Pakistan’s convenient rediscovery of a civilisation it long disowned

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” — George Santayana

The land now called Pakistan holds some of the subcontinent’s oldest inheritances — the university-town of Takshashila, the brick avenues of Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, the birthplace of the grammarian Panini, even a small bronze figure whose cocked hip and bangled arm art historians read as the earliest evidence of dance in South Asia, a gesture some trace forward into the classical grammar later refined into Kathak. For most of its seventy-eight years, the Pakistani state wanted remarkably little to do with any of it.

This was not neglect. It was policy. The Two-Nation Theory did not simply carve out a homeland; it required a new ancestry to go with it. Pakistan’s intellectual lineage was traced towards Arabia, Persia and Central Asia, and the Vedic, Sanskritic and Indus past lying beneath its own soil was filed away as someone else’s prehistory — interesting to archaeologists, irrelevant to the nation. Mohenjo-daro was a curiosity. Takshashila was a footnote. The Dancing Girl was a museum exhibit, not an ancestor.

That posture is changing, and the change is official. The Punjab government is currently running a heritage development plan worth close to four billion rupees to restore and rebrand Taxila as a premier tourist destination. Provincial budgets tout the restoration of Harappa and Rohtas Fort alongside Gandhara-circuit tourism drives. Mohenjo-daro is marketed abroad as a UNESCO showpiece. Panini, once an obscure name from a rejected past, is now claimed as a native son. History, apparently, is good for footfall.

Ruins are not the same as inheritance

Consider that Dancing Girl a little longer. She was cast in bronze in Mohenjo-daro, in what is today Sindh, nearly four and a half thousand years ago. A second, cruder casting of the same figure was found beside her. When the subcontinent was partitioned, the finer of the two statuettes went to the National Museum in New Delhi, where she remains the single most reproduced image of the Indus Valley Civilisation. The lesser copy stayed behind, in Karachi. Pakistan inherited the ground she was found on. It did not inherit her.

The same split runs through everything else Pakistan is now restoring for tourists. It can excavate a stupa at Taxila, but the unbroken line of Buddhist and Vedic scholarship that once animated that university has no living school inside its borders. It can point to the ruins of Harappa, but Sanskrit is not taught there in gurukulas the way it still is across India. It can rope off Mohenjo-daro for visitors, but the dance grammar its Dancing Girl is said to anticipate is taught today in the gharanas of Jaipur, Lucknow and Varanasi — not in Sindh or Punjab. Geography gave Pakistan the sites. It did not give it the tradition.

Heritage as reputation management

Why the sudden enthusiasm, then? It is worth asking what else has been happening to Pakistan’s standing in the world these past years — the terror-financing scrutiny, the repeated economic bailouts, the image of a state better known for instability than for scholarship. Ancient civilisation is good cover for a troubled present. A country associated with extremism can present itself instead as the cradle of the world’s earliest cities and its most rigorous grammarian. Restoring Takshashila photographs well. It is also, transparently, a rebrand.

There would be nothing wrong with genuine custodianship. But custodianship is judged by continuity, not by construction budgets. A state that spends on restoring temples and stupas as tourist infrastructure, while showing far less urgency about the living minority communities who are the actual cultural descendants of that civilisation within its own borders, is not practising heritage. It is practising public relations. Ruins do not complain about neglect. Living communities do.

None of this is unique to Pakistan — every young nation wants an old civilisation behind it, for the same reason every parvenu wants an ancestral portrait on the wall. But there is a difference between a nation growing into an honest relationship with the past beneath its soil and a nation reaching for that past only once the present has become an embarrassment. The first is scholarship. The second is theatre.

Panini’s grammar, the ruins of Takshashila, the streets of Mohenjo-daro and the Dancing Girl who stands, unclaimed, in a Delhi museum are not props to be dusted off for a tourism campaign. They belong to a civilisational continuum that long predates Pakistan and that Pakistan’s own founding ideology spent decades trying to disown. You cannot renounce an inheritance for seventy years and then present the paperwork the moment the neighbours stop calling.

A civilisation is not a rebrand

The Panini question, therefore, is not ultimately about Pakistan. It is about how civilizations endure. Nation-states are political arrangements. They emerge, fragment, redraw borders and sometimes disappear altogether. Civilizations operate according to a different logic. They survive because institutions, languages, rituals, philosophies and systems of knowledge are transmitted across generations with remarkable continuity. That continuity cannot be manufactured retrospectively simply because the archaeological site now falls within a different frontier.

Panini illustrates this distinction with unusual clarity. His genius did not arise in isolation, any more than Newton’s emerged without the European scientific tradition or Confucius without the intellectual world of ancient China. The Ashtadhyayi was the culmination of centuries of Vedic linguistic inquiry, drawing upon earlier traditions of phonetics, etymology and grammatical analysis. It belonged to an ecosystem of scholars, teachers and students extending across the cultural geography of ancient Bharat. His birthplace may today lie inside Pakistan’s borders; the intellectual universe that produced him does not.

That distinction also explains why heritage cannot be reduced to possession. A ruined monastery may be restored with public funds. A museum may renovate its galleries. Tourism campaigns may attract visitors. Yet the deeper life of a civilization lies not in stone but in continuity. Sanskrit is still spoken, taught and debated. The grammatical tradition Panini codified continues to be studied in universities, monasteries and traditional centres of learning. Classical dance, whose earliest artistic echoes some scholars discern in the Dancing Girl of Mohenjo-daro, survives through living lineages rather than archaeological exhibits. Civilizations remain alive because their knowledge systems remain alive.

There is, in principle, nothing objectionable about Pakistan preserving Panini’s birthplace or restoring the monuments of Takshashila and Harappa. Indeed, such efforts should be welcomed. The preservation of humanity’s shared heritage is a universal responsibility. The problem begins only when conservation is quietly transformed into ownership, and ownership into civilizational authorship. Geography can preserve monuments; it cannot rewrite the intellectual traditions that created them.

Perhaps this explains the growing attraction of ancient heritage within Pakistan’s official narrative. Soft power increasingly matters in international politics. Nations seek legitimacy not only through military strength or economic performance but through cultural depth. Ancient civilizations offer prestige, tourism, diplomatic capital and a more attractive international image than perpetual association with conflict or extremism. The impulse is understandable. But prestige cannot rest upon selective memory. One cannot celebrate Panini while remaining intellectually detached from the Vedic and Sanskritic tradition that made Panini possible.

History is often generous to those willing to confront it honestly. It is far less forgiving to those who edit it for contemporary convenience. Pakistan is free to acknowledge that some of the world’s greatest centres of ancient learning stood on the land it now governs. What it cannot plausibly claim is that the civilization which produced them somehow begins where the modern Pakistani state begins. Civilizations are not inherited through borders. They are inherited through continuity. And continuity cannot be declared by policy, funded through tourism budgets or recovered by rebranding. It has to be lived.

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