First published by Context, an imprint of Westland Publications Private

partitioned history along with it.
Through  the  1970s  and  ’80s,  Pakistan  embarked  on  a  process  of
Islamisation,  and  introduced  a  series  of  legislation  aimed  at  religious
minorities.  The  systematic  process  of  rewriting  history  in  Pakistan
started  in  1981  under  General  Zia-ul-Haq’s  military  dictatorship  to
‘induce  pride  for  the  nation’s  past,  enthusiasm  for  the  present,  and
unshakeable  faith  in  the  stability  and  longevity  of  Pakistan’.  The
Constitution was abandoned, textbooks were rewritten, the pork-eating,
port-wine-drinking  Muhammad  Ali  Jinnah  was  transformed  into
Pakistan’s first governor-general, and a ‘man of orthodox religious views
who sought the creation of a theocratic state’.
7
 The shared history of the
subcontinent’s struggle for freedom from the British was erased, and the
new ‘heroes of the Pakistan Movement’ were created.
Almost  forty  years  later,  India  is  now  on  the  same  path,  rewriting
history and remaking its citizens. The portrait of the man who plotted the
assassination of Mahatma Gandhi now hangs in the Indian Parliament.
When  I  started  reading  about  Zia’s  reign  in  Pakistan,  I  also
discovered  that  the  audio  recordings  of  Jinnah’s  speech  on  11  August
1947, three days before the creation of the country, where he calls for a
secular  Pakistan,  had  mysteriously  disappeared.  BBC  News  reported,
‘Successive  military  governments  in  Pakistan  were  accused  of
attempting to downplay, even remove, the speech from official records.’
8
Murtaza Solangi, the former director general of Radio Pakistan, called it
‘a case of criminal, wilful destruction of our history’.
9
In  his  quest  to  find  those  audio  recordings,  Solangi  contacted  the
BBC  archives  and  AIR  in  Delhi.  Indian  officials  initially  told  him  that
they had the tapes, but later denied having them.
Indian officials, however, have confirmed the existence of two other
speeches,  now  called  the  Jinnah  tapes,  but  not  the  speech  from  11

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August. It’s not just Jinnah whose work has been obscured. The work of
writer Saadat Hasan Manto, one of the foremost chroniclers of Partition,
is  theoretically  held  in  the  AIR  archive.  Outlook,  a  news  magazine,
reported  that  ‘when  historian  Ayesha  Jalal,  Manto’s  grandniece,  sought
the recordings as part of ongoing research, she was told by officials that
the recordings did not exist. Yet, persistent queries have revealed that All
India Radio does have a recording of a Manto play.’
10
Similarly,  recordings  of  Indian  actors  Dilip  Kumar  and  Prithviraj
Kapoor  are  with  Pakistan’s  broadcasting  authority.  Kumar,  born
Muhammad  Yusuf  Khan,  and  Kapoor  are  both  legendary  Indian  actors
from Peshawar in undivided India, who later migrated to Bombay.
Natasha was right when she told me, ‘My history lies on the other
side of the border.’
India and Pakistan took very different paths seventy years ago, but a
defining  divergence  between  them  was  that  India  produced  a
Constitution. Pakistan didn’t.
Following  Pakistan’s  independence,  it  took  nine  years  to  produce
the  first  Constitution  in  1956.  On  the  day  of  its  adoption,  two  main