“I am born on the land of Pakistan. I am Pakistani.”: Terric nationalism among Hindu Pakistanis

ABSTRACT

Pakistan is known for the problems of its religious minorities. Moreover, official Pakistani nationalism is religio-ethnic – a state created for the Muslims of British India. One would expect that Pakistan’s religious minorities don’t feel a sense of belonging to it. Drawing on more than 50 interviews and four months of extensive fieldwork among working class Hindu residents of a mixed Hindu-Muslim neighbourhood in Karachi, Pakistan, this article evidences that they felt belonging to the Pakistani nation based on an embodied connection they had with the land of Pakistan through birth, nourishment from the land and similarly embodied connections of their ancestors. By presenting the idea of terric nationalism, this article critiques the ethnic/civic nationalism binary. Further it makes a case for nationalism studies to focus on the subjectivity of the subaltern to build theory.

KEYWORDS:

• Civic nationalism
• ethnic nationalism
• terric nationalism
• subaltern
• Hindus
• Pakistan

Acknowledgements

I would like to specially thank José Itzigsohn, Ricarda Hammer, Atiya Husain, Josh Pacewicz, and Meghan Tinsley for their helpful comments and suggestions. I would also like to thank the audiences at the ASA annual meeting, ASA Sociology of Development section conference, Social Science History Association annual conference and Middle East Studies Association annual meeting for their engaged comments and feedback. The article was written thanks to the financial support of the Saxena Centre for Contemporary South Asia at Brown University and NSF-IGERT grant disbursed by Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. Thanks is also due to Central European University which gave me the time and space to revise the draft. Last but not the least, I am grateful to those who helped me gain access and the participants of this research who gave me access and their valuable time.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethical concerns

The study included human research participants. Approval was granted by Brown University IRB (#1504001227).

Notes

1 Although many among the Ahmadiyya community contend that they are Muslim, the Pakistani state and many among the Pakistani society categorize them as non-Muslim.

2 Although the definition of the subaltern is debated, for the purposes of this article, I will rely on a combination of Ranajit Guha and Dipesh Chakrabarty’s definitions of the subaltern classes. For Guha, any non-elite or dominated group could be considered the subaltern (Guha 1982), Chakrabarty defined it more narrowly as “the peasants and the workers” (Chakrabarty 1992, 7). The group I study is subaltern by virtue of being working class and belonging to a dominated religion and caste in their national setting.

3 Non-Muslim population includes Christians, Hindus, Sikhs and others.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by NSF and the Saxena Center for Contemporary South Asia, Brown University.