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Conjuring Pakistan: History as Official Imagining

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 April 2009

Ayesha Jalal
Ayesha Jalal
Affiliation:
Associate Professor in the Department of History, Fayerweather Hall, Columbia University, Columbia University, N.Y. 10027, U.S.A.
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Extract

Even before an anthropologist‧s tour de force underlined the power of imagination as creation in narrative constructions of the “nation,” memory, myth, and might had been triumphantly parading the realm of historical scholarship. The torch of objectivity did not have to go cold for the heat of subjectivity to captivate and command audiences through print and signs, visual or aural. It is simply that the cornmodification of the past by the marketplace and the expansive imaginings of power have combined to reduce the once revered craft of the historian to a battlefield where mired imaginings posture as interpretations in a contest in which there are no umpires, only partisans. So it is not necessary to claim objective ground when presumably no such domain exists or even to spin yarns about “authenticity” and “falsification.” But it is possible to make an analytical distinction between the past as invention and the past as inspiration without denying the role of creativity or power in either conception.

Type
Articles
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 27 , Issue 1 , February 1995 , pp. 73 - 89
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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References

NOTES

Author‧s note: This article was written for a conference sponsored by the American Social Science Research Council on Nationalizing the Past at Goa, India, May 1993. I also presented versions of it at New York University and King‧s College, Cambridge. I am grateful to participants at these meetings for their helpful comments.

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7 In this paper I examine a number of required readings for this curriculum during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Among some of the used textbooks I collected, there was one in which an independentminded student had scribbled “Hell Studies”—an indication of the ongoing resistance to the tyranny of official history. This sentiment has been echoed recently by at least two Pakistani historians, Aziz, K. K., The Murder of History in Pakistan (Lahore, 1993)Google Scholar and Ali, Mubarik, In the Shadow of History (Lahore, 1993)Google Scholar. Unfortunately, both writers spend more time quibbling about “facts” than calling into question the ideologically motivated distortions in official interpretations of history.

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