Professor Mubarak Ali has fought a long, hard, and often lonely battle. Justifiably called the “the peoples’ historian” by Syed Jaffar Ahmed — editor of Challenges of History Writing in South Asia: Special Volume in Honour of Dr Mubarak Ali and director of the Pakistan Studies Center, University of Karachi — Mubarak Ali’s contributions to the popularisation and development of history in Pakistan are second to none. Equally important have been his attempts at highlighting the limitations of nationalist historiography and dispelling many of the myths peddled by it.

There is therefore, perhaps, no historian in Pakistan as deserving of a festschrift — a volume of essays in honour of an esteemed scholar — as Mubarak Ali, especially a volume of this nature, which claims to examine the challenges to history writing in South Asia. While history has generally been much abused in South Asia, nowhere is it held in as much contempt and disregard as in Pakistan. Even in the humanities and social sciences, which have generally got short shrift in Pakistan, history is often treated as a stepchild.

For many though, this was a development foretold. After all, history would struggle to survive, let alone thrive, in the face of a sustained ideological onslaught that was predicated on a denial of history. This was, of course, a denial of a specific version of history; a version that spoke of a past which couldn’t be easily disciplined to serve the purposes of nazariya-i-Pakistan. Yet, this wasn’t merely an act of disowning the past, for history was also actively appropriated by the state and nationalist ideologues to peddle an official narrative that sought to redefine our past and shape our future. It was this narrow view of the past and the consequently narrow vision of the future that passed off as ‘Pakistani history’ in educational institutions across the country.

It is this tradition of history writing that historians in Pakistan have to contend with. This volume, then, is a welcome addition to the rather substantial body of works which critically examine the limitations of South Asian historiography. It is a compilation of articles by prominent historians in Pakistan, India and elsewhere. Taken together, these articles encompass an impressive variety of historiographical themes which range from the medieval to the modern.

The volume kicks off with an introduction by Jaffar Ahmed of Mubarak Ali’s contributions to the cause of history. This is a useful account and bibliography of Mubarak Ali’s works, which all together amount to dozens of books and countless numbers of pamphlets and articles. Taken together, these works cover a breathtaking range of themes and periods, from Mughal India to the nationalist movement in Sindh, and from the role of women in history to the history of food and culinary habits. Throughout this, his chief contribution has been in popularising history and rendering it accessible to a non-academic audience. In order to achieve this, most of his works have been authored in Urdu. This, as Jaffar Ahmed has pointed out, is a crucial intervention in a landscape which is flooded by polemical vernacular tracts penned by religious and nationalist ideologues.

Later in the book, Jaffar Ahmed reviews the limited ways in which East Pakistan and its separation in 1971 is written about in Pakistan (‘Pakistan’s Intellectual Discourse on the Events of 1971: Apathy, Blames, and Remorse, but not much Objective and Critical Analysis’). This is a useful survey of the literature produced on 1971, which largely views this event through nationalist lenses. Accompanying this criticism of nationalist historiography are two pieces by Sharif al Mujahid who has written an overview of the state of history in Pakistan as well as a thought-provoking methodological account on “reconstructing Pakistani press history”. Both articles, and particularly the latter, question how ‘Pakistani’ history should be written in light of its regional moorings and shared subcontinental past. These contributions aside, perhaps the most intriguing piece on history writing in Pakistan comes from Muhammad Shafique who has written about Baloch historiography as an “elitist self-assertive historiography”. While there are a number of problems with his reading of Baloch historiography, Shafique’s account is nevertheless a welcome addition to this volume, especially since there is little or no attention paid to regional histories in Pakistani historiography.

Other contributions to the central theme of this book come from India and ‘beyond’. Harbans Mukhia has adopted a longue duree view of Indology and its ties to a Sanskritised reading of history that ignores the porous nature of communitarian identities (‘India through Indological Prisms: Filling-in Some Voids’). On a similar note, Gyanendra Pandey has highlighted the importance of writing histories that complicate and contest nationalist historiography in India (‘Towards a More Capacious and Contradictory History’). Pandey himself has worked throughout his academic career on alternative narratives of communalism and nationalism. Also related to the history of nationalism and its icons is Sudhir Chandra’s piece on the two “failed heroes” of South Asia: M.K. Gandhi and M.A. Jinnah (‘Two “Failed” Heroes: Understanding Modern South Asia’), while the theme of ‘community’ and its historical development is again taken up by Sarah Ansari who deftly deconstructs the uncomplicated categories frequently employed in South Asian historiography (‘Making Historical Sense of Community?: Reflections on Developments in South Asia, Pakistan and Sindh’). Additionally, there are two essays, by Ruby Lal and Raziuddin Aquil, which question the historiography of medieval India (‘Rethinking Mughal India’ and ‘The Study of Sufism in Medieval India’). Lal in particular does an impressive job of showing how Mughal historiography can move beyond its favoured themes of “military and political power”.

Other articles, unfortunately, have precious little to do with the central theme of this book. That’s not to suggest, however, that these essays are not impressive in their own right. Standing out in particular are Kamran Asdar Ali, with his work on literary and cultural debates in the formative period of Pakistan, and Nadeem Omar Tarar, with his piece on the formation of the colonial state in Punjab. Somewhat less insightful is the piece by Suchetana Chattopadhyay who examines the impact of the First World War on Calcutta. Also included are three articles which seem somewhat out of place in this volume. Rubina Saigol, for instance, examines issues pertaining to women’s education in Pakistan while Pervaiz Vandal reviews the state of art and architecture education in the country. Lastly, Ishtiaq Ahmed looks at the peace movement of diasporic intellectuals in the wake of the 1998 nuclear tests in South Asia.

Equally odd is the arrangement of the volume itself. Aside from the essay on Mubarak Ali’s work, the remaining articles have been arranged along the lines of contributions from Pakistan, India and ‘beyond’. The most sensible arrangement, as the editor partially acknowledges, would have been to group the essays thematically. Yet, this structure was overridden in favour of one which would give due recognition to the ‘seniority’ of certain contributors. Perhaps, as a first step towards challenging dominant historiography in South Asia, academic hierarchies also have to be given less importance without seeming ‘disrespectful’.

Nevertheless, what seems to be the most prominent omission in this volume is an essay on the state of archival resources in South Asia, and particularly in Pakistan. This, perhaps, is one of the most daunting challenges to the discipline of history. In Pakistan, for instance, most archives are in state of disrepair owing to a chronic lack of funding and resources. This doesn’t include district offices where historical documents are destroyed as a matter of course. Further complicating the problem are the arcane and often arbitrary procedures for declassifying historical records, especially from the post-colonial period. And while there are many other problems that could be added to this list, one of the most significant impediments in writing history in South Asia is the lack of access for Pakistani and Indian researchers to each others’ archives.

Yet, for all its shortcomings, this volume comes at a crucial time, when the need for challenging the dominant narratives in South Asian, and particularly Pakistani, historiography is greater then ever before. This indeed is the first step for history writing to move in new directions. Some of those have been pointed to by Professor Mubarak Ali who, more than anyone else in Pakistan, has emphasised how the battle for the future of Pakistan is inextricably linked to the battle of writing its history. It’s up to others now to further the cause which he has struggled for throughout his career.

The reviewer has a PhD in South Asian history from the University of Oxford

Challenges of History Writing in South Asia(Historiography) Edited by Syed Jaffar AhmedPakistan Study Centre, KarachiISBN 978-969-8791-43-8506pp.