The ‘Aqeel Collection’ is held by Kyoto University ASAFAS. It is a most valuable collection of books on the history and literature of South Asian Muslims and Islam in general. The collection consists mainly of books in Urdu. However, Dr DiCostanzo works solely on the part of the collection that is written in English. There, he focuses on anti-colonial Indian nationalism and the ‘idea of Pakistan’. Thanks to the Collection, DiCostanzo has been able to ‘mine’ dozens of books published all over the British Empire in India and elsewhere in the twenties, thirties and forties, in order to find more about political and communal ‘passions’ like fear, anger, hatred, joy etc, in them. The great variety of the Aqeel corpus might make it possible to imagine a new typology of nationalism for the ‘idea of Pakistan’. It might also help to shed some new light on the theme of ‘emotional’ politics in South Asian history and why emotions and passions might have been used by intellectuals of the time before the Great Partition of 1947 occurred.