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Pakistan
Chapter 1 Historical Setting
WHEN BRITISH ARCHAEOLOGIST Sir Mortimer Wheeler was commissioned
in 1947 by the government of Pakistan to give a historical account
of the then new country, he entitled his work Five Thousand
Years of Pakistan. Indeed, Pakistan has a history that can
be dated back to the Indus Valley civilization (ca. 2500-1600
B.C.), the principal sites of which lay in present-day Sindh and
Punjab provinces. Pakistan was later the entryway for the migrating
pastoral tribes known as Indo-Aryans, or simply Aryans, who brought
with them and developed the rudiments of the religio-philosophical
system of what later evolved into Hinduism. They also brought
an early version of Sanskrit, the base of Urdu, Punjabi, and Sindhi
languages that are spoken in much of Pakistan today.
Hindu rulers were eventually displaced by Muslim invaders, who,
in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries, entered northwestern
India through the same passes in the mountains used earlier by
the Indo-Aryans. The culmination of Muslim rule in the Mughal
Empire (1526-1858, with effective rule between 1560 and 1707)
encompassed much of the area that is today Pakistan. Sikhism,
another religious movement that arose partially on the soil of
present-day Pakistan, was briefly dominant in Punjab and in the
northwest in the early nineteenth century. All of these regimes
subsequently fell to the expanding power of the British, whose
empire lasted from the eighteenth century to the midtwentieth
century, until they too left the scene, yielding power to the
successor states of India and Pakistan.
The departure of the British was also a goal of the Muslim movement
championed by the All-India Muslim League (created in 1906 to
counter the Hindu-dominated Indian National Congress), which in
turn wanted both political independence and cultural separation
from the Hindu-majority regions of British India. These objectives
were reached in 1947, when British India received its independence
as two new sovereign states. The Muslim-majority areas in northwestern
and eastern India were separated and became Pakistan, divided
into the West Wing and East Wing, respectively. The placement
of two widely separated regions within a single state did not
last, and in 1971 the East Wing broke away and achieved independence
as Bangladesh.
The pride that Pakistan displayed after independence in its long
and multicultural history has disappeared in many of its officially
sponsored textbooks and other material used for teaching history
(although the Indus Valley sites remain high on the list of the
directors of tourism). As noted anthropologist Akbar S. Ahmed
has written in History Today, "In Pakistan the Hindu
past simply does not exist. History only begins in the seventh
century after the advent of Islam and the Muslim invasion of Sindh."
Data as of April 1994
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