Audio: Markus Daechsel on The Historian and the Pakistan Crisis (2010 Seminar)

The public historian of ‘Pakistan’ has to struggle with some major problems that do not exist with the same sharpness in other geographical or historical contexts. To begin with, the very subject of study is not simply a geographical area where ‘history’ in all its fullness and manifold manifestations could be observed, studied and described; similar to let us say ‘German History’ or ‘Chinese history’. ‘Pakistan’ is and always has been a political problem category, and any engagement by the public historian amounts to an explicit or implicit judgement of either ‘What went wrong with Pakistan?’ or ‘Is Pakistan really a legitimate state that is there to stay?’. This orientation – which is strongly enforced by audience expectations – precludes a full historical engagement with histories that fall outside the narrow remit of state policy or state failure, for instance, histories of regions, of arts and culture, of aspects of everyday life. At the same time, and in stark contrast to audiences in Europe or India, Pakistani public culture does not actually provide much space for the public historian. History as an academic profession has been completely overshadowed by Political Science and Security Studies, by Law and by Religious Studies. Short historical memories and absence of a rich engagement with the past in education, politics and public life mean that the historian’s interventions are confined to a very limited number of highly politicized instances, for instance, in debates about what the nation’s founder M.A. Jinnah ‘really’ meant back in 1947.