Chandigarh: A little-remembered, and often overlooked aspect of Pakistan’s founding history, is that it spent seven years after independence without a national anthem, as sections of its leadership struggled to define a distinct Muslim identity for the fledgling state, and resisted identifying too closely with the subcontinent’s shared Hindustani–Urdu inheritance.Till mid-August 1954, when it formally adopted Qaumi Taranah, the newly founded country had a flag, a governor-general, an army, and a blood-soaked disputed frontier with India, but no official song to give voice to its identity. For all those intervening years, it relied on instrumental music for official ceremonies, military marches, and funerary occasions, while searching for the words and melody that could give voice to what the new Islamic state was meant to be.Thereafter, when it finally settled on an anthem, it was overwhelmingly Persian in content – as activist Shabnam Nasimi has pointed out in a recent video – reflecting a conscious attempt by sections of Pakistan’s ruling elite to culturally anchor the country within a broader Persian-Islamic civilisational sphere – historically associated with Iran – rather than the syncretic Hindustani linguistic world from which the new state had emerged just seven years earlier.The anthem itself, whose music was composed in 1949 by Ahmad G. Chagla, while the lyrics were written three years later, in 1952, by the Urdu poet Hafeez Jalandhari, was first broadcast on Radio Pakistan on August 13, 1954 before receiving formal government approval three days later.Taken together, these choices – the composition of the anthem’s music, the formulation of its lyrics, and its eventual adoption in a heavily Persianised form – reflected not only the cultural and ideological direction of Pakistan at the time and since, but also an early inclination towards situating the new state within a broader Persian-Islamic world. This bilateral relationship was further anchored in geography, that includes a 900-km-long shared border and cross-frontier linkages across Pakistan’s Balochistan and Iran’s Sistan-Baluchestan provinces, where Baloch communities straddle both sides of the divide.In multiple ways, this early orientation continues to echo in Pakistan’s regional outlook even today, visible in Islamabad’s enduring attempts to position itself as a mediator in the ongoing US–Iran crisis. In this sense, Islamabad’s regional posture is not only strategic, but also one shaped by centuries of history, reflecting older patterns of cultural and political connectivity that continue to inform Islamabad’s engagement with Tehran.Meanwhile, the choice of Persian for its national anthem was not accidental for Pakistan. Historically, Persian had occupied a privileged place across much of South Asia for centuries, serving as the language of administration, high culture, poetry and elite discourse under several Muslim dynasties, including the Mughals.Online research has revealed that this broader Persianate milieu facilitated the emergence of the Hindustani spoken tradition, within which Urdu later developed as a distinct literary and formalised language. Hindustani first took shape as a spoken lingua franca in the Delhi region between the 12th and 13th centuries, formulated through sustained interaction between local Indo-Aryan dialects such as Khari Boli and linguistic influences from Persian, Arabic, and Turki, introduced through successive waves of invaders and rulers.Initially functioning as an everyday spoken medium – variously referred to as Hindavi, Rekhta, or Zaban-e-Dehli – it remained primarily oral and unstandardised in its early phase. Over time, particularly from the 16th and 17th centuries onwards in the Deccan, and later in the 18th century in and around Delhi and Lucknow, it began to develop a parallel literary form.Also read: Union Govt Clears Proposal to Treat Vande Mataram at Par With National Anthem, Make Disruptions PunishableSubsequently, Urdu, as one of the principal literary crystallisations of this Hindustani progression, later acquired wide currency across North India, becoming deeply embedded in its political, cultural, literary, and aesthetic life.However, in Pakistan’s post-Partition imagination, Urdu’s strong association with the Indo-Gangetic linguistic and cultural milieu introduced a palpable and non-negotiable layer of political and ideological complexity. This, in effect, helps explain Pakistan’s ambivalence toward fully embracing the shared Hindustani–Urdu cultural continuum, especially in its search for a national anthem. Therefore, in this context, Persian emerged for it as a preferred lyrical register for the anthem, linking the new state to a broader Islamic civilisational inheritance extending beyond the subcontinent.Beyond the question of its national anthem, Pakistan’s post-independence linguistic trajectory also reflected deeper internal contradictions. For while it adopted Urdu as the national language – despite its highly limited usage in East Pakistan – its decision generated profound political and cultural tensions between the two wings of the partitioned country. In East Pakistan, where Bengali was the dominant language, the imposition of Urdu by the domineering West became a major point of unrest which, alongside myriad other factors, ultimately culminated in the creation of Bangladesh in 1971.Against this backdrop, Pakistan’s ambivalence toward fully embracing Urdu in its national symbolism – especially the formation of its national anthem – reflects a broader tendency to define state identity in contrast to India. Over the past 79 years, this competitive dynamic has extended across multiple domains – military, cultural, sporting, and symbolic between the neighbouring rivals.At its upper end, it has included recurring displays of military posturing, parallel development of conventional military and nuclear force structures, and periodic efforts to demonstrate relative capability in air and missile systems, often framed through explicit or implicit comparisons.More consequentially, this rivalry has encompassed four serious military confrontations, including contested narratives surrounding last May’s Operation Sindoor, as well as reciprocal nuclear testing in 1998: six underground tests by Pakistan in response to India’s five. At its most consequential level, this confrontation has extended to the nuclear threshold itself between the two neighbours, underscoring the depth and persistence of strategic competition.In parallel, this dynamic has also spilled over into more theatrical, and at times faintly absurd, forms. The most visible expression of this rivalry unfolds daily at Wagah, where carefully selected and impeccably drilled border guards engage in choreographed displays of aggression during the flag-lowering ceremony at sunset. With exaggerated marches, synchronised stomping, and thunderous commands, the Border Security Force and Pakistan Rangers stage a resounding spectacle that draws thousands of spectators on both sides.A bizarre “flag-pole” competition has also emerged at Wagah, where mutual one-upmanship has extended into vertical display. India’s 418-feet-high flagpole, erected in late 2023, currently stands marginally taller than Pakistan’s 406-feet-tall installation; the latter had earlier replaced a 400-feet structure, itself a response to India’s 360-feet flagpole installed in 2017. In an almost inevitable cycle of escalation, Pakistan is now expected to raise its own flagpole even higher than India’s 418-foot structure, extending a rivalry in which even the height of border flagstaffs becomes a proxy for national assertion.Also read: Full Text | Two Songs, Two Visions: TM Krishna on Why India Chose ‘Jana Gana Mana’ Over ‘Vande Mataram’Beyond such amusing theatrics, India–Pakistan competition also extends across a wide spectrum of cultural and everyday comparisons, with either side routinely claiming superiority in cuisine, hospitality, humour, intellect, and etiquette.Either country claims to grow a greater variety of sweeter mangoes, melons and grapes than the other, produce better music and television programmes and even entertain, dress and keep a better table than those across the border. Pakistanis claimed Indians were far less hospitable and prided themselves on a keener sense of humour and irreverence, higher intellect and finer sense of tehzeeb or etiquette than their neighbours.Sport further provides another intense arena of hostility, particularly in cricket and hockey, where matches often mirror the emotional intensity of their geopolitical rivalry. Victories are celebrated as national triumphs, while defeats are frequently experienced as collective humiliation, reinforcing the broader psychological dimension of the contest.Ultimately, from language and anthem formation to Wagah’s choreographed theatrics and the periodic flagpole race, the India–Pakistan rivalry has permeated nearly every mode of bilateral state dynamics. Yet it is in the formation of Pakistan’s national anthem – the most distilled expression of any state’s identity, finalised only after seven years – that its earliest ideological intent becomes most clearly visible, articulated through an alignment not with neighbourly proximity to India, but within a broader Islamic civilisational sphere.