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Intellectual Discourse in Pakistan: An Indian Visitor's Perspective
By Yoginder SikandOn the bus from Delhi to Lahore early this year, I chatted with an elderly Muslim man from Delhi who was travelling to Pakistan to visit his relatives. He identified himself as a socialist. I dont want to go to Lahore but my wife insists I should, he said to me frankly. I get so bored there. I can hardly find any like-minded people to talk to, he went on. Youll soon discover, he warned me, that the level of intellectual discourse is so limited in Pakistan. Quite awful actually. I thought the man was exaggerating, but I was soon to discover that he was not entirely wrong. In my interactions with a wide cross-section of people in various places that I visited in Pakistan during my one-month visit I was shocked at the pathetic state of intellectual discourse that seemed to pervade the country, which I often unconsciously contrasted with the situation in India. There are, I discovered, less than half a dozen good bookshops in the whole of Lahore, once considered to be the intellectual capital of India, that stock books in English. The vast majority of these books are, curiously enough, published in India, a few in the West and the rest, a very small proportion, are local Pakistani publications. Books on Pakistani society, based on empirical realities, are almost impossible to find, although the number of titles on the so-called two-nation theory and the history of the Muslim League, as well as on elite politics in Pakistan, run into the hundreds. So do books on Jinnah and Iqbal, the two major ideological heroes of Pakistan, after whom a vast number of public institutions throughout the country are named. As a Lahori friend of mine quipped, The intellectual scene in Pakistan is so bad that our rulers think we have almost no one else to name our institutions after. Posted by: john 2006-08-27 |
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