A 1933 pamphlet acronym became South Asia’s fifth-most-populous state
Pakistan, home to more than 241.5 million people, ranks fifth in world population and second among Muslim-majority nations as of 2023. Choudhry Rahmat Ali coined “Pakstan” in a January 1933 Now or Never pamphlet before 1947 independence carved Muslim-majority lands from British India.
Stone tools from the Soan Valley in the north push human presence back about two million years, into the Lower Palaeolithic. Mehrgarh’s Neolithic layers near 8,500 years old, Bronze Age Indus cities, and Gandhara sit under later Achaemenid, Alexandrian, Mauryan, and Mughal layers. After the Indus civilisation faded, semi-nomadic Indo-European Aryans arrived around 2000 BCE, perhaps via the Khyber Pass, and blended with Harappan culture.
Western areas joined the Achaemenid Empire around 517 BCE, Alexander defeated King Porus at the Jhelum in 326 BCE, and the Mauryas ruled from 322 to 185 BCE. Makran fell under Muslim rule in the seventh century, and in 711 the Arab general Muhammad ibn Qasim took Sindh and parts of Punjab. Under the Mughals, Multan, Lahore, Peshawar and Thatta gained grand buildings and a flowering Persianate culture.
British rule began only in 1839, when Karachi, then a fishing village with a mud fort, was seized as a base for the First Afghan War. The region was later organised into three main units, Punjab Province, the Baluchistan Agency and the Sind Division, with Bahawalpur the largest of its princely states. The All-India Muslim League’s 1946 victories and the Pakistan Movement secured statehood at partition. Islamabad is the capital; Karachi the largest city.
Rahmat Ali’s acronym pulled letters from Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir, Sindh, and Balochistan; he imagined separate Banglastan and Osmanistan too. Declared nuclear status and the world’s seventh-largest standing forces mark a middle-power profile with a fast-growing middle class.
Source: Pakistan
