Pakistan’s Past Penetrated and Performed, or How to be Critical (And Why it Matters) Review: Towards Peoples’ Histories in Pakistan: (In)audible Voices, Forgotten Pasts, ed. Asad Ali, Kamran Asdar Ali, Bloomsbury Academic, London 2023.

The reviewed volume contains numerous articles which aspire to be “critical studies” on Pakistan’s “forgotten pasts”. The quality of these papers varies, ranging from brilliant to unacceptable (including two cases of rehashed material), although most of them are useful and informative. However, aside from commenting on each of them separately, I also try to show that some of the authors’ mistakes arose from their conviction that they are pioneers, working in the field (almost) no one has found before. In fact, what many of them present as groundbreaking methodological turns are typical methods of social history, and their apparent ignorance of this fact means that the authors fail to use these research tools efficiently