A country does not usually discover a new name on social media. Yet for the last few days, a suggestion by Pakistani history communicator Faisal Warraich turned into something larger than a branding exercise. Warraich proposed that Pakistan consider “Indus” as an alternative civilisational name – not necessarily a replacement for Pakistan, but a way of acknowledging that the country’s story did not begin in 1947.
The idea travelled because it touched a nerve. “Islamic Republic of Indus” appeared in posts, memes and arguments. Some treated it as a playful thought experiment. Others heard in it an overdue recovery of a past that official history had often compressed into the arrival of Islam, the Pakistan movement and Partition. Critics, especially in India, saw an attempt to appropriate a civilisation that spread across much of north-western South Asia.
By Kanwal Sibal’s logic, postcolonial borders would sever every new nation from the civilisations that preceded it.
Then Zulfikar Ali Bhutto Jr. gave the debate a different centre of gravity:
“Very much loving the new Islamic Republic of Indus trend on Pakistani twitter. The Indus has always been the backbone and single unifier of Pakistan. Hopefully this will reverse the damage that has been done to our lion river and restore its delta. If Indus is Pakistan’s backbone, its delta is our very foundation.”
The most consequential sentence in that post was not about renaming the state. It was about restoring the river.
The argument is easy to trivialise as a contest over who “owns” the Indus Valley Civilisation. It becomes more serious when framed as a question of inheritance. What does a modern country inherit from the territory within its borders? Does a change of religion cancel earlier history? And does the birth date of a state determine the age of the memory it may claim?
The Indus debate is therefore not only about Pakistan’s past. It is about the kind of nation Pakistan wishes to become. The anxieties surrounding Pakistan’s embrace of the Indus and its cultural roots surfaced with unusual clarity in an otherwise exchange on X. After Timothy Kane, Australia’s High Commissioner to Pakistan, returned from Taxila and wrote that it was “impossible not to be struck by the depth of Pakistan’s history,” describing the ancient city as a centre where people, ideas and cultures once converged, Kanwal Sibal, India’s former foreign secretary, responded with scathing ridicule. Taxila, he wrote, had been founded around 1000 BC; Islam appeared roughly sixteen centuries later; Pakistan was created only in 1947. What “depth,” he asked, could Pakistan therefore claim?
The chronology sounds decisive only because it changes the question. Kane had not claimed that Taxila was a Pakistani city in antiquity. He had observed that Taxila forms part of Pakistan’s historical landscape. Sibal answered as though modern sovereignty must exist at the moment of an ancient site’s creation before a present-day society can inherit it.
That is a category error. The Arab Republic of Egypt did not exist when the pyramids were built. Modern Iraq did not exist when Ur flourished. The Republic of Türkiye did not exist when Troy, Ephesus or Constantinople took shape. Italy is not pagan Rome, but no serious person concludes that Rome has no place in Italian history.
Nor would the logic survive its application to India. The Republic of India and the Islamic Republic of Pakistan both came into being in 1947. If that date bars Pakistan from treating Taxila as part of its past, it would also complicate modern India’s claim to the Mauryas, the Guptas, Ashoka or the Vedic age. The point is not to deny India those inheritances. It is to recognise that modern states routinely inherit histories older than themselves.
Taxila also resists the neat civilisational ownership implied by the exchange. It is not one city from one age. The archaeological complex contains prehistoric occupation, the Achaemenid-era settlement at Bhir Mound, the Hellenistic city of Sirkap, the Kushan city of Sirsukh and Buddhist monasteries and stupas. It is a record of movement, conquest, trade, faith and intellectual exchange. Its importance lies precisely in the fact that no single modern nationalism can contain it.
Taxila is in Pakistan. Pakistan administers it, preserves it and presents it to the world. That does not make the site exclusively Pakistani in cultural meaning. But neither does Pakistan’s founding date erase the site from the country’s history.
The impulse to do so is revealing. It reduces Pakistan to an event – Partition – while allowing India to speak as both a modern republic and an ancient civilisation. Pakistan is told that its past begins in 1947, or perhaps with Muhammad bin Qasim (credited with bringing Islam to the region in 712 AD, even when disputed by accounts of Arab merchants regularly sailing to the coastal areas of the subcontinent before the 7th century), while “India” moves freely between a contemporary state, a civilisational zone and the entire precolonial subcontinent. The terms of the argument change depending on who is making the claim.
Nevertheless, Pakistan’s geography is inseparable from the Indus River. Warraich’s suggestion was not the first time Pakistanis have looked to the Indus for a unifying symbol. As early as 1934, Choudhry Rahmat Ali (famous for having coined the name “Pakistan”) had described the land as the “birthplace of human civilisation”. The current debate taps into deeper questions: Was the Indus Civilisation “Indian” or something else entirely? Does religion sever ties to ancient heritage, or can it coexist with it?
Modern nationalism often tries to compress ancient civilisations, but the Indus Civilisation belongs to a period long before contemporary borders. The mature Harappan or Indus civilisation flourished roughly 2600 BCE – 1900 BCE. It was one of the world’s earliest great urban societies, contemporary with ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. Its settlements stretched across a vast region covering much of present-day Pakistan, with connections into Afghanistan and Iran. Harappan cities used standardised bricks, carefully planned streets, wells, covered drains, systems of weights and measures, and long-distance trade networks. At Mohenjo-daro, the absence of obvious royal palaces or monumental tombs has long intrigued archaeologists. The city’s most famous public structure is a bath, not a throne room. We still do not know who governed these cities, what language their inhabitants spoke, or how political authority was organised.
That uncertainty should encourage humility. It rarely does. The irony begins with language. The names India, Hindu and Hindustan all trace, through Persian and Greek transformations, to Sindhu, the ancient name of the Indus. That etymology does not transfer ownership of the civilisation to Pakistan. Nor does it invalidate India’s name. It simply reveals how unstable modern claims become when ancient geographical terms are treated as national property. The word “India” itself remembers a river that now flows mostly through Pakistan.
The Indus River itself has been revered for millennia. In Tibetan, it is known as Sengge Chu, meaning “Lion River”, a name that refers to the belief that the river springs from the mouth of a lion near Mount Kailash. In Pashto, it is called Abaseen, or “Father of Rivers”, reflecting its role in nourishing the plains. These terms capture the river’s stature long before the words “Pakistan” or “India” were coined.
Archaeologists regard Mohenjo?daro and Harappa as the twin capitals of the mature Harappan network, and both lie in present?day Pakistan. Mohenjo?daro covers about 250 hectares and exhibits extensive urban planning, while Harappa is a large planned city with a citadel and lower town. More than 1,000 Indus sites have been reported across Pakistan and India, but many of the largest excavated urban centres are located in Pakistan. Mohenjo?daro, inscribed on UNESCO’s World Heritage list in 1980, is also described by researchers at the Laboratory for Integrated Archaeological Visualization & Heritage as one of the main urban centres of the Indus civilisation.
The Cholistan desert hosts the site of Ganweriwala, covering roughly 81.5 hectares-larger than Harappa-and considered the third major Indus urban centre in Pakistan.
These facts undermine the nationalist desire to monopolise the civilisation. To call the Indus civilisation “Indian” ignores the linguistic origins of the name India and the geography of the civilisation.
No loud sloganeering can undo how the vast majority of excavated urban centres lie within present?day Pakistan. (To Be Concluded)
The writer is OpEd Editor (Daily Times) and can be reached at durenayab786 @gmail.com. Shetweets @DureAkram.