Given the pervasive sense of sectarian conflict, linguistic diversity, and even divergent histories of allegiance to the idea of Pakistan as a modern Muslim nation, how is a sense of belongingness created? How is social space mapped on entities both smaller and larger than the nation? This book inaugurates a new moment in Pakistan studies by asking how we are to understand the lives of ordinary people as they work to make their country inhabitable, even in the midst of anxious discourses about a crisis of nationalism and a failed state that is commonly found in academic writings and media reportage. The greatest achievement of this volume is that it displaces a teleological framework within which both the promise and the failures of Pakistan have been typically viewed, and instead makes us look at specific historical and social factors through which we can understand the contingencies, the narrowing of possibilities as well as the work done in homes, neighbourhoods, mosques as part of everyday reality. Instead of viewing Pakistan primarily as the state that was carved out of India, the book offers us a way of looking at the country through categories of political plenitude though not without its own pathos. It will appeal to academics and students of anthropology, sociology, religion, history, political science and comparative literature, as well as to policy makers, journalists and cultural theorists.