ABSTRACT
Ernest Renan has famously said that ‘Getting its history wrong is part of being a nation’.1 History taught in schools of Pakistan is full of errors that have been pointed out in earlier works by Pakistani scholars.2 The aim of this article is not to do the same. Nations are not as old as history and in the case of Pakistan, nation is clearly a constructed category. But it is in the nature of the nation state to claim itself as ‘old’, ‘pre-modern’, ‘pre-historic’ and construct a linear narrative from past till present that justies its existence and order. Pakistan is no exception, rather being a modern state born in 1947; the challenge of constructing this past becomes more dicult and may become painful if it has to share its past with the neighbour that threatens its existence and remains hostile towards it (the hostilities are obviously reciprocated). An important key in understanding Pakistan is to see how Pakistan sees itself, i.e. how it has constructed its history in order to achieve its objective of nation-building.
