Sara Waheed’s intricate textual analysis of key literary moments in twentieth-century colonial India and postcolonial Pakistan reveals that, under the guise of religious conservatism, much of the impetus for censorship arose from a crisis of ethics (akhlāq). By tracing the literary history of censorship, both state-sponsored and socially driven, Hidden Histories of Pakistan: Censorship, Literature, and Secular Nationalism in Late Colonial India argues that, although censorship laws in the subcontinent were rooted in colonial moral frameworks, “leftist Urduphone intellectuals” faced an additional layer of surveillance and speech mediation from their own peers. Structured into four main chapters, each devoted to one of the charges historically levelled against progressive authors, namely blasphemy, obscenity, sedition, and immorality for women, the book contends that progressive Urduphone writers were censored not only for challenging religious dogma and extremism, but also for articulating an ethical selfhood grounded in a humanist Islamic tradition intent on exposing the moral contradictions of such ideologies.

Casting a long shadow over the twentieth century, Waheed traces the crystallization of “Muslimness” in the introduction as it became weaponized in colonial and postcolonial India and Pakistan. In these nations, majoritarian and extremist notions of purity, faith, and community dictated permissible and impermissible speech acts. As many of the writers within the Progressive movement wrote in Urdu, the language serves as the linguistic frame and filter through which the cross-border legacy of censorship is marked in the book. The chapter “Blasphemy” punctuates the publication and subsequent banning of Angāre (1932) by the colonial government in British India as the “earliest political intervention made by the Urdu progressive intelligentsia.” However, Waheed points out that despite being censored on charges of blasphemy under Section 295-A of the Penal Code for outraging “religious feeling,” the outrage within the sharīf elites of the Muslim community arose due to the collection’s obscene (fohsh) and unadulterated centering of marginalized voices of lower-class women and sex workers, and its stark critique of masculine sexual desire and pride within patriarchal families. This refrain of studying the cases teleologically and contextually, and not through anachronistic readings of hierarchical legal scholarship, is sustained powerfully by Waheed throughout the book.

In the following chapters, such as in “Obscenity,” Waheed focuses on misinterpretation, self-censorship, and censored translations prevalent in the archives that persist today. Sa’dat Hasan Manto’s short stories, which came under fire multiple times in colonial India and postcolonial Pakistan for their unregulated descriptions of sex, filth, and moral decay, upset the elite reformers of the countries due to the texts betraying their participation in the systemic violence against women, the Adivasi, and other religious communities especially in the aftermath of Partition. The retranslation of Manto’s “Bū” by Indian bureaucratic officials for the courts in 1944 highlights the role played by Indians in sharpening the contours of the vague obscenity charge. Similarly, the chapter, “Sedition” focuses on Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s prison poetry during the Rawalpindi Conspiracy Case of 1951, which he laced with secret metaphors and images to avoid the censor’s eyes. His poems for Palestine postured to an internationalist ethical code of Islamic solidarity that was being suppressed by General Ayub Khan’s military governmental regime in the 1960s, which had declared martial law, banned the Communist Party of Pakistan, and outlawed socialist literature of the ilk produced by Faiz in his ghazals.

The last chapter, “Feminist Literary Ethics and Censorship,” turns to the gendered layer of censorship that women faced in the newly formed state of Pakistan during the harshest decades of military dictatorship under General Zia-ul-Haq from 1977 to 1988. This chapter tells the story of dissident-poet Fahmida Riaz, whose poems came under heavy scrutiny due to Zia’s introduction of the Hudood Ordinances, which targeted Riaz for her feminist stance against state-sanctioned misogyny and religious orthodoxy. As a result, Riaz was charged with sedition and was exiled, returning to Pakistan from India only after the end of Zia’s rule. Waheed delineates how through Badan Darīda (1972), Riaz joined a cadre of feminist poets in Pakistan, namely Sara Shagufta, Attiya Dawood, and Kishwar Naheed, who stood in solidarity with an invisiblized majority of women who responded to their confinement to the “chādar aur chār dīvārī” (veil and four walls of the home). This chapter testifies to the sexism and misogyny embedded in male endeavors of progressivism in the subcontinent, and offers a gendered alternative worldview employed by women to articulate their resistance to being censored by law and by society.

The book is most compelling in its literary criticism of the internationalist Islamic ethical tradition as expressed in progressive poetry and prose. However, it is less persuasive in demonstrating how these writers’ contributions to an “alternative history of secular nationalism” continue to resonate in postcolonial Pakistan today. The core chapters are framed by a preface, introduction, and epilogue that hesitate to address the specific contours of “right-wing Punjabi Sunni extremism” in Pakistan beyond General Zia’s regime of the 1970–1980s. At times, the author seems unable to identify the very instances of social, if not legal, cultural censorship that the book itself posits as part of a larger, obscured history that persist into the twenty-first century, such as the 2016 honor killing of media personality Qandeel Baloch. While the preface foregrounds India’s rise of Hindutva nationalism and its suppression of dissent, illustrated through the 2020 Anti-CAA/CAB (Citizenship Amendment Act/Citizen Amendment Bill) protests and the controversy surrounding Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s poem Hum Dekheñge, which echoed across protest sites, it omits mention of the 2019 amendment to the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government, which enabled terrorism charges without trial and led to the incarceration of numerous activists. Across the border, although the book claims to “cover regimes of censorship in Pakistan extensively,” apart from a cursory reference to the 2020 Aurat March in the preface, its invocation of the “dystopia of Pakistan today” in Ghulam Abbas’s 1960s short story “Dhanak” in the epilogue remains suggestive rather than developed. The reader is left to bridge the gap between the mid-century Islamization of Pakistan and the current governmental apparatus that continues to suppress Baloch and Sindhi voices.Footnote ¹ Despite the book’s literary-legal historiographical focus on the twentieth century, these contemporary omissions remain visible.

Hidden Histories of Pakistan offers readers a novel methodology of literary-legal studies that de-hierarchizes legal scholarship by studying the social responses to censorship, found in pamphlets, newspapers, and letters, that illuminate the evolving conceptions of Muslimness in late colonial India and postcolonial Pakistan. Its analysis of the Sufi cosmological and pan-Islamic influences that permeate Urdu literature’s mode of resistance to the control and surveillance of the state advances the field of literary ethics and aesthetics in its marrying of the two through adab (a homonym for ethical conduct and literature in Urdu).