Autobiography, in its classical conception, was often an act of confession. Rousseau’s Confessions remains perhaps its most famous example: the autobiographer places himself before the reader, exposes his weaknesses, contradictions and vanities and submits his life to a searching moral examination. The autobiography nowadays is something different. It is frequently an apology – a sustained attempt by the writer to explain, defend and vindicate his choices. The autobiographer is no longer confessing; he is making his case before posterity. Muhammad Saeed Mehdi’s The Eyewitness: Standing in the Shadows of Pakistan’s History is no exception.

The title promises an eyewitness account of some of the most consequential episodes of Pakistan’s political and administrative history. Mehdi occupied a succession of important positions in the civil service. In the course of his career, he found himself close to the centres of political power. His proximity to Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, in particular, gives the book its potential historical importance. A civil servant who has witnessed the working of governments from the inside can offer something that conventional political histories often cannot: small details, private conversations, observations on personalities and institutional practices that remain invisible in official records.

Unfortunately, the book does not entirely fulfil the promise of its title. Its principal weakness is structural. It does not develop a consistent narrative line. Its 28 chapters often read as separate recollections rather than parts of a single autobiography. The result is a patchy and occasionally incoherent account. The reader moves from one posting and episode to another without always being given a sufficiently strong sense of how these experiences transformed the author or shaped his understanding of Pakistan’s political order. There is material here for a compelling political memoir, but it has not always been disciplined into a coherent story.

Some of the anecdotes Mehdi recounts are genuinely engaging because they illuminate the informal workings of a system usually described through official documents and public statements. The book is strongest in these moments. The anecdotes from his various postings occasionally reveal the personalities behind institutions and the informal calculations that accompany official decisions. Such episodes are valuable not necessarily because they alter the grand narrative of Pakistan’s history, but because they add texture to it. Mehdi was exceptionally well placed to observe this dimension.

The book’s perspective is also its limitation. Mehdi was a beneficiary of the system he describes. That fact inevitably colours his recollection. The reader is entitled to ask whether the book is merely an eyewitness account or also an exercise in retrospective self-justification. How does a man who participated in a system narrate that system without defending his own place in it?

This question is never entirely resolved.

There is, indeed, an intriguing paradox at the heart of the book. The author calls himself an eyewitness, but an eyewitness is never a neutral camera. He selects what to remember, what to emphasise and what to omit. The memoirist inevitably becomes both the protagonist and the historian of his life. In Mehdi’s case, this creates a tension between historical testimony and personal vindication. The book would have gained greater intellectual force if the author had been more self-critical about the privileges that accompanied his career and more candid about the compromises demanded by proximity to political power. A genuinely searching autobiography asks: What did I do, why did I do it, what did I get wrong, and what were the consequences? An apologetic memoir more often asks: How was I justified in doing what I did? The Eyewitness tends towards the latter mode.

This does not make the book historically useless. On the contrary, its value lies precisely in the access its author enjoyed. Memoirs by senior civil servants are important sources for understanding Pakistan because the country’s political history has often been shaped by an intimate relationship between elected politicians and the permanent bureaucracy. The official record tells us what governments decided; memoirs such as Mehdi’s can sometimes tell us how the decisions were reached. But such memoirs must be read against the grain. Their silences are as significant as their revelations and their self-defence must be distinguished from historical explanation.

Another disappointment is the prose. An autobiography of this kind ought to have been spicier. The subject matter certainly permits it. Pakistan’s political history is replete with intrigue, reversals of fortune, bureaucratic manoeuvring and colourful personalities. A writer who has spent decades close to power possesses an abundance of material from which to create vivid scenes. Too often, potentially dramatic material is narrated without the literary sharpness that could bring it alive.

This is not a demand for sensationalism. A political memoir needs a distinctive narrative voice. Mehdi occasionally achieves this in his anecdotes, but not consistently. The prose rarely has the bite or irony that one might expect from someone who has spent a lifetime observing the theatre of Pakistani power from close quarters. The book consequently works better as a collection of recollections than as a fully realised autobiography.

The author remains somewhat too close to the world he describes. The title Standing in the Shadows of Pakistan’s History is therefore revealing. Mehdi was not merely standing in the shadows. At various points in his career, he was quite close to the centre of the stage. The interesting question is not what he saw from the shadows, but what role he himself played in producing the history he witnessed. That question should have been at the heart of the book.

The book’s greatest value, therefore, may lie not in accepting Mehdi’s version of history at face value but in reading it as a document of the system it describes. The eyewitness is also a participant; the participant is also a beneficiary; and the beneficiary, when writing his memoirs, is inevitably his advocate. That is precisely why The Eyewitness is worth reading and precisely why it should be read with a critical eye.

The Eyewitness

Standing in the Shadows of Pakistan’s History

Author: Muhammad Saeed Mehdi

Publisher: Lighthouse

Publishers, 2025

Pages: 344

The reviewer is a professor in the Faculty of Liberal Arts at the Beaconhouse National University, Lahore