ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how fictional and non-fictional representations of the built environment in Pakistan – particularly as they involve acts of destruction – inform the production and interpretation of what it means to be “Pakistani.” The goal is to question more purposefully whether domestic and global politics have exerted a reciprocal pressure or, put more plainly, to explore whether internal efforts to Islamise Pakistan via the built environment bore any connection to Pakistan’s geopolitical role as an erstwhile U.S. ally in the Cold War. The early moments of U.S.-Pakistan relations connect to the development discourses operating in Pakistan through the 1950s and 1960s, particularly through Constantinos Doxiadis’s plans for Pakistan’s purpose-built capital, Islamabad. Additionally, the chapter discusses literary representations of the built environment in Pakistan, with a particular interest in how non-Muslim minorities are imagined to occupy and move through this space. The chapter concentrates on Sorayya Khan’s fictional universe populated by characters appearing in a trio of fictional texts – the 1995 novella “In the Shadow of the Margalla Hills,” the 2009 novel Five Queen’s Road and the 2017 novel City of Spies.
