Whose Pakistan? Competing Historiographical Traditions and the Case for a Social History Approach

Abstract

The question of what Pakistan was meant to be has divided historians since the creation of the state. This article surveys the principal historiographical traditions that have answered it and argues that all of them stop short at the same point. Three established schools are examined: a materialist school, associated with Hamza Alavi, Tariq Ali, and Sibte Hassan, which explains Pakistan through class interests; a religious-ideological school, running from Ishtiaq Husain Qureshi to Francis Robinson, which reads the state as the fulfilment of a long-nurtured Islamic aspiration; and an ambiguity school, dominant in the international academy through the work of Ayesha Jalal, Christophe Jaffrelot, Farzana Shaikh, and Faisal Devji, which holds that Pakistan was insufficiently imagined. A fourth and younger current, the print-and-public turn exemplified by Sandria Freitag, C. A. Bayly, and Venkat Dhulipala, relocates the question from the intentions of leaders to the arguments of publics, but halts at the frontier of 1947. The article contends that absence of consensus is not absence of imagination, and makes the case for a social history of the idea of Pakistan in the public arenas of the Punjab between 1947 and 1977, where contending publics gave the constitutional formula of an Islamic Republic its content.

Keywords: Idea Of Pakistan; Historiography; Public Sphere; Public Arenas; Punjab; Social History; Muslim Nationalism; Islamic Republic