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American scholar calls for rewriting Pakistan`s history `without fear`

By Peerzada Salman 2016-01-21
KARACHI: The first session on the second day of the 25th International History Conference at Hamdard University on Wednesday morning was marked by some insightful research papers presented by a diverse group of scholars.

Dr Richard Barnett of the University of Virginia spolce on teaching of Pakistan history in the United States. He said South Asian history had been dominated by study of India at the expense of Pakistan and Bangladesh. He said he had been teaching for the past 35 years the only perennial history course on Pakistan in North America.

Dr Barnett said his idea was to unpack and discount the overwhelming and chronic media emphasis on the so-called global war on terrorism, and at the same time explain Pakistan`s uniqueness in the trajectory of the medieval background of conversion in South Asia; the structural effects of being the last part of South Asia conquered by European imperialIsm; the serial redefinitions of Islamic belief, practice and political application before and during the British Raj; and Palcistan`s role as America`s whipping boy. He said on the first day of his class, he asked his students to fill out a one-page survey that why they were there and what they expected to learn. He said some of the topics that the studentsemphasised were `Why Pakistan exist s`, `(Pakis tani) people`s daily lives`, `Sufism` etc. Indian students would raise issues such as `Why Pakistan hates India`.

Dr Barnett said in his class there were four papers but no exams. He said choosing reading material for students was always a challenge. He mentioned many titles of books that he recommended to his students. In the category of fictional reading, he mentioned the names of Sara Suleri and Shaukat Siddiqui and told the audience that one of his students was briefly detained for carrying Shaukat Siddiqui`s book Khuda Ki Basti because it was translated into English as God`s Own Ground. He quoted from a couple of writers` books on Pakistan and argued that contrary to what some westerners thought, natural good came out of ethos in Pakistani society constituting of a system of loyalties, tribes, regions and patriotism. He said Pakistan was not a failed state.

Dr Barnett said the unbearable lightness of Pakistan`s history was the result of the idea of Pakistan being hijacked by fear. He suggested rewriting of Pakistan`s history without fear, and the task was to be objective in historicising hope and appreciation. He said it was time for some high-ups in the US to say that Pakistanis were a good, nice and hospitable people. In the end he quoted an excerpt from Milan Kundera`s novel The UnbearableLightness of Being: `Criminal regimes were made not by criminals but by enthusiasts convinced they had discovered the only road to paradise.

Dr Sanaa Riaz, an assistant professor in the department of sociology and anthropology at the Metropolitan State University of Denver, shed light on universal education in India opportunities, policies and challenges. She said in 1947 India`s literacy rate was 12 per cent and in 2011 it stood at 74.04. In 2009 the government enacted the Right to Education (RTE) Act under which all children between ages of six and 14 must receive free education. She then gave a succinct background to the schooling systems that existed during and after the British Raj.

Dr Riaz said in 1946 the Rashtriya Swaymsevak Sangh (RSS) opened its own brand of schools to propagate the Hindutva ideology. In 1989, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) adopted the ideology to find patronage. Pointing out the social challenges following the RTE, she said caste difference was one where Dalit and Muslim students were marginalised and insulted in class. The biased treatment, she said, contributed to low attendance and dropouts.

Dr Altaf Qadir of Peshawar University gave a critique of the history of content in the secondary school textbooks in Khyber Pal
He also raised the issue of Islamic nationalism and Pakistani nationalism with reference to the minorities of the country.

Ashraf Khaja, a PhD student at Aligarh University, read out a paper on the educational policies of the Dogras towards Kashmiri Muslims. He said oppressive policies of the Dogras awakened a movement in Muslims.

Dr Tariq Rehman, who presided over the session, talked about linguistic history as a branch of history. He said in order to know that what linguistic history was, one first needed to know what it was not. He said it was not historical linguistics, nor was it a history of literature or political chronological history. He said linguistic history looked at language and its connections with a number of things, including policy and power. He said it also looked at the politics of a language prevalent in a certain period.

He divided it into three types: status planning (the ruling elite does it), corpus planning (to do with script) and acquisition planning (where government systems influence language).