| Submit your comments on this article |
| India-Pakistan |
| Intellectual Discourse in Pakistan: An Indian Visitor's Perspective |
| 2006-08-27 |
| By Yoginder Sikand On the bus from Delhi to Lahore early this year, I chatted with an elderly Muslim man from Delhi who was travelling to Pakistan to visit his relatives. He identified himself as a socialist. ‘I don’t want to go to Lahore but my wife insists I should’, he said to me frankly. ‘I get so bored there. I can hardly find any like-minded people to talk to’, he went on. ‘You’ll soon discover’, he warned me, ‘that the level of intellectual discourse is so limited in Pakistan. Quite awful actually’. I thought the man was exaggerating, but I was soon to discover that he was not entirely wrong. In my interactions with a wide cross-section of people in various places that I visited in Pakistan during my one-month visit I was shocked at the pathetic state of intellectual discourse that seemed to pervade the country, which I often unconsciously contrasted with the situation in India. There are, I discovered, less than half a dozen good bookshops in the whole of Lahore, once considered to be the intellectual capital of India, that stock books in English. The vast majority of these books are, curiously enough, published in India, a few in the West and the rest, a very small proportion, are local Pakistani publications. Books on Pakistani society, based on empirical realities, are almost impossible to find, although the number of titles on the so-called ‘two-nation theory’ and the history of the Muslim League, as well as on elite politics in Pakistan, run into the hundreds. So do books on Jinnah and Iqbal, the two major ideological heroes of Pakistan, after whom a vast number of public institutions throughout the country are named. As a Lahori friend of mine quipped, ‘The intellectual scene in Pakistan is so bad that our rulers think we have almost no one else to name our institutions after’. |
| Posted by:john |
| #5 The author is right for all the wrong reasons, as usual when some communist writes something interesting. Stopped clocks and all that. |
| Posted by: Cluck Glulet6232 2006-08-27 13:31 |
| #4 "Intellectual Discourse in Pakistan" What intellectual discourse? |
| Posted by: Barbara Skolaut 2006-08-27 12:20 |
| #3 What we have here is a marxist trying to make commmon cause with islamists and being terribly disappointed when the reality of islamist life hits him in the face. |
| Posted by: john 2006-08-27 10:43 |
| #2 I could not help contrast this to what I had been reared on in the five years that I spent at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, where almost every day we were treated to a talk or a seminar by intellectuals, politicians, journalists and social activists on a whole range of pressing social issues In other words the author was himself brainwashed for 5 years. JNU faculty is dominated by marxists. Many of the maoists in Nepal are graduates. |
| Posted by: john 2006-08-27 10:38 |
| #1 Punjab University in Lahore, the largest university in the country, I discovered, does not possess a single bookshop But it has 3 mosques on the campus. No wonder they need Cuban scholarships. |
| Posted by: john 2006-08-27 10:33 |