I have attempted in this book to demonstrate how the radical political imaginary that thrived in Pakistan through the late 1970s has been virtually banished from the popular consciousness – the ‘common sense’ of the lower orders of society has shifted away from transformative and towards more accommodative political strategies. This shift has been coeval with dramatic social and economic changes associated largely with the spread of capital and urbanization, and despite the increasingly fragmented practices of state functionaries. All told the twin realities of exclusion and exploitation for the subordinate classes at large, inclusive women, oppressed nations and religious minorities are as pronounced as ever.

As discussed in the introduction, a substantial body of scholarship dealing with different aspects of subordinate class culture, consciousness and politics has been generated over the past few decades. Over time the focus of scholarly efforts to understand subalternity have moved away from the question of whether and to what extent the working class – or any other class – acts as a class-for-itself to much more localized interrogations of events and daily practices.

In this book I have taken what might be considered a somewhat ‘traditionalist’ look at class, even while I have tried to understand the complex micro-foundations of the prevailing structure of power in Pakistan. One of my primary arguments is that even propertied classes in Pakistan tend to map their fundamental interests in terms of access to state power and resources which may not correspond to the understanding of class interests in a traditional materialist schema.

The subordinate classes too have become enmeshed in a system that privileges the building and maintenance of patronage networks often linked to state functionaries. However, the politics of common sense cannot be considered a simple continuity of historical modes of political engagement in the wider social formation that persisted through the British period, and into the post-colonial epoch.