HYBRIDIZATION’S IMPRINT ON PAKISTANI INTELLECTUALISM: CATALOGUING POST-COLONIAL SENTIENCE THROUGH DAWN

Abstract

Perpetuated through recurrences, the English daily Dawn curates those everyday databases of existence, which meld together to constitute a multifariously textured interplay of cognitive processes. Intrinsically hybrid, the newspaper illumines psychological, emotional, intellectual, factual, fictional, sociological, political, indigenous, and foreign discourses that become complimentary and contrapuntal to one another. In being the seminal Pakistani newspaper and forbearer of its nascent postcoloniality, Dawn chronicled the initial opposition to colonialism of sorts. Fast-forwarding to today and traversing Pakistan’s post-colonial landscape through Dawn, the Books and Authors and People and Society sections present an instance of the Pakistani intellectual’s psychological tethering that appears moored to an intellectualism borrowing from the centrality of Western discourses. Employing a theoretical amalgam of cultural hybridity and literary discursive nuances, as viewed within the Pakistani psychology, this study aims at dismantling a form of intellectual hybridization that owes its shaping to its post-colonial identity. A textual analysis of interviews and non-fiction reviews from the Dawn newspaper has been carried out, focusing on the newspaper as a hybrid genre capable of assimilating the national discourse. The inquiry of this analysis attains a triadic multifariousness; an examination of Dawn’s existential, generic, and topical aspects seeks to answer how hybridity configures and reconfigures culturally observable psychological expressions of Pakistani post-colonialism. Eventually, a striking critical finding of this document is that the intellectualism of Dawn that began as a counterpoint to the central dominating consciousness of the British colony, inevitably, got caught up in the paradoxical creation of elitist stereotypes and cultural peripheries in the long run.