Paper short abstract:

This paper offers a history of electrification in early post-colonial Pakistan, bringing together ideological and discursive influences with evolving power structures on the ground.

Paper long abstract:

Electric power consumption in early post-colonial Pakistan was amongst the lowest in the world. Apart from some colonial-era plans for multi-purpose dam projects in East and West Pakistan - and an assortment of aging municipal coal or diesel generating sets - there was little viable electrical power infrastructure on the ground. At the same time, electrification was quickly gaining an unassailable (and often highly ideological) position at the top of the developmentalist to-do list around the world, with immediate implications for what the new citizens of Pakistan expected their government to achieve. My paper will explore how ideological expectations of nationalism, newly emerging discursive formations of development, international funding regimes and local and regional governmental requirements came together in a characteristically Pakistani experience of electrification between the late colonial period and (roughly) the first decade of independence.