C. M. Naim

Choudhri Mohammed Naim (born 3 June 1936) is an American scholar of Urdu language and literature. He is currently professor emeritus at the University of Chicago.

Quotes

• I woke up early, probably on my own. More likely I was awakened by the voices of the Congress boys who went around the city that morning -- as they had been doing for more than a week -- loudly chanting nationalist songs. I imagine I was quite excited. The previous afternoon we -- all my friends in the Muslim Students Federation (MSF) and I -- had celebrated the creation of Pakistan by holding a rally in front of our small office-cum-library. The crescent-and-star-on-green flag of the Muslim League was raised and saluted, poems were sung, and speeches were listened to. Later, as we were dispersing, someone had suggested that we should further display our commitment to the Muslim League and the Quaid-e Azam by "boycotting" the ceremonies at the school the next day. There was an immediate agreement. We were fearless Muslims. Hadn't we just won Pakistan "laughingly?" (After the announcement of the Partition and the acceptance speeches of the leaders on 3 June 1947, some enthusiastic slogan-maker of the Muslim League had come up with a hot one: hans ke liya hai Pakistan / lar ke lenge Hindustan.)
  • ‘Two Days’ in C. M. Naim, Ambiguities of Heritage (Karachi, 1999).
  • ‘Hans ke Liya hai Pakistan, Lad ke Lenge Hindustan’ , is translated as : We took Pakistan with no effort, We will seize Hindustan by force, in : Venkat Dhulipala - Creating a New Medina. State Power, Islam, and the Quest for Pakistan in Late Colonial North India-Cambridge University Press (2015)

• So there we were finally at the western gate, waving the crescent-and-star and shouting the familiar slogans: Pakistan Zindabad... Quaid-e-Azam Zindabad... Na'ra-e Takbir, Allah-o-Akbar... Hans ke liya hai Pakistan, Lar ke lenge Hindustan. In front of us was the low boundary wall, behind which was the front yard of the school where we could see our fellow students assembling and forming rows. Most of them came through the eastern gate, for it was closer to most of the city, but quite a few also went past us. Given the population of the city, most of them were Hindus -- at the time there were only two Sikh families in the city and only one Sikh boy in our school. But, Muslim or Hindu, none of the boys going in challenged us. (We, on the other hand, probably accosted the Muslim boys and tried to stop them from going in. We had plenty of practice of doing that the previous year, during the provincial assembly elections, much to the discomfort of the numerically fewer kangresi Muslim boys.)
  • ‘Two Days’ in C. M. Naim, Ambiguities of Heritage (Karachi, 1999).
  • ‘Hans ke Liya hai Pakistan, Lad ke Lenge Hindustan’ , is translated as : We took Pakistan with no effort, We will seize Hindustan by force, in : Venkat Dhulipala - Creating a New Medina. State Power, Islam, and the Quest for Pakistan in Late Colonial North India-Cambridge University Press (2015)