The Affective State: Governance, Emotion, and the Shifting Meanings of Happiness in Pakistan, 1947–1988

• MARYAM QASIM

  Author

I examine the socio-political and cultural construction of happiness in Pakistan during its formative four decades, from 1947 to 1988. I propose that 'happiness', far from being a simple private emotion, operated as a public and political concept, actively shaped and deployed by the state to legitimise its authority and navigate profound societal change. This essay explores how collective and individual conceptions of happiness were informed by political ideologies, social practices, and cultural texts during three distinct epochs: the foundational nation-building and internationalisation period (1947–1958); the age of developmental politics and populist socialism (1958–1977); and the subsequent era of state-led Islamization and military rule (1977–1988). Taking happiness as an emotion continually moulded by governance, economic policy, and religious discourse, I trace its shifting definitions. I establish that in the years following independence, happiness was constructed as a collective dream of national and democratic transformation, forged amidst the trauma of Partition. During Ayub Khan’s ‘Decade of Development’, this definition shifted towards a discourse of material prosperity, which was later contested and reframed by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s populist socialism. Finally, I suggest the Islamization programme under Zia-ul-Haq recast happiness entirely, linking it to spiritual satisfaction and public moral conservatism. This work contributes to the critical trend of affective history in South Asia, revealing the competing definitions of happiness that expose the underlying ideological shifts of post-colonial Pakistan’s political culture.

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