Living on the Margins. Minorities in South Asia - EURAC

Strangers in the House
Minorities in Pakistani Textbooks
Rubina Saigol ♣
Collectively Remembering, Forgetting Together
Historical narratives are a part of the process of nation building and state formation.
They construct national memory and determine what we collectively choose to remember
and what we are required to forget as we tell the tale of our collective coming into being
as a nation and as a state. Carefully crafted national stories of suffering, loss, death, pride
and martyrdom enable a diverse and heterogeneous group of people to feel an imagined
sense of oneness called national identity. This identity is manufactured by exclusions
(forgetting, eliding, overlooking) those who do not belong, and inclusions (remembering,
glorifying and claiming) those who do belong to the nation as it is officially defined,
agreed and stamped and approved. Those who form an integral part of the nation, the
insiders, are collapsed into an imagined homogeneity of goodness, while those who are
external to the nation’s, forever challenged and precarious, self-definition- the outsiders,
are also homogenized into an evil or wicked oneness.
Nations, and particularly newly formed states, reiterate the story of their coming into
being, lest the carefully woven tale is forgotten. The wounds inflicted by the evil
outsiders, the perpetual enemies, are relived so that future generations do not forget the
blood spilled and the sacrifice given that nurtured the infant tree at its birth. Similarly,
the heroic deeds, real or conjured , of those who spilled their blood are remembered,
reiterated, repeated, retold, embellished and re-written as often as the nation’s actual
existence is challenged or threatened by enemies within and enemies without.
There are many forms of writing the legends and folktales of the nation for national
memory. There are cinematic representations, television serials, nationalist poetry and
songs, national day parades and towering monuments that all recount the ‘great history of
the nation and state’ for posterity. However, the most effective, far-reaching and reliable
method of ensuring the continuity of nationalist legends and myths is through the
omnipresent, ubiquitous and easy to acquire and grasp textbook – the textbook enables
the future generation to remember itself, its history and its glory with an ease rarely
available to other forms of public talking. It is cheap, often compulsory, available
everywhere and there is always the teacher, the school, the textbook board and the
ministry of education to ensure that the national story is told, reiterated, revised,
remembered and spewed out faithfully on an examination paper. The latter method
♣ This paper is a shortened version of the article ‘Enemies Within and Enemies Without: Representation
of the Other in Textbooks’. In Futures: The Journal of Policy, Planning and Futures. ‘Futures Beyond
Nationalism’. Vol. 37. No. 9, pp. 1005-1035.November 2005. Imtiaz Ahmad (Ed) Elsevier.
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