Any account of the history of publishing in Pakistan should, in all fairness, start with Lahore, the publishing centre for British India. Under the British, most publishing was in the hands of Hindu publishers. With Partition, most Hindu publishers migrated to India, leaving a nearly complete vacuum in the publishing industry of the newly founded Pakistan, which the Muslim publishers in Lahore tried to fill. What success they achieved was due mainly to the fact that, from 1947 to 1962, the government of Pakistan followed British India's policy of allowing private-sector publishers to produce textbooks for government schools. This work subsequently formed the bulk of the publications in Pakistan, and provided the bread and butter for its nascent publishing industry.
Slowly, publishers such as Sheikh Muhammad Ashraf, Sheikh Ghulam Ali & Sons, Qaumi Qutb Khana and Ferozsons of Lahore, along with Urdu Academy Sindh and Shaikh Shaukat Ali of Karachi, began to make headway in identifying and developing local authors. However, this advantageous position changed shortly after the onset of General Ayub Khan's martial-law rule, in 1958. Instead of allowing multiple private publishers to compete in the textbook market, the public sector was granted the exclusive right to publish all textbooks for state schools from classes 1 to 12, which were to be prescribed by a single textbook board, created in 1962. This board was later divided into five bodies, one for each province.
The formation of the textbook board was a great setback to the publishing industry in Pakistan. Deprived of the need to exercise initiative and creativity in producing new works, publishers were relegated to the role of printers and contractors of books published by the textbook boards. The low profits and lacklustre tasks consigned to them cast a pall over the industry. This situation could not be mitigated by publishing for private schools as, in those days, there were no more than 200 English-medium private schools in the country.
Publishing general books did not get the publishers very far, as the market for these was not large in a country where literate members of the population were, and still remain, in the minority. There was the occasional windfall, however, such as the publication of Ayub Khan's Friends not Masters in 1967. The book generated sales of more than 70,000 in its English and Urdu editions, and translation rights were sold in several other languages. It was also prescribed in colleges throughout Pakistan. Friends not Masters was published by Oxford University Press Pakistan (for which this writer works), which at this point was also printing low-profit government-prescribed textbooks, like other publishers in Pakistan. At the same time, it was importing general books, English textbooks and dictionaries from the UK, and acting as an agent for several commercial and university presses abroad.