A Concise History of Indo-Pakistan.

• Author: Conlon, Frank F.

It has become something of a cliche to observe that history is a contested subject, the outlines and content of which are in constant flux. In recent years significant reinterpretations of and orientations toward South Asian history and culture have appeared in the subcontinent, the most prominent example being the emerging "subaltern" school emphasizing both "history from below" and challenging conventional historiographical wisdom. Readers of South Asian history in the West have become accustomed to discovering South Asian scholars who are distinguished by both intellectual acuity and ideological agility. One might be tempted to assume that the contestatory nature of the "new" South Asian history symbolized a pervasive intellectual ferment in the practice of history in the subcontinent. One might be tempted to assume that. One might be wrong.

The second edition of S. F. Mahmud's A Concise History of Indo-Pakistan illustrates the substantial gulf between the exquisite dynamic frontiers of historical revision and the everyday production of those truly subaltern subcontinental academics, the history lecturers and instructors who preside over undergraduate instruction in India and Pakistan. Mahmud's history is a model of what passes in Pakistan colleges and schools for conventional wisdom in the teaching of subcontinental history. In a sense it would be ephemeral to scholars' concerns were it not for its obvious...