Not too long ago, Timothy Kane, Australia’s High Commissioner to Pakistan, stood in Taxila and wrote: “Walking through #Taxila, it’s impossible not to be struck by the depth of Pakistan’s history… A fascinating visit and a beautiful reminder of 🇵🇰 rich heritage.”
The sentiment, surprising for a senior diplomat, is rooted in a flawed reading of history and deserves correction. Taxila was a prominent city of ancient India, home to one of the world’s oldest known centres of higher learning. Before the concept of the nation-state was codified in the Westphalian settlement, places were understood as parts of civilisations, not states. The city of Troy, immortalised in Homer’s epics, now lies within modern Turkey — but that does not make the Iliad and the Odyssey Turkish literature.
Pakistan is a state carved out of India less than 80 years ago, founded on the ideology that Hindus and Muslims could not live together as one nation. India, by contrast, is the world’s oldest continuously surviving civilisation and its largest secular democracy. To ascribe any part of ancient Indian civilisation to the modern state of Pakistan does a disservice to history itself.
Taxila predates Pakistan by at least two and a half thousand years, and predates Islam’s arrival in the region by at least a millennium. It is traditionally associated with Kautilya, also known as Chanakya, one of the ancient world’s great teachers of politics and economics, credited with helping Chandragupta Maurya found the Mauryan Empire, one of antiquity’s largest. Taxila’s university was a centre of learning encompassing several strands of Indian academic and philosophical pursuits. Much of this heritage was destroyed in successive waves of attacks by Islamic invaders.
To call this “Pakistan’s history,” then, is effectively to credit an ideology that sought to erase the very civilisation that built Taxila. Curiously, some quarters within Pakistan — a nation whose founding claim was that Islam alone constitutes nationhood — now appear to be reaching further back: past the Mughals, the Delhi Sultanate, and the Arab conquest of Sindh in 711 CE, to Mohenjo-daro and Harappa, cities that were planned and thriving when much of the ancient world was still emerging. For those who have long held that the Indian subcontinent is, at its deepest level, a single civilisational entity bound together by the profound wisdom and metaphysics of Hindu philosophy, expressed across extraordinary diversity, for, at the very least, over five thousand years — this shift, if genuine, would carry real meaning. But only if it is genuine.
The Sindhu-Saraswati civilisation (also known as the Indus Valley Civilisation) is among the oldest known civilisations of humankind, alongside Egypt and Mesopotamia, and by some estimates the most extensive of the Bronze Age world by geographical reach — spanning roughly 1 to 1.5 million square kilometres. According to current understanding, it stretched from what is now the Iranian border and northern Afghanistan across to Jammu, western Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat and northern Maharashtra in India. Some of its cities are estimated to have held populations of 40,000 or more, remarkable against a typical ancient city of roughly 10,000.
One of the defining features of Indian civilisation is its cultural continuity across millennia. The Pashupati seal from Mohenjo-daro, depicting a figure in a yogic posture, and the swastika motifs recurring throughout Indus Valley artefacts, are threads that run unbroken into symbols still used across the Indian subcontinent today.
There are indications that some in Pakistan feel the Indus narrative offers an identity anchor the Islamic-state framework has failed to provide — *Maryam Nawaz’s revival of *Basant, the kite-flying festival as being one example. But without acknowledging that this civilisation is part of India’s story, rooted in Hindu philosophy, and without shedding the exclusionary baggage of Islamist denial, any attempt at Pakistani self-recovery through this route is unlikely to succeed.
There is a harder argument here too, about the cost of political Islam as an organising principle for a state. Pakistan faces what analysts call a polycrisis: an economy dependent on repeated IMF bailouts, institutions hollowed out by a military establishment that consumes the largest share of the budget, and chronic instability. In 2024 it held elections widely regarded as manipulated and jailed its most popular political leader, Imran Khan. It continues to face a freedom movement in occupied Balochistan and civil unrest in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. More recently it also saw protests in Pakistan occupied Jammu and Kashmir which were met with a brutal crackdown, with many killed by security forces. A nation defined entirely by what it opposes — Hindus, India, the “infidel” — has no positive civilisational content left once that opposition is exhausted. Pakistan’s founders believed Islam alone could supply the national glue; instead the country produced the Taliban, sheltered Al-Qaeda’s leadership, and in 2025 found itself exchanging cross-border strikes with the very Taliban it had nurtured for decades.
If Pakistan is genuinely turning toward the Indus, metaphorically speaking, it would be good news for the Pakistani public that deserves an identity built on truth rather than religious bigotry, and good news for the world too that has for long borne the costs of terrorism exported from Pakistan.
*Maryam Nawaz – Current Chief Minister of Pakistan’s Punjab province, daughter of former Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, niece of current PM Shehbaz Sharif.
*Basant – Basant is a spring festival associated with the Hindu month of Magha, marking the onset of spring and celebrated in parts of the Indian subcontinent with kite-flying festivities; its date varies by regional tradition.
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