The Reluctant Republic: Ethos and Mythos
of Pakistan
By Nadeem Farooq Paracha
Vanguard, Lahore
ISBN: 978-9694026480
147pp.

Like time, history is also relative. It can be considered to take form in two ways. One is the static, black-and-white version of events — and this is the kind of history that nation states use to build societies in their preferred mould, to make loyal and obedient citizens. This is the sterile version of history that we study in schools, trawling through weighty textbooks that are designed to snuff out any spark of critical thinking in our formative years.

The other version presents life and the concept of truth in all its many complexities. This form of history exposes the inconvenient truths of our carefully held beliefs, lays bare the follies of our heroes and puts forth the simple fact that the world is not, in fact, black-and-white.

There are plenty of shades of grey in this version and within those grey patches lies some truer essence of what we could consider a more honest account of past events. This is not to say that certain factual events never transpired, but it does help clarify that which has grown murky, being as it is an honest recollection of the causes that led to those indisputable factual events, of who the prime actors were and of other details.

Official, state-approved versions of history are meant to keep the blinkers firmly in place around people’s eyes. The other version — more feral, life-like and complicated — is intended to reveal some measure of the truth without fear or favour.

Nadeem Farooq Paracha’s latest book may not tread new ground for those who follow his column, but will provide a different perspective on Pakistan’s history to those fed only official tales

Nadeem Farooq Paracha is one of the few chroniclers of the latter sort of our history. Although valued for his popular culture writings, he is, at the same time, considered somewhat persona non grata when it comes to narrating the past — warts and all — of a country that has still not come to terms with its own times gone by. His latest book, The Reluctant Republic: Ethos and Mythos of Pakistan, is a work in a similar vein.

Part autobiography and part history, The Reluctant Republic draws readers in from the get-go, by way of the author’s numerous anecdotes of personal experiences and memories that serve to garnish the grand, historical sweep of Pakistan.

The country’s slide down the path of fundamentalism mirrored a radical friend’s own personal lapse into extremism. The destructive ethnic and sectarian divides simmering in Karachi even today remind him of the doomed romance that took place in the 1990s, between a Punjabi Sunni friend of his and a Mohajir Shia girl, their families, circumstances and flaring politics of that time ripping a budding romance to shreds.

Decades later, the friend would return to Karachi — having fled earlier — to pay one last visit to the beloved now lost to the vagaries of time. “I could not help but visit the house where the girl lives. I did all secretly. The house looked deserted. It was falling apart. The paint, the bricks and a beat-up car were parked outside … but now the tiers [sic] were flat and it was rusting. I was told about the tragedies that destroyed her family. I never saw the girl again.”

The personal is the political and the political is personal in Paracha’s numerous tales of woe in the Land of the Pure. The author laces his book with more conversations, observations and even bus-stop chatter — pieces of the individual that illuminate the bigger picture of the national.

Readers who follow Paracha’s regular column in Eos may be inclined to treat this book as a sort of compendium of the same. In other words, The Reluctant Republic does not break new ground, nor is it a radical departure from his earlier books.

To truly know a place, the sensible thing is to turn to local knowledge. Paracha, with skin in the game, has that advantage and so is able to provide more depth on the subject.

This may well appeal to the author’s devout fans. It may also lead a new readership down what, for them, would be considered previously untrodden avenues of thought. However, other readers may come away feeling this is simply old wine in a new bottle.

The book is not very lengthy, and so it will not take more than a few days of dedicated reading to consume. Its three chapters serve as a smorgasbord of events that have made Pakistan what it is today. But, to Paracha’s credit, there are no holy cows: everyone gets an equal drubbing.

And why not? The state in which we find ourselves at present is a classic case of too many cooks spoiling the broth. So if a certain dictator is scorned, then seasoned democrats are as well. Paracha does not discriminate his critique on the basis of race, ideology or faith.

Neither does he discriminate on topics. The ethnic conflicts of the not-too-distant past, the cancer of sectarian violence, the dysfunction of our politics, the radicalisation of society and other social ills, all feature prominently in the pages.

It is interesting that, of late, quite a few books on Pakistan have been written from a foreign lens. Some recent works that come to mind in this respect are Karachi Vice: Life and Death in a Contested City by Samira Shackle and The Nine Lives of Pakistan: Dispatches from a Divided Nation by Declan Walsh.

However, when one wishes to truly know a place, the sensible thing is to turn to local knowledge. Paracha, with skin in the game, has that advantage and so is able to provide more depth on the subject.

So who would need this book? As said already, veteran Paracha fans will not find it terribly different from his earlier political writings. But, for an overwhelming majority — whose study of history is more or less restricted to the textbooks foisted upon them by the educational authorities — this will serve as a way to approach things from a different perspective.

In the book, Paracha rightly says that students don’t learn history; they learn a carefully crafted collection of falsehoods. But one can always make the choice of which side of history to be on, and The Reluctant Republic may be a good starting point.

The reviewer has worked as a producer in news media and analyst in the NGO sector and is faculty of media sciences at SZABIST

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, August 28th, 2022