Focusing on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the book argues that Pakistan, as a concept, implicitly emerged from the cultural and political insecurities of the ashraf, or the upper strata of the Indian Muslim society, and certain political missteps of the Congress. Once the administrative elite of the Mughal Empire, the ashraf inhabited a cultural paradigm manifested by it—it is termed Islamicate. There was a relative decline in the worldly fortunes of the ashraf under British rule. On the other hand, the Islamicate cultural paradigm, once hegemonic in the ashraf-dominated qasbas, or small towns, was increasingly imperilled with Hindus aggressively asserting their own cultural symbols. The colonial state exacerbated this volatile situation by introducing local self-government.