Claiming Gandhara, rejecting its roots: Pakistan’s war with its own history

Pakistan was born violent — and poor. And it continues to exude these two grim realities.

The bloodshed of Partition is well documented, but less discussed is the economic hardship the new-born state faced. When the first finance minister arrived in Karachi, the capital of his new country, on August 15, 1947, he found the treasury so depleted that Pakistan could hardly pay its army for a few months. It took the intervention of the Nawab of Bahawalpur, who donated Rs 7 crore and even paid government salaries for a month, to keep the administrative machinery running.

But material scarcity was only the surface crisis. The deeper void was civilisational. What exactly was Pakistan? Where did it belong in history? The answer it chose was not discovery, but denial.

The princely state of Bahawalpur itself offers a telling example.

Its rulers claimed descent from the Abbasid Caliphs of Baghdad. Most historians dismiss the Arab lineage, but what it reveals is a deeper psychological impulse: the urge to flee from the soil beneath one’s feet and anchor identity in an imagined Arab past. The last Nawab’s insistence on wearing the ‘fez’ (a conical hat made of red felt that was synonymous with the Ottoman Empire), and even enforcing it among courtiers, reflected the general Pakistani tendency to search for an imagined Arab lineage.

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VS Naipaul captures this pathology with brutal clarity in Beyond Belief. He writes, “The Nawab, driving out one day, saw one of his courtiers far off on the road without his fez. The courtier saw and began to run. The Nawab gave chase in his car. The poor courtier, forgetting dignity, fearing the Nawab and his famous stick at that moment more than anything else, ran off the road and into a sugarcane field, with its razor-edged grass, and hid there.”

Pakistan today manifests the Bahawalpur syndrome. The invention of Arab ancestry has been fully incorporated. History in Pakistan, to use the words of Naipaul, “has become a kind of neurosis”, where “too much has to be ignored or angled” and there is “too much fantasy”.

And that neurosis — and the tendency to fantasise — is alive and kicking.

This selective engagement with history became evident last week when Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari asserted the country’s claim over the Gandhara civilisation, sparking widespread criticism. As aptly summed up by former Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai, Zardari has attempted to appropriate what has historically been an inalienable part of the Indic civilisation and later manifested the Afghan cultural heritage. Gandhara, with its deep Indic roots, is not a blank slate waiting to be appropriated. It belongs to a civilisational continuum that predates Pakistan by millennia and extends beyond its borders.

Here lies the contradiction: Pakistan wants Gandhara’s glory, but not its essence. It wants the monuments, but not the meaning. It wants the past, but only after it has been stripped, sanitised and repackaged to fit its Islamic script. The result is two-fold: while the pre-Islamic past is downplayed, if not totally disowned, the Islamic nature of the state is overemphasised. Naipaul hits the nail on the head in Beyond Belief as he writes, “If you hear people (of Pakistan) talking, you would believe that this great and wonderful land was nothing but wild jungle, that no human beings lived here.”

This explains why the land, which should have prided itself on being the birthplace of one of the world’s oldest civilisations — Pakistan may not highlight the Saraswati connection but could focus on its Harappa and Mohenjo-daro nomenclatures — officially recognises Mohammed bin Qasim, the Arab invader who attacked Sindh in 712 AD and killed and enslaved the very ancestors of the people who are eulogising him today, as the “first citizen of Pakistan”!

Only a nation with a twisted sense of history and identity would make the invader the “first citizen” of the country!

But then that is what happens when history is made to serve religion. In Among Believers, Naipaul recounts a letter published in Dawn suggesting Quranic verses be installed at Mohenjo-daro — not to understand the site, but to reinterpret it through a theological lens. The impulse is clear: if history cannot be erased, it must be distorted.

Zardari must explain how he claims ownership of the Gandhara civilisation when Pakistan as a country denies everything before the rise of Islam. How can his view hold up when Islamabad officially links the creation of Pakistan to the arrival of the Arab commander 1,300 years ago?

This paradox is not accidental, but doctrinal and foundational. As Venkat Dhulipala argues in Creating A New Medina, Pakistan was imagined not merely as a “refuge for the Indian Muslims”, but as an “Islamic utopia” that would be “the harbinger for the renewal and rise of Islam in the modern world, act as the powerful new leader and protector of the entire Islamic world and, thus, emerge as a worthy successor to the defunct Turkish Caliphate as the foremost Islamic power in the twentieth century”.

Such Islamic obsessions leave little room for a plural, layered past. In fact, Pakistan goes a step further as it sharpens its ideological and religious edge as the alter ego of “Hindu Bharat”. Thus, Bharat’s heroes inevitably become Pakistan’s villains — and vice versa. This explains Pakistan’s fixation with figures such as Qasim, Ghori, Ghazni, Babur, Aurangzeb, Abdali, et al. Islamabad’s hostility towards Delhi, thus, is neither accidental nor episodic; it is structural, ideological and civilisational.

Here, the contrast with, say, Iran is instructive. Despite its Islamic identity, Iran maintains a visible connection with its pre-Islamic past, including its Zoroastrian heritage. Pakistan, by comparison, remains uneasy with its own antiquity, even when it physically inhabits it.

Aatish Taseer captures this dilemma with striking honesty: the inability to embrace a past that feels culturally alien, even if it is geographically one’s own. In Stranger to History, he quotes a Pakistani as saying, "If all India became Muslim, we might have been able to identify with the Hindu past. We would have modified something. But since it did not happen that way, we cannot choose something that goes against our taste. You would not wear a T-shirt you do not like.”

Zardari may be trying to wear the Gandhara T-shirt today, but it won’t fit him. Because Pakistan’s defining narrative leaves no room for Gandhara, Harappa, or any pre-Islamic inheritance that challenges its Islamic identity. In this narrative, there is space for only one narrative, one truth, one past, and ultimately one religion.

Ever since it came into existence in 1947, Pakistan has been waging a war on its own history. Zardari’s Gandhara gambit can’t mask this treacherous reality.

(Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)