Memory: A Wound, A Womb

Memory is a contested field. Demagogues have tried to erase and rewrite it. State apparatuses have bent it to their needs.

- Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee

IN his novel, Shame, Salman Rushdie calls Pakistan, “insufficiently imagined...a failure of the dreaming mind”. The root of this insufficiency and failure lies in Pakistan suffering from the absence of a history. Pakistan is a nation with an insufficient past, without a long enough historical memory that nations live and suffer from. Pakistan suffers an opposite phenomenon: from the lack of memory. Being a nation built on the logic of religion, its official history had the pernicious burden of dividing its claim to an older history of the Indian subcontinent into religious lines, glorifying the Islamic and downplaying the others. Hamida Khuhro lays bare the lie of Pakistan’s history, which invents its origins from the conquest of Sindh by the Umayyad army, led by the young general Muhammad bin Qasim in 711 AD. In Sindh, textbooks mention Mohenjodaro and the Indus Valley cities, the Mahabharata, and Buddhism without serious pause or attention. Born out of the ripped belly of a beast named Partition, history for Pakistan not only reflects the severance of ties, but also a severance of memory. A country without a past remains paranoid about its future.