Primordial parting

The Indus Saga and the Making of Pakistan

by Aitzaz Ahsan

Oxford University Press, Karachi, 1996

413 pages

There has been a school of Pakistani writers which has held that the partition of the Subcontinent into India and Pakistan had more to do with the inability of two different civilisations to co-exist than with the religious incompatibility of Hindus and Muslims. This belief is echoed by Aitzaz Ahsan in The Indus Saga and the Making of Pakistan when he writes: "The essential differences between Indus and India are civilisational and cultural. These differences (are) deep-rooted, primordial and many. To restrict the differences merely to those of religion is to refuse to comprehend the issue. Fundamentalists on both sides of the border are doing just that, and thereby exacerbating tensions and acrimony."