#7 There’s more than one way to understand the portmanteau that is Pakistan, DooDahMan. The following answer from some guy on Quora summarizes the history nicely:
Where did the name Pakistan originate from?
From the Round Table Conferences that were organised in the 1930s to decide the fate of India, to be precise, the name Pakistan originated from the third Conference.
The second Conference had seen much infighting among leaders of Indian national Congress (INC), while the government in the UK changed for Labour to Conservatives. Neither INC nor the Labour took part in the third Conference, and the the Conference was participated by only 46 representatives.
Near the conclusion of the Conference Choudhry Rahmat Ali, a young Muslim nationalist presented a radical pamphlet demanding a separate Muslim state. He struck the idea while he was strolling by the Thames (according to his friend Abdul Kareem Jabbar) or riding on top a London Bus (according to his secretary Ms Frost).
The pamphlet demanded a separate homeland for “thirty million Muslims of PAKSTAN, who live in the five Northern Units of India”. He defined PAKSTAN as “Punjab, North-West Frontier Province (Afghan Province, as it was known as), Kashmir, Sind and Baluchistan” in the very first paragraph of the pamphlet.
It was drafted by him alone. But, Ali needed other people to sign the pamphlet to make it representatives. It took him about a month to get three young Muslim intellectuals to sign the document. But, as soon as it was presented at the Conference, the Muslim League took it up as their demand.
The League has already passed the Lahore Resolution, which proposed a Two Nation theory demanding a separate Muslim constitution. But, they did not have a name for it. So they adopted the name, adding an “I” in the middle to make it easier to pronounce.
In the new spelling, PAKISTAN, it also meant a land (stan) of the pure (pak).
P.S. Choudhry Rahmat Ali also proposed Banglastan for Bengali Muslims and Osmanistan as independent Nizamat of Hyderabad. The former became part of Pakistan, while the latter became part of India. |
[Dawn] What PM Shehbaz Sharif blurted out recently isn’t quite a national secret. Though none in high office can admit it publicly, in a moment of despair he admitted that wherever he visits, disdain is written on the faces of hosts. Respecting those who keep asking for loans and rollovers is hard. This, said he, is no way to live and so, "today we have to decide whether to live uprightly or by begging".