With the emergence of India and Pakistan as new postcolonial states, the decades of the 1950s acquired unique importance in the history of South Asia. It was a period of dismantling colonial structures and gestation for a whole new set of impulses that owe their life to the birth of modern nations on the cultural and political map of South Asia. The nascent Pakistani state in its early decades struggled to forge a hegemonic cultural identity over a multicultural and multiethnic landscape to replicate an official version of an “imagined community” of a modern Islamic nation. One of the central challenges for the postcolonial state was to foster a national identity and develop an allegiance to a nation-state that did not exist before. The identity of the Pakistani nation was not the cultural a priori but culled through aesthetic artifacts and ritual performances in literary, visual and performing arts. The nation was formed through the invention of cultural traditions and aesthetic forms as material embodiments of a territorial imaginary. A new set of national symbols, signifying the identity and unity of the nation, was required to mark the political and cultural independence from British colonialism. The spirit of Pakistani nationalism was generated through the enactment of a national inventory of state symbols, whose repertoire included the national flag, national anthem, national emblem and national days. The state symbols were designed to mark the historical, cultural, economic and ideological basis of Pakistani nationhood. The national symbols were central pedagogic instruments of the state for national awareness, identity formation and nation-building.

A nation cannot exist without flagging its presence in a material aesthetic form. The process of appropriating the flag of Pakistan as a symbol of the state started well before the creation of Pakistan in June 1947. Attributed to A. R. Chughtai, the form and design of the Pakistani flag was finalized by the founder of the nation, Quaid-a-Azam (the great leader) Mohammed Ali Jinnah himself, with the assistance of Amir Ali Kidwai, a Muslim League lawyer.