Listen to this article:

Chandigarh: A little-remembered, and often overlooked aspect of Pakistan’s founding history, is that it spent seven years after independence without a national anthem, as sections of its leadership struggled to define a distinct Muslim identity for the fledgling state, and resisted identifying too closely with the subcontinent’s shared Hindustani–Urdu inheritance.

Till mid-August 1954, when it formally adopted Qaumi Taranah, the newly founded country had a flag, a governor-general, an army, and a blood-soaked disputed frontier with India, but no official song to give voice to its identity. For all those intervening years, it relied on instrumental music for official ceremonies, military marches, and funerary occasions, while searching for the words and melody that could give voice to what the new Islamic state was meant to be.

Thereafter, when it finally settled on an anthem, it was overwhelmingly Persian in content – as activist Shabnam Nasimi has pointed out in a recent video – reflecting a conscious attempt by sections of Pakistan’s ruling elite to culturally anchor the country within a broader Persian-Islamic civilisational sphere – historically associated with Iran – rather than the syncretic Hindustani linguistic world from which the new state had emerged just seven years earlier.

The anthem itself, whose music was composed in 1949 by Ahmad G. Chagla, while the lyrics were written three years later, in 1952, by the Urdu poet Hafeez Jalandhari, was first broadcast on Radio Pakistan on August 13, 1954 before receiving formal government approval three days later.

Taken together, these choices – the composition of the anthem’s music, the formulation of its lyrics, and its eventual adoption in a heavily Persianised form – reflected not only the cultural and ideological direction of Pakistan at the time and since, but also an early inclination towards situating the new state within a broader Persian-Islamic world. This bilateral relationship was further anchored in geography, that includes a 900-km-long shared border and cross-frontier linkages across Pakistan’s Balochistan and Iran’s Sistan-Baluchestan provinces, where Baloch communities straddle both sides of the divide.

In multiple ways, this early orientation continues to echo in Pakistan’s regional outlook even today, visible in........

© The Wire