Abstract
In this paper, I explore how colonial-era censorship laws continue to shape the national identity and cultural production of Pakistan. Drawing on legal history, literary analysis, and decolonial theory, I examine how laws governing blasphemy, obscenity, and sedition – originally codified in the Indian Penal Code under British rule – have been selectively adapted by the Pakistani state to police cultural and religious expression. At a moment of intensifying state control in Pakistan, this work highlights how literature not only responds to censorship, but also how legal regulation interacts with literary form, public controversy, state discourse and cultural memory. As such, I offer a South Asian perspective on global patterns of moral regulation, ideological nation-building, and the preservation of dissenting voices across history and the contemporary world.
Bio: Dr Fatima Naveed is a literary historian whose work explores the intersections of literature, censorship, and history in South Asia. She is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH) at the University of Edinburgh, and an AHRC-funded postdoctoral associate at the University of Exeter. For the academic year 2026/27, she is a visiting fellow at the Law and the Humanities Hub (LHub) at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London. Her doctoral research presented the first complete literary history of the All-India Progressive Writers’ Association (PWA) spanning pre-Partition activities and postcolonial transformations in both India and Pakistan, and won the Bloomsbury Academic Writing Fellowship in 2025. Her published and forthcoming works appear in Wasafiri, South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, and Critical Pakistan Studies. She is also co-founder of The Tasavvur Collective, a consortium of early career researchers focused on the cultural representations of South Asian Muslims.
