by Richard Rose
A few years ago, I received a thoughtful email from a lady, a former journalist who I had never met, sent from her home in Karachi. My correspondent was the grandmother of one of my students who was about to graduate having completed studies for her PhD. The message expressed regret that because of her age and various infirmities she would be unable to attend her granddaughter’s graduation and thanked me for the support and tuition that I had provided during her years of study in England. In all honesty, her granddaughter had been an excellent student and the task of guiding her through her research and writing had not been onerous. However, the kind words expressed in the mail were greatly appreciated and I responded to thank the lady for her affirmation of my work.
When next I met my student, which if my memory serves me well, was a couple of days before her graduation, I shared her grandmother’s mail and expressed my gratitude for her kind words. During the course of our conversation, it was revealed that my correspondent was now in her eighties and whilst mentally alert found long journeys physically uncomfortable, hence her regrets at not being able to travel to witness the pomp and ceremony of an English university graduation. Happily, her daughter, my student’s mother, was to be present at this event and would doubtless have shared joyful memories and photographs on her return to Pakistan. It was during the course of our conversation that I commented to my student, that when her grandmother had been born, more than ten years before 1947, she would of course have been an Indian. Whilst this fact was not new to my student, I suspect that for a young woman who had never known a time before the existence of Pakistan, it was not a matter that had warranted a great deal of thought.
Whilst it would be unfair to say that the line drawn by Sir Cyril Radcliffe which bifurcated the states of Punjab and Bengal in his role as Chairman of the Boundary Commission in August 1947 was arbitrary in nature, it is not without reason to suggest that a man whose previous cultural experiences had been confined to western Europe, may not have been an obvious candidate for this task. It may be argued that the decisions which led to partition were not his and that he was ill-chosen to take upon his own shoulders an impossible role that enabled others to abdicate their responsibility for the massacre that was to follow. Given just five weeks to complete his mission and with no real insight into the socio-political context in which he was working, it is hardly surprising that many today quite understandably regard him as a figure of contempt. In mitigation for an act undertaken, which was clearly beyond his comprehension or capabilities, it is believed that he refused to accept the £3,000 fee for this work (£3,000 was a vast sum of money in 1947).
The establishment of a boundary and with it the creation of a new country resulted in the movement of around 14 million people and the mass slaughter of possibly as many as two million, as has been well documented in many tragic personal accounts and histories of this period. Perhaps as great a tragedy is the fact that since this time the levels of enmity between the two independent countries of India and Pakistan has resulted in major armed conflicts in 1965 and 1971, and the more limited Kargil war of 1999. Even today, those occasions when I can pick up a newspaper during my regular visits to India without seeing reports of further border skirmishes, are indeed rare and it seems that the politicians of both India and Pakistan have little idea of how they might resolve the ongoing tensions which exist between these two powerful countries.
I was recently at a conference in Delhi, attended by delegates from across the region, though notably none from Pakistan. During this event I found myself one lunchtime in discussion with a colleague from a university in Dhaka, Bangladesh. During the course of our conversation, I recounted the tale of my student whose grandmother had been born an Indian and was now officially a Pakistani. My Bangladeshi colleague shrugged his shoulders and told me, ‘This is nothing, my grandmother was also born in India, she then became Pakistani and is now a proud citizen of Bangladesh’. Apparently, she was born in Chittagong in 1941, became a Pakistani living in what was then East Pakistan in 1947, and a Bangladeshi in 1971 after what is usually referred to as the Bangladeshi Liberation War. It is to be hoped, stated my colleague, that matters are now stable, and she will not be expected to adopt a further nationality.
The Israeli writer Amos Oz in his 2014 novel Judas described the creation of boundaries as a major source of many problems. Once one draws a line of demarcation to establish a border, he suggests, the people on either side stare across the divide and see that which they believe to be exotic. They are in effect like visitors to a zoo. They seldom see those characteristics that bind us together, but are more inclined to emphasise difference, and once those differences are established we compare them with our own experiences and often measure what we see as inferior to what we know. Oz was of course referring to the disputed border between Israel and Palestine, but he could equally have been discussing that which exists between India and Pakistan, or many of the other troubled parts of the world.
In what ways has my former student’s grandmother changed since she became a Pakistani? Has the transformation from Indian to Pakistani and finally to Bangladeshi fundamentally altered the humanity of my colleague’s grandmother? I suspect that the person behind the label has not greatly changed, though the politics and environment, which have shaped the lives of both of these ladies, have had a significant impact upon how they are perceived both within and beyond the borders of their nations.
According to Plutarch’s text Of Banishment, Socrates is credited with having said, ‘I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.’ I suspect that when he made this assertion there were few in Greece, or for that matter in Macedonia, or the great civilisations of the Pallavas or the Chola in India who would have seen the world in his terms. I am convinced that the levels of jingoism that characterise much of today’s politics means that we have made little progress in our thinking since the days of Socrates. Would it be possible for one of the world’s most powerful men to propose the construction of a wall between two countries had we made such an advance? I am however heartened, that students from Pakistan continue their studies in England, that my colleagues from England work alongside others from China, Brazil, Iraq and Turkey and that Bangladeshi academics meet with others from Australia, the UK, India and Korea in conferences where they can enjoy each other’s company and recognise what they can learn from each other.
What we have in common is a shared humanity, that which divides us has generally been created by those who are afraid to recognise this as a fact. Will this ever change? Sadly, the physical borders that have been created between nations are destined to remain, but perhaps we could do more to dismantle those artificial boundaries that have become embedded in our minds.
