Every Nook and Corner of Punjab: Students, Women, and the Popular Mobilization for Pakistan, 1937–1947

Abstract

Histories of the Pakistan movement are written overwhelmingly from the leadership downward, and even revisionist accounts of the demand’s public career concentrate on what was argued rather than on who carried the argument. This article reconstructs the popular mobilization for Pakistan in the Punjab as a history of participants: the student federations of Lahore, Aligarh, and Peshawar whose scripted door-to-door canvass carried the demand into the villages of a province the Muslim League had lost in 1937 with under five percent of the Muslim vote; the manufactured symbols, flag, title, and festival calendar, that gave a lawyers’ party a mass liturgy; the women whose processions, courted arrests, and jail-going made the campaign of 1946–47 their public debut; and the civil disobedience movement of January to March 1947, the only mass agitation the League ever launched, which broke the Unionist ministry and demonstrated that the demand had become a street power. Against the reading of Pakistan as insufficiently imagined, the article argues that a demand canvassed door to door, from a script, by tens of thousands of volunteers, had been imagined concretely enough to be taught; and it traces the mobilization’s repertoire, the procession, the student deputation, the flag day, into the postcolonial arenas where the argument continued.

Keywords: Pakistan movement; mass mobilization; Muslim Students Federation; women; civil disobedience 1947; Punjab; elections 1945–46; popular politics