Pakistan

"Simply because it’s terribly important for Westerners to know the facts about Pakistani history and to have an understanding of where Pakistan today is coming from and how it was shaped. Ian Talbot’s book remains the standard work on that subject. His is the essential historical textbook that everybody needs to read. It’s essentially a straightforward narrative history with analysis, starting with the movement for the creation of Pakistan and then proceeding through the various stages of Pakistani history and explaining the reasons for the repeated military coups and so on. He’s more optimistic than me about prospects for democracy and progress in Pakistan. On the other hand – and this is where we agree very much and where Talbot is very strong – his work does bring out very well the resilience of Pakistani society and the fact that it’s not a failed state, that it does have tremendous resources, social toughness and even institutional toughness and that the potential for progress and regeneration does still exist within Pakistani society and Pakistani institutions. A new edition of this book is coming out in 2012 and in it he shows that Pakistan’s democratic institutions, so often decried as deeply corrupt and incompetent, nonetheless in the past couple of years have been able to bring about a very significant devolution of powers between the centre and the provinces. There has also been a rebalancing of revenues between the provinces in ways that have reduced regional and ethnic tensions within Pakistan. These changes are actually quite a significant tribute to the flexibility and dynamism of Pakistani democracy. I couldn’t say if Talbot has been translated into Urdu. I’m afraid the English-Urdu gap in Pakistan is very great and very, very destructive. Of course the vast majority of the population read and understand Urdu, but very little real scholarship and very little serious journalism today is either written in or translated into Urdu. In the field of literature, after partition and independence you had writers like Manto and great poets like Faiz Ahmad Faiz writing in Urdu. Now the biggest literary figures in Pakistan write in English. Urdu, from an intellectual point of view, has become deeply impoverished by the flight of intellectuals from Urdu into English. Then again, one of the reasons they are flying from Urdu is that the quality of the Urdu media in Pakistan, when it comes to serious analysis or thought, is frightfully bad. It’s a rather tragic situation. There is a some good scholarship about Pakistan but it is very striking I’m afraid that if you go into a specialist library such as SOAS [the School of Oriental and African Studies in London] and you look at, say, the books on the Punjab you will find a whole bookcase stretching several metres on Indian Punjab and perhaps a sixth of that on Pakistani Punjab, even though Pakistani Punjab is about four times the size of Indian Punjab. There is a tremendous lack in particular of in-depth sociological studies and political anthropology. I’m afraid the reason for this is twofold. One is that Western researchers won’t go there. Curiously enough they didn’t go there when it was relatively safe to do so. This is in part a function of the decline of regional studies in the West, a turning away from the study of other societies towards a reliance on general theory in Western academia. Now added to that are security concerns. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . On the Pakistani side, I’m sorry to say that the Pakistani higher educational system doesn’t turn out enough people who are capable of studying their own society in a sophisticated and in-depth way. Those who are capable also have a very strong tendency to want to get out of the country. They don’t want to go and live in a village in the Punjab and study the society there and get beyond the endless clichés and stereotypes about what’s happening and actually do the basic spadework of understanding that society. And so as a result you have very little of the nitty-gritty empirical material on which to form sound judgments about society and development in Pakistan and you have quite a lot of people who sit in Western universities and basically draw up general ideas and then clap them on to Pakistan with no actual idea whether these are appropriate or not."