of state: an imagination that delineates national
Pakistan thereof.” history and collective identity. In Pakistan, K.K.
Aziz, has lamented the Murder of History,
The letter brought into limelight how the site
Mubarak Ali has put History On Trial, while
of official knowledge
production has been
working in over-drive
to create a sanitized
and one-dimensional
image of Pakistan
and its citizen. This
image allows for no
nuances of identity
and political
expression. Instead,
it is the Pakistan that
students in schools
across the country
learn about in their
Pakistan Studies
classes, popularly
dubbed Pak
S t u d i e s – a [Final Work] Error iii, Eraser on paper, 22 x 30 inches, Imran Channa, 2015, Lahore.
compulsory subject
2 For example
which was M.N. Qureshi has asked Whither History?.
Jalal, Ayesha.
“Conjuring introduced during Ayub Khan’s era to replace Along with several other historians2 they have
Pakistan: History
history. highlighted the flagrant instrumentalization
as Official
Imagining.”
and twisting of history for the purposes of
International Since 1947, the state machinery of producing
Journal of Middle state ideology in an independent Pakistan.
myths of origin, and images of “us” and “them”
East Studies 27.1
(1995): 73–89. has been chugging away, disseminating, with This article traces both the state’s construction
varying degrees of success, a fabricated, of an imagined Pakistan, and the critical
distorted and, at times, absurd version of academic’s attempt to take this imagination
history which “promotes” the “Ideology of apart. States like
Pakistan.” For the historian trying to Pakistan try to 3 A phrase borrowed from Jalal, Ayesha. “Conjuring Pakistan: History as

understand the processes and discourses conjure3 a Official Imagining.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 27.1
(1995): 73–89.
behind nationalism, Pakistani history textbooks homeland with a

Winter 2015 Tanqeed 139

 unique and bounded history and identity. To This applies with special
do so, they draw lines around what it means force to Muslims for their
to be, and not be, Pakistani. This helps roots not only go deep into
produce the citizen who, schooled in the the past but extend as far as
history and identity of Pakistan, identifies with Spain on the one side and
the state. In turn, the critical academic tries to Indonesia and China on the
question these boundaries of Pakistaniat. other. … Of special relevance
to us is the study of
A close look at official and academic
movements in the world of 4 Pakistan Advisory
discourses and practices reveals that one
Islam, of the causes of their Board of
cannot speak of a straightforward success Education.
rise and fall as also the cause Proceedings of the
story of an all-pervasive national dogma. Even
of our present state of Sixth Meeting of
after Pakistan became a concrete entity, there the Advisory Board
decline and disorganisation of Education for
was little agreement on e.g. Pakistan’s Pakistan, Held at
and continued
relationship to Islam, or the multiplicity of Peshawar on the
backwardness4 2nd to 5th March,
languages and ethnic identities. The debates 1954: 8.
continue today, as much in formal politics, as The history of Pakistan in textbooks, but also
in the arenas of history and culture. It is these in state-sponsored academic works, was thus
debates and their particular engagements with to be traced back out of the Indian
Pakistan that constitute one of the strongest subcontinent, distancing itself from an
arguments for retaining, rather than discarding, ostensibly separate Hindu or Indian history to
Pakistan Studies as a field. create the notion of a distinct Indo-Muslim
culture. I.H. Qureshi, nationalist historian par
Imagining Pakistan excellence, wrote in 1962 in his book The
Muslim Community in the Indo-Pakistan Sub-
A new nation needs a new history. Mr. Fazlur continent (610-1947):
Rehman, the minister of education, made this
clear at the second meeting of the Advisory Whatever the degree of
Board of Education in Peshawar in February toleration developed
1949. He stated that it was of paramount between the communities,
importance to focus on correcting the the Indo-Muslim culture 5 Qureshi, Ishtiaq

Husain. The Muslim

perspective on the history of Muslims in the remained mostly Islamic and Community of the
Central Asian in spirit [...] In Indo-Pakistan
Subcontinent. According to Rehman, this
Subcontinent,
history had been distorted by British colonial view of the great assimilative 610-1947: A Brief
qualities of Hinduism, which Historical Analysis.
historiography. The boundaries of the new Renaissance Pub.
nation’s history, however, were not to be has absorbed within its House, 1985:
78-82.
confined to any “narrow national-framework”: bosom many a foreign
community, this needed
constant vigilance and effort5

Winter 2015 Tanqeed 140

 Harking back to the glorious past of Islam
outside the borders of India had a longer
historiographical tradition. This was not least
due to the influence of the Orientalism of
British rule, which played its part in the
construction of a timeless and “authentic”
Hindu India, in which the Muslim featured as
foreign invaders. Muslim foreignness and the
attendant pan-Islamic conception of a
historical community became a core idiom in
the Muslim historiography of the late
nineteenth century, which postulated Muslim
distinctiveness, historically and culturally, in a
time of ever-increasing politicization of
religious identities. The following lines by Altaf
Husain Hali’s (1837-1914) reflect this
sentiment in Shikwa-e-Hind:
F a r e w e l l ,
Hindusthan, land of eternal
spring, for long have we,
foreign guests,
stayed here and enjoyed
6 “Shikwa-E-Hind.” Rekhta. N.p.,
n.d. Web. Nov.9, 2015.
your hospitality.6
Even with the achievement of a distinct
territory carved out for Indian Muslims, the
ideological frontiers of Pakistan remained
much more expansive than could be easily
contained within the limits of a territorially
bound nation-state. The two-winged form it
took thwarted any easy cultural-geographic
legitimation. It is clear at every turn that state
efforts to create a coherent narrative and forge
a national identity were faced with
contradictions and tensions within the nation-
state project of Pakistan.
Winter 2015 Tanqeed
In an analysis of textbook history, Rubina
Saigol shows how these projects were
characterized in the 1950s and early 1960s
by a “futuristic and modernist” nationalism that
depended on a developmentalist image of the
hardworking, industrious, upright and patriotic 7 Saigol, Rubina:
citizen, unbridled by narrow ethnic loyalties “Ideology and
Curriculum in India
and parochialism.7 It was not until the 1965
and Pakistan” in Imtiaz
war, and especially after 1971, that the Alam (Ed.): History and
Education in South
subject-matter took on a more aggressively Asia. SAPANA. 2006.
exclusivist and homogenizing turn, reaching its Lahore, p. 184.
full bigoted form under the Islamization drive
of the Zia years. Henceforth, there was an
increased jingoistic preoccupation with the
enemies within and without. Internally, the
room for cultural, linguistic and religious
pluralism shrunk, while externally, the Hindu/
Indian became the epitome of the “Other”–
reduced to a one-dimensional caricature that
only existed in history as the conspirator,
manipulator and conniver against the Muslim/
Pakistani.
Challenging Pakistaniat
Challenges to the official narrative are as old
as Pakistan itself. The history of political
contestation that the centralizing state has
faced since its inception is mirrored in
intellectual and popular milieus. These
challenges have come from Left-oriented
ethnic groups, labour and peasant
movements, and, even, religious and Islamist
groups–all of whom reflect the heterogeneity
of life in Pakistani society. The story of
contestation is the story of movements and
political struggles led by people like Khan
Abdul Ghaffar Khan  in what was the North
141
 Western Frontier Province (NWFP), Maulana
Bhashani  in East Bengal, and G.M. Syed  in
Sindh. The on-going struggle in Balochistan,
too, has a long history that goes back to
1947. The political writings, treatises,
histories, poetry and literature inspired by
movements such as these represent an entire
alternate production of knowledge.
Similarly, the official narrative simply ignores
female voices unless they fit neatly into
patriarchal categories: for instance, Fatima
Jinnah has a mono-dimensional role in
Pakistan’s history as a loyal sister and as the
mother of the nation (Mader-e-Millat). Such
established tropes of female agency have,
however, been challenged by a strong
tradition of feminist literature by writers like
Kishwar Naheed, Zaheda Hina, Fehmida Riaz
and Ishrat Afreen. While these alternate visions
certainly flourished and informed people's
lives, they, sadly, remained marginal when it
came to informing scholarly engagement with
Pakistan, be it within the country or elsewhere.
The reasons are manifold: state repression,
neglect of serious academic scholarship in
Pakistan, and the marginality of vernacular
languages, to name a few.
The long history of multiple narratives and
subaltern identities, and the rich corpus of
sources that these present, are among the
new avenues that emerging scholarship on the
Pakistani context have begun to draw into the
limelight. It is only in the last decade or so that
Pakistan Studies has been taking on a new,
academic connotation, especially within the
country, gradually freeing itself from the
shackles of nationalist dogma. Within
Winter 2015
Pakistan’s academic landscape, this has to do
with the increased promotion of higher
education that began under Musharraf’s
regime. It has allowed departments of
humanities and social sciences at Pakistani
universities to look beyond established
ideological boundaries. There has been a stark
increase in funding, international collaboration
and opportunities for Pakistani academics from
diverse social backgrounds to study and work
at universities in Europe and the United
States. These changes have opened up the
field to those without privileged biographies of
private English-medium schooling. Pakistani
universities, state-run as well as private ones,
have entered networks of global academic
debate and exchange, and are more
integrated in the international political
economy of academia. In my conversations
with academics, I am beginning to discern a
greater willingness to go back to Pakistan. It
seems it is becoming more attractive and
financially feasible for western-trained
Pakistani and Pakistani diaspora researchers
to work in Pakistan–they see opportunities to
bring change in their home country without
having to compromise on their academic
careers. Furthermore, there has been an
opening up of public spaces for debate (which
also has its sensationalist downsides) with the
proliferation of electronic media, a revival of
civil society, and the spread of the internet, to
name a few factors.
It is from within this context that critical
scholarly engagements with Pakistan emerges.
Within the academy, Pakistan is situated within
the multidisciplinary field of Area Studies, more
Tanqeed 142

8 Ali Usman Qasmi has
written about the
potential and challenges
of working in archives in
Pakistan. Qasmi, Ali
Usman. “Three Archives in
Pakistan.” Dissertation
Reviews. N.p., n.d. Web. 9
Nov. 2015. [LINK: http://
dissertationreviews.org/
archives/12520
Winter 2015
specifically South Asian Studies, which has its
own history of motivations, biases and
exigencies, as explored by David Szanton in
his book Politics of Knowledge (2002). The
boundaries of ‘areas’ as academic disciplines
are a product of history. That is not to say that
these boundaries cannot be intellectually
productive, but it is nevertheless vital to be
aware of their limitations as well as their
potential. Just as Pakistan Studies within
Pakistan has been shaped by state-control, so
has international academic inquiry into
Pakistan been delineated by the framework of
South Asian–and Area–Studies.
Within the institutional set up of Area Studies
in the West, multiple factors have influenced
the specific trajectories and disciplinary
concentrations that define the study of
Pakistan: Developments in international
relations and global security concerns; ever-
changing public and private funding interests;
the transpiring of serious events or conflicts;
the interests of the Pakistani diaspora; the
larger shifts of theory and method within the
disciplines dominating research on Pakistan;
and, of course, simply the question of access
to the field and archives.8
Most scholarship on Pakistan is concentrated
in the United Kingdom and the United States.
The tradition of studying South Asia in the UK
is of course embedded in colonial history. In
the US, it is related to the fact that this is
where Area Studies emerged as a multi-
disciplinary field, motivated by US-hegemonic
aspirations during the Cold War. While Area
Studies have grown and asserted their spaces
of independence from the real political
Tanqeed
rationale that governed their founding years,
there is a need to study the extent and nature
of US influence on the directions and fields of
Pakistan Studies. Ainslie T. Embree has written
a brief survey of The Discovery of Pakistan in
American Academia (2007) which traces this
history and raises questions in this regard.
Since its inception, Pakistan has been the
subject of research in the humanities and
social sciences within Area Studies institutes,
departments, research centers and think tanks
across the West. The ‘areas’ covered range
from South Asia to the more expansive Asia or
the Orient. Not seldom, Pakistan is even to be
found in the Middle East, as with the Center
for Pakistan Studies in the think tank Middle
East Institute in Washington DC. As a field of
knowledge production on the global stage, it
remains fairly disjointed and poorly
institutionalized, unless we talk about the
trope of Pakistan as a ‘crisis state’ which has
inspired a consolidated field of inquiry in
political science, security and policy studies, in
particular from a US foreign policy perspective.
The lens of crisis
At the forefront of the crisis discourse today
are studies that feed into the post 9/11
international mainstream narrative, in
journalistic accounts as well as academia, of
Pakistan as a land caught in a perpetual circle
of violence and radicalism, always on the brink
of failing as a state. For instance, Stephen P.
Cohen, a political scientist and senior fellow at
Foreign Policy at Brookings Institution in
Washington, in his last edited volume on
Pakistan, Future of Pakistan (2011),
143
 approaches the existential dilemma of
Pakistan, identifying problems and proposing
solutions that could bring about a kind of
Pakistan that would be in the interest of a
stable world order and, more so, in the
interest of the USA.
The shelves of English-language bookstores in
Pakistan are overwhelmed with titles such as
Descent into Chaos, Pakistan at the Brink, or
Avoiding Armageddon. These view Pakistan
exclusively through the security lens, focusing
on radical Islam, the ‘Af-Pak’ region, and India-
Pakistan relations. And while these studies
certainly do not all tow a unified line–many,
like Ahmed Rashid’s Descent into Chaos, are
critical of US-Imperialist foreign policy–they
nevertheless tell “a single story” of Pakistan, to
use Chimamanda Adichie's most succinct
phrase.9
9 See Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie speak about the “single story” here: The single story
https://www.ted.com/talks/ of Pakistan is one
chimamanda_adichie_the_danger_of_a_single_story
of crisis, and it is
a story that has a
longer historiographical tradition that goes
back to its nascent years, but especially came
into its own after 1971. At the core of the
academic discourse on Pakistan, characterized
by the disciplines of political history and
political science, is the concern with why
Pakistan faces the problems it does–its
identity crisis, its authoritarian tendencies, its
place in global cold-war and post-cold war
politics. The question, Can Pakistan Survive?
which is also the title of Tariq Ali’s book
published in 1983, has been framing
academic inquiry much before Pakistan
became a front-line in the ‘War on Terror’. This
Winter 2015
view of Pakistan as struggling for survival on
various fronts (ideological, political,
international) has manifested itself over the
years in “evaluations of crisis” such as the
failure of nationalism, of the state or of
security and sovereignty, as identified by
Naveeda Khan in the edited volume Beyond
Crisis. Re-evaluating Pakistan.10
Already in the 10 See my review here: http://edoc.hu-berlin.de/suedasien/band-2/271/
1960s, scholars PDF/271.pdf
were looking at
the shaky foundations of nationalism and the
structural weaknesses of the state. For
instance, in the 1967 The Making of Pakistan:
A Study in Nationalism, K. K. Aziz writes about
the multiplicity of imaginings and politics that
underlay the idea of Pakistan, pointing to the
myths of origin that make up Pakistani
nationalism. Meanwhile sociologist Hamza
Alavi’s works on the post-colonial state located
in the Marxist tradition of the 1960s and
1970s, point to “the over-developed” post-
colonial state.
The events of 1971 present a break, in history
and historiography, in terms of the “failure”
that was now no longer avoidable but had
come to pass. Immediate evaluations following
the crisis of 1971 analyzed the failure of
Pakistan in maintaining its sovereignty against
Indian and Hindu interferences, its failure in
building a viable state and its failure in nation-
building. The debunking of the Two-Nation
Theory brought about a more intensive
engagement with what Pakistan’s relationship
to Islam was: There emerged a concern with
the tenuousness of Pakistan’s very origins.
These evaluations point to the crisis of
Tanqeed 144

11 Toor, Saadia. The
State of Islam:
Culture and Cold War
Politics in Pakistan.
London!: New York:
Pluto Press!;
Distributed by
Palgrave Macmillan,
2011: 2.
12 Communism in Pakistan:
Politics and Class Activism
1947-1972. I. B. Tauris,
2015: 2.
Winter 2015
nationalism and the state. Ayesha Jalal’s
Jinnah: The Sole Spokesman (1985) or
Hamza Alavi’s (1983; 1988) theory of the
“salariat” identify the origins of the crisis in the
Muslim League’s lack of rootedness in the
new territory. In contrast to such socio-political
arguments, historian Farzana Shaikh in her
book Making Sense of Pakistan (2009)
represents an approach which emphasizes the
realm of ideas and identity. She propounds
that at the heart of Pakistan's many crises lies
one national identity crisis that is rooted in a
historical “lack of consensus” on the role of
Islam in the state.
Pushing boundaries
Saadia Toor in her analysis of the role of the
Left in the contestation of ‘national culture’ in
Pakistan11 flips Shaikh’s analysis of the crisis
of nationalism around to view such debates as
signs of a lively public political field rather than
of ideological uncertainty. Similarly, Kamran
Asdar Ali, in documenting the history of
Communism in Pakistan (2015) in his new
book, is concerned with reframing “Pakistan's
social and cultural history by presenting other
possible imaginations for Pakistan's future that
were available in the country's formative
years.”12 Such a perspective on uncertainty
and contestation uncovers new spaces and
actors central to Pakistan’s history.
This flip in perspective is representative of a
trend in recent works on Pakistan which have
been pushing boundaries of disciplines and
thought. There has been a spate of
scholarship concerned with “alternative
politics” and “politics on the margins” that has
Tanqeed
emerged. For instance the collection of essays
in Dispatches from Pakistan wants to “account
for the voices of the multitude” that negotiate
in their day-to-day lives through the violence of
the political, economic, gender
and social hierarchies that they 13 Tahir, Madiha R., Vijay Prashad and Qalandar
Bux Memon, eds. Dispatches from Pakistan.
are embedded in.13 Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
2014: xiv.
In these works, day-to-day life is
not some realm where crisis is
overcome by the force of “daily-ness” and
habit, as if what is normal and usual can offset
the negativity of Pakistan’s conditions of crisis.
Rather, by looking for the “everyday”
experience of crisis they contribute to a more
holistic and differentiated picture of what
informs the many conditions of Pakistan’s
many subjectivities. It gives us an insight into
h o w P a k i s t a n i s c o n s t a n t l y r e - d e fi n e
themselves, their communities, their
aspirations, their fears, and their enemies. The
everyday dimension, as theorized by scholars
such as Michel de Carteau (1984) among
others, allows the scholar to see the range of
possible trajectories at every turn and makes it
possible to move away from treating
outcomes through the retrospective lens.
Studies like the edited volume Islam and
Society in Pakistan. Anthropological
Perspectives (2010) use the lens of the
everyday to study the countless social,
economic, religious or literary facets of lived
Islam, trying to balance the disproportionate
focus on the “high” politics of Islam and the
state. In contrast, the contributions in Beyond
Crisis. Re-evaluating Pakistan, as well as other
recent literature especially in the field of
anthropology, employ the everyday to think
145

14 Speaking of the
urban, it is encouraging
to see something of an
embryonic field of urban
studies developing
around a core of
excellent ethnographic,
sociological and
historical works on the
many facets of Karachi:
Laura Ring’s Zenana:
Everyday Peace in a
Karachi Apartment
Building and Huma
Yusuf’s City of Lights:
Nostalgia, Violence and
Karachi’s Competing
Imaginaries, are two
examples. Also see
Tanqeed’s regular blog,
Invisible Cities, curated
by Fizzah Sajjad and
Hala Bashir Malik.
15 Lodhi,
Maleeha, ed.
Pakistan Beyond
the “Crisis State.”
New York:
Columbia
University Press,
2011: 2.
Winter 2015
about topics to do with the state, nation and
questions of sovereignty. These are topics
which have till recently been squarely within
the purview of the crisis discourse and high
politics. For instance, they ask: how does the
state operate in relation to society? How is it
experienced in the everyday? Matthew Hull’s
contribution to the volume is about the
everyday workings of the state in Islamabad’s
Capital Development Authority.14
Such works are different from optimistic
evaluations of Pakistan, such as Maliha Lodhi’s
Pakistan. Beyond the Crisis State (2011). This
genre of publications underscores the
“strength and stability of its underlying social
structure which enable the country to weather
national and regional storms and rebound
from disasters–natural and manmade [sic.]”.
While these are refreshing rays of hope in the
gloom-filled narrative scapes of Pakistanis,
they do not actually “go beyond” the
established repertoire of questions. They look
to “explore the path to a post-crisis state” and
thus approach contemporary Pakistan and its
history from a macro-problem-solving
perspective.15 It needs to be asked whether
the predominance of this perspective is not
foreclosing a more diverse and multi-layered
inquiry into Pakistan’s state and society?
Another way that scholarship has begun
overcoming boundaries is on the temporal
front. Many studies have highlighted the
continuities across 1947 in terms of the
legacies of colonial rule (like Ayesha Jalal and
Ian Talbot). But aside from institutional and
structural continuities, there other areas that
straddle the conventional nationalized
Tanqeed
periodization of history which need more
attention. This is true for topics such as
Partition, environmental histories, migration,
media, popular culture and many more, which
have been limited by caesura such as 1947 or 16 Zamindar, Vazira
1971. For instance, Vazira Zamindar’s book Fazila-Yacoobali. The
Long Partition and
The Long Partition that sits at the threshold of the Making of
Modern South Asia:
1947 and “sutures severed histories” trying to
Refugees,
overcome the region's nation-bound Boundaries,
Histories. Columbia
historiographies.16
University Press,
2007: 4-7.
For a critical Pakistan studies
The developments in Pakistan studies at home
and abroad exhibit a slow but steady
diversification of disciplines and fields within
the study of Pakistan. In Pakistan much
needed spaces of critical engagement are
emerging at universities, in cultural centers
and online. Themes of local, urban, and
people’s histories and cultures dot the
landscape of academic and cultural events.
The last conference held by the Lahore-based
five-year old forum THAAP was dedicated to
the “Culture, Art and Architecture of the
Marginalized and the Poor” and this year the
theme is “People's History of Pakistan.” This
focus on margins and peripheries was also
central to the academic conference “Locally
Sourced in Pakistan: Recovering the Local in
History, Culture, and Politics” that took place
this August, 2015, in Islamabad.
Similarly, academic events abroad are also
critiquing the academic and journalistic
discourses on Pakistan that view the country
through the lens of Islamic fundamentalism
and the “War on Terror.” The conference
“Pakistan Beyond Tremors and Terror” from
146
 which the contributions have been published
in a previous Tanqeed issue, “Issue 7: Beyond
Tremors and Terror,” critically engage with
political, economic and cultural change by
analyzing regimes of power as well as sites of
resistance and subversion. What is
conspicuous is the moving in of cultural and
social history and anthropology from the
programs of a workshop or a conference
cannot be too specific or else filling the ranks
of presenters and chairs becomes difficult, a
state of affairs that does not do justice to the
complexities of a country of almost 200
million. It reflects the need of Pakistan studies
for more institutionalized space where focused
and critical conversations about Pakistan can
take place that

v e r c o m e t his are at the same

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P a k i s t a n
Studies, or the
disciplinary fringes of Pakistan studies, which
many Pakistan Studies centers at universities
had been overwhelmingly informed by political
in Pakistan that are cautiously exerting their
science and political history.
independence from the ideological imperatives
But there remains a lack of consolidated fields of state institutions.
within Pakistan studies with the potential to
Such a promotion of Pakistan studies is not a
contribute more than mere empirical data and
“parochial” call opposed to the frame of South
insular narratives. It is often the case that

Winter 2015 Tanqeed 147

 Asian Studies or one which seeks to insulate
Pakistan in its specificity from larger
disciplinary and theoretical debates. Rather it
is a call to recognize that this might currently
be the most useful route in terms of advancing
the study of Pakistan within South Asian
Studies and in established theories and
disciplines, specifically, by the setting up of
more distinct Pakistan Studies centers, forums
and study programs. There is a need for
assertion in the face of South Asian Studies
being dominated–by virtue of sheer size but
more so because of its vibrant academic
terrain and the international interest in India as
an “emerging economic power”–by scholars
working on independent India. This applies
especially to scholars in Pakistan and the kind
of access they have to and audibility they have
in the academic circles of South Asian studies
on the global stage.
Of course, India and Pakistan share a history
and no amount of institutional boundary-
drawing can or should separate the two. But
Pakistan is no longer a nascent state. It has
been a fact on the world map for almost
seventy years and has, since 1947, lived and
generated its own distinct history, which
desperately needs to come into its own. It is in
my view necessary to create a space for
cultivating critical scholarship on Pakistan, in
the country and abroad.
There is also another motivation which I
believe should drive us towards promoting
Pakistan Studies. Pakistan Studies needs to
find its place as a critical multidisciplinary field
to correct the harm that has been done by its
misuse for politics and ideology. A critical and
Winter 2015 Tanqeed
self-reflexive Pakistan studies can help the
emergence of a positive sense of identity and
citizenship imbued with a sense for Pakistan’s
heterogeneity–religious, cultural, and socio-
economic.
And last but not least, like Postcolonial Studies
and the overarching Area Studies, Pakistan
Studies carries a responsibility to challenge the
inequitable global realities through activism on
the battle field of knowledge production,
empirical as well as theoretical. For Area
Studies and the study of Pakistan within it,
scholarship is intrinsically political and activist
in its initial motivation: it is about counter-
balancing the skewed power relations that
define the conversations we are having. One
of the critiques of Area Studies has been that
it reproduces the exoticization that lies in
colonial and imperial roots. Why do Area
Studies only refer to the regions of the Global
South, formerly known as the “Third World”?
Are Europe and North America not regions like
the rest? It is, in fact, the aim to overcome this
division between “First World” and “Third
World” that lies at the very core of the
motivation behind the promotion of Area
Studies and its explicit focus on the former
colonized regions and societies of the world.
Even today, theory in the social sciences and
humanities overwhelmingly draws on the
empirical contexts in the West. Meanwhile, the
study of the “Third World” was for a long time
relegated to the exotic and particularistic
peripheries of authoritative Western
academics. In the context of the rising Global
South and the post-Cold War emergent multi-
148
 centric world, this state of the art becomes
untenable. As Rehbein and Houben (2010)
have argued, area studies have the potential
to expand their theoretical horizons, while the
social sciences need to do the same for their
empirical frontiers.

At a different scale, Pakistan Studies is fighting

the same battle: to be taken seriously in
producing theory.

Sadia Bajwa is a Ph.D candidate in history of

South Asia and research associate at the
Humboldt University, Berlin. She is currently
working on the history of student politics in
Pakistan's early decades.

Winter 2015 Tanqeed 149