5,000 years of Pakistan?

TOXIC debates around cultural identity are a frequent occurrence in online spaces, both between people from Pakistan and among those here and across the border in India. In recent months, intense discussions have taken place on the Indus Valley Civilisation (IVC) and Pakistan’s claims of ownership of that part of this region’s history. Alongside, there is a parallel debate on the cultural status of Hindu and Sikh heritage (place names, religious sites and so on) in the area that is now Pakistan.

The IVC debate is an old one, but it’s gained more traction in recent years as the government of Pakistan increasingly draws on regional heritage as part of its cultural projection, both online and in public spaces such as global trade and exhibition shows. This is not something entirely new — after all R.E.M. Wheeler’s Five Thousand Years of Pakistan came out in 1950 — but online spaces and their polarisation make both projection and bitter conflicts over that projection somewhat easier.

There are several strands in this debate worth considering. The standard right-wing position from the neighbouring country is that Pakistan has nothing to do with the IVC because the state’s creation was on the back of a Muslim minority identity that is ‘delinked’ with the ancient heritage of this region. Resultantly, a claim on ancient heritage cannot be made without a rejection of the present, and in its most extreme variant, of the very creation of a separate state.

Some respond to this by asserting that Pakistan’s population consists of a majority of people who have always inhabited this region and who share a common genetic inheritance with all past societal forms. Therefore, they cannot be faulted for claiming various bits of history, even if their cultural practices, such as their religious affiliation, has changed over time.

Any serious and sustained interrogation of the Pakistani state’s cultural politics would inevitably bring the tension between projected identity and geography to the surface.

Closely associated to this position is the somewhat more fantastical claim that the geographic lands that now constitute Pakistan were always a distinct sociopolitical entity stretching all the way back to the IVC. The creation of a separate state, then, is merely geographic reality taking on a distinct political form in 1947.

The most important thing in all of these debates is that they cannot be settled on some objective benchmark of what counts as authentic cultural heritage and what counts as appropriation. Heritage, like all other cultural forms, is a contested domain. Winning this battle is a question of political power, social influence, mass acceptance and popular belief. It is very possible that 100 years from now, this debate appears entirely meaningless because of how politics and societies evolve.

Without conceding to the critiques from across the border, which frequently aim to deny legitimacy to Pakistani statehood, and more viscerally to the Muslim presence in South Asia, there are some interesting aspects to this question that point to ongoing and unsettled tensions in the Pakistani political and cultural sphere. The first is the long-standing tension between geography and identity, which has characterised Pakistani statehood from its origins.

While authors like Faisal Devji and others have talked about this more extensively and with much more nuance, there is no avoiding the fact that the Pakistan Movement delinked its idea of the nation from a distinct geography, choosing instead to place itself within the broader ideological formation of a transregional Muslim community, or more narrowly, within Indo-Muslim historical lineage, which again covers the entire geography of South Asia. As David Gilmartin points out, the 1946 election results in both West and the erstwhile East may have given territorial roots to the Pakistan Movement, but they did so without fully resolving the territory-culture question.

The second, and related, tension concerns the Pakistani state’s own project of building unitary nationhood around Muslim identity that supersedes ethno-linguistic affiliation within its territory. This identity too was imagined and curated with a distinct flavour of Muslim modernism closely associated with 19th-century Islamic revivalist movements in north India, at the expense of other local Muslim traditions and beliefs, which were deemed unorthodox or too heterodox for a project of modern citizenship.

The project of building a national identity around Muslim political subjectivity also comes with its own version of the past, which prioritises some historical features and events, such as the spread of Islam in north India, while ignoring or sidestepping others. Again, it does not necessarily leave much space for other types of geographic heritage, in its ancient form (the IVC) or its more recent form (non-Muslim sites in present-day Pakistan).

Obviously there is nothing stopping the state and sections of the commentariat from making an IVC pivot as part of a new imagination of Pakistan’s past. The country has been around for almost eight decades so it can afford to take some experiments on the cultural front, especially if the intention is to build a tourist economy and gain attention on heritage matters. The Egyptian state is a parallel example, given how much it has leaned into ‘ancient Egypt’ via the billion-dollar Grand Egyptian Museum as a way to gain international legitimacy.

But any serious and sustained interrogation of the Pakistani state’s cultural politics would inevitably bring the tension between projected identity and geography to the surface. And this isn’t just about what the IVC means for Pakistan, but what do other, still practised local customs, languages, practices, and forms of collective/ethnic affiliation mean for the notion of a unified Pakistani identity and its attendant politics.

Ultimately, it may be easier to incorporate an artifact from 5,000 years ago or a street name from 150 years ago into a digestible story about the past, given that neither has any living political form or inheritor in the present. But it is obviously far more difficult to confront and accommodate the diversity that is still politically, socially and culturally active today.

The writer teaches sociology at Lums.

X: @umairjav

Published in Dawn, May 25th, 2026