ABSTRACT
In 1947, Jinnah imagined Pakistan as a secular state in which religious communities’ ‘angularities’ would ‘vanish’. Yet, with the consolidation of a national ideology which invokes Islam as Pakistan’s reason for being, this vision has become eroded. In the wake of 9/11 and the West-led ‘war on terror’, the vulnerability of Pakistan’s Christian minority to acts of ‘retaliation’ on account of a mistaken ‘Western’ affiliation, and to more ambiguous forms of social and legal discrimination, seems ever more apparent, and problematic to address. This chapter offers contextualised readings of autobiographical, oratorial and photographic texts produced in the wake of such events as the 2011 murder of Pakistan’s Minorities Minister Shahbaz Bhatti, who had defended the Christian woman Asia Bibi against blasphemy charges, and the 2013 attacks on Lahore’s Joseph Colony. It argues against the championing of these creative outputs as ‘representative’ of minority experience. Instead, it proposes a cautious unfolding of what they may reveal about the scope that exists in third-millennium Pakistan for the place of its indigenous Christians to be articulated, made visible and imagined differently.
