Living on the Margins. Minorities in South Asia - EURAC

its advent as dark/immoral/bad time versus good/moral and enlightened time of Islam. 15
After making a series of anti-Christian statements in which Christianity is presented as a
source of corruption and evil, the textbook historian turns towards the Jews and one of
the first sentences is about how rich trade had made them. This envy is followed by
accusations of how they corrupted their faith and misled and deceived the Holy Prophet
of Islam. The social studies textbook for Class VII, in the course of a discussion about
‘Islamic Society’, has this to say of the Jews:
Some Jewish tribes also lived in Arabia. They lent money to workers and peasants on
high rates of interest and usurped their earnings. They held the whole society in their
tight grip because of the ever increasing compound interest…In short there was no
sympathy for humanity. People were selfish and cruel. The rich lived in luxury and
nobody bothered about the needy or those in suffering. 16
The Jews are thus primarily moneylenders who have no sympathy for humanity and are
selfish and cruel. The alleged Jewish tendency to accumulate wealth is contrasted in the
subsequent pages by asserting that Islam prescribes a just distribution of wealth and
caring for the poor and needy. 17 This kind of contrast of the self and other is designed to
create both religious communities as mutually exclusive categories that are morally
opposed.
The Knife-wielding Butcher: The Sikh Other
The Sikhs constitute another minority in India where Hindus form the majority religious
community. The Sikhs are, therefore, not a strong or direct threat to Pakistan. On the
contrary, Pakistan tacitly supports the occasional rumblings of anti-state feeling in
Eastern Punjab. However, when the Sikhs do make an occasional appearance, they are
dressed in militant attire, wielding the Kirpan (sword-like knife, dagger) as butchering,
murdering and marauding hordes. The stereotype of the ‘martial race’ is conjured up in
the representation of the Sikhs, who appear as those who challenged Muslim rule.
Usually two occasions are reserved for the appearance of Sikhs on the stage of textbook
dramas. One is their takeover of the Punjab after the decline of the Mughal empire, and
the second is at the time of partition when they appear as looters, marauders and killers.
At other times, the Sikhs simply disappear into the mist of ‘history’ lying somewhere
waiting to be ‘discovered’ as actors in the historical drama by some less forgetful
textbook writer. Their function in the politics of textbook writing in Pakistan seems to be
to underscore the sufferings inflicted upon hapless Muslims who sacrificed for the Land
of the Pure. Their only role is that of the villain in the shadows who appears suddenly
from nowhere to kill the hero of the drama, the besieged Muslim.
The first type of appearance of the Sikhs, as invaders of the Punjab, is exemplified by a
social studies textbook written for Class IV in 1998. According to this representation:
15
Rubina Saigol, Knowledge and Identity, pp. 225-226.
16
Social Studies for Class VII, Punjab Textbook Board, Lahore, January 2002, p. 13.
17
Ibid. p. 18.
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