Banned Publications of Pakistan: A Bibliography. Compiled by Mumtazul Islam with the assistance of Syed Shehbaz Haider Naqvi. Karachi: Bureau of Bibliography and Reference [1980]. (4). 17 p. ISBN 909‐8056. Price not given.
Banning of books is not a new phenomenon in Pakistan. This was inherited from the British government which frequently used such a measure to silence the voice of dissent during its rule in India. After independence, Pakistan has also been using such repressive methods during political changes in the country.
Many of the books, newspapers, magazines and other reading materials that have been prohibited as a result of such measures have been withdrawn from the market. No mechanism has yet been developed in the country to provide access to such materials, even to research scholars. The notification banning such materials is, however, published in the official gazettes, and through them in the newspapers.
Bibliographical access to these banned materials is also nonexistent. The first attempt in this direction was made in 1981 by Afzal Haq Qarshi in his master's thesis submitted to the Department of Library Science at the University of the Punjab. Based on the official gazettes, this bibliography, although not yet published, includes books alone for a period of 25 years (from 1947 to 1972).
The bibliography under review is, however, limited to the years 1981 to 1986, but includes in it a wider variety of print materials (booklets, books, handbills, leaflets, pamphlets, posters, and serials such as newspapers and magazines)—not just books alone as in Qarshi's bibliography. This 196‒item bibliography includes 72 books, 45 newspapers and magazines, 27 booklets, 24 pamphlets, 18 posters, nine leaflets, and two handbills, largely in Urdu; six books and one magazine are in English, and a few are in the Sindhi language. The entries have been romanized in accordance with the transliteration scheme followed by the Library of Congress Accession List—South Asia, published in New Delhi, India; but the languages of the items are not identified except in the case of serials and three Sindhi pamphlets. Author entries have been made according to the rules for Pakastani names, followed in Pakistan.
This 196‒item bibliography, if viewed in the context of Qarshi's unpublished bibliography, still leaves a gap of some nine years (1972 to 1980) insofar as books are concerned. In the case of other print materials, Mumtazul Islam's bibliography, although limited to a shorter period, stands out as the only bibliography of its kind in the country.
As pointed out earlier, the banned materials are noted in the official gazettes, but the compilers of the present bibliography under review have not used this source material. Instead, they have searched seven national newspapers—four in English and three in Urdu—four of which are published in Karachi, two in Lahore, and one in Islamabad. One Urdu magazine published by the National Book Council of Pakistan (Lahore) was also used for this purpose. The source materials used for the compilation of this bibliography, however, do not include state language or regional language newspapers; nor do they include those local newspapers published in the two provincial capitals, Peshawar and Quettathese—these places do not find any representation in the newspapers used for the study.
The arrangement of the materials in this bibliography is under their type, such as books, serials, etc., with the facility of an index by title of the materials at the end. Bibliographical information is not complete, although the compilers have made an attempt to supply data that was lacking in the sources.
All told this small bibliography, despite its limitations, presents useful source material for research scholars. It provides valuable bibliographic access to the reading materials of a varied nature which were withdrawn from the access points in the country during the mid‒1980“s, a period of vital importance in the political history of Pakistan.
Anis Khurshid