Pakistani views on Porus and identity

Another theme that echoes throughout the series is that of resistance to tyranny as the characteristic attitude of the Indus region.14 This is first brought out in an ingenious revision of the standard account of Alexander’s invasion of the Punjab and his defeat of King Porus. Porus, whom Ahsan describes as “a jat raja” from Gujrat, is mentioned by Alexander’s biographer Arrian as a brave and bold captain whom Alexander captured and ultimately let go. Ahsan suggests that this
story is a cover-up for Alexander’s defeat by Porus, which he commemorates by composing some appropriate Urdu verses (7).

**************

http://www.unc.edu/~cernst/articles/AITZAZ.DOC

“Local Cultural Nationalism
as Anti-Fundamentalist Strategy in Pakistan”
Carl W. Ernst
Department of Religious Studies, University of North Carolina-Chapel
Hill
Published in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle
East 16 (1996), pp. 68-76.
Copyright © Carl W. Ernst; not to be reproduced without permission

National identity would seem to be an unavoidable issue in world political culture in the late twentieth century. Every nation-state functions as an absolute sovereign unit, its borders defined with mathematical precision, its administrative and military units laid out
in full bureaucratic complexity, and equipped with the full regalia of symbolic authority, down to flag, currency, and stamps. All these prerogatives are guarded with special zeal in states that formerly were colonies. The glory of independence did not guarantee a clear sense of national identity, however. The massive experience of 19th-century European colonialism in Asia and Africa left in place institutions created along European lines, staffed by native bureaucracies trained by colonial administrators. Recreating
historical and cultural links with the pre-colonial past was a task taken with utmost seriousness by nationalist theoreticians the world over. In this quest to define national identity, the most problematic issues have typically revolved around questions of language, ethnicity and religion.

Ever since the creation of Pakistan in 1947, one of the most hotly
debated questions there has been that of Pakistan’s national identity.
Was the nation founded as the ideal Islamic state, or was it to be a
modern secular state where the destinies of Muslims could be worked
out without oppression by a Hindu majority? Islamic fundamentalist
thinkers like Maududi were theoretically opposed to nationalism as a
divisive force within the global Muslim ummah, and they accordingly
criticized the establishment of the Pakistani state. Nonetheless,
once Pakistani independence was achieved, they were gradually drawn to
the prospect of fully Islamizing the state. The increasing strength
of ideological formulations of Islamic identity has been evident in
Pakistan over the last two decades. Landmark concessions were granted
to Islamists by Zulfikar `Ali Bhutto in the 1970s, while a major
program of Islamization was announced by Gen. Zia al-Haqq. In the
post-Zia period the mantle of Islamization has fallen to the Islami
Jumhuri Ittihad (IJI) led by Nawaz Sharif, and there are a number of
vocal proponents of implementation of Islamic legal systems in order
to attain the objective of a nation with a fully Islamic identity.
In this paper I do not propose to relate a detailed history or analyze
the particular features of Islamic fundamentalist movements in
Pakistan. I wish simply to note that this is a critical ongoing issue
in Pakistan as well as in other formerly colonized nation-states with
majority Muslim populations. The fact that this category includes the
majority of Muslim countries means that the question of national
identity in all these cases has similar issue parameters of language,
ethnicity, and religion. That is also one of the reasons that the
topic of Muslim fundamentalism looms large in the fears of
Euro-American journalists and foreign policy strategists. On a
comparative level, one can also extend the analysis to states where
fundamentalist versions of other religions have attempted to exert
control by ideologically redefining the role of the state and national
identity.

The arena of choice for staking out claims of national identity is
history. For Pakistan, the debate most frequently takes the form of
argument about the true intentions of the founding father,
Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad `Ali Jinnah. The letters to the editor columns
of Pakistani newspaper are frequently filled with salvos citing
chapter and verse from various documents, resolutions, and speeches of
Jinnah to shore up a particular interpretation of the true nature of
the Pakistani state. The historical thinness of the dossier makes
this material difficult to use as a satisfactory basis for national
identity. How can the separate ethnic groups of Sind, Punjab,
Baluchistan, and NWFP be made to feel that their ambitions and
identities are perfectly enfolded by the formulations of a leader who
died shortly after the birth of the nation? Jinnah’s distinctly
secular upbringing and his ambiguous statements about religion make it
even more difficult to accommodate his vision to any form of Islamic
identity. During the Zia period the slogan was constantly unfurled on
banners, Pakistan ka ma`na kya? La ilaha illa allah, Muhammad rasul
allah: “What is the meaning of Pakistan? `There is no god but God,
and Muhammad is the messenger of God.'” As a sentiment asserting the
identity of Pakistan with Islam it may have seemed admirable, but the
slogan left out any reference to the culture or history of the region,
which is precisely what differentiates Pakistan from other Muslim
countries such as, say, Algeria or Egypt. In fact, the only thing
about this slogan that is particularly Pakistani is the Urdu phrase
that raises the question of identity; the Arabic answer that asserts
this to be universal Islam is poignant in its transcendence of the
actual situation of Pakistan. This kind of abstraction may have
occasioned the dry remark attributed to Wal* Kh*n, who put national
identity into the longer-term perspective of religion and ethnicity:
“We have been Pakistanis for forty years, we have been Muslims for
fourteen hundred years, but we have been Pathans for four thousand
years.”

For this discussion I would like to comment on a highly interesting
recent attempt to recover Pakistani national identity. This was
presented in a series of newspaper articles published in the fall of
1993 on “The Cultural History of the Indus Basin,” written by
prominent PPP leader and constitutional lawyer Aitzaz Ahsan; Ahsan
promises that the articles will be revised for publication as a book.

The author has had a fairly long career in Pakistani politics, acting
as a provincial minister in Punjab during the period of Zulfikar `Ali
Bhutto (probably the youngest provincial minister in Pakistan’s
history), and he joined the Tahrik-i Istiqlal party for a brief time
in the late 1970s. He attained prominence over the long term while
acting as chief legal counsel for Benazir Bhutto, particularly during
her legal battles with Gen. Zia al-Haqq, and he has also acted as
Minister of the Interior on a federal level. Ahsan won a legislative
position from Punjab in the 1990 elections, when the People’s Party
suffered a general electoral setback, but he lost a bid for election
in the recent 1994 elections. He has now been appointed by Benazir
Bhutto to a four-year term as Senator. His theoretical exposition of
Pakistani identity thus emanates from the highest political circles of
the current government.

The general project that Ahsan proposes is to retrieve Pakistani
identity from a historical continuum six thousand years old,
stretching from Mohenjo-Daro to the colonial period. Whether Islamic
or non-Islamic, figures including the Mauryan Buddhists, Raja Rasalu,
the Tughluqs, Hindu Bhaktas, Sikh Gurus, and Punjabi Sufis all have
contributed to an enduring folk culture that has survived wave after
wave of invasion and central government oppression. He has presented
the argument in a series of twenty articles, with separate titles,
published in a recently-founded English-language daily in Lahore, The
News, with the following outline:

1. (Aug. 13). The Twain–Patliputr to Pakistan
2. (Aug. 20). The Historical Divide
3. (Aug. 27). The Mullas of Mohenjodaro
4. (Sept. 3). The Man on Horseback
5. (Sept. 10). The Iron Grip of the Iron Hand
6. (Sept. 17). Buddha and Iron Destroy the Tribe
7. (Sept. 24). Porus: The True Story
8. (Oct. 1). Pax Mauryana: The First Universal State
9. (Oct. 8). The Oxus and the Indus
10. (Oct. 15). The Indus in the Medieval Period
11. (Oct. 22). The Romance of Raja Rasalu
12. (Oct. 29). Prelude to Islamic Conquests
13. (Nov. 5). The Arab Invasion
14. (Nov. 12). More Men on Horseback
15. (Nov. 19). The First Feudal State
16. (Nov. 26). Turbulent North, Peaceful South, and Panipat
17. (Dec. 3). The Second Universal State
18. (Dec. 10). Resistance, Opportunism and Consumerism
19. (Dec. 17). The Bhaktis, Nanak and the Sufis
20. (Dec. 24). Coming to Some Conclusions

The main thesis, which I would like to explore in some detail, is that
the Indus basin culture is ultimately separate from both the Indian
subcontinent and the Arab region, having its most important links
instead with Central Asia. Using a modified Marxist-flavored
socio-economic analysis, Ahsan argues from this position that the
basic character of Pakistani identity is incompatible with religious
fundamentalism. His historical survey proposes that resistance to
tyranny is the fundamental characteristic of the Indus culture, and as
an important related theme he stresses the independent and leading
role of women. Borrowing an analysis of nationalism from Benedict
Anderson, I would like to characterize this effort as a classic
example of the formation of an “imagined community” through print
journalism in the language of power, in this case consciously modeled
on the well-known example of Jawaharlal Nehru’s The Discovery of
India. It appeals to local cultural identity as a strategy to oppose
Islamic fundamentalism in Pakistan, which is assisted by Ahsan’s
portrayal of his study as a Nehruvian prison project, positioning him
as the champion of liberation from imperialist authority. Questions
remain, however, as the question of multiple ethnic and linguistic
particularity in Pakistan is glossed over by a Punjab-centered
narrative.

The first essay by its title, “The Twain,” immediately suggests a dyad
of opposites, like Kipling’s “East and West,” which shall never meet;
these of course are Pakistan and India, poised forever in a balancing
act. In his preface to this essay, Ahsan speaks of several months
spent in New Central Jail, when he was troubled by doubts about the
fragility of Pakistan, and the danger that it would revert to India
one day. His thoughts turned to the inviolable oneness that Nehru had
discovered in India, expressed in The Discovery of India, a book
written in the Ahmednagar Fort prison in the early 1940s. Ahsan’s own
“journey” through the contemplation made possible by imprisonment
would continue, he notes, in the jails of Sahiwal, Faisalabad, and
Mianwali. He writes of the vision that unfolded to him “of myself as
part of a magnificent continuum,” something destined as an
inheritance. He began to explore this vision through history and
myth, writing the entire study during his jail terms. Disarmingly, he
makes no claim as an historian, but presents his conclusions as the
results of a journey of self-discovery. Although the primary
importance of the parallel with Nehru is symbolic, The Discovery of
India has been clearly on Ahsan’s mind, and he quotes directly and
indirectly from the book on more than one occasion.

Where Ahsan disagrees with Nehru, it is in the conclusions that the
two theorists draw from epic materials in their quest for a national
identity, as in their discussions of Mahmud of Ghazna’s raid on the
famous Hindu temple of Somnath. Here Ahsan takes certain selective
elements from Nehru, but with an opposite interpretation. The debate
concerns Nehru’s account of a military defeat suffered by Mahmud in
Rajputana after the raid on Somnath. Nehru based this on a very late
source, a 19th-century Persian history of Junagarh and Saurashtra, the
Tarikh-i Sorath, which uses Rajput bardic materials to relate that
the victorious Hindu armies divided their Afghan, Turk, and Mughal
prisoners according to class and enrolled them into appropriate Hindu
castes and tribes. What is odd about Aitzaz’s quotation from Nehru’s
summary is that he only cites the portion that relates how the female
prisoners were treated: the virgins among the Afghans, Turks, and
Mughals were married by Indian soldiers, but others (probably meaning
women of lower rank) were given purges and emetics to cleanse their
bowels (a euphemism for abortifacients?) before being married to men
of low rank. Aitzaz views these as “morbid procedures” that “provide
the clearest picture of the divide” between Hindu and Muslim. Nehru,
on the contrary, in quoting the incident of the captured members of
Mahmud’s army, was primarily interested in “the way foreigners are
said to have been absorbed into the Rajput clans,” and he remarks of
the “cleansing process” that it was merely “novel.” Nehru in general
downplays the religious significance of Mahmud’s invasions, arguing
that “the whole of central, eastern and south India escaped from him
completely”; unlike historian Romila Thapar, whom Ahsan relies upon
elsewhere, Nehru regards Mahmud in an almost entirely secular light,
as one who “used and exploited the name of religion for his
conquests.” Thapar in this early (1966) book still speaks of the
temple raids as being partially motivated by “the religious
motivation, iconoclasm being a meritorious activity among the more
orthodox followers of the Islamic faith.” Here Aitzaz chooses
Thapar’s narrative as a better fit than Nehru’s for his argument.

In its present form, Ahsan’s study is much shorter, and unlike Nehru’s
book it does not contain any discussion of the British colonial period
of history. It appears from Ahsan’s projection of the forthcoming
revision in book form that it will have a much more comprehensive
scope, again possibly with an eye to Nehru. Ahsan’s choice of Nehru
as a foil was perhaps a natural one, given the anti-fundamentalist
tone of this series; Nehru’s secularist position and reservations
about the public role of religion are remarkably close to Ahsan’s
views. The real difference between the two obviously lies in the
precise nature of the national identity that may be “discovered”
through a study of history.

The problem, then, is the myth of Indian unity, to which the existence
of Pakistan is the primary challenge. This Indian unity is assumed
“with an arrogance entirely Indian” in the epic Mahabharata, it is
suggested even by the geographical map, and it is argued in Hindu
religious thought from Shankaracarya to Vivekananda. Ahsan notes that
this unified concept of India was given particular force by the
British Raj. The only alternative offered to the Pakistani has been
that of Arab identity, which came with the Islamic religion. But
Ahsan argues that the culture of the Indus has little to do with
either Indian or Arab (1). Only rarely has an Indian empire like that
of the Mauryas held the Indus; contact with the Arabs was brief, and
limited mostly to portions of Sind. Insofar as the Pakistan region is
connected with another area, it is Central Asia that has greatest
importance, particularly in terms of economic relations (“the means of
production”); the Indus basin forms in effect a shifting and
semi-porous dividing line between the Central Asian and Indian
civilizations.

A review of the social patterns, of economic activities, for the
political movements, of culture, of the religions and rituals,
throughout the history of this area, in comparison with those other
areas will establish its distinctiveness and uniqueness. It will
point to the need to discard either the defensive approach towards the
Indian society and culture, or the obscurantist leap towards the Arab.
It will hopefully reassure the Pakistani in the pride that he must
take in what he is: a Pakistani, a citizen of the Indus valley, with
a richer, more glorious history and past than any other area in the
region (2).

The historical argument for the separate character of the Indus points
to the Persian and Greek conquests (7) as evidence of an early Central
Asian connection. After the brief Mauryan ascendancy, the rise of the
Bactrian Greeks was further evidence. “Historical gravity has always
pulled the Perso-Afghan areas of Central Asia and the Indus towards
each other” (9). The overseas trade in the Arabian Sea, and the
monsoon-driven boats from the Persian Gulf, bypassed the Indus and
went straight to the coast of Gujarat (10). In terms of trade, a
constant factor over the years since Bactrian and Kushan times was the
import of horses from Central Asia, since the hot Indian climate was
inimical to horse-breeding. The military superiority of Central Asian
nomads consequently made raiding a favorite activity. “To the Central
Asian soldier-kings, the Indus was their lawful and natural domain,
the inheritance, so to say, of their forefathers” (14).

The realm of religion and culture also demonstrates the
distinctiveness of the Indus region. Islam came to the Indus
primarily through Sufi missionaries from Iran and Central Asia.
Ahsan observes a curious point about the spread of Islam in the
region. Because of the raiding proclivities of the Central Asians,
with slaves a frequent object, Indian converts to Islam always changed
their names to Muslim names, to escape the potential danger of
enslavement; this absence of pre-Islamic names, he maintains, is a
feature unique to this area. When speaking of the ephemeral nature of
Arab control over the lower Indus, Ahsan seems to justify Mahmud of
Ghazna’s overthrow of the Isma`ili kingdoms of Multan and Mansura, not
because they were heretics but on the grounds that they owed
allegiance to foreign Arab rulers (14). Although the Delhi Sultanate
established in 1192 (often in fact ruled from Lahore) did create a
genuine “Indian-Muslim” empire, Ahsan plays down its pretensions to be
a truly great empire, and he notes that Turkish, Afghan, and Mughal
rulers all cherished in vain the dream to establish a great empire in
Central Asia (15). The Indus region, he observes, differed from the
south of India in every important respect, although Rajasthan and the
Gangetic plain shared characteristics of both regions. The north he
characterizes as militarized, puritanical but tolerant, and feudal,
while the south was tribal, pastoral, and pacifist, with a strong
tendency toward the erotic esthetic of tantra and temple dance. The
militaristic tendency worked to the impoverishment of the feudal north
in wasteful warfare, while the south grew rich from ocean trade (16).
Ultimately, all efforts at cultural synthesis between these diverse
regions failed. Ahsan acknowledges that the poet Amir Khusrau’s
delight in things Indian made him “the first nationalist,” only to be
matched later on by Sufis like Bulleh Shah, Sultan Bahu, and Shah
Latif. But these efforts, along those of the bhakta reformers
Ramanand and Kabir, Akbar’s eclectic religion, and royal marriages
between Mughals and Rajputs, all failed to bridge the civilizational
gap (19). It is here that we see the greatest contradiction between
Ahsan’s vision and that of Nehru, who remarked, “Akbar’s success is
astonishing, for he created a sense of oneness among the diverse
elements of north and central India.”

Meditation on the distinctive character of the Indus region produces
the first clues to the anti-fundamentalist thesis. In searching back
through the mists of earliest history, Ahsan comes up with what is
undoubtedly the best line of the series, in the title of the third
essay, “The Mullas of Mohenjo-Daro.” This was, as he later
acknowledges (20), the most controversial thesis in his entire
presentation, and it would be interesting to see the resulting letters
to the editor. Scanning the ruins of Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa, Ahsan
notes their relatively high technological level in construction and
flood control, combined with a lack of any palace structure. The
prominent water tanks and other features suggest a rule by priesthood,
to which Ahsan attributes the stagnation and decline of this otherwise
impressive civilization.

Priests, not kings, thus governed the Indus cities. Dogma
(Mulla’ism), not monarchy ruled. Religious doctrine, not the force of
arms, expropriated the product and crops from the primary producers.
The food surplus was yielded not out of fear of the sword, but by the
fear of divine retribution. A minimum of violence was involved. . . .
The clergy was characteristically conservative and opposed to
development and change. . . . Development and innovation were
anathema, as these have the natural potential of weakening the hold of
obscurantists. . . . . But for the twentieth-century archeologists,
there may still have been no trace or evidence whatsoever of the great
and rich civilisation that had atrophied and disappeared under the
dead weight of the Indus sands and the orthodox, debilitating dogma of
the conservative priesthood (3).

This richly rhetorical passage was undoubtedly meant to target not
just the ancient inhabitants of Mohenjo-Daro, but rather the mullas
who lead fundamentalist groups in Pakistan today.
In his attack on fundamentalism, unlike many liberal apologists for
Islam, Ahsan does not argue that Islam offered equality, in contrast
to the Hindu caste system. He sees Arab Islam as temperamentally
unsuited to the Indus region. “Arabs were brutally patriarchal. The
Indus civilisation was tempered by the soft strains of matriarchalism”
(13). Arab Islam developed in a tribal patriarchy, and it did not at
first deal with the kinds of family structure possible in agrarian
regions; therefore Islam caught on more readily in the Indus region
when it was imported from civilized Iraq and Persia rather than
directly from Arabia. In any case, Ahsan feels that religion is only
part of the picture. “To restrict the differences to merely those of
religion, is to refuse to comprehend the issue. Fundamentalists on
both sides of the Indo-Pak border are doing just that. Of such
all-pervading differences, the religious difference is only one
aspect. It is not the whole.” With this understanding, peaceful
coexistence like that between Germany and France should be possible
between India and Pakistan. He stresses that the Sufis, whom he
regards as the real bearers of Islam, were non-dogmatic. The popular
Sufi poems in folk idioms, he feels, were a direct response to the
zealously dogmatic authoritarianism of Aurangzeb. “The Sufi’s message
rejected orthodoxy outright, both Muslim and Hindu.” By retelling of
the folk tales of the region, they “took the opportunity to preach the
lessons of love and tolerance, and to denounce rigid social customs
and the intolerance of the rulers and the clergy.” Their poems with
heroines like Heer and Sohni reveal the true role of women. “The
woman in the Indus region has always had a leading role, whether our
fundamentalists like it or not. The rejects of the cultural tradition
of the progressive Indus region cannot change those traditions,
howsoever they try” (19).

These last forceful points should emphasize the remarkable importance
of the status of women in Ahsan’s argument. It seems reasonable to
suggest that this argument has special political significance for the
legal counsel to Pakistan’s first woman president. After all, one of
the most frequent jibes of Benazir Bhutto’s Islamist opponents was the
assertion that Islam requires women to avoid the public and political
sphere. Ahsan, as just mentioned, finds evidence for a matriarchal
society in the pre-Islamic Indus society, as witnessed in the myths of
Krishna and his multiple marriages; these assume “widespread
assimilation of countless matriarchal and matrilineal aboriginee
tribes with the patriarchal and patrilineal Aryans” (6). Epic
literature and bardic tales furnish further important evidence. The
popular tales of Raja Rasalu and Dulla Bhatti indicate that “women
enjoyed substantial importance and equality . . . Most were free to
make their own choices” (11). The heroines Heer and Sohni, among
others, further bear out this contention, as mentioned above. This
argument seems all the more significant when we consider that a
patriarchal leadership is one of the most common indexes of
fundamentalist movements worldwide.

Another theme that echoes throughout the series is that of resistance
to tyranny as the characteristic attitude of the Indus region. This
is first brought out in an ingenious revision of the standard account
of Alexander’s invasion of the Punjab and his defeat of King Porus.
Porus, whom Ahsan describes as “a jat raja” from Gujrat, is mentioned
by Alexander’s biographer Arrian as a brave and bold captain whom
Alexander captured and ultimately let go. Ahsan suggests that this
story is a cover-up for Alexander’s defeat by Porus, which he
commemorates by composing some appropriate Urdu verses (7). Another
conclusion emerges from scrutiny of the epic of Puran Bhagat.
Noticing that the hero’s companions are a goldsmith’s son and
carpenter’s son, Ahsan concludes, “a republican order prevailed in
most of the Punjab and Indus states of that era. In the kingdoms too,
the republican tradition was strong, and the authority of the king was
neither absolute nor autocratic. That is, indeed the tradition of the
Indus. (That, surely, must be the tradition of Pakistan)” (11). This
“republican” reading of the Punjabi tale recalls the “socialist”
interpretation of the coppersmith Kaveh in the tenth-century Persian
epic of The Book of Kings; since Kaveh helped lead a rebellion against
a tyrannical king, modern Iranian intellectuals argued that he should
be taken as the model of the people’s revolutionary. The
anti-authoritarian tradition is then measured by the standard of
imprisonment, and here Ahsan looks back to many distinguished
predecessors, such as the early Persian poet of Lahore, Mas`ud Sa`d
Salman, who was renowned for his prison poems. He was just “the first
in Lahore’s rich line of poets of resistance. His spirit was to live
on for centuries through Shah Hussain to the modern day poets like
Iqbal, Faiz, Jalib, Kishwar Naheed, Salim Shahid, and Javed Shaheen”
(15). Most notably, the tradition of resistance manifested in a long
series of revolts against centralized authority that was imposed over
Punjab and Sind from elsewhere. Ahsan notes the failed imperial
ambitions of the Tughluqs, which faltered due especially to the
rebellion of Sheikha Ghakhar in the Salt Range and Taghi in Sind.
Sheikha Ghakhar took Lahore in 1394, and both he and his son dared to
confront the conqueror Timur. Another figure was Sarang Khan, who
raised a peasant revolt in 1419 (15). “The Indus region remained a
hotbed of revolt. Almost every Sultan was preoccupied with quelling
rebellion in the Punjab” (16). Likewise the Lodis remained stable
until they “began to arrogate absolute power with scant consideration
for the norms and traditions of tribal counsel and participation,” at
which point tribal leaders looked again to Central Asia “for their
redemption.” Babur would be the answer. Ahsan observes that
historical references to Akbar’s architectural activities in Lahore
fail to mention that the real reason for his presence was to suppress
revolts of Punjabi peasantry. The outrage of corvée labor and
overtaxation to support courtly extravagance led to the rise of “that
brave Robin Hood of the Punjab, Abdullah, of Pindi Bhattian . . .
[a.k.a.] Dulla Bhatti . . . who robbed the rich to feed the poor.”
While both Central Asia and India have attempted to control the
dwellers on the Indus, “They stoically, but actively, resisted the
force of both sides” (18). In this connection, Ahsan also points out
the coincidence of the ten Sikh Gurus overlapping almost exactly in
time with the great Mughal emperors. Since the Sikh movement was a
response to “the conflict, war, intolerance and anarchy of the times,”
their movement appears here as another local resistance movement (18).
This trend includes the peasant revolt of the Sikh leader Banda
Bairagi (executed 1716), which also happens to be a favorite moment in
history for the leading Sikh nationalist author Khushwant Singh.
The historical legacy is mixed, however. The repeated irruption of
war and conquest has taken its toll on the psyche of the Indus valley
dweller. One unfortunate effect has been a tendency toward “the
belief in the futility of savings, and in the advantages of instant
consumption [which] seems a permanent cultural imprint, one of the
dominant traits of the Indus region.” This is explained as the result
of the rapacious invasion of Ahmad Shah Durrani, which was summarized
in proverbial form: “Whatever you spend is yours, as Ahmad Shah will
take all that you have saved.” Thus one may explain the custom of
extravagant weddings that bankrupt families. Another effect was
lowered expectations of the people regarding administrators, “the
threshold of tolerance that we have displayed towards oppressive and
cruel rulers. [Ahsan then observes sardonically, with a nod to
Bangladesh:] The Bengalis did not have the same tolerance threshold
as those on the Indus. And they separated.” Finally, political
culture was infected with a rootless disposition to form factions and
betray allegiances at the drop of a hat, a recognition of “the ease
with which governors could switch loyalties to retain their titles.”
This was a success ethic based on opportunism rather than loyalty.
“Of course, in those uncertain times, the penalty for steadfastness
was death, often of the most brutal and painful variety. Today’s
opportunists have much less at stake, but follow a cultural trait with
the facility of an easy conscience” (18).

A constant sub-theme in Ahsan’s analysis is an economic approach
colored by Marxism. This is not perceived intrusively as a strong
ideological slant, but as a general “scientific” tendency to look for
economic determinants for historical change, and a somewhat rigid
progressivist view of social structures. The absence of iron in the
Indus area, and its presence in eastern India, looms as a fatal though
enigmatic historical factor in several discussions (5, 6, 7, 9, 11).
Sometimes pastoralism is opposed to agriculturalism, while on other
occasions it is contrasted with feudalism. The role of craft guilds
is discussed in relation to the rise of the Hindu caste system. The
theory of matriarchal societies mentioned by Ahsan (6) is not accepted
today by most anthropologists, except for extreme feminists and
Marxists. Soviet scholar Y. Gankovsky is quoted on the Gupta empire
as “vast slave-owning state” (10), and the well-known economically
oriented history of India of Romila Thapar is cited occasionally.
Religion is often analyzed from this perspective. The Buddha is seen
primarily as a critic of an unjust social system (6), while the
Buddhist policies of Ashoka are evaluated primarily in terms of their
beneficial impact in terms of private property ownership and business
(8). The overall effect of this kind of analysis is to reinforce the
view that religion is just one aspect of culture that needs to be put
in the perspective of other concerns; it is not the universal solvent
claimed by fundamentalists.

How should we understand the symbolic nature of the Pakistani national
identity recovered by Ahsan? Ahsan contrasts cultural history with
the clear beginnings and endings of dynastic history, thus making a
methodological principle out of the tradition of resistance to
authority. He sees instead his task as one of finding, discovering,
and constructing the national character.

Whosoever attempts to write about the cultural history of any people
does, in fact, venture upon an [attempt?] to discover each element
that makes the contemporary individual. He, in other words,
endeavours to “assemble” the man. In doing so the historian aspires
to discover his natural and acquired impulses, emotions, responses,
habits, fears, delights, and predilections. Going into his roots, he
seeks to identify him as an individual apart from all other nations,
but as a part of his own people (18).

Ahsan judges his effort to have been successful. The goal has been to
demonstrate the existence of a separate cultural heritage for
Pakistan. “This is a distinct heritage, of a distinct and separate
nation. There is, thus, no fear of any other country devouring us. .
. . From pre-history to the nineteenth century, the Indus region has
been Pakistan. 1947 was only a reassertion of that same reality. As
such, `Pakistan’ preceded even the advent of Islam in the
Sub-Continent” (18). The problem raised by Nehru’s theory of a
unitary subcontinent has evidently been solved. The method has been
heuristic, looking for elements that can fit the theoretical needs of
the situation.

Quite frankly the purpose of the present discourse is only to select
facts and circumstances that help to highlight the dichotomy between
the Indus region and the rest of the sub-continent. These will show,
therefore, the almost unbroken continuity of a distinct social and
political order, even within the expanse of a vast and universal
empire that spanned the whole of India . . . It will thus bear
testimony to the primordial and restless impulse of the Indus region
(Pakistan), to be a distinct and independent “nation state” (17).
Q.E.D.

The project of Ahsan, which is still in the process of formation, can
best be understood in terms of the general phenomenon of nationalism
and culture that has been fully active at least since the early 19th
century. It thus exhibits the paradoxical characteristics of
simultaneous novelty and antiquity to which Anderson has drawn
attention. It is as if the very novelty of a political concept such
as Pakistan at some point requires for its legitimation a historical
reach to the farthest accessible depth of history. The same has
certainly been true of other recent nations such as Israel, with its
Biblical identification. What should never be surprising is the ease
with which the search for identity through antiquity inevitably finds
that which is most present. It can be compared with similar projects
of recovering pre-Islamic antiquity in other Muslim countries: the
Phoenicianism promoted by the Druze and Maronites in Lebanon, the
Pharaonism popular among certain intellectuals in Egypt, and the
extravagant attempts of the last Shah of Iran to connect his regime
with that of Cyrus the Great. What is distinctive about Ahsan’s
interpretation of the ancient past of the Indus is that he identifies
its ruins with his opponents. The somewhat playful and speculative
tone of his proposal acts as a rhetorical tonic, to which
fundamentalists can only reply by overly serious refutations.
In terms of technique, Ahsan’s articles also exploit resources that
typically make possible the extension of nationalism as an “imagined
community.” The newspaper format, and the later book, make this
detailed presentation available on a mass basis. It is especially
noteworthy that this has been carried out in English, the language of
the former colonial administration, which is still favored by the
administrative elite that represents Pakistan internationally. To be
sure, Ahsan bows to local languages with occasional quotations of
verses in Urdu and Punjabi. In terms of education, bureaucratic
administration, and journalism, however, English is still tremendously
important in Pakistan, despite attempts to foster Urdu (a language
born in Awadh and the Deccan) as a Pakistani “national” language on
top of the regional languages of Punjabi, Sindhi, Baloch, and Pashtu.
Ahsan’s complicated relation with Nehru reminds us of Anderson’s
dictum that nationalism is a modular phenomenon. As Anderson points
out, “It is difficult today to recreate in the imagination a condition
of life in which the nation was felt to be something utterly new.”
Yet once articulated, nationalism provides a ready-made model, which
can be modified and cut to fit, and then copied at will. It is clear
that in striving to articulate a separate destiny for Pakistan, Ahsan
was still wedded to a model earlier developed by Nehru. In creating a
separate identity, Pakistan had to start in this case from an Indian
model.

Some obscurities remain. It may be possible and even desirable to
define Pakistani negatively with respect to Arabia and India. The
identification with Central Asia is problematic, however, in terms of
its policy implications. Despite its rich emotional appeal, the
return to the ancestral roots in Bokhara and Samarqand may founder on
the first visit to the disappointing new cities that bear those names
in the post-Soviet era. Constructing Central Asia as an imaginative
homeland still leaves considerable practical difficulties to solve on
levels such as trade, that could perhaps be solved more easily with
India if the symbolic barriers of negativity could be avoided. Within
Pakistan, one wonders if the Punjab-centered narrative will be equally
accepted on all sides, despite the occasional nod to a Sindhi figure.

If Ahsan’s present version were to be adopted, would that lead to
policies of “official nationalism,” which identified the Punjab as the
true Indus society and penalized other languages and ethnic groups?
Does the nominally liberal feminist reading of Indus history act as
the excuse for defense of a dynasty led by a woman Prime Minister?
These readings would probably be too negative. The real catalyst for
this exercise has been the attempt of fundamentalist parties to use
religion as an ideology to gain control of the state. In resisting
this effort, Ahsan wishes to foreclose the fundamentalists’ attempt to
hijack the nation-state, by defining it in terms that transcend their
historical grasp. Although they will doubtless contest his right to
do so, he still has the opportunity through this exposition to ring
changes on themes that have a strong claim on the sensibilities of
Pakistani intellectuals.

The priests that first debilitated, and then brought down that rich
and vigourous civilisation [of Mohenjo-Daro], would have us today put
yokes around the necks of the better half (and more) of our
population. Yet when I ventured upon the discovery of my own roots I
found that that is not natural to the Indus man. Nor to the Indus
woman. And therefore not to the Pakistani person. There is strong
and primordial tradition of liberalism and tolerance in the Indus
valley. It allows women the freedom of learning, education, pursuit
of the arts, travel, and even of a choice of her life partner. The
deviants from this tradition of liberalism and tolerance, be they
emperors, priests, or dictators, have always paid a heavy price for
the transgression. No wonder religious parties perform so miserably
in every successive general election in Pakistan. They will have to
discover the Pakistani person before they can hope to win his support.
In the event they may of course be forced to discard their
fundamentalism (20).

Is this empty rhetoric, or will the phrases conjured by Ahsan succeed
in constructing a new identity for Pakistan, based on his discovery of
ancient traditions of anti-clericalism, women’s rights, and resistance
to tyranny? What is especially striking about Ahsan’s effort is that
he mostly refrains from using the typical metaphor of “awakening” to
true national identity, with all its unspoken assumptions about
nationalism as a natural state; instead, he is fairly straightforward
about the creative nature of his project. Nonetheless, Ahsan’s
position is not an isolated instance, but part of a larger project of
reclaiming Pakistan’s cultural identity, which has been previously
proposed by other Punjab-based writers such as Hanif Ramay and Fateh
Mohammad Khan. As David Gilmartin has pointed out, “The attempt to
reclaim this culture as a foundation for a new, politicized Punjabi identity defining a popular claim on the state remains, despite its vicissitudes, one of the most important cultural agendas in Pakistan.”
In any event, Aitzaz Ahsan has drawn the lines of the contest, and has entered into battle for the soul of Pakistan with “the mullas of Mohenjo-Daro.”

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/JatHistory/message/1716?o=0&var=1

Aashiq Hussain jatt-Punjabi folk hero Dulla Bhatti
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yL1798q03_0&feature=related

hi friend i am also bhagat singh why i am saying that maarbulas
fighting in uk gvt,scarify his lify below 23years, he not join any event ,total life scarify india . jai hind …..