Towards Peoples’ Histories in Pakistan: (In)Audible Voices, Forgotten Pasts

After seventy-five years of independence, the history of Pakistan remains centered on the state, its ideology and the two-nation theory. Towards Peoples’ Histories in Pakistan seeks to shift that focus away from histories of an imagined nation, to the history of its peoples.

Based on the premise that the historiographical tradition in Pakistan has ignored the existence of people who actually make history, this book brings together historians, anthropologists, sociologists and political scientists to shed light on the diverse histories of the people themselves.

Assembling histories of events and peoples missing from grand narratives of national history, the essays in this collection incorporate a diversity of approaches to the past as it opens the possibilities of multiple histories, the archives through which they are registered, and the various temporalities in which they persist.

The volume highlights and recuperates the entangled nature of history and memory within Pakistan’s social and cultural life. By critically examining both leftist and nationalist thought, Towards People’s Histories in Pakistan explores competing visions of what is meant by ’the people’, and charts new ground in developing the promise of people’s histories both within Pakistan and beyond.

Kamran Asdar Ali is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin. He is the author of Planning the Family in Egypt: New Bodies, New Selves (UT Press, 2002) and Communism in Pakistan: Politics and Class Activism 1947-1972 (I.B Tauris 2015). Ali has been the President of the American Institute of Pakistan Studies (AIPS: 2011-2017), the Director of the South Asia Institute, UT, Austin (2010-2017) and the Dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Lahore University of Management Sciences.

Asad Ali is an independent scholar based in the UK. He is the co-editor of Love, War and Other Longings: Essays on cinema in Pakistan (OUP 2020) and has taught at North American Institutions including New York University, Rutgers and Harvard. He is currently completing a manuscript entitled Languages of the Law: Islam, Liberalism and Moral Community in Pakistan.