HISTORIOGRAPHICAL ANALYSIS OF PAKISTAN-INDIA RELATIONS: NATIONALIST DISCOURSES, DISPUTED MEMORIES, AND EVOLVING ACADEMIC PERSPECTIVES

Abstract

The study of Pakistan-India relations is so intertwined with a diverse range of political debates, including the partition of British India, the Kashmir issue, defense and security concerns, nuclear proliferation, terrorism, and diplomacy. Since 1947, historians, political scientists, diplomats, military officers, journalists, and public intellectuals have examined these issues from varied nationalist, ideological, and methodological perspectives. The political exclusiveness of Muslims, Two Nation Theory, Muslim majority in Kashmir, and India’s alleged unwillingness to accept Pakistan as an equal sovereign state were the main themes of the Pakistani nationalist historiography. Geographical and pluralistic nature of Indian nationalism, legal basis of the integration of the princely states, and Pakistan’s revisionist stance on Kashmir, however, were the focus of Indian nationalist and secular-nationalist scholars. International research started with diplomatic and state-centric approaches, but later on, realist, constructivist, postcolonial, feminist, subaltern, oral-history, and memory perspectives were added. The discipline has been greatly enriched by the work of Ayesha Jalal, Urvashi Butalia, Gyanendra Pandey, Sumantra Bose, Srinath Raghavan, Rounaq Jahan, Yasmin Khan, Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, and others. The changes in historiography from 1947 up to 2024 are analyzed in this article. It argues that academic research has increasingly moved beyond the mutually reinforcing national narratives towards more varied, international, and methodologically informed analyses. However, archival restrictions, nationalistic education, selective memory, current territorial disputes, and the legacy of governmental institutions remain influential in the understanding of history. The present study, viewing historiography itself as an important dimension of Pakistan-India relations, delves into its thematic analysis and identification of its problems and suggests some new dimensions for future historians to work out.

Keywords: Pakistan, India, historiography, Partition, Kashmir, nationalism, memory, conflict, nuclearization, South Asia.

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23245585