Public Arenas in an Islamic Republic: A Theoretical Framework for the Social History of Pakistan

Abstract

Historians of Pakistan have rarely paused over the concept that any social history of the country must presuppose: the public. This article asks whether Jürgen Habermas’s celebrated model of the public sphere can describe the postcolonial Punjab, and answers that it cannot do so without reconstruction. Taken neat, the model excludes the illiterate, the vernacular, the ritual, and the religious, which is to say most of the Punjabi public between 1947 and 1977. Drawing on Habermas’s critics, on Sandria Freitag’s notion of public arenas, on C. A. Bayly’s account of the Indian information order, on Dietrich Reetz’s extension of the concept to South Asian religious movements, and on Karl Popper’s open society, the article specifies five features that distinguish the postcolonial Punjabi arena: multilingualism, a continuum of orality and print, ritual as argument, an entangled state, and plural rival publics. Three demonstrations, the Lahore coffee house, the Sufi shrine, and the constitutional controversies of 1949 and 1953, show the framework at work and establish the feedback loop running between arena and state. The framework is portable, and it explains why the constitutions of an arguing society came to name Pakistan an Islamic Republic.

Keywords: Public Sphere; Public Arenas; Habermas; Punjab; Pakistan; Social History; Sufi Shrines; Print Culture