This article was sent to me by the writer’s daughter, Sarah Siddiqi. Zuhair Siddiqi was a senior journalist who died in a road accident in 1979
By Zuhair Siddiqi
It is not surprising that Pakistan, which has now completed 29 years of her life, should still be involved in a debate on the roots and character, the substance and orientation, of her culture.
Perhaps, no other newly liberated nation has experienced cultural problems of such complexity. The birth of Pakistan was not the mere emergence of a country from political slavery into sovereign independence. Nor was the partition that it involved a simple case of separation, like that of Burma from British India ten years earlier. The new State came into being as the result of a three-way partition — of the Indian sub-continent, of Muslim India, and of the two major Muslim provinces. Continue reading A nation in search of its culture