Enemies within and enemies without: The besieged self in Pakistani textbooks

In the process of state formation and nation building, states organize the production, organization and distribution of social knowledge to construct national collective memory. The tendency is even more pronounced in newly independent states that struggle to build new identities by discarding earlier belongings. When new states are formed by amalgamating diverse regional entities into a single and centralized one, the earlier, older and differentiated identities are expected to be discarded in favour of the new homogenized one. In cases where the new state is carved out of an existing one, the national remembering on each side is divergent-the Parent state mourns the loss and remembers the event as wound in the body politic, and the emerging state celebrates its creation with a sense of pride and triumph achieved through suffering and pain. Competing and rival tales of the partition are then woven in the creation of national memory. This is done by relying heavily on the identity forming subjects such as history (sense of time), civics (a sense of power), and geography (a sense of space), together known as social studies. An important requirement of all states, but particularly new ones, is the construction, elaboration and frequent invocation of 'enemies' across and within national borders. Without enemies lurking everywhere, and as the moral opposites of the self, the Self is hard to define and consolidate. The sense of threat and fear that enemies help evoke, enables the fractured and differentiated self to merge and solidify into a defensive oneness. The state of Pakistan, in this context, is an interesting, but hardly an exceptional case. Designing education for a post-national world becomes a critical task.