Image and imagination in the creation of Pakistan

Abstract

Chester traces the origins of the 1930s–1940s campaign to create Pakistan, a homeland for South Asian Muslims. Paying particular attention to the role of maps, she argues that calls for Pakistan combined specificity and ambiguity. Debates over this new Muslim state foreshadowed key elements of the 1947 India-Pakistan partition, including retaliatory violence, mass migration, and assaults on women. These implications received little attention, due to internal contradictions in Pakistan proposals, the widespread assumption that minority populations would remain in place, and British and secular nationalist reluctance to engage with Muslim separatism. “Image and Imagination in the Creation of Pakistan” shows how this combination worked against serious discussion of the way that migration, identity, and space could—and would—collide in the event of partition.