The Founding of Pakistan

This bibliography contains resources related to the founding of Pakistan, collected from the vantage point of the fiftieth anniversary of partition, August, 1997. The call for the creation of Pakistan began in the 1940s-some Indian Muslims were nervous about living in a state in which the overwhelming political control would be in the hands of the Hindu majority. In 1947 India was partitioned and the state of Pakistan was created. What ensued was terrible ethnic violence and cultural strain as Hindus and Muslims clashed. Those conflicts still inform the relations between the two countries, as each eyes the other warily over important and sometimes deadly issues. This fact was dramatically highlighted by the tension over India's recent testing of fissible material and Pakistan's own ballistic missile tests. The histories of the formation of Pakistan that are collected in this book are numerous in their perspectives. They include the views of imperial historians, world systems theorists, world historians, Marxists, British historians, and subalternists. In addition there are constitutional historians, historians of the much maligned "Cambridge school," historians of communalism, as well as biographers and novelists. The wide range of this important historical collection makes it essential to scholars and students of Asian history. It provides a wealth of detailed information about one of the most ambitious and successful colonial independence movements in the world, and broaches the difficult questions surrounding religion and ethnicity, and their intersection with the state.