We are a nation where a nostalgic streak has pervaded to the very core of our collective being. In our case, romance with the past holds clear precedence over the concern for the future. When the twentieth century drew to a close, optimistic belief in the future became outmoded, while nostalgia, for better or worse, never went out of fashion, remaining uncannily contemporary.

It can be defined as a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed. It is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy. This description of nostalgia seems an apt description of how we (Pakistanis) think and deliberate about our present and the past.

We are instructed through various means to relocate our imaginary ‘golden’ past into our future, which is possible only by a continuous spawning of nostalgic feelings about the bygone days of Muslim political and cultural supremacy. In the days of political decline, longing for the revival of the past is projected as the preferred course of action.

Thus it is, in a way, a revolt against the ‘existing’ time primarily because it firmly establishes on us the ignominy of being ‘dominated’ and ‘subdued’. Thus, the romanticism for the past inhabits our consciousness as the ‘unpromising present’ continues to haunt us.

Besides, nostalgia that engulfs us so completely has another dimension too, underlining the irrelevance of a lived ‘space’. Religion as the marker of our identity impels us to develop an affinity for Arabia, which is usually reserved for one’s own homeland.

The sensibility epitomised in such expressions like ya rab bula ley madiney mujhey (Oh God call me to Medina) in which the land of one’s origin is relegated to relative insignificance in comparison to a spatial centrality of Hijaz, has gained widest possible currency in our society.

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Shibli Naumani through his historical writings and Iqbal through his poetry laid the scholarly foundations for such nostalgia, with its resonance in the distant past and simultaneously with its trans-regional embeddedness.

The same can be said about Altaf Hussain Hali who emphasised the notion of Ummah, in his Mussadas-i-Hali. The simplistic categories of ‘Muslim civilisation’ or ‘Muslim culture’ were profusely employed with the Arabian Peninsula being designated as their fountainhead.

The particular form of nostalgia that we are trying to make sense of, in this piece, was conjured up in the days of colonial dispensation. We, in fact, got it as a colonial legacy. In the postcolonial era, at the popular level, the pen pushers of the ilk of Nasim Hijazi peddled that nostalgic streak with utmost effectiveness.

Writers like Mukhtar Masud and Mumtaz Mufti also cast quite a profound influence on Pakistani educated class and, as a result, instilled nostalgia among them through their literary endeavours. Careful scrutiny of peculiar nostalgia figuring in the works of these writers, the political reality which transpired in the form of Pakistan seemed to be an endeavour that had gone abortive.

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Here the expression of nostalgia becomes trans-national and pan-Islamic. Thus, the nostalgia circulating in Pakistan hardly corresponds with it. The political imagination fostered through the nostalgic feelings among us fundamentally contradicts the existing political reality (which means Pakistan itself).  But before going any further in our analysis of the nostalgic streak, which forms the integral part of our weltanschauung, it is pertinent to expound and elucidate nostalgia in the historical context.

The word "nostalgia" stems from two Greek roots, nostos meaning "return home" and algia "longing". However, it was in 1688 that the Swiss medical doctor, Johannes Hofer, settled on a combination of these words in his dissertation that was published and, thus, the word nostalgia was born.

Quite contrary to the general belief, ‘nostalgia’ came to be employed as a medical symptom rather than a notion of poetry or politics. Among the first victims of nostalgia were "various displaced people of the seventeenth century: freedom-loving students from the Republic of Berne studying in Basel, domestic help and servants working in France and Germany, and Swiss soldiers fighting abroad."

Another analysis pertains to the rise of industrialisation in modern Europe that triggered nostalgia through the writings of the European Romantics, as Rousseau, Goethe, and Wordsworth explored--"the restorative, nurturing potential of memory for the threatened individual".

Subsequently, in the 19^th century nostalgia acquired central importance in the writers and thinkers of different hues, like Dickens and Turgenev or Ruskin and Nietzsche. In the 20^th century, nostalgia’s importance markedly increased and thus found a space in the works of Henri Bergson, Freud, and Proust.

Later on, as the twentieth century wore on, the rise in migration, exile or forced eviction accompanying the end of the empire and the disasters of war made nostalgia a central theme of the writers. Several Pakistani writers: Intizar Husain being the most prominent among them or Mushtaq Yusufi, particularly in his Aab-i-Gum very effectively used nostalgia to describe the trauma of partition (1947).

Like the laureates -- Chinua Achebe and J.G.Ballard -- Intizar Husain and several others have "led to a representation of the present as a place marked by a trail of survivors searching for their roots, for a home, in the ruins of history."

Svetlana Boym, in one of her brilliant essays "Nostalgia and its Discontents" makes three crucial points which I find worth-mentioning here. 1) nostalgia essentially is not "anti-modern"; it is not opposed to modernity but coeval with it. 2) nostalgia appears to be a longing for a place, but it is actually a yearning for a different time -- the time of our childhood. The nostalgic desires yearn to turn history into a private or collective mythology, to revisit time like space, refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition. 3) Nostalgia is not always retrospective; it can be prospective as well. The fantasies of the past, determined by the needs of the present, have a direct impact on the realities of the future.

These three crucial points foregrounded by Boym help us immensely to analyse our engagement with nostalgia. In a way, it serves as a connection between the past, present and the future. However, the past that we usually feel nostalgic about is imaginary rather than real. Pakistan’s past as depicted in its history is quite contested. Therefore, the history that circulated in this country has a fair part of imagination in it.