A National Culture for Pakistan

Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Volume 6, Number 3, 2005

ISSN 1464–9373 Print/ISSN 1469–8447 Online/05/030318–23 © 2005 Taylor & FrancisDOI: 10.1080/14649370500169946

A national culture for Pakistan: the political economy of a debate

Saadia TOORTaylor and Francis LtdRIAC116977.sgm10.1080/14649370500169946Inter-Asia Cultural Studies1464-9373 Print/1469-8447 OnlineOriginal Article2005Taylor & Francis Group Ltd63000000September [email protected]

ABSTRACT This paper explores the relationship between (national) culture and state formation,arguing that the former is effectively a field of contestation where struggles over hegemony betweenvarious classes and social blocs are played out. Cultural nationalism has been the pre-eminent formof nationalism in the twentieth century, particularly within the anti-colonial and postcolonialcontexts. Since this form of nationalism lends itself to moral regulation by ruling classes in a waythat civic or political nationalisms do not (given its ability to produce and manipulate emotionalaffect) it becomes imperative to understand its relationship to power and to the project/process ofstate formation. This paper uses the case of postcolonial Pakistan as a lens through which to exploreand analyse the complexities of this relationship during the early years of the Pakistani nation-state.Using primary material – Constituent Assembly Debates and the texts of important intellectualdebates on culture during this period – I show the different ways in which Pakistani culture wasdefined at this time, the politics and interests behind these various articulations, and their ultimateimpact on state formation.

KEYWORDS: National culture, cultural nationalism, state formation, hegemony, Pakistan, moral regulation

No state, not even an infant one, is willing to appear before the world as a bare politicalframe. Each would be clothed in a cultural garb symbolic of its aims and ideal being. Can onepredict the cultural fashions of the new states? Can one say what the nature of a nation’scultural raiment will be – what elements of culture will be worn by all citizens as the commoncore of decency in the new national identity, what elements will be officially put forward asthat state’s special claim to respect in the eyes of mankind. (Marriott 1963: 27)

This quote from a seminal social science text published in the 1960s simultaneously high-lights the contemporary importance attached to culture within the context of nationalprojects, as well as the international dimension of this desire. At the same time it alsodisplays a surprising lack of expectation that the link between the two is likely to be eitherobvious or somehow organic or natural: which it is likely to ultimately be presented asbeing. It also presents the imperative, that a nation must have a culture with which to‘clothe’ its ‘nakedness’, as well as the choices now opened up before the nation-state, assomehow existing outside the realm of the political. In contrast, I shall show, as we enter thedebate with the Pakistan instance, the profoundly political nature of these ‘decisions’, asthey inform the affective force of cultural nationalism.

If the nation is always the realization of a hegemonic project, then debates overnational culture necessarily provide a glimpse into the complex process of hegemony –both the old power bloc’s attempts to maintain it, and its contestation by alliances ofdifferent social forces. As such, ‘national culture’ is obviously a category that emerges asimportant within the ideology of cultural – as opposed, say, to political or civic – national-ism. It is fair to say that by the twentieth century, cultural nationalism had become the

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hegemonic form of nationalism especially within anticolonial national struggles. This wasdue in part to the fact that cultural politics formed a privileged aspect of anticolonialstruggles,1 because it was so effective in creating precisely the kind of ‘emotional attach-ment to the nation’ which I.H. Qureshi, Pakistan’s premier Establishment historian,lamented as absent in Pakistan in the period under study – i.e. from Independencethrough to the late 1960s (Qureshi 1961: 4). The ‘nation’, understood as a political andmoral community, needs to be naturalized in order to have the emotive force and inspirethe kind of passion and loyalty that is required for the idea of the nation to ‘work’. Theideological labour involved in producing this loyalty to the nation – and by extension, thestate which ostensibly represents/embodies it – is performed through the agency of‘national culture’. As Qureshi goes on to suggest, it can also be done by performed by reli-gion, but only if religion itself is cast in a cultural mould.2

‘Are the Indian Muslims a nation?’

The problems, contradictions, lacunae and constraints, which I argue made it difficult toarticulate a coherent idea of Pakistani nationhood and culture, had their genesis in themismatch between Indian Muslim identity as consolidated during the period of British colo-nialism and the actual territorial and demographic reality of the Pakistani nation-state. Theconcept of the nation had hegemonized political and cultural discourse in colonial BritishIndia from the 19th century on, so much so that it was on the basis of claims to nationhoodthat political identities and representation came to be negotiated. More to the point, theseclaims (which undergirded the ‘two-nation theory’) had been based on cultural grounds –understood as an ethnic Muslim identity as well as a clearly identifiable cultural history;hence, Islam in a civilizational as opposed to a religious sense,3 being simultaneouslyMuslim and Indian as a claim to peoplehood separate from, if overlapping with, the sense ofbelonging to a larger Islamic political community, the ummah.4

The political and cultural importance that the category of nation had come to occupy istestified to by the ways in which claims to nationhood were made and contested and, as inthe 19th century, the contestations only reinforced Muslim claims to nationhood. The‘nation’ thus became the site over which claims to political identity and representation werecontested. Thus, Iqbal argued that the Muslims were ‘the only Indian people who [could]fitly be described as a nation in the modern sense of the word’ because the Hindus had beenunable to ‘achieve the kind of homogeneity which is necessary for a nation and which Islam[had given to Muslims] as a free gift’. Thus the Muslims in India were not a minority, but anation (quoted in Barlas 1995: 178).

This contestation over Muslim claims to nationhood is best symbolized by an exchangebetween Gandhi and Jinnah. In September 1944, Gandhi had dismissed Muslim nationalismas used by the League, saying

I find no parallel in history for a body of converts and their descendants claiming to be anation apart from the parent stock. If India was one nation before the advent of Islam, it mustremain one in spite of the change of faith of a very large body of her children. (Jinnah–Gandhi correspondence 1945 [1944])

To which Jinnah had famously replied:

We are a nation of a hundred million, and, what is more, we are a nation with our owndistinctive culture and civilization, language and literature, art and architecture, name andnomenclature, sense of value and proportion, legal laws and moral codes, customs andcalendar, history and tradition, aptitude and ambitions; in short, we have our owndistinctive outlook on life and of life. By all canons of international law we are a nation.(Jinnah–Gandhi correspondence 1945 [1944])

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The importance of legitimising claims to nationhood on the basis of existing and acceptedscientific and legal (’all the canons of international law…’) discourses was also reflected, forexample, in a series of articles carried in the Dawn during April 1947 under the general title‘Are the Indian Muslims a nation?’ and written by someone who claimed simply to be ‘astudent of International Politics’. The argument engaged many of the contemporary debatesover nationhood, invoking such ‘authorities’ as Mazzini and Lord Acton, as well as issuesand debates over nationalism that continue in this field; the logic of the argument is thusstrikingly contemporary. Dawn made a case for cultural nationalism based on art/architec-ture, literature/language and ‘way of life’. Crucial to this claim of a nationhood separatedfrom the majority ‘Hindu’ community was the fixing of a national culture that could bespecific to (Indian) Muslims. In this case, the writer’s rather sophisticated definition of‘common culture’ – ‘developed manifestations of thought and feeling’ – serve to reinforcethis distinctiveness. Indian Muslims thought differently, felt differently, had a different andunique history and therefore had a common purpose and interest, hence were a nation.

The relation of such nationalism to a territorial definition was at best problematic, andrendered further complex by the unnatural division of space and communities wrought byPartition. In one sense, territorial nationalism – in conjunction with cultural nationalism –was a way to assert the modernity of the national community in question. It was also a secu-lar move – and one that was recognised as such by Muslim critics of nationalist ideologyfrom Jamaluddin Afghani and Muhammad Iqbal to Maulana Abul Ala Maududi. On theother hand, as Barlas notes, ‘if there was a flaw in Muslim nationalist discourse, it was notthe inability of the Muslim nationalists … to develop loyalty to a territorially defined …[state], but their continuing sense of commitment to the Indian state’ (Barlas 1995: 176–177).

David Gilmartin writes,

Even though the term ‘Pakistan’ was coined to link together into a single territorial referencethe names of the provinces of northwestern India, there was little in the rhetoric of the Paki-stan movement to suggest that attachment to a particular piece of territory was of criticalimportance to the idea’s popular meaning. The very uncertainty as to which land was to bethat of Pakistan was reflected in the variety of possibilities appearing in various proposalsbefore 1947. (Gilmartin 1998: 1083)

Bengal, he further notes, didn’t even feature in these schemes, yet was a bastion of supportfor the Pakistan plan. Like historians such as Ayesha Jalal, Gilmartin further suggests thatthe reason for these multiple overlapping lacunae within the idea of Pakistan was that itwas never imagined as an actual independent and sovereign nation-state:

The real struggle of the Pakistan movement … was not so much to create a territorial home-land for India’s Muslims, as it was to create a Muslim political community, to define asymbolic center to give moral and political meaning to the concept of a united ‘Muslimcommunity’ in India. (Gilmartin 1998: 1071)

By August 1947, then, the Muslim ‘nation’ had a separate, sovereign state to call its own butironically this state resulted in a physical division of the very nation – the ‘united Muslimcommunity in India’ – on whose behalf it had been conjured into being. To add insult toinjury, the contours of the new nation-state effectively cut the citizens of Pakistan adrift ofsome of the clearest manifestations of Indo-Muslim culture and history on the basis ofwhich claims to nationhood had been so eloquently made.

Examples of material culture were not the only things left behind in the other Domin-ion. Muslim nationalism, as an ideology and as a movement had its roots in Muslim minor-ity provinces. This meant that, except for those who managed to migrate to Pakistan, mostof the Muslims from these areas were not included in the nation-state whose creation theyhad supported. Many of these Muslims who had been active in the Muslim League struggle,including some of Jinnah’s own associates such as Ismail Khan and the Nawab of Chhatari,


ultimately could not ‘tear themselves apart from their social milieu and cultural moorings’and decided to stay in India; those who did migrate to Pakistan, could not but do so ‘with asense of unease and remorse’ (Hasan 1993). Like many others, ‘they were pained to bidadieu to the symbols of their faith [and] … no less agonized to snap their ties with Lucknowand Delhi … or the qasbahs in Awadh which served as centres of cultural and intellectuallife’ (Hasan 1993) the home of the very civilization whose protection had been the sin quanon of Muslim nationalism.

Thus, the very birth of the Pakistani nation-state split the ‘Indian Muslim community’at the demographic level, but even more foundationally, it effected a contradiction withinthe very heart of the discursive construct of the ‘nation’. If the majority of the members ofthe ‘nation-as-community’ were only to be found, strictly speaking, outside the state whichwas purportedly its embodiment, then where/what exactly was ‘the [Pakistani] nation’? Onthe one hand, the discourse of the Muslim League was a triumphalist one, albeit temperedby the tragedy that was Partition. Pakistan had been achieved and it was the MuslimLeague that had achieved it. Accompanying this was the implication that what was mostneeded now was not a preoccupation with the ‘other Dominion’, but a concern with thenew ‘Muslim’ state. In its essence this was a conflict between territorial nationalism and anorganically imagined community of Indian Muslims. In Virginia Dominguez’s evocativephrase, it was ‘an ideology of Nationhood in search of content’ (Dominguez 1990: 131).

This, then, introduced a major paradox into the heart of the new nationalist project.How could Pakistan claim to be the nation of Indian Muslims if the vast majority of itsconstituency continued to live in the other Dominion, Hindustan, the land of the Hindus?Then, there was the question of non-Muslims: despite the division of Bengal and Punjab ona communal basis,5 and the communal riots which had accompanied Partition, the newMuslim nation-state included a significant percentage of non-Muslims, particularly Hindus.What was to be done with these Hindu Pakistanis who were a contradiction in termsaccording to the older definition of ‘the nation’ but whose equal representation – in bothsenses of the term – now had to be ensured within the new nation-state if it was to be true toits aspirations to modernity and claims of being a modern state? It was clear that the olddiscourse of Muslim nationalism would no longer serve its purpose of constructing consent.How, then, could the various and diverse interests and identities which characterized thenew nation-state be articulated into a new discourse of nationhood?

The trauma of Partition was only compounded by the assertion of monolithic andexclusionary national identities by both the new nation-states. As Aziz Ahmad argues,‘[when] Pakistan came into existence in 1947, it had achieved only a political nationhood.Culturally it was not yet a nation’: the most pressing problem was ‘the cultural counterpartof the political problem of cutting adrift from the Hindu cultural residue of India in order toisolate and establish the new nation’s cultural identity’ (Ahmad 1965). No overlap could beconceded, because if ‘culture is what sets one nation … off from another’ (Handler 1988: 15),then a shared culture with India would undermine the very raison d’être of Pakistan’s estab-lishment. This resulted in the need to ‘homogenize’ the national space – cleanse it of thosethat did not belong, and demand the return of those that did; and unsurprisingly, the crite-rion for determining their inclusion/exclusion was to be their religious identity.

The absurdity and ultimate violence of such state imperatives can be seen in the anxietyover the ‘recovery and exchange’ of ‘abducted’ women (Menon and Bhasin 1998; Butalia2000). Sa’adat Hasan Manto6 satirized such attempts to forcibly cut Pakistan and India (andtheir citizens) loose from one another in his oft-quoted short story Toba Tek Singh, in whichthe two states orchestrate an exchange of inmates of mental asylums. Through the confusionand ultimate tragic death of the main character, Manto draws out the coercive role of thestate, and the pathos – and insanity – of state attempts to impose a national identity onpeople without their consent.

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As to where Pakistan was located the inmates knew nothing … the mad and the partiallymad were unable to decide whether they were now in India or Pakistan. If they were in Indiawhere on earth was Pakistan … It was also possible that the entire subcontinent of Indiamight become Pakistan. And who could say if both India and (Pakistan might not entirelyvanish from the map of the world one day? (Manto 1990)

This passage reveals both the actual confusion over the boundaries and location of Pakistan,as well as the sheer absurdity of trying to enforce such ambiguous boundaries on people asif they were self-evident truths. It also mirrors Manto’s own feelings about Partition: whichcountry did he now belong to? ‘When he sat down to write he tried in vain to separate Indiafrom Pakistan and Pakistan from India’ (quoted in Hasan 1993: 31).

The paradoxes and politics of ‘Pakistani culture’

Defining Pakistani culture became something of a national pastime in the period immedi-ately following Independence and Partition. The debate essentially revolved, for example,around whether and to what extent Pakistani culture was or should be Islamic, and evenwhat exactly this meant. The various alternatives being bandied about were not neutral –they either directly represented the interests of particular constituencies/groups or did soindirectly by foreclosing certain political possibilities and opening up others. This section isdevoted to fleshing out an analysis of some of the most important of these periods of crisisand contestation, among them the Bengali demand that Bangla be declared the nationallanguage of Pakistan along with Urdu.

The particular configurations of the ‘imagined community’ which the nation-stateclaimed to represent, had thus now changed. The immediate issue facing the political lead-ership and Pakistani intellectuals was, therefore: what exactly is ‘the nation’ that corre-sponds with the state of Pakistan? The first five years of Pakistan severely tested thediscourse of Muslim nationalism and brought out its unresolved contradictions, as well asgiving birth to new ones. The imperative of the moment was to create some kind of nationalconsensus since the old one – fragile and momentary as it had been – had assumed a‘nation’ that was significantly different. The conflict between ‘Pakistani nationalism’ andMuslim nationalism, ironically, became the fundamental issue facing the ruling elite as wellas intellectuals in the new state.

However, as Gilmartin explains:

While Pakistan had stood during the 1940s as a symbol of moral order, transcending thedivisions among Muslims, the Pakistan state that emerged in 1947 generally saw its tasknot as one of integrating diversity, but rather one of imprinting its authority onto a new andintractable territory. The elites who dominated the new state came quickly to mistrustthe particularisms of Pakistani society as a threat to the state’s own moral sovereignty.(Gilmartin 1998: 1091)

Since authoritative claims to power in this period of world history must be made in thename of ‘the nation’, defining the latter becomes a contest between different aspirants topower. And since nations are defined by their unique cultures, ‘national culture’ becomes thelocus of these struggles over hegemony. This is why, although Pakistani culture – its exist-ence, its content, et al. – has been the subject of debate at any given point in Pakistanihistory, the most intense engagements and contestations can be traced to particular periodsof political upheaval – especially those that Habermas would call ‘legitimation crises’(Habermas 1975).

As long as no national identity and culture could be identified that correspondeduniquely to ‘Pakistani-ness’, the legitimacy of the Pakistani nation-state itself was at stake,for after all, the authenticity of a claim to nationhood depends on the existence of a unique


‘national culture’. Defining a national culture thus became an imperative for Pakistaniintellectuals (and the state elite) for several reasons. Not ‘having’ a definable national iden-tity produced an identity crisis of national proportions, an anxiety palpable in the writingsof several Pakistani intellectuals over the years, as much as a concern among ordinaryPakistanis evident from debates over national identity and culture within the publicsphere of newspapers, cultural and literary criticism and intellectual seminars. For exam-ple, Jamil Jalibi, a prominent liberal (West) Pakistani intellectual declared that, becausePakistan had no national culture, it was not fit to be called a nation.7 Jalibi was also theone who, in the aftermath of the 1965 war, revealingly spoke of the absence of a defin-able/bounded Pakistani culture as a matter to be treated on par with a breach of nationalsecurity because

[if] someone attacks our geographical borders, or occupies an area of land, we instantlyknow that the frontiers of our country have been attacked, and we expend all our strength inwinning back that piece of land. But when this attack is aimed at our cultural frontiers, wedon’t even realise it nor do we experience a sense of loss [because we don’t know what ourcultural boundaries are]. (Jalibi 1964: 25–26)

For the Establishment, the lack of a unique Pakistani national culture was also a matter ofserious concern, but for other reasons. For if the party of the ruling class – the MuslimLeague – derived its moral authority from the fact that it was the ‘national’ party, itcertainly didn’t help to have ‘the nation’ itself under question. These moments of nationalidentity crisis were also deeply connected to the centrifugal tendencies that characterizedthe ‘political’ realm in this post-Independence period. Demands for regional/provincialrights or indeed any questioning of the authority and purview of the central governmentwas taken as a direct challenge to the state.

The politics of this period – cultural and otherwise – can thus best be framed as a strug-gle for control over the very terms of the nation-state, insofar as the latter represents boththe ideological and the structural (political, economic, institutional) aspects of rule.

Moral regulation and the ‘problem’ of East Bengal

One of the major pre-occupations of the (West) Pakistani ruling class during the first 24years of Pakistan’s existence was to limit and/or undermine the influence of East Bengalin national politics. East Bengal was demographically Pakistan’s majority province, withover 50% of Pakistan’s total population. United Bengal had also played a crucial role inthe Muslim nationalist movement – the Muslim League was established in Dacca in 1906,and the Muslim League leadership included many prominent Bengalis such as HussainShaheed Suhrawardy. However, the Punjabi and Urdu-speaking Muhajir ruling group inWest Pakistan had no intention of sharing power, although they did initially try collabo-ration with their Bengali counterparts; this was possible as long as the Muslim League’srule over East Bengal survived (which, as we shall see, was not long, given its repressivepolicies). Bengalis also had a history of political awareness and activism and there was agradual rise in grassroots militancy and political consciousness after the establishment ofPakistan, which threatened the West Pakistani Establishment.8 The latter thus tried all thetricks in the book, and more besides, in order to contain West Bengal and deny it itsrightful share in power, from coming up with complex (but bogus) political formulae forrepresentation in the National Legislature and Assembly, to refusing to hold scheduledprovincial elections because of the very real fear that the provincial Muslim Leaguewould be routed (it was), to perhaps the biggest attempt at gerrymandering ever, theconsolidation of the provinces of West Pakistan into a single administrative and politicalunit.

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The Urdu-Bangla controversy

The ruling elite’s first attempt at moral regulation through the rubric of national culture wasthe squashing of the Bengali demand for cultural and/or symbolic representationwithin the nation-state. This first manifested itself in the Bangla Language Committee’sdemand that Bengali be declared a national language of Pakistan on par with Urdu. Thisseemed reasonable, given the Bengali share of the Pakistani population. However, thecentral government’s intractability and intolerance in the face of this reasonable demandturned it into a national crisis, which spread over 5 years. The five-year ‘controversy’ culmi-nated in the tragic shooting by the police on a peaceful demonstration in Dacca on 21February 1952 – the event, henceforth immortalised and commemorated annually asEkushey (the Bengali word for ‘21’), generated its own language martyrs and symbols, suchas the ‘Shaheed Minar’, and hardly endeared the central or provincial Muslim Leaguegovernments to the Bengali people. In the aftermath of this tragedy and the political furoreit generated, the central government finally declared Pakistan’s second national language.9

This concession to Bengali demands only added insult to injury by exposing the officialdiscourse – which had previously argued that the demands of pro-Bangla supporters werenothing less than sedition – as being about nothing more lofty than political expediency.

The reaction to the original demand from West Pakistani intellectuals in particular, butalso certain Bengali members of the ruling elite – who were part of a pan-Indian Muslimaristocracy whose habitus included such symbols of Persianate/Mughal high culture as theUrdu language – was, to say the least, overwhelming. One would think, to read ConstituentAssembly reports and letters to the editor (of English, let alone Urdu, dailies!) that Bengalishad literally committed blasphemy. The main argument presented against Bengalidemands was that only Urdu – as the symbol and repository of Indian Muslim culture – hadthe right to be designated Pakistan’s national language, given that Pakistan had been estab-lished in the name of Islam. The implication was that Bangla (metonymically standing in forBengali culture as a whole) could hardly aspire to the exalted role of a national language,not being ‘Islamic’ enough. After all, went the discourse, everything from its script to itsvocabulary smacked of the corrupting influence of Sanskrit (read: Hindu culture). Theimplication and the effect of this discourse was the designation of Bengali culture and there-fore Bengalis themselves as not really ‘Muslim’ – and therefore, by implication, not Pakistani– enough, being too in thrall of ‘Hindu’ culture and the arts given their interest and invest-ment in such examples of the latter as classical dance, and Rabindranath Tagore, etc.10 Thesubsequent demand by Bengalis for greater political autonomy was read against this sensethat they were not-really, not-quite Pakistani; this ‘common-sense’ enabled and justified thevarious forms of state repression they were subjected to, up to and including the militaryaction in East Pakistan in 1971.11

Jinnah himself – hardly a fluent speaker of Urdu – told Dacca University students whileaddressing them in the wake of the first demands articulated at the end of 1947/beginningof 1948, that nothing could displace Urdu from its status as Pakistan’s sole nationallanguage, and that anyone who told them otherwise was exploiting them for political ends.Bengali demands were denigrated as examples of the ‘virus of provincialism’ let loose inPakistan by various Fifth Columnists (variously identified or darkly hinted as being‘communists’, or ‘Hindu’ elements from ‘across the border’). I have argued elsewhere (Toorc2000) that this discourse of provincialism and the progressive designation of East Bengal/East Pakistan as a space of sedition was a crucial way in which state formation was effectedin this period. This manifested itself in the most ironic and perverse of ways in the secessionof Bangladesh.

I am not, of course, arguing that there was a direct causal link between the very ideathat Indo-Islamic culture alone could be the basis of Pakistani national culture, and the rape


and murder of Bengalis in 1971. I am, however, trying to show – in this specific instance andin the argument as a whole – that the ways in which national culture gets defined has mate-rial consequences for the population being defined, and especially for the groups that areexcluded or marginalized from or placed in the liminal zone of any particular definition of‘the nation’.

‘One Unit’ and the politics of ‘parity’

The original version of the Basic Principles Committee Report – which was understood to bea draft document for the first constitution – submitted under the first Constituent Assemblyhad proposed a legislature ‘which would transform East Bengal’s numerical majority of thepopulation into a minority of seats’ (Callard 1957: 92). Such efforts to reduce the influence ofEast Bengal were in fact a consistent feature of Pakistani politics during the period understudy – the West Pakistani establishment had no intention of sharing power, let aloneletting East Bengal gain the upper hand. This intention was only intensified after the masscharacter of East Bengali politics became evident through, first, the language movementwhich later transformed into the movement for greater regional autonomy, and later, thecombination of middle class and mass rural politics under the Awami League and MaulanaBhashani. The result of the provincial elections in East Bengal in 1954 (reluctantly called bythe Muslim League under severe pressure from the opposition) frightened the ruling cliqueeven more – the Muslim League was routed out of power by the United Front, a coalition ofopposition parties which included the Awami League, the Krishak Sramik Party, theGanantari Dal, Nizam-i-Islam Party and the Youth League. This had immediately led to theimposition of Governor’s Rule in East Bengal.

Also in 1954–55, the West Pakistani establishment consolidated the provinces of WestPakistan into a single administrative and political unit in order to undermine and subvertthe edge which East Bengal was bound to gain under the principle of proportional represen-tation in the federal system proposed by the emerging Constitution. In 1954, the existingCabinet was dissolved, thus ending the tenure of the first Constituent Assembly, which hadproved unable to pass the West Pakistan Unification Bill. The Bill had been met with severeopposition from East Pakistani members, as well as members of the ‘smaller’ provinces ofWest Pakistan all of whom feared – and rightly – that this Bill would not only undermineEast Bengal’s share of power, but their own position. The reshuffling of the provincial lead-ership resulted in a handpicked set of men who posed no such problems. It was hardly asurprise, then, that the Bill was passed. But the debates over it are fascinating, both for theglimpse they give us of the power politics at play, but also because of the discursive terrainthey chart.

Ironically, the main justification presented for the unification of West Pakistan’s prov-inces into One Unit was a version of the ‘Indus thesis’,12 which had been long been articu-lated by secular and Leftist intellectuals, particularly – as Mian Mumtaz Daultana13 didn’tfail to repeatedly point out – one Mian Iftikharuddin!14 I shall provide a few relevantexcerpts from Daultana’s speech in support of One Unit, to show how the Indus thesis wasused to prove that West Pakistan had always – since time-immemorial – been an organic andnatural cultural unity. In fact, according to Daultana, this consolidation would be not justthe culmination of the Pakistan movement itself (!), but of a much longer historical process.Brushing aside the arguments and protests of its detractors as to the manner and motive ofthe Bill’s presentation and imposition, he argued instead that:

The real point which we have to consider and decide and the question on which our peoplehave to be convinced is whether the integration of West Pakistan is a natural culmination, anatural fruition, a natural realization or something that is unnatural to the genius of thepeople who live in West Pakistan. (Daultana 1955: 337, italics added)15

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But if that was not convincing enough, Daultana could invoke History to speak on hisbehalf. And not just any history, it was the history of human consciousness itself, for ‘… inthe realms of the mind, in the development of the human spirit as far as the memory of mankindcan go, the history of the area of West Pakistan has been one’ (Constituent Assembly ofPakistan Debates: 337, italics added). This glorious history was none other than that of ‘thefirst traces of human consciousness in Mohenjodaro, Harappa and in the regions of Taxila’(Constituent Assembly of Pakistan Debates: 337, italics added). Incontrovertible proof, onceagain, argued that ‘from the very earliest time our history has been one’:

Mohenjodaro, Harappa, Taxilla, the great Empire of the Emperor Kaniska, throughout theages we have faced the world as one unity. Sir, we have always fought together the sameenemies; we have faced the same problems; we have made identical adjustments; we haveanswered the same challenges with the same responses, from time immemorial … In fact theunity of our valley of the Indus gave the first concept of unity to the entire peninsula of Hindusthan .Sir, ours was the first unity that an outsider could perceive in the multifarious diversity ofthe Indo-Pakistan sub-continent, and it is from our land, the land of the ‘Sindhu’ that theword ‘Hindu’ and the word ‘India’ has been derived. It was our unity that created the concep-tion of unity for the peoples of India. From the very beginning, from the days of Moohenjodaroto the days of our last glorious conflict for freedom against the British, we have always,invariably, acted as one people. We are not, Sir, a congeries [sic] of conflicts; we, Sir, are apattern of unison. (Constituent Assembly of Pakistan Debates: 339, italics added)

Thus, not only is the case made for the historic unity of West Pakistan, but it is asserted thatit was this unity that inspired the idea of a unified India. This led an Opposition member fromBengal to later interject that this was nothing short of a recap of the idea of Akhand Bharat anda clear abrogation of the two-nation theory. But it is when Daultana proceeds to talk aboutthe ‘realm of the very highest traditions of the mind’ that things become even more interesting:

Here again, from the very first day, the people of West Pakistan have always accepted thesame spiritual heritage, the same mental direction. I do not speak of today or of the seven oreight hundred years that have passed, but even before the glorious advent of Islam, the philoso-phy and thought of West Pakistan has been one. (Constituent Assembly of Pakistan Debates:339, italics added)

And here is where Daultana makes the most interesting move of all, coming from a MuslimLeague politician:

It is West Pakistan which gave to the entire Hindu religion its first great mystic vision, the Rig Veda .When these first spiritual stirrings decayed and lost direction in a morass of ritual and super-stition and the time ripened for the teaching of Gotham to come upon the world, we tookthem to heart, not through the imposition of Asoka but during the glorious age of our ownKaniskha. (Constituent Assembly of Pakistan Debates: 340, italics added)

It is difficult to understand the importance of this statement unless one recalls that Islamhad always been the sine qua non of the Muslim League’s line on Pakistani nationalism.Recall, for example, the crux of the central government’s official discourse on the Bangla-Urdu crisis: that the basis for Pakistan was Islamic culture and civilization and Bangla wasthus disqualified from being considered Pakistan’s national language because it was notMuslim enough. The historical narrative expounded by Daultana finally got to Islam, butonly after a detour through the influence of the Greeks:

… in the final fulfillment of our existence, in the final development and culmination of ourthought, when our ears heard the noble message of Islam, we accepted it, not with hesitation,not through conflict, but all the areas of West Pakistan accepted it as if at one moment of illu-mination, within the first century of the advent of Islam. And once having accepted Islam,despite the various conflicts that have taken place, despite the innumerable vicissitudes and


tribulations to which this area, being at the very hub of world civilizations, has beensubjected we, Sir, have always held to it steadfastly, we have never resiled [sic] from it, wehave never compromised it. This indeed is the great and noble heritage of which todaywe are proud. Therefore, Sir, in culture and spirit and mind we have always, not today, fromthe very beginning of time been one indissoluble integrated unity. (Constitutent Assembly ofPakistan Debates: 340).

This sounds like the assertion of a national identity rather than an argument for what wasessentially a bureaucratic move (even if it had enormous political import). Not only was thisan incredible statement to be coming from the representative of a government who cried‘provincialism’ at the slightest hint of a justified regionalist demand, if the assertion thatWest Pakistanis formed an ‘indissoluble integrated unity’ in ‘culture and spirit and mind’were to be accepted as true, then where did that leave East Pakistan? And, in fact,Daultana’s open adulation of a pre-Islamic – and specifically Hindu – past as a legitimatepart of Pakistan’s national cultural heritage, led Opposition members to shocked retorts thatthis sounded no different from the discourse of the Indian nationalists:

Sir, I was wondering whether I was listening to our friend Mr. Mumtaz Muhammad KhanDaultana in the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan delivering a speech on the indivisibility ofWest Pakistan or I was listening to Dr. Rajendra Prasad at a Congress session at Delhipropounding the theory of indivisibility of Mother India!’ (Constituent Assembly of PakistanDebates 1955–56: 368)

And compelled a passionate outburst from another member from East Bengal:

Sir, if I may be permitted to say so … if everybody in the House closes his eyes and the nameof Mian Mumtaz Daultana is effaced from the records and either the name of Sardar Patel …or even that of Gandhiji is substituted in his place and the words ‘One Unit’ are dropped andthe idea of Akhand Hindustan16 is placed in its place and if the whole speech is read in ameeting of Hindu Mahasabha, I think the entire Hindu Mahasabha will rise and singHalleluiah to our Mian Mumtaz Daultana … Where is that Islam in him or in Sardar AmirAzam.17 If you look into his speech, to his references to a civilization which was heresupposed to be 4000 B.C. you will see that he is proud of that. His references to Mohenjo-daro, his references to Harappa, his references to Ashoka, you look at them. If you belong tothat civilization then why are you here. Go where the Ashoka Chakra is flying over the beau-tiful mosque built by Shah Jahan… His references to these things have really pained me verymuch. (Constituent Assembly of Pakistan Debates 1955–56: 571)

As I pointed out earlier, by undermining the Islamic basis of the ideology of Pakistan,Daultana’s discourse left no place for East Bengal within the Pakistani national project. Ifwhat united the people and land of West Pakistan was an extra-religious history, and onethat, it was argued, was a natural and organic fact, then what bound East Bengal to WestPakistan? Clearly the basis of their unification as part of one nation-state could not but beread as something less than natural and organic. As one Bengali member put it:

Your existence may have resulted from that culture [i.e. the Indus Valley civilization], but Iwonder where does East Pakistan stand after the exposition of this theory? Is this talk ofunity between East and West Pakistan all empty? … What would then bind East and WestPakistan?’ (quoted in Malik 1963: 267)

East Pakistanis could not help but feel that their regional, cultural and historical traditionswere slighted by Daultana’s claim of the antiquity of West Pakistan. Noor-ur-Rahman contin-ued his critique by saying that ‘we have our own history and heroes. Raja Ram Mohan Roywas one of them. We all, Hindus and Moslems, are proud of his great deeds’ (quoted in Malik1963: 267). It may have been more pertinent to have mentioned Tagore, given the treatmenthe had suffered at the hands of the Muslim League government in East Bengal as well as theirattitude of scorn towards Bengali culture due to its supposedly ‘Hindu’ influences.

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In his response to Daultana’s speech, Iftikharuddin cannily admitted that the latter’shistorical-cultural argument in favour of the unification of West Pakistan was in some waysa restatement of his own: ‘…my brilliant friend from the Punjab has been guilty of plagia-rism by stealing all the arguments that I have been giving for the last four years for theunification of West Pakistan’ (Constituent Assembly of Pakistan Debates 1955–56: 608). Thisturn of events was astonishing, he stated with some sarcasm, given Daultana’s past record –among other things, signing both versions of the Basic Principles Committee Report(Constituent Assembly of Pakistan Debates 1955–56: 608).18 In any case, there was an importantcaveat to the claim that Daultana was simply repeating Iftikharuddin’s own thesis. Thecrucial difference lay in the political projects they were being articulated with, and the formthis unification should take, specifically

whether to unify West Pakistan on a federal or unitary basis. My submission is that a federalunity will be more lasting, will be far more democratic, as compared to a unitary unity. Thatis the difference. (Constituent Assembly of Pakistan Debates 1955–56: 609)

Needless to say, this was hardly a trivial point of difference!19

An important part of Daultana’s speech was devoted to pre-emptive damage control –answering the anticipated (and justified) charge that this was a cynical and politicallyopportunist move. Opposition to One Unit did not just come from West Bengal, eventhough it was an open secret that undermining its numerical majority was the reasonbehind this scheme. The elites of the various ‘smaller’ provinces of West Pakistan were notinterested in being subsumed under a unitary Punjabi-dominated provincial administra-tion. Daultana had to address both these charges. The assertion that One Unit was a way toassert the hegemony of the Punjab over the other nationalities was simply untrue, hedeclared. In fact, it was simply not possible because there was no such thing as ‘the Punjab’.(Rule of thumb: the ruling class has no overarching attachment to its ‘own’ culture and willhappily disavow it should that help its project of rule.)

… Sir, the Punjab which we fear so much is not an ethnic entity. It is also not a linguisticentity … Again, Sir, Punjab is not a complex of distinct and desparate [sic] historical experi-ence … Therefore, Sir, what is the Punjab? This Punjab is a term of convenience. This Punjabis in effect a geographical expression… The moment the boundaries of the Punjab cease toexist, there remains no entity that you can distinguish as the Punjab. (Constituent Assembly ofPakistan Debates 1955–56: 355).

An entity that did not exist, according to this logic, could hardly be accused of trying totrample on the rights of the other provinces and nationalities. Quid pro quo. Not only that,but the consolidation of the different provinces of West Pakistan should actually be seen asthe way to resolve once and for all the mistrust of the Punjab.

… Sir, this Punjab of which one is often so frightened, really represents nothing. In fact thosewho hate the Punjabi; those who find that the Punjabis represent something perverse in thelife of the nation, for them the real solution is to take away the boundaries of the Punjab…(Constituent Assembly of Pakistan Debates 1955–56: 356)

As further proof that this was not a Punjabi conspiracy, Daultana pointed out that under theprovisions of the proposed Bill, ‘the people of the Punjab’ (who had, of course, not beenconsulted and so had no idea what was being done or said in their name – as various oppo-sition members pointed out) had ‘graciously conceded to accept 40% representation’ ratherthan the majority which was their due by dint of population. (Of course, this was to be thecase only for 10 years). Daultana presented this as a ‘gift’ to the people of the other prov-inces, and especially to East Bengal, as well as, modestly, ‘the most patriotic concession inthe history of political thought’ (Constituent Assembly of Pakistan Debates 1955–56: 356). Bythis logic, the consolidation of One Unit was – far from being a conspiracy against the


people of East Bengal – in fact nothing less than an attempt to ensure East Bengal’s rights!This was a clever sleight of hand, since it was the combined population of the various WestPakistani provinces which would be used to counter the demographic dominance of EastBengal, so the population of the Punjab was never the real issue. In an even more astonish-ing and shameless move, the case for One Unit was actually defended ‘as a deliberateattempt to meet the national demand of Bengal for provincial autonomy’!

It is clear – and it was clear to everyone in the Constituent Assembly then – that theconsolidation of West Pakistan was not about culture, or history or geography. It was, asCorrigan and Sayer remind us, what integration in the context of the nation-state is essen-tially and always about: enforcing rule (Corrigan and Sayer 1985: 6–7). In this case, it wasabout changing the political landscape of Pakistan per se and constraining the political imag-ination of ordinary Pakistanis. Moreover, the One Unit Bill was not just concerned with theactual administrative consolidation of the territory of ‘West Pakistan’ as its full title madeclear: ‘The Establishment of West Pakistan Bill: The Bill to provide for the Establishment ofthe province of West Pakistan by integrating Provinces and States and for other purposesconnected therewith’ (my emphasis). Indeed, among the ‘other purposes’ of One Unit was thecounterposing of this new province of West Pakistan to the officially renamed province of‘East Pakistan’ within a system of ‘parity’, thus effectively neutralising any danger of EastBengal’s dominance. The truth was that without the consolidation of West Pakistan, EastBengal would dominate national politics because of its share of the total population;combining all the non-Bengali provinces (serendipitously, they were all in West Pakistan)ensured that this would not be the case.

Since this move on the part of the West Pakistani establishment was bound to be under-stood by its detractors in terms of a framework of ‘Bengali’ versus ‘Punjabi’, an interpreta-tion which Daultana’s ‘clarification’ affirmed, Mian Iftikharuddin was forced to clarify inhis response that the people of the Punjab were an entity separate from the West Pakistaniruling elite. Thus, the political intrigues of the West Pakistani establishment should not,under any circumstances, be associated with the people of West Pakistan. In fact, if their pasttreatment at the hands of the ruling elite was anything to go by, no benefit was to accrue tothem. Iftikharuddin reminded the House that, in crucial ways, the people of West Pakistanwere more deprived and suffered greater repression at the hands of the West Pakistani estab-lishment than those of East Bengal. Among other things

civil liberties enjoyed by the people of East Pakistan, even under present constitution, aredenied to us in West Pakistan. Why is this? … The reason is very clear. It is here that thepresent clique wishes to rule. It is through this base that they want to maintain their positionfor the present and their position in the future… Sir, my Bengali friends … will pardon mewhen I say that they have completely misunderstood and unconsciously misrepresented tothemselves, the position of the present leadership vis-à-vis the people of the Punjab. Theyhave confused in a most dangerous manner the present clique which has ruled over us withthe people of Punjab. People of Punjab have no enmity, have never had any enmity with thepeople of other provinces … Please do not mix the present leadership with the people of thePunjab. In fact, nobody has been a great [sic] enemy of the people of Punjab than the presentruling group. Nowhere have civil liberties been denied in the way that they are denied to usin the Punjab… They adopt special repressive methods to maintain their present powerthere. If they lose Punjab as their base they will be nowhere. (Constituent Assembly of PakistanDebates 1955–56: 633– 634)

By dissociating the Punjabi people from the ruling elite, Iftikharuddin undermined the rhet-oric of Punjabi nationalism, as well as the tendency to assume a corporate interest based ona shared regional/ethnic identity.

Just how much respect the civil-military bureaucracy (which, it has been convincinglyargued, has always been the real base of power in Pakistan from the latter’s very inception)

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had for the democratic process and constitutional niceties is evidenced by the fact thatbefore the debate on the One Unit Bill was concluded, the Governor General dissolved theCabinet and disbanded the Constituent Assembly. A state of emergency was declared, andthe announcement that the provinces of West Pakistan were to be merged into one adminis-trative unit followed soon after.

Muslim nationalism versus nationalist Muslims: progressive Muslims and the idea of Pakistan

The engagement of the Marxist Left with nationalism has always been a complex one,fraught with ambiguities and tensions. However, the terrain of nationalism was a particu-larly slippery one for Pakistani Leftists – particularly the communists – to negotiate. Despitethe official blessing conferred on Muslim nationalism and the demand for Pakistan by theCommunist Party of India (CPI) prior to Independence, the vast majority of Muslimcommunists and sympathisers, especially those in the leadership of the Progressive WritersAssociation (PWA), tended to be nationalist Muslims rather than Muslim nationalists – i.e.they privileged the Indian rather than Muslim aspect of their identity. Many were, of course,atheists and so this was hardly surprising. Many looked on the Muslim League as a party ofreactionary interests, and the demand for Pakistan as communalist in nature, or at leastlikely to exacerbate communal tensions. Of course, many well-known Muslims in the PWAalso switched their affiliations away from the communist party and/or Indian nationalismto the Muslim League as the political situation became more polarized in 1946–47.

However, since communalism was one of the main issues which the ProgressiveWriters Association was devoted to addressing, many shared the opinion that the Muslimnationalist ideology of the Muslim League was based on communal sentiments, and so feltstrongly that it should not be supported.20 Hardliners within the PWA such as Ali SardarJafri were critical even of the great Faiz Ahmad Faiz, without doubt the most influentialUrdu poet of the contemporary period, because Jafri felt that his poetry allowed for toomuch ambiguity and could as easily be appreciated and appropriated by Muslim Leaguersas by communists. In his attack on the Progressives immediately following Partition,Muhammad Hasan Askari spilt much ink on what he called the particular (and tragic) caseof the Muslim Progressive as one who is forced to renounce that which forms the basis ofhis identity – i.e. the history of Muslim culture and civilisation, the basis of Muslim nation-alism – so as to avoid the possible charge of being communalist.

After Independence, when – under the influence of what has come to be known as the‘Ranadive line’, the CPI (and hence the Communist Party of Pakistan) took a radical leftturn; existing differences within the Progressive movement became more sharply delin-eated and took on new meaning.21 As I argued above, the relationship of Pakistani Leftiststo Muslim nationalism and especially to the ‘Pakistan Movement’ had been ambiguous atbest and suspicious at worse. However, this was clearly not a sustainable position to take ifthey wished to work within Pakistan; the degree to which the idea of the nation had beennaturalized is testified to by the fact that politics – whether of the Right or the Left – had tobe articulated within the terms of a nationalist framework; there could be differences overhow the nationalist project should be defined, but the idea that something called the(Pakistani) nation existed was not up for contestation. Moreover, given the centrality ofthe debates over Pakistani national identity and culture, the Left could not afford to ignorethe issue. It was imperative, then, that the Left not only not ignore this ideological strugglefor the soul of Pakistan, but take it seriously. In particular, because the cultural sphere wasprecisely where the Left was likely to have the most influence given its historical successwithin cultural politics in the subcontinent and the political realities of Pakistan. It is alsopossible that even the hardliners within the All Pakistan Progressive Writers Association


(essentially the locus of the Marxist cultural Left in Pakistan at this time) recognized theJanus-faced nature of nationalism and saw that the actually existing reality of Pakistan – asa multireligious, multicultural state without a defined nationalist ideology – opened uppolitical possibilities.

It is thus not surprising that Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Pakistan’s premier Progressive poet,prominent Left journalist and an active member of the Communist Party of Pakistan until itwas banned in 1954, was one of the first and certainly the most prominent intellectual toparticipate in the national debate over Pakistani culture. During the 1950s and 1960s, Faizwrote a series of essays on the topic and gave a number of public lectures; he also took partin a broadcast debate on the topic with other prominent intellectuals, such as Jalibi on RadioPakistan. In the late 1960s, Faiz accepted the invitation to chair the government Commissionon Culture and the Arts. His report was unfortunately submitted at the same time as thepopular agitation against Ayub Khan reached its climax, and was thus temporarily shelved;however, it formed the blueprint for Pakistan cultural policy under Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto inthe 1970s.

In his introduction to the Report, Faiz defined culture as comprising both material andideological elements besides having both spatial/territorial and temporal/historicalaspects. On the other hand, he argued, ‘its ideological component may include extra-territo-rial and supra-temporal elements’. This was, of course, his way of offering a definition ofPakistani culture that could simultaneously accommodate the history of Muslim national-ism and the reality of Pakistan’s cultural geography; this meant simultaneously acknowl-edging the possibility that some part of Pakistan’s national cultural history could be sharedwith India, and accepting the cultural traditions indigenous to the land that comprisedPakistan even if they had little to do with Islam or the high culture associated with Muslimcivilization in India. Just how difficult a task this was can be adduced from the semantic andintellectual acrobatics he had to perform.

He began by reiterating an accepted truism within Pakistani intellectual circles:

Before the inception of Pakistan, there was, understandably, no such entity as a Pakistanination. [… there was political community, but no ethnic and geographic unity… ]. Under-standably, therefore, the culture of the new Pakistani nation when it emerged was not afinished, ready made unified entity … but a composite of diversified patterns. (Faiz 1968: 15)

Here we see his attempt to set up the national(ist) project as something open, rather thanclosed and bounded. ‘Nevertheless’, he continued,

these people in all parts of Pakistan shared a common historical experience as well as thosecommon ethical and cultural mores which originated from the religion that they professed.(Faiz 1968: 15–16)

Moreover, there was

considerable difference of opinion on how precisely this culture should be defined. Thereappears to be some agreement … that the culture of Pakistan includes everything which hasbeen integrated into the bloodstream of our people:

a) religion of Islam which provides ‘the ethical and ideological basis for the people’s way oflife’

b) indigenous cultures of various linguistic regionsc) elements of Western culture absorbed since the days of British occupation.d) distinct cultures of minority groups who form a part of the Pakistani nation.’ (Faiz 1968: 16)

At this point he takes on the contemporary debates over national culture in Pakistandirectly, asking rhetorically whether ‘Muslim or Islamic culture’ wasn’t ‘an adequate defini-tion of Pakistani culture’ given that Pakistan was an ‘ideological state and its ideology [was]

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Islam’? This was a question which came up repeatedly in public debate, and showed howsticky the connection between Islam-as-religious-identity and the idea of Pakistan wasproving to be despite the fact that the discourse of Muslim nationalism had relied on acultural rather than a religious idea of Islam.

As a Leftist, Faiz’s answer to this question was, obviously, no. But he could not leaveIslam out of the equation entirely. His solution was thus to argue that Islam was an impor-tant element in Pakistan’s national culture but was not everything; i.e. that it was a neces-sary but not sufficient condition of Pakistani nationhood because it was not unique toPakistan. By definition, a Pakistani must have something that was his/hers alone:

[as] Muslims the people of Pakistan naturally share with other Muslims, apart from acommon ideology, many elements of a common cultural heritage, collectively called Muslimculture. But as Pakistanis they also possess distinctive cultural traits of their own which distin-guish them as a society and a nation from their co-religionists elsewhere. (Faiz 1968: 17)

Second, this assertion that Islam was the only basis of Pakistani culture ‘ignore[d] the politi-cal reality of “nationhood”’ which

embodies in itself the political reality of independent existence. It is synonymous with the State.It is the identity with which people are recognized in the community of nations. Nationhood may bea good thing or a bad thing but as long as it exists as a political reality, a national of Pakistanremains a Pakistani… (Faiz 1968: 17)

and would/could not, unless he changed his nationality, become something else.

What sets him and his nation apart from the Sudanese or the Indonesian, therefore, must besomething other than religion. This something else is his nationhood and his culture which aretwo sides of the same coin. (Faiz 1968: 17–18. My emphasis)

By asserting that ‘nationhood and culture’ are ‘two sides of the same coin’, which set one‘Muslim’ nationality apart from another, he deals a blow to religion as the sole legitimatebasis for collective identity in the contemporary world. In fact, the centrality he claims forcultural nationalism would have been – and was, as we shall see – anathema to the likes ofMaududi for whom nationalism was nothing less than a Western (or even Hindu/Indian)conspiracy to destroy the unity of the Muslim ummah.

The other – and related – issue which preoccupied Pakistani intellectuals at this time(and was actively used by the Establishment) was the issue of ‘national integration’ and itsnemesis, ‘provincialism’. As I have shown, demands for regional autonomy, even purelysymbolic ones, were instantly labelled ‘provincialism’ by the government and its organicintellectuals and treated as nothing less than seditious. Ayub Khan took advantage of thisanxiety over regional demands by turning issues such as ‘national integration’, ‘nationalculture’ and other such ‘national’ crises into a veritable cottage industry for Pakistani intel-lectuals. As part of his social engineering efforts, he set up the Bureau of National Recon-struction, which came under the purview of the Ministry of Information. Herbert Feldmantells us in his largely laudatory contemporary account of the first four years of the regime,that

[by] national reconstruction was meant the inculcation of ethical and civic values; the devel-opment of a character-pattern; a raising of the cultural and intellectual level, assistingwomen to overcome the social handicaps that confronted them; encouragement of a healthynational spirit; the elimination of sectarianism, regionalism, and provincialism, and theteaching of simplicity, frugality and good taste in living standards. (Feldman 1967: 84)

The Bureau, often in conjunction with the semi-private Pakistan Council on National Integra-tion and the Pakistan Committee of the Congress for Cultural Freedom,22 organized seminarsand conferences on the above-mentioned topics. In contrast to the constant handwringing


and self-criticism by liberal intellectuals (safely contained within such seminars) about thelack of national integration in Pakistan and the necessity of taking even the most drastic ofmeasures to achieve it, Faiz argues that such an integration could not be either imposed ororchestrated.

Even as he built up a case for the importance of art and culture to national integration,and for the involvement of the state in promoting it, Faiz was careful to state that a ‘nationalculture’ could not be evolved ‘from above’ but must come about gradually through a dialec-tical process determined in large part by the relationships between the different groups ofpeople who made up Pakistan. Cultural problems, according to Faiz, ‘form an integral partof the basic structural socio-economic problems of every society’, and their solutions there-fore lie ‘with the solutions of those problems’ (Faiz 1968: 3). Thus, the idea of a unitary andshared national culture could not be a wielded as an ideological weapon to enforce nationalunity in the face of glaring social, economic and political inequalities: ‘to evolve a commonor unified culture for such a society must presume the evolution of a unified and equitablesocial structure’ (Faiz 1968: 3). This point is of course is tragically brought home with thesecession of East Pakistan in 1971. No amount of seminars on national integration couldpaper over the cracks created by a development project founded on the twin doctrines of‘functional inequality’ and the ‘social utility of greed’23 – not to mention bad governance bya cynical political elite bent on holding on to power at all costs.

The religious right claims its due

The idea that ‘Islam’ was the basis of Pakistan may not have been meant to convey or legiti-mate the idea of a theocratic state by the modernists in the Muslim League, but that did notprevent it from discursively opening the gates to just such a normative vision of Pakistan.The Jama’at-i Islami of Maulana Abu Ala Maududi was one major player within the politicaland cultural sphere, which selectively interpreted the mainstream/official discourse thatPakistan was a Muslim/Islamic state to mean that it was – or should be – a theocracy.

Maududi himself had been highly critical of Muslim nationalism and the Pakistanmovement during the 1930s and 1940s, and had had some choice words for the modernistMuslims who made up the leadership of the Muslim League in its second phase, includingJinnah.24 Maududi’s critique of Muslim nationalism was that it privileged an essentiallysecular locus of identity and allegiance (i.e. ‘the nation’) which undermined the Islamiccommunity or ummah, which could be the only basis of Muslims’ collective identity. Thedemocratic state, which was the privileged political form within modern (’Western’) nation-alist discourse also posited ‘the people’ as sovereign, which undermined the Islamic injunc-tion that God alone was sovereign.

In his early political ethnography of Pakistani society, W.C. Smith found Pakistanisfrom all walks of life espousing the idea that Pakistan was a Muslim state; however, by thisthey generally meant a state of/for Muslims rather than a theocracy (Smith 1962). The samestudy showed that the desire for an ‘Islamic state’ and/or society, which was similarly ubiq-uitous in the discourse of Pakistanis, actually amounted to nothing more than the desire fora ‘good society’ and a ‘moral’ state. When probed further, it became clear that for the major-ity of people this meant, in essence and aside from the ‘Islamic’ label, a democratic, welfarestate. However, Maududi’s Jama’at-i Islami in alliance with other Islamist parties, success-fully lobbied the government – which had its own agenda – to introduce the language of‘Islamic state’ within important pieces of legislation such as the Objectives Resolution andthe first Constitution. That the Maududi version of Islam was not the same as that of thePakistani Establishment – or that the corporate interests represented by the Jama’at’s constit-uency sat uneasily with the interests of this ruling establishment (until the martial lawregime of Zia ul Haq) – is clear from the fact that Maududi was jailed for sedition under

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more than one government, for arguing that their policies undermined the aspirations of thePakistani people for a ‘truly’ Islamic state and society.

Faiz and other Leftists tried to claim for territorial and cultural nationalism a privilegedplace in understanding and defining Pakistani national identity. The sine qua non of Leftistpolitics in Pakistan also became the defence of regional claims of autonomy from the centre.Faiz even claimed that art was an important moral social force insofar as it ‘prescribes thegood and bad in taste, the ‘cultured’ and ‘uncultured’ in personality and behaviour,the beautiful and ugly in material surroundings’, and so ‘profoundly influences both valuejudgments and social behaviour within the community’ (Faiz 1968: 6). All this was bound toget a rise out of the Religious Right, given that it arrogated to itself the exclusive right tospeak on issues of morality.

For Maududi and the Jama’at-i Islami’s intellectuals, the very concept of ‘culture’became an anathema during this period. They understood it, correctly, as a secular substi-tute for religion and their response was to denounce it as seditious, and to posit a purelyreligious conception of Islam. However, the hegemony of cultural nationalism was suchthat even these arguments had to be cast within a ‘nationalist’ framework. As BruceKapferer (c1988) has persuasively argued through a comparative study of Australia and SriLanka, and pace Anderson (Anderson 1983) and other literature on the subject,25 nationalismneed not be thought of as a universal and monolithic form. The discursive framework ofnationalism is capable of accommodating a diversity of political and ideological projects,and cultural codes.26 The Jama’at’s ‘nationalist ideology’ was essentially a religious national-ism that was based on Maududi’s own particularly reactionary understanding of Islam, andaimed explicitly against the cultural nationalism that was hegemonic during this period. Intheir writings and speeches, the idea of ‘culture’ was directly correlated with communism,and declared a ploy by which to undermine the Islamic foundation of Pakistan.27

So strong was this connection in the minds of these Jama’ati intellectuals, that in the late1950s Naseem Hijazi, a prominent member of their fraternity, wrote a serialized radio playsatirizing two hapless ‘comrades’ deputed by their leader to go to the villages to ‘discover’Pakistani culture. In his preface to a collected edition of these plays, Hijazi explained that the‘Progressives’ (read: communists) had, c1956, taken on the ‘mantle of culture’ as a result oftheir literary activities being curtailed (a reference to the banning of the PWA) and alsobecause they had found it to be the most effective weapon in their assault on Pakistan’sIslamic foundations. As he recalls, the plays were structured around a group of communistsand ‘exposed’ their designs on the ‘Islamic’ basis of Pakistan through the agency of ‘culture’:

… this was the time when an army of so-called progressives had declared war on the fortressof the moral and spiritual values of Pakistan through the front of ‘culture’. Those same ‘greatartists’ who earlier used to conduct a trade in obscenity in the name of ‘literature’ [i.e. theProgressive Writers], had now, disappointed by the lack of interest shown by the people,taken on their ‘delicate’ shoulders the weight of the service of culture. (Hijazi 1978: i–ii)

But, argued Hijazi, one should not be fooled by this shift in emphasis:

Their goal was still the same as before – only their method had changed. The politicalcircumstances of those years require no paraphrasing or analysis. Our every step [as anation] was towards decline and degeneration, but despite this, these ‘artists’ realised thatthere was a strong guard of moral and spiritual values on the national fortress of Pakistanwithout removing which they could not hope to create a conducive environment for them-selves. In this mission these spirited ones threw away their pens and took up dhols andtablas28 instead. It was not mere accident that in this mission our progressives had the coop-eration of those enemies of national unity who thought regional cultures were the easiestmeans with which to awaken regional hatreds … [this was the time when] our respectedProgressives thought that the beat of tablas and the tinkling of ghungroos29 was enough toshake the foundations of this neophyte nation-state. (Hijazi 1978: i–ii)


By collapsing the defence and promotion of performance art forms – folk and classical (assymbolized by the dhol and the tabla respectively) – by the Progressives, with their supportfor regional rights (particularly East Bengal), Hijazi discredits both in one fell swoop.Support for art – and ‘culture’ more generally – becomes synonymous with sedition in hisdiscourse! (1956, it must be kept in mind, was also the year that saw the consolidation of theprovinces of West Pakistan into the infamous ‘One Unit’).

In Act One, Scene One of ‘Saqafat ki Talash’, the second-in-command is briefing his teamon the strategy of the communists:

Comrade Alif30 says that we have to change our modus operandi because we have beenunable to win the people over … we should have realized that the people of Pakistan willrefuse to accept any philosophy which is explicitly against the ideology of Islam. We should,instead, try to incorporate entertainment for the people into our slogans. Instead of trying topresent communism in opposition to Islam, using culture to lead these simple people astraywould be easier. For instance, we could explain to the people that despite being Muslims, itis their duty as human beings to keep their cultural traditions alive … we should make themfeel that culture is something without which human beings cannot remain human. Muslimshate dance but tradition and culture are terms with which we can easily lead them astray…(Hijazi 1978: 1).

Since some of Faiz’s essays which I reference here also date from the mid to late 1950s, it ishardly a stretch to read Hijazi’s satire as a critique of Faiz in particular, especially since he isquite clear that his target is the ‘Progressives’ of which Faiz was the most visible and iconicfigure.31 Faiz strongly attacked this reactionary approach to culture in his Report to theCommission on Sports, Culture and the Arts, arguing that ‘[t]here is a school of thinkingwhich holds that all cultural activity in general and the performing arts in particular areimmoral and anti-religious’ (Faiz 1968: 8), and pointed to the political expediency behindsuch ways of thinking:

Since independence, these anti-attitudes inherited from the past have been seized upon bycertain factions in the country for topical political ends. They first sought to equate all culturewith music and dancing and then to equate all music and dance with the lewd vulgarizationsof these arts by inept professionals. From these premises, it was easy to proceed to theconclusion that, as has often been done, that all art is immoral, hence anti-religious, henceideologically unacceptable. (Faiz 1968: 9)

When Maududi and his intellectuals did use the rubric of ‘culture’, it was, unsurprisingly,as ‘Islamic culture’. But their use of the term was different from that current among main-stream Muslim intellectuals, i.e. the sum total of the artistic, literary, architectural artefactsproduced either by Muslims or during the various Islamic empires, which together consti-tuted an Islamic civilisation. Nor even the different popular forms of Islam and the literaryand artistic works they inspired. No – by ‘Islamic culture’, Maududi meant, simply, theIslamic religious creed as embodied in the Quran, reflected in the shariat [Muslim law], andthe rituals of prayer, fasting, alms-giving, sacrifice and Haj which the creed enjoined uponMuslims.

It was this definition of ‘Islamic culture’, especially vis-à-vis Pakistani nationalism –that Faiz seems to have encountered frequently during his lectures and radio presentations.Faiz’s aim was to define, pin down, and put in its place this ‘Islamic’ aspect of Pakistaniculture, lest it lead to a theocratic meaning à la the Jama’at-i Islami. However, Faiz’s nuancedengagements with the complexities of Pakistani culture and his sensitivity to issues of exclu-sion and marginality did not always appeal to those who were looking for a simple answer.This is evident from the transcripts of radio presentations and the odd university lecture,where he was invariably – and often frustratingly – asked variations on the same question:‘Can we not say that Pakistani culture is Islamic culture?’ (Faiz n.d.: 21). In such situations,

336 Saadia Toor

Faiz drew on the accepted idea that a national culture had to be unique to the nation-stateand could not be solely based on something that was shared with other nation-states, inorder to strategically articulate an idea of Pakistani culture which could not be read asendorsing the Jama’ati position.32

For example, in response to one such question, he replied:

There are aspects of Islamic culture [articles of faith] which are internal and there are someexternal forms of these which are national in their historical and geographical contexts. Thisdoesn’t mean that they are separate, but that both these aspects combine to make what iscalled a ‘national culture’. Thus Pakistani culture is only limited to Pakistan, and Islam is notlimited by nationalism…but is universal…thus that which is Pakistani culture will be Islamic,not non-Islamic. In fact, you can call it Pakistani Islamic culture. You cannot just call itIslamic culture because you don’t have a monopoly on Islam. (Faiz n.d.: 21, italics added)

The query which followed this one enquired whether ‘…[i]f the culture of every Islamiccountry is engendered by its specific geographical context, and cannot be Islamic, then thatmeans that there is no such thing as Islamic culture’ (Faiz n.d.: 24). To which Faizresponded:

Since Islam is a universal faith, therefore the culture of every Muslim nation is Islamicculture … but alongside this, every Islamic country has its own national culture as well.There is no contradiction in these two things. (Faiz n.d.: 24)

Here Faiz paused to illustrate the point with the example of Iran, which held on to both theIslamic and the pre-Islamic aspects of its culture; arguing that it was the synthesis of the twowhich made Persian culture unique.

just like this, Pakistani culture will be both Islamic and Pakistani, but you cannot say that theculture of any one nation is Islamic such that it is the culture of the entire world of Islam…(Faiz n.d.: 24)

In answer to a question by a student as to whether it would not simply be easier to think ofPakistani culture simply as ‘Islamic culture’, Faiz declared

… we cannot completely fit the culture of any one nation with the culture of another nationeven if their faith and many other characteristics are shared. For this reason, we should eithernot use the term Pakistani … but if we do, and we accept Pakistani nationality then obvi-ously you will have to create a separate culture for this nationality if it doesn’t exist, and if itdoes, then you will have to own it. Pakistan is not Islam, Pakistan is geography, it is thename of a country, not the name of a faith. If you don’t call yourself a Pakistani, and denyyour nationality, then it is possible, but if you insist on nationalism, then you have to bepersistent about national culture as well, then you cannot consider this national culture partof some other national culture. (Faiz n.d.: 35)

What we are seeing here is the attempt to displace a religious worldview and an essentiallyreligious understanding of political and social order (which interpellates religious identi-ties), in favour of the more secular project of nationalism. The fact that this is an intenselydifficult and immensely political process – despite the hegemony of the idea of ‘nation’ – isevidenced by the resistance displayed by the students who comprised Faiz’s audience forthese lectures. Here Faiz is trying to disarticulate religion from (national) culture to theextent possible, in response to the argument that Pakistani and Islamic culture were not justrelated, such that the culture of Pakistan was not one manifestation of the essentially multi-various nature of Islamic culture, but were one and the same thing. The implications of impos-ing such a limited and unitarian definition of Islamic culture, especially in the context of adiverse nation-state such as Pakistan could only be disastrous.

But eschewing Islam as a basis for Pakistani nationhood had implications for how tojustify East Bengal as an ‘organic’ part of Pakistan. In answer to a question as to why East


and West Pakistan should stay together, given his definition of Pakistani culture, Faiz wasforced to admit that ‘firstly there is the shared religion, which is the biggest reason’ butbacked it up by stating that it wasn’t the only relationship between the two wings. But thealternatives he came up with were rather unconvincing. There was, for one,

the historical connection – for ages we have been associated with the same government andstate. Then there is the cultural connection – our mosques and tombs look the same, ourlearned men and their learned men have gone back and forth… So lots of connections withthem that we don’t have with other Muslim countries. (Faiz n.d.: 49)

But if religion were to be eschewed as the (sole, or even main) basis of Pakistani nationalidentity – and the ‘Indus thesis’ made the assertion of a shared culture and/or historybetween East and West Pakistan, that would imply that the only relationship between thetwo was a political one. And this would truly be heretical. Moreover, reference to theseconnections opened up once again the great unsaid: the ‘culture’ and ‘history’ which wereshared with India, and hence the impossibility of justifying the establishment on Pakistanpurely on the basis of culture.

Conclusion

Speaking ‘in the name – and language – of the nation’, as Corrigan and Sayer point out,‘both denies the particularity of what is being said (and who is saying it) and defines alter-natives and challenges as sectional, selfish, partial, ultimately treasonable’ (Corrigan andSayer 1985: 195). When this language of ‘nationhood’ is combined with that of ‘culture’, weget a potent mixture, which explains why ‘national culture’ – far from being an integrativeforce – is all-too-often a space of intense contestation within nation-states. In Pakistan,defining a national culture has been similarly important both for the Establishment and itsdetractors precisely because of its double-edged nature. Boundary-definition is also apowerful form of rule – who gets to be within and who is designated outside the nation isstrategically important, as important as what alternatives – political, economic, social – aredesignated to be acceptable or unacceptable given a certain definition of ‘Pakistan’.

It is obvious from the case of the controversial One Unit Bill, and the changes itwrought, that the need to hold on to power can over-ride the imperatives of ‘nationalism’and nation-building for the ruling establishment. So much so that in order to undermineEast Bengal and neutralise the rising mass politics of the region, as well as quell dissent inWest Pakistan, the establishment did not hesitate in throwing out the two-nation theory andits assumption of Muslim nationalism as the basis of the Pakistani nation-state when itsuited them.

As Faiz pointed out, ‘cultural problems do not relate to the arts alone’ but were inti-mately tied to the very structure of society, especially its socio-economic aspect (Faiz 1968:3). Social equity – or, the resolution of the ‘basic structural socio-economic problem[s]’ – of asociety was thus the only way of ensuring a just and permanent resolution of the problem ofcultural integration. Since the lack of national integration in Pakistan was taken as a culturalrather than a socio-economic or political problem, even the most culturally sensitive initia-tives could finally achieve nothing in the face of the persistent inequalities between the Westand East as well as the unresolved political demands of the East Pakistanis, which increas-ingly became couched in the language of ‘internal colonialism’. The state’s violent attemptsat suppressing these demands – and by so doing, attempting to suppress the differencesand inequalities themselves – ultimately resulted in a bloody pogrom against the Bengalisand the secession of East Pakistan. The secession and subsequent establishment ofBangladesh is often referred to as an example of a failure of national integration, but asCorrigan and Sayer so eloquently put it,

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Social integration within the nation state is a project, and one in constant jeopardy from thevery facts of material difference – the real relations of bourgeois civilization – whose recogni-tion official discourse seeks to repress. (Corrigan and Sayer 1985: 197)

Thus, no amount of cultural initiatives and other attempts at national unity – even the briefmoment of consolidation and national solidarity during and immediately following the warwith India in 1965 – could ultimately paper over or make up for the glaring inequalitiesproduced by the economic policies pursued by various administrations, culminating inAyub’s ‘Decade of Development’ and embodied in various Five-Year Plans. People may notlive by bread alone, but without bread they cannot live at all.

Notes

1. See, for example, Chatterjee (1993, 1989).2. As both concept and phenomena, ‘religion’ and ‘culture’ are often so deeply articulated in real life that it

becomes difficult if not impossible to separate their effects; this overlap and ambiguity it producesenables many slips within nationalist discourse in Pakistan, as I argue in my work.

3. On this, see Aziz (1967: particularly pages 8 and 123).4. Up until the mid-1930s, Indian Muslim intellectuals understood themselves as having two separate iden-

tities – Muslim and Indian – which they did not see as mutually antagonistic. Even the creation ofMuslim homelands proposed by Muhammad Iqbal as a solution to the communal problem was pitchedas a move that would simultaneously preserve ‘the life of Islam as a cultural force’ while strengtheningIndian Muslim loyalty to the Indian state. Thus Muslim nationalism had not and was not automaticallyarticulated within the framework of separatism.

5. Under the original terms, the whole of Bengal and Punjab were to be part of Pakistan as Muslim majorityprovinces; their partition was the result of pressure from militant Hindu nationalist groups.

6. Manto was and remains one of the most popular and controversial Urdu writers of his time, and also oneof the most relentless chroniclers of the violence – physical, symbolic, psychological – of Partition.

7. In this essay, Jalibi features as a representative liberal modernist Pakistani intellectual of this period; Faizrepresents the Marxist, and Hijazi the religious Right.

8. For instance, East Bengal instituted far-reaching land reforms in the early 1950s which scared the WestPakistani ruling class.

9. This remained pretty much a formality, as various speeches by Bengali members to the ConstituentAssembly in subsequent years testify to.

10. Tagore was officially banned from the airwaves in East Bengal and it was considered seditious activity toplay or sing his songs. East Bengalis considered Robindroshongeet (or the songs of Tagore) to be an inte-gral part of Bengali culture, whether Muslim or Hindu.

11. The attitude of the West Pakistani elite towards Bengalis also became increasingly more racialised overtime, which enabled the horrific actions of the West Pakistan army during the civil war of 1971, inwhich, among other things, the rape of Bengali women was justified on the basis of ‘purifying’ their‘race’.

12. Focusing on the Indus valley civilization as an important – indeed, the distinguishing – aspect ofPakistani culture was a familiar secularist move by Leftist and liberal Pakistani intellectuals. The placeof this ancient civilization, and that of the Gandhara period within Pakistani culture, was the subject ofmuch debate from the very beginning.

13. Daultana was the main protagonist from the Government side, and widely known to have been thearchitect of the Bill. Daultana had been Chief Minister of the Punjab when the anti-Ahmediyya riotsracked the province in 1953, and was held accountable for them by the Report of the Commission ofEnquiry into the Punjab Disturbances.

14. Mian Iftikharuddin was himself a social democrat, but was nevertheless the most important patron of thecommunist Left in Pakistan, especially through the platform (and employment) he provided themthrough the Progressive Papers Ltd. The various publications of the PPL were extremely influential inPakistan, and the most important platform for Leftist views, which was the reason staging a takeover ofthe PPL was one of the first things which Ayub ordered after his coup d’état in 1958.

15. All references from the Constituent Assembly debates including quotes from speeches of particularmembers such as Daultana are cited collectively in the bibliography under the general head of ConstituentAssembly of Pakistan Debates (1955–56).


16. Akhand Hindustan: literally, ‘United, Indivisible India’. It was the slogan used by the Indian NationalCongress to counter the Muslim League’s demand for a separate state. It also became associated withmilitant Hindu nationalist outfits like the Hindu Mahasabha.

17. The actual mover of the Bill. Daultana strategically chose not to introduce it himself.18. Both versions of the BPC report were criticized by East Bengali Opposition members as proposing a

legislature which reduced East Bengal’s majority to a minority in the House, and also reiterated thatUrdu was to be the only state language, a slap in the face of the Bengali language movement. Iftikharud-din’s jibe refers to the centrality given to Islam as the basis of the Pakistani nation-state within both theseversions.

19. Iftikharuddin’s amendment highlights the fact that intentions and interests and effects cannot be read offfrom the cultural content of particular nationalist discourses. For that it is important to pay attention towho is articulating these discourses and the political projects they are being harnessed to.

20. This undermines the general understanding of the PWA as somehow completely and directly under thecontrol of the CPI. It must be remembered that before Partition the CPI supported the Muslim League’sdemand for an independent state on the basis of the nationalities thesis.

21. See Coppola (1975), especially Chapter V, ‘The Progressive Writers’ Association in India and Pakistan:1947–1970’.

22. This was the local chapter of the Cold War cultural organization, the Congress for Cultural Freedom.23. Both of these were the declared assumptions underlying the economic policies of Ayub’s notorious

‘Decade of Development’ instituted under the tutelage of the consultants from the Harvard AdvisoryGroup. The good people from Harvard are also credited with being behind Ayub’s system of ‘BasicDemocracies’.

24. The Progressive intellectual Safdar Mir used this historical record of Maududi to good effect in his attackon the Jama’at-i Islami in the late 1960s.

25. Some representative examples are Hobsbawm (1990), and Gellner (1983).26. For example, Kapferer found a nationalism based on a historically grounded egalitarian code, as

opposed to the Sri Lankan one, which rested on a deeply embedded sense of hierarchy.27. In part because communists such as Sardar Jafri and Faiz Ahmed Faiz had consistently articulated a

materialist – and hence necessarily secular – understanding of culture.28. Traditional percussion instruments.29. Dancers’ ankle-bells.30. Alif is, of course, the first letter of the Urdu (as it is of the Arabic and Persian) alphabet. This is a sly refer-

ence to Mian Iftikharuddin – whom we encountered earlier – whose name in Urdu begins with Alif.31. For this he was made the victim of much red-baiting at the hands of the Jama’atis during the mid to late

1960s.32. These complex counter-arguments also point to the difficulty – and often impossibility – of separating

the ‘religious’ from the ‘secular’. At the same time, Faiz’s continuous attempts to do so point to the neces-sity from a secular/liberal/Leftist perspective of drawing a distinction between these two or at leastexpanding what is meant by ‘the religious’ aspects of culture.

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Author’s biography

Saadia Toor teaches Sociology at the City University of New York, College of Staten Island. She is a develop-ment sociologist and recently completed her doctoral dissertation on the relationship between nationalculture and state formation from Cornell University; this paper is a revised version of a chapter from thisdissertation. Originally from Lahore, Pakistan, she has been active in progressive politics both in Pakistanand in the US. Her research and political interests include the politics of culture, globalization, feminism andnationalism.

Contact address: Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work, Building 4-S Room 223, Collegeof Staten Island, 2800 Victory Boulevard, Staten Island, NY 10314, USA; Email: [email protected]

Documents

A National Culture for Pakistan