Intellectual Bankruptcy in Pakistan

Bit old but still spot on! The article has a leftist slant but still, it is an interesting commentary on the sorry state of intellectual bankruptcy in "Mamlikat-e-Khudadad".



There are, I discovered, less than half a dozen good bookshops in the whole of Lahore, once considered to be the intellectual capital of India, that stock books in English. The vast majority of these books are, curiously enough, published in India, a few in the West and the rest, a very small proportion, are local Pakistani publications. Books on Pakistani society, based on empirical realities, are almost impossible to find, although the number of titles on the so-called 'two-nation theory' and the history of the Muslim League, as well as on elite politics in Pakistan, run into the hundreds. So do books on Jinnah and Iqbal, the two major ideological heroes of Pakistan, after whom a vast number of public institutions throughout the country are named. As a Lahori friend of mine quipped, 'The intellectual scene in Pakistan is so bad that our rulers think we have almost no one else to name our institutions after'.

Even on Islam and Kashmir, two issues that are central to the way in which the Pakistani state has sought to construct the notion of Pakistani national identity, I discovered hardly any decent literature in English in the numerous bookshops that I visited. Many of the few English books on Islam I came across were actually published in India. A few others were by Western writers, while the rest, not more than three dozen titles, many of these being were poorly-researched and ideologically-driven propaganda tracts of the Pakistani Jamaat i Islami and its associated publishing houses. Likewise, on Kashmir. In Lahore's biggest bookshop that also stocks English books I came across an entire shelf of books on Kashmir, but almost all of them were written by Indian scholars, published in India and probably represented the Indian position on the disputed territory.