We need more historians, says Pak scholar Ayesha Jalal

January 23, 2012 10:51

One of Pakistan's most acclaimed historians, Ayesha Jalal, bemoans the fact that history as an academic discipline has failed to grow in her country, a deficiency that needs to be addressed to spawn a new breed of scholars in the subject.

A professor of History at the Tufts University with as many as seven books to her credit, the Pakistani-American who is an authority on South Asia has chosen to return to Pakistan as a visiting scholar to help address the gap in her own way.

In India to attend the Jaipur Literature Festival, Jalal told PTI during an interaction why she felt that the academic growth of history in India had contributed to the development of a worthy scholarship in this country.

"Of course, there are biases and political agendas too, but India has continued to teach history, as a result of which you have historical scholarship coming from India," she said. "I was bemoaning the fact that in Pakistan history has suffered as an academic discipline, and is not taught as is the way in India," she said.

Jalal's books include The Sole Spokesman and Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia, "works that have tried to trace the history of the subcontinent including the origins and the tortured legacy of the partition."

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