Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- List of tables
- Acknowledgments
- Note on transliteration
- Introduction
- 1 Articulating a new nation
- 2 Urdu and the nation
- 3 The nation and its margins
- 4 The case of Punjab, part I: elite efforts
- 5 The case of Punjab, part II: popular culture
- 6 History and local absence
- 7 Bringing back the local past
- 8 Speaking like a state: language planning
- 9 Religion, nation, language
- 10 Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - History and local absence
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 August 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- List of tables
- Acknowledgments
- Note on transliteration
- Introduction
- 1 Articulating a new nation
- 2 Urdu and the nation
- 3 The nation and its margins
- 4 The case of Punjab, part I: elite efforts
- 5 The case of Punjab, part II: popular culture
- 6 History and local absence
- 7 Bringing back the local past
- 8 Speaking like a state: language planning
- 9 Religion, nation, language
- 10 Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
What is our past, and what is our relationship to it? Are we the logical result of the past's historical flow?
Dr. Jamil Jalibi, Pākistānī Kalcar (1964)Seventeen years after Pakistan's birth, and some twenty-four years after the Lahore Resolution demanded Pakistan as the necessary political expression of the Indian Muslim nation, esteemed scholar of Urdu literary history Dr. Jamil Jalibi penned Pākistānī Kalcar in an effort to reason through the problematic of what precisely comprised the national culture of Pakistan. Jalibi's inquiry took as axiomatic the idea that a nation-state must necessarily have a culture which is national in order to evidence its status as a nation:
This question by itself is troubling, because without a national culture, we have no right to be called a nation, nor can we demonstrate the creative power in our individual and collective lives.
The peculiarity of Jalibi's statement illustrates a contradiction, one central to our concerns here: Pakistan was created, even naturalized, as the expression of a nation, but that very nation self-consciously lacked a “national” culture well after its founding. As with debates concerning the national language, the idea of a national culture held the status of a problem despite its prominence as a rationale for the creation of the new state – a sort of causality conundrum. The solution to this problem would be to craft a national past for dissemination to citizens of this new country, a past which would assert the authenticity of Pakistan as an organic entity with long claims to existence, yet somehow in a long phase of dormancy – what Ronald Grigor Suny refers to as the “Sleeping Beauty” theory of the nation – before its emergence into the world of nation-states in 1947.
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- Speaking Like a StateLanguage and Nationalism in Pakistan, pp. 105 - 137Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2009