Language and Politics in Pakistan

by Tariq Rahman

In this book, Tariq Rahman describes the inextricable link between language and politics in Pakistan. Conflict about language, the author argues, is really about political dominance. He examines the history of British language policies, the Urdu-Hindi controversy, and the role in identity formation of the Bengali, Pasato, Balochi, Sindhi, Punjabi, and Siraiki language movements.

Genres: History, Pakistan

340 pages, Hardcover

First published November 13, 1997

About the author

Tariq Rahman PhD is presently Dean, School of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences at the Beaconhouse National University, Lahore. He is also HEC Distinguished National Professor and Professor Emeritus at the National Institute of Pakistan Studies, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad. Dr Rahman has been a guest professor in Denmark and Spain, and a Fulbright research scholar (1995-96) at the University of Texas at Austin, USA. He was also the first incumbent of the Pakistan Chair at U.C. Berkeley (2004-05). He has been a research fellow at the Oxford Centre of Islamic Studies and the South Asia Institute at the University of Heidelberg. He has been given several awards: the Presidential Pride of Performance (1994), HEC lifetime achievement award, the highly prestigious Humboldt Research Award (2012) from Germany, and the Sitara-i-Imtiaz in 2013. He was awarded a higher doctorate (D.Litt) by the University of Sheffield for all of his published research in 2014.

Reviews

[Saadullah · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a richly detailed, massively comprehensive survey of Pakistani language politics. That it is somewhat sanitising about the Pakistani state's response to certain language movements is a conscious choice it makes; one can have disagreements with this choice and still regard this as a singular, unusual work of linguistic and literary history.

[Nazim]

Nice Book