The assumption that people were to be given theatre was of course in keeping with the government fiction that people were to be given development particularly if they behaved themselves. (Wa Thiong’o, 1986:41) Despite our short history, the norms of scholarship in Pakistan have already become well entrenched: the grooves already seem so deep that digging ourselves out of them may present some difficulties. (One example of that in the social sciences generally, and political science and history in particular, is the retelling of the major historical events and noting major trends without offering any remarkably new interpretations). The need, in other words, of newer and different understanding of where we are and how we got there is considerable. One purpose of introducing Escobar’s (1997) Encountering Development and related materials is to offer an opportunity to get out of these academic ruts. Specifically, two exits are simultaneously provided by Escobar; one lets us interrogate the dominant narrative of development, and the other enables us to consider the possibilities that postmodernism opens up. He applies the latter to the former, which is an uncomplicated way to make what is valuable in postmodernism clear and accessible. (In what follows, the numbers in parenthesis refer to pages in Escobar’s work).