Pathways to Pakistan: Race, Religion, and Orientalism

The history of the Pakistan movement, whose sustained political agitation led to the creation of a new nation-state in South Asia in 1947, is often told as a story of Muslim religious separatism. In this talk, I offer a critical re-reading of early conceptualizations of “Pakistan” and explore the broader intellectual climate that formed the backdrop for such imaginations of a Muslim homeland in South Asia. Drawing on recent research, I argue that ideas about Muslim political subjectivity and nationhood were not so much informed by the Islamic tradition, but rather by European and American racial theories, the essentialization of religious identities, and Orientalist interpretations of Islamic and South Asian history.