Teaching Pakistani History/Teaching Pakistanis History
Featuring:
Manan Ahmad (History)
Sana Haroon (University of Massachusetts, Boston)
Tahir Kamran (University of Cambridge)
Vazira Zamindar (Brown University)
Moderated by S Akbar Zaidi (SIPA and MESAAS)
Time:6:00pm - 8:00pm
Location:Room 208, Knox Hall, 606 West 122nd Street, between Broadway and Claremont
Pakistani
history has been a contentious topic, especially in Pakistan, where
different sets of narratives give differing accounts of what Pakistani
history is, and hence, how one imagines Pakistan. Given the eventual
partition of British India into two states, some historians have claimed
that Pakistan was `created in 712 AD when an Arab invader came to an
area which is now part of Pakistan. This event is incorrectly seen as
the first Muslim contact with what is now called South Asia, yet it
supports one of the many official narratives of when Muslim
"consciousness" and identity were created in this region.
Other
competing narratives still in the official domain, look to the Delhi
Sultanate, or the Mughal Empire, or events in the nineteenth century and
1857, crystallising into a separate Muslim identity, which inevitably
led to the creation of Pakistan. The question, when was Pakistan
"created," is one which simply works around a
Muslims-are-different-from-Hindus discourse, culminating in a separate
homeland. As a consequence, "Pakistani" history then ignores the history
of the people who live in what was Pakistan prior to 1971 and what it
is today. Mohenjo-Daro, Harappa, and the history of the people of
Pakistan is dominated by a north Indian (largely Hindustani) Muslim
history, and that too only of kings and their courts. Once politics
began to dominate undivided India in the twentieth century, the Pakistan
"freedom movement" of course - and not the movement for independence
from British colonialism for all Indian peoples - shaped this discourse
more teleologically.
The
problems of teaching history to Pakistanis by trained historians in
Pakistan has given rise to a different set of issues. While some
academics claim that the state of social sciences in Pakistan has been
dismal, the state of History in Pakistan has been particularly so.
Interestingly, some decades ago, some Pakistani historians were highly
respected scholars doing archival research, but today, the absence of
professional historians, with little research being done, and hence few
conferences or seminars or academic journals, exacerbates the problem,
with non-historians now teaching History. Moreover, since the
propaganda of the Pakistan "ideology" and the "freedom movement"
constitute what pass for History in/of Pakistan, teaching history is not
considered a priority.
Manan Ahmed is Assistant Professor in the History Deparment.
Sana Haroon
is Assistant Professor in History and Asian Studies, University of
Massachusetts, Boston.She received her BA at Yale and PhD at SOAS,
London. She is the author of Frontier of Faith: Islam in the Indo-Afghan Borderland (2007).
Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar is Associate Professor of History at Brown University.She is the author of The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories, (2007).
Tahir Kamran
is the Allama Iqbal Fellow at the Centre of South Asian Studies at
theUniversity of Cambridge. He is the former head of the department of
history at Government College University in Lahore. He is the author of
Democracy and Governance in Pakistan (2008).
S. Akbar Zaidi
is Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and
African Studies and the School of Public and International Affairs.