On April 9, 1996, the Lahore High Court reached a judgment on a case that had been pending for eighteen years. Four Punjabi-language books (two novels and two collections of poetry) had been banned by executive order on charges of obscenity in 1978. The petitioner, author Fakhar Zaman, then filed the Writ Petition cited above, which refuted the obscenity charges in part by arguing that what was at stake was the freedom to develop Punjabi as a literary language, to retrieve the language of Punjab, the literature of Punjabi, and the history of Punjab from an abject and subservient status. This subservient status, according to the Writ Petition, came about as the result of all histories of the region having been written first from the perspective of the former British masters, and then from the perspective of an “obscurantist” and oppressive “minority elite.”