Introduction

Rahmat Ali (1897-1951) is mentioned in the history textbooks circulating in Pakistan only briefly. His coining of the name for a separate Muslim polity, Pakistan, and the publication of the pamphlet Now or Never, which he wrote in 1933, are the reasons that Rahmat Ali found a marginal niche in the collective historical imagination of the Pakistani laity. In the Pakistan Studies books for undergraduate students, sponsored by the University Grants Commission, Rahmat Ali's description begins and ends in one line: ‘Choudhary Rahmat Ali had started his struggle for a separate state for Muslims in 1933.’ Why Rahmat Ali's other works, comprising ten pamphlets of varying size and scope, are not mentioned in Pakistani national discourse is a pertinent question that has not yet been framed. Similarly, his thoughts are conspicuously barred from circulation in the media as well as in educational institutions. Despite a sizeable corpus of literature in Urdu that underscores Rahmat Ali's role as a thinker and political visionary, including Khurshid Kamal Aziz's adulatory biography, Ali has remained a peripheral figure in the annals of Pakistani political history. The lack of interest in Rahmat Ali exhibited in the Pakistani national narrative could be due to his disdain for Muhammad Ali Jinnah, obvious in his writings. Rahmat Ali derisively branded Jinnah ‘Quisling-i-Azam,’ instead of Quaid-i-Azam (The Great Leader), his customary epithet in Pakistan. Similarly, his well-known repugnance for the idea of Pakistan as a nation state was explicitly articulated in a pamphlet The Greatest Betrayal, which he wrote after Pakistan's creation in 1947. This evolution in Rahmat Ali's political imagination will be the central focus of this chapter, in order to make sense of Rahmat Ali's virtual banishment from Pakistan's history, along with his thoughts and the history and evolution of the Pakistan National Movement that he founded in 1933. The Pakistan National Movement was later transformed to the All-Dinia Milli Movement in 1940. Thus Ali's political vision went through various phases of evolution: starting with the Pak Plan in 1933, it was transformed into the concept of the Continent of Dinia, and eventually culminated in the Cultural Orbit of Pakasia.

The sources employed for this study comprise the original writings of Choudhary Rahmat Ali, stocked as part of the Foster papers at the Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge.