Last semester, I finished reading Declan Walsh’s The Nine Lives of Pakistan: Dispatches from a Precarious State. From 2004 to 2013, Walsh worked as a foreign correspondent for The Guardian and later as the Pakistan bureau chief for The New York Times. If I were to describe the book, I would say that, at its core, it is Walsh’s attempt to make sense of what “Pakistan” is - a question that pertains not only to the physical nation-state itself, but also to Pakistan as an imagined concept. As a result, the book explores this question through nine different individuals, each of whom presents Walsh with a distinct interpretation of “Pakistan.” Yet as each perspective unfolds, it seems to complicate itself from within. The meanings each individual attaches to Pakistan are often marked by their own contradictions, so that even a single perspective refuses to settle into a coherent account. Rather than clarifying what Pakistan is, each narrative seems to tangle its own threads further, producing a kind of cognitive dissonance in which the meaning of “Pakistan” becomes increasingly difficult to hold together. This haze of cognitive dissonance is, in turn, shared by Walsh, who I would argue offers a tenth perspective woven throughout the book through his own probes and narration. That perspective reaches its climax with his expulsion from Pakistan on the grounds of “undesirable activities,” an ending that, like the other perspectives in the book, offers no satisfying resolution and instead leaves the meaning of “Pakistan” unsettled. Likewise, if one also considers the reader, an eleventh perspective is actively being formulated over the course of the book as well. Yet Walsh’s expulsion leaves this perspective similarly unsatisfied, denying the reader the sense of resolution or coherence that the preceding narratives have continually seemed to promise but ultimately fail to provide.
I am not quite able to put my finger on it yet, but there is something in this mess of meaning and cognitive dissonance that fascinates me immensely. I have been thinking it over in conjunction with Ferdinand de Saussure’s theory of the sign, in which, from my understanding, “Pakistan” functions as an unstable signifier: one that appears to point toward a recognizable concept, yet whose meaning continually shifts, fractures, and contradicts itself depending on who is attempting to define it. This exploration, of course, also has historical roots given the nature of the Partition of the Indian subcontinent along religious and political lines. As a result, I believe it would be useful to re-familiarize myself not only with the historical events leading up to Partition, but also with the ideological and conceptual questions that shaped it: What identities formed the basis of Partition, and why? How were those identities defined? And how did they ultimately translate into nationhood? Even if these questions are not centered in my writing, I believe they will certainly inform it. Similarly, I think it would be helpful to define the perspective I want to explore, since, from my reading of Walsh, the answer seems to change depending on whose perspective is being centered. I am not yet entirely sure which perspective I want to pursue. Initially, I was drawn to the experiences of Pakistani women, especially because only one woman is featured in Walsh’s book, which is itself an interesting point of examination. However, I have yet to find a text in English that I feel captures the particular gendered experiences I am interested in examining within a religious and heteropatriarchal social order. Because of that, I am not entirely certain that this is the direction I want to take. I think that, for the larger thesis to become clearer to me, I need to spend more time thinking seriously about whose perspective I want to center and what kinds of texts might allow me to do so.