Conclusion

Summary

This book has pressed a range of approaches to the study of postcolonial political modernity to give shape to a genealogy of Muhajir questioning, a historically and spatially sensitive contextualization of the capacity of Muhajir nationalism in the present to question universality “from within” and remake it, in the non-elite context of the urban state of emergency, “from below.” The time of Muhajir nationalism is not the time of origins but the more arrested time of the “no longer” (Guha 1998; see Foucault 1977). By questioning their preceding attachments to Pakistan, Muhajir nationalism calls on Muhajirs to do nothing less than question themselves. Such a demand complicates our ideals of whose imagination and whose essences merit deconstruction as forms of nationalist discourse. It follows that the element of questioning, refusal, and transformation within the Muhajir nationalist imaginary complicates any attempt to periodize and interpret the history of Muhajir community formation. Since the time of independence, the groupness of Muhajirs has been imagined in terms of their exemplary embodiment of the extra-territorial ideal of Muslim nationalism. What can be said about the shifting official and popular registers of nationalist and democratic recognition in relation to which such questioning has taken place, at least since the late colonial period? And what light does this shed on the making of collective political identities, institutions, and spaces in Pakistan and South Asia today? At this stage, I wish to reintroduce some of the larger themes I have explored so far: (a) the categorical newness of Muhajirs (being the product of Pakistan's independence, Muhajirs are not marked as such within the colonial archive, (b) the subjective, material, and institutional role of mass migration in shaping Muhajirs into a certain kind of new ethnicity, and (c) the relationship of this process of representation to Pakistan's wider and freighted narrative of postcolonial nation-state formation.

What do nationalism and nationhood mean to groups, such as Muhajirs, whose self-understanding as an ethnic community does not neatly comport with the idea of the essentialist “subject of certainty”? Essentialism can be thought of as a metalinguistic practice that ties the being of an object (in this case, the past and future interests and actions of a group) to a “self-actualizing” nature removed from the heterogeneous shaping effects of history (Cheah 2003).