In last week’s column, I discussed how certain Pakistani historians challenged the ‘reactionary’ national narrative constructed by the state after 1971, when the country’s eastern wing violently broke away to become Bangladesh.
The post-1971 narrative amplified Political Islam, weaving it into what was officially branded as the “Pakistan Ideology” in 1978. Though some historians began dismantling this construct in the 1980s, it took another three decades for their efforts to bear fruit.
Today, the state has not only softened its stance towards these counter-narratives, but is actively borrowing elements from them to fashion a brand-new national identity. This emerging narrative seeks to reposition Pakistan as a moderate, organic continuation of the ancient civilisations that flourished along the Indus River for over 5,000 years.
Works of scholars such as K.K. Aziz, Sibte Hassan, Ayesha Jalal, Mubarak Ali, Muhammad Waseem, Aitzaz Ahsan and, later, Abdul Hameed Nayyar, Rubina Saigol, Pervez Hoodbhoy, M. Qasim Zaman, Manan Ahmed Asif and Ali Usman Qasmi, are instrumental in providing the intellectual material for this quiet shift.
For decades, Pakistani historians who challenged the state’s narrative faced censorship, exile, isolation and financial ruin. Yet, the perspectives they championed are now quietly shaping the country’s evolving identity
By the mid-2000s, counter-narratives became easier to evolve, but doing so in the 1980s and 1990s was a rather dangerous pursuit. In this column, I will explore this, alongside a now largely forgotten historian who pioneered the pursuit of challenging state-curated history, long before the state’s reactionary turn was fully formalised after 1971 and was cemented in the 1980s.
In 1977, the source material Aziz was using to write a book on the ‘sensitive’ Hamoodur Rehman Report, was confiscated and allegedly destroyed by the Ziaul Haq dictatorship. The report was the outcome of a commission set up by the Z.A. Bhutto regime to investigate the civil war in East Pakistan. After Bhutto’s fall in July 1977 in a Zia-led coup, Aziz was forced to leave the country. In exile, he managed to find a research position at Heidelberg University in Germany.
In 1985, during the peak of the Zia dictatorship, Aziz chose to return to Pakistan, where his brother-in-law provided him with a place to live in Lahore. Here he wrote his most influential book, The Murder of History.
Though published by Najam Sethi’s Vanguard Books, The Murder of History faced severe distribution hurdles from a regime hellbent on making it disappear. The book had used original source material to expose the glaring historical discrepancies that had crept into Pakistani textbooks after 1978. According to the late author and journalist Khaled Ahmed, when Aziz ran out of funds, he approached several wealthy patrons that he believed valued intellectual pursuits. But none replied.
Relief came in 1994 when Benazir Bhutto’s second government sent Aziz to London, employing him at the Pakistan High Commission, so he could continue his multiple research projects. This stability ended in 1996, when the Benazir government was dismissed by President Farooq Leghari.
Fortunately, the alumni of Lahore’s Government College (Ravians) stepped in to fund his research and stay in London, though this support from the Ravians eventually dried up in 1998. Upon returning to Pakistan that same year, Aziz was told he could no longer stay at his old Model Town residence. His once-doting brother-in-law had finally had enough of him. Aziz tried to earn a living as a lecturer, but discovered that no college or university would dare hire him.
The Murder of History had ruffled too many feathers in the state, even though Aitzaz Ahsan’s counter-narrative, The Indus Saga, was by then gracing the shelves of all major bookstores. Vanguard had already issued a second edition of The Murder of History in 1993 and, riding the wave of the popularity of counter-narrative literature generated by Aitzaz’s book, the publisher released a third edition in 1998. Driven by the increasing public interest in counter-narratives, The Murder of History finally began to sell well, more than a decade after it was first published.
Although Aziz left Pakistan once more in 1999, The Murder of History had already established itself as an early work that systematically debunked the post-1971 narrative. It became an inspiration for a new generation of historians who have since driven a gradual shift in the state’s own historical outlook.
Aziz passed away in 2009, having authored over 50 books. The Murder of History has gone through 12 editions and sold thousands of copies, vindicating a tome that long threatened the livelihood and life of its author for challenging a national narrative he refused to accept.
Long before Aziz, though, there was Dr Ashiq Husain Batalvi. As a young scholar, Batalvi had worked closely with the poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal, and the founder of Pakistan, Mohammad Ali Jinnah.
Following the creation of Pakistan in 1947, and particularly after Jinnah’s demise in 1948, Batalvi had a falling out with the country’s nascent ruling elite. To Batalvi, this new leadership was abandoning the path Jinnah had envisioned. He watched with dismay as the state apparatus was infiltrated by men who had actively worked against Jinnah. These included landed elites from the anti-Jinnah Unionist Party and Islamists with whom Batalvi held deep ideological differences.
Sidelined by these factions, Batalvi left the country in 1954. Settling in Britain, he became Dawn’s foreign correspondent and earned his PhD from the prestigious School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). His first post-Partition book was published in 1961, but it was in his landmark 1969 work Chand Yaadein Chand Tassuraat [Some Memories, Some Impressions] that he lamented in detail how post-Partition Pakistan had drifted away from its original inclusive and pluralistic ideals.
Though a passionate Pakistani nationalist, Batalvi never returned to the country. To him, Jinnah’s Pakistan was long dead. He continued writing for Dawn, but his output as a historian in his lifetime was eventually overshadowed by more prolific counter-narrative historians such as Aziz, Ali and Jalal.
As mentioned, while early counter-narrative historians faced immense struggles in the 1980s and much of the 1990s, things in this regard have improved significantly since then, unlike the tightening of intellectual spaces in present-day India. Yet, certain institutional no-go areas remain. For instance, no local publisher or bookseller dares to touch Qasmi’s 2014 study, The Politics of Religious Exclusion in Pakistan. It remains one of the most thorough investigations into how the Ahmadiyya community was ousted from the fold of Islam in Pakistan.
This is a stark reminder that, while the state’s narrative has softened on some fronts, certain historical truths are still deemed too dangerous to print.
Published in Dawn, EOS, 31st, 2026
