The name of Pakistan

 

Pakistan was created in 1948 as a Muslim nation carved out of former British India. But where did the name come from? It was coined by a Muslim Indian nationalist named Choudhary Rahmat Ali, in a 1933 pamphlet entitled “Now or Never”.

Ali, who was based in the UK as an academic working at Cambridge University, simply took the names of the five provinces of India that were to be incorporated as the new country. The initial letters of four of them, plus the end of the fifth, could be read as the new name. These were:

Punjab
North West Frontier (Afghan province)
Kashmir
Sindh
Baluchistan

Put together, this made Pakstan, so adding a “i” made sense in terms of producing something more pronounceable. The idea caught on and before long everyone was referring to the putative new country as Pakistan, although its creation was still 15 years into the future.

Ali later claimed that a slightly different derivation was what he had in mind, namely:

Punjab
Afghania (North-West Frontier province)
Kashmir
Iran
Sindh
Tukharistan
Afghanistan
Baluchistan

Ali spent most of his life in England but travelled to Pakistan in 1948, hoping to settle in the country he had named. However, he soon made it clear that he had envisaged a much larger Muslim nation – presumably including Iran and Afghanistan – than Pakistan turned out to be. He also threatened to set up a new Liberation Movement that would have challenged the status quo. Not surprisingly, he was subsequently refused a Pakistani passport and returned to England. He died in 1951, back in Cambridge, but Pakistan continued to bear the name he had conjured up.

© John Welford