Punjab notes: Pakistan and India: distorting and erasing history - Part II.

After the emergence of Pakistan, our elite comprising civil and military bureaucracy, landlords and nascent industrialists faced a real dilemma; how to reconcile the present with the past.

The question arose from the simple fact that the state was new but the society it inherited was old having history of thousands of years. The situation was exacerbated by another peculiar factor; the foundational principle which provided raison detre for the state's existence was rooted in a faith that had nothing to do with the distant past of the region. Another element that complicated the case further was that Pakistani society shared the past with what it separated from; India, the enemy. The ideologues of the new state bereft of a broad historical vision opted for a shortcut; denial of history. What didn't belong to their faith didn't simply exist, they pretended. They deliberately tended to forget both specificities of their own society and what they shared with India while being part of the subcontinent. They did not even understand properly what set their region partly apart from the rest of India.

Amaury De Riencourt has something relevant to say in his The Soul Of India: 'It was a strange fact that, long before the birth of Christ, the Indus Valley, birthplace of Indian culture, had become an impure land. Along with the Punjab beyond the Sutlej, the holy land of the Vedas had been repeatedly overrun by barbarians and had become unholy, soiled ground for all orthodox Brahmins, totally unfit for their permanent residence. Subsequent invasions did not improve matters. From then on, Hindu India proper started east of the Sutlej and Sarasvati rivers leaving out of Indian perimeter Afghanistan (White India), Baluchistan, Sind, and the western Punjab (roughly the area covered by modern Pakistan)'. Even this view of history isn't accepted by the ruling elite though some Pakistani scholars have tried to push this point. Acceptance means; 1, owning of Harappa/Indus Valley civilization which despite being free of orthodox Brahmanical stranglehold is considered non-Islamic, even anti-Islam, 2, in the post-Harappa society even if importance of caste-based social structure is brushed aside, one still has to deal with the lingering vestiges of Harappa, Jainism and Buddhism which were practiced here. In the conditioned Pakistani imagination all the diverse elements of the past society are lumped together and declared Hindu or non-Muslim, at least. When the...