The territorial heritage of Pakistan is quite rich. Before the Common Era and in the early Common Era, compared with other areas on the subcontinent - primarily the Gangetic Valley, Deccan and Kalinga - the Indus Valley was subject to great disruption from a variety of conquerors from the north and west. Persians (under Cyrus), Greeks (under Alexander), Greek-Bactrians, Scythians, Parthians, and the Kushans, all at some point conquered the Indus areas.
Sitting at the cross-roads of various regions - Central Asia, West Asia and South Asia - even today, Pakistan’s geographic significance provides it with a larger than life personality than would otherwise have been the case for a nation of this size.
Of course, the Pakistan idea as it was projected by its ideologues afforded at best an attenuated place to history and geography.
In the striking words of one academic, Jon Dorschner, “Pakistan was a state that inhabited the imagination rather than a particular place.” As many historians - most notably Faisal Devji - have argued, Pakistan as an idea transcended, and even negated, what was deemed in many other European nationalisms as indispensable motifs, namely a collective attachment to ‘blood’ and to ‘soil’, however mythical in reality these attachments may have been. The sense of belonging and attachment to an ancestral or historic territory and the myth of common origins, of common ancestry, were apparent in many European nationalist movements. It was also present in the Indian nationalist movement.
The ‘romantic’ form of nationalism, which rests on history and geography contrasts with the ‘enlightenment’ form of nationalism, where unity ultimately rests on belief and volition. Pakistan belonged to the latter, its sense of itself resting not on concrete geographic anchorage, nor on the membership of ‘blood-based’ community, but simply on belonging to a shared religion and the power of faith, will and belief.
We see this vision manifested in the national anthem. As Pakistani historian Ali Usman Qasmi notes, there is “the idea of land as an abstract space. None of the regions of Pakistan is named. This is in sharp contrast with the Indian anthem…The thrust of the Pakistani anthem was futuristic, meant to serve as an inaugural moment of state formation that promised a prosperous future with an earnest prayer to God to protect the homeland. The anthem does not engage with the past, other than referring to the state as the embodiment of the past’s glory.”
It is its very novelty as an idea that is both its strength and weakness. On the one side its form as a political idea provided a certain dynamism, being future-oriented and therefore open to experimentation. On the other hand as an idea it has been much contested and fought over. As the former Civil Servant and now academic, Akbar Ahmed put it: “the idea of Pakistan is greater than the reality of the country.”
