Unfinished stories of the Partition: Across 75 years

Abstract

This conversation between two second cousins born and brought up on different sides of the India/Pakistan border and now, as academics and writers, engaged in examining the Partition, looks at what the tumultuous and tragic events of 1947 have meant for families most obviously impacted by them, and how their impact has unfolded over the past 75 years. Educated, Muslim, Urdu-speaking middle-class families (ashráf) from North India were sundered by the Partition, and, as they remain divided between the two (later three) countries — unlike the bulk of Hindu refugees from Pakistan, who relocated to India over the next few years — the traces of the Partition can be observed with particular vividness in this large group. The dialogue explores what it meant for post-Partition Indian Muslims to have Pakistani relatives, and how Pakistani immigrants reacted to the home regions of India. It also examines some of the ways in which the division of colonial India continued and continues to shape post-Partition events, such as the creation of Bangladesh or the rise of religious nationalisms. Progressive politics, socio-economic fissures, and related tensions are also examined.

Introduction

In this conversation, Kamran Asdar Ali, born and educated in Pakistan, who now teaches Anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin, USA, traces the negotiation of postcolonial and post-Partition identities in South Asia with Tabish Khair, born and educated in India, who now teaches English literature at Aarhus University, Denmark. Belonging to the same extended family, the two cousins and scholars — who have engaged with the Partition in their own writings (Khair, 2007; Ali, 2015) — examine what the traumatic division of colonial India in 1947 came to mean to families like theirs and talk about its legacy 75 years later. The conversation that follows examines the fracturing of a family, as well as emotive affiliations that survived the Partition, and highlights the differences between the way the Partition has been experienced across the decades and by different generations.

Ali and Khair look at what it meant for post-Partition Indian Muslims to have Pakistani relatives, and how Pakistani immigrants reacted to and revisited the home regions of India, which they had left behind. The conversation explores some of the ways in which the division of colonial India continued to shape — even as it was itself shaped by memory —post-Partition events, such as the creation of Bangladesh or the rise of religious nationalisms. The role of Muslim elites and progressive elements among them are discussed, carefully located in the context of class differences; and the sometimes conflicted and sometimes enabling relationships between modernity and religious conservatism are also explored across the borders.

The conversation traces the transformation of the North Indian Ashráf communities (affluent and educated Urdu-speaking Muslim families from the advantaged “castes”) into a subcontinental and then global diaspora, notes the differences of identity-formation among its members on both sides of the border, and adumbrates the conflicts between progressive values and traditional entitlement in such circles, thus providing an unusual perspective on the Partition and its aftermaths. What comes across is a narrative of many crisscrossing lines whose complexity can often be reduced in a purely academic article, with its disciplinary specifications — hence the choice of a conversation for this exploration. However, the conversation should also be read as one conducted between two individual middle-class men from educated Muslim families and should not be generalized to embrace all experiences across the borders.

Tabish Khair (TK): Kamran Bhai, we met only once while I was in India, in my recollection. You came for a visit (after graduation, I think). This was common in the branches of the family that had moved to Pakistan. All of them came for visits. We, who had stayed on in India, almost never visited Pakistan. Then I met you again after I moved to the West, where we were both academics in the humanities. I am sure I must have met you when I was younger, as your father, Asdar uncle, who was my father’s cousin, was the one person I heard of most often when growing up. My father adored him, but he (your father) died early in an air crash, and I have no physical memories of him. Asdar uncle was one of my parents’ relations who had crossed the border after the Partition. They cropped up in my parents’ conversation all the time, but there was also a lot of nervousness when any of them visited: you had to inform the police, and so on. Government officers knocked to check. We did not live in a Muslim mohalla, and felt nervous at the way our neighbours looked at and spoke of “Pakistanis”. So my relationship to all of you was mixed: there was love and apprehension. What was your relationship to us, across the border? What made you visit? What did you feel?

Kamran Asdar Ali (KAA): Actually, we met very often when you were much younger. You are correct, my father died in an airplane crash in Cairo in 1965, but our mother would bring us kids to visit his family each year (which basically meant spending a considerable amount of time in Gaya at your grandfather’s house) until 1970 when it became difficult to travel to India. I remember your immediate family living on the top floor of your grandfather’s house and how we used to play together, you four to six years younger than me, on the open roof. Then, in the 1970s when we came for a relative’s wedding, your family had moved into the new house next door. I came again in 1980 or 1981, when you may have been in ninth grade and I was already in my second year of medical college. You are right in saying your father’s family was very close to my father: my father basically grew up in his uncle’s (your grandfather’s) house. My father did not have a brother; your father was like his brother. He insisted that we call your father Chotay Abba, a term used for paternal uncles in old ashráf Muslim families of North India meaning “younger father”. You may not know this, but as a young person your father visited his uncles, aunts, cousins in Pakistan, and considered studying medicine there. But he went back after a few months and continued his studies in India. Many people from the family remembered him from those days during my own youth. He then completed his medical studies in India and of course stayed there all his life. Moving back and forth between India and Pakistan in the 1950s and even 1960s — until the 1965 war — was relatively easy. You needed a passport from the late 1940s onwards, but perhaps not a visa. I have photos of us as very young children travelling through India in our father’s car — photos of Agra, Delhi, and other places — so people could take their vehicles.

Now to the difficult questions you raise. For us, going to India was a vacation and also visiting our extended family, like all of you, and also getting to know our own roots. I am not sure we were questioned on our return (at least our mother never told us about it if we were) and neither was I when I travelled in my twenties. Although, I did feel the apprehension among family members in India when I visited in the early 1980s. Perhaps prior to that I was too young to notice such emotions. I do remember how in the summer of 1967 our ageing paternal grandmother escaped the communal riots in Ranchi to Gaya (and safety), with only the sari she was wearing; other relatives were not so lucky. In the 1980s, visiting from Pakistan, I was always surprised to see narrow staircases in relatively modern family homes in Gaya or Patna. When asked why, people would stay silent, and then, on insistence, they would say that this would protect them as they could barricade themselves on the top floor, and the “others”, when they came, would only be able to climb the stairs one at a time, making it easier to accost them. The symbolic and real fear and violence that may have permeated even the architectural concerns of middle-class Muslim homes have to be understood to determine how a new society, envisioned as a place where people of all religions would be equals, would co-exist, had transformed into one in which fear had become the normative affect for many. Perhaps this was my perception.

Intizar Hussain, the doyen of Urdu literature, who is read with eagerness on both sides of the Indo-Pak border, has a short story called “Hindustan se ek Khat” (A Letter From India). The protagonist, who in the early 1970s is still in India, sends a heart-wrenching letter to his relatives now settled and enjoying the “good life” in Karachi. There is a lamentation in the letter about the family’s social decline and the unkempt nature of ancestral graves due to financial burdens. But the story begins with the arrival of a nephew from Dhaka trying to find his way back to Pakistan, after Bangladesh’s independence. This is in early 1972, when many did eventually return to their ancestral homes after making a journey from Bengal, Bihar, and Uttar Pradesh to then East Pakistan a generation earlier. The protagonist, although delighted to see Imran, his nephew, remains fearful and anxious that no one in the village recognizes the visitor (the anxiety you are suggesting). This is a changed landscape: the pre-Partition Muslim elite presence and influence has been eroded, and now Muslims have to prove their loyalty to the new nation, lest they are considered supporters of that other Muslim land. Imran, with his new Pakistani roots, would jeopardize the security of this ageing couple’s neglected existence. Hussain’s portrayal speaks to the implicit fear of being found out, of perpetual surveillance and the constant threat of real or imaginary violence that has become the reality for many Indian Muslims.

TK: My actual memories start with the new house that you mention: skating in my ordinary shoes on its newly polished tiled floor as a 4- or 5-year-old! I know that before then my parents, and my brother, lived on the top floor of my grandfather’s house, next door. My sister was born in the new house. As such, alas, I have no recollection of your earlier visits, for I have no recollection of living in my grandfather’s house. But I knew that you had visited quite often in the past: I just assumed it was while Asdar uncle (your father) was still alive. I know that some relatives had a difficult time during the Bangladesh war: children and families moved to West Pakistan (now Pakistan) when the war broke out, and parents at times had stayed on, folding up business matters, and were, if I recall correctly, interred in a refugee camp for two to three years before rejoining their children. To be honest, my memory of Pakistani relatives visiting us starts only from the 1970s and hence is coloured with tension, and then with memories of the Bangladesh war: many young Muslim kids from secular families, like me, had adopted a staunchly patriotic position in its aftermath (I can still recall some very jingoistic slogans against Pakistani leaders from those years). We were influenced by our playmates and classmates, and our parents avoided talking about the war. But strangely, and this was a contradiction that revealed how the space that families like mine occupied was different from that of most of our classmates, we still did not connect visiting Pakistani relatives post-war with the “enemy”. It was not even as if there were no noticeable differences between the generations growing up in India and those who had left and were now growing up in Pakistan. Even our Urdu had not remained the same. Most people who had moved to Pakistan came back speaking Urdu in the Punjabi manner (for example, main for I), while we spoke in the Awadhi-Bihari manner (hum for I), and so on. I have often thought about this, and I think the experience subconsciously formed me in other areas too, making me avoid binarisms even before I read anything faintly “postcolonialist”: it is obviously easier to sustain binary oppositions when you do not meet and greet the other.

To return to three related points that your response raised in my mind. It strikes me that there was a very complex movement in a ashráf families during the 1940s–60s which was both political and geographical: the movement of many from our family from India to East Pakistan (later Bangladesh) and then West Pakistan; the decision of some of my father’s and mother’s relatives to move to Pakistan, and of many other relatives to stay on in India. As you noted, my father actually visited Pakistan in the 1950s, returned to Bihar, and never left the country (hardly leaving Bihar!) after that, though he often spoke with so much fondness of his relatives, especially of your father. Like your father, he was a single son. Interestingly, he never spoke of Pakistan as a nation even to us; he only spoke of his uncles, aunts, and cousins there. Today, Indian Muslims, especially ashráf, are often accused by Hindutva leaders of “creating” Pakistan, but of course many chose to stay on, and a few even moved from Pakistan to India — for instance, the Urdu writer, Izhar Asar, author of a thousand novels (it is said), who left Lahore (Pakistan) for India. Also, regarding the accusation that the movement for Pakistan was often led by ashráfi leaders — who obviously saw little chance to retain their class privileges or linguistic cultures in a democratic India, where they would be submerged not only by the Hindu majority but also by the majority of Muslims (who were not of their class) — one also thinks of the other side. As your study of the Communist Party of Pakistan (OUP) notes, many progressive and radical activists were also from Muslim ashráfiya (Ali, 2015). What do you, as an anthropologist, make of this immense complexity? Has it been adequately addressed on either side of the borders?

KAA: You are correct, many Muslim leaders with the Communist movement in South Asia around the time of the Partition belonged to the ashráf. Here let me touch briefly on how the Communist Party in Pakistan negotiated the question of diversity and difference within the context of its own colonial history. The Communist Party of India (CPI) throughout the 1940s actually itself struggled with such issues including the major question of Muslim rights and their place in the national struggle. As you know, my own research interests have been in the cultural history of the progressive movement in Pakistan’s early history. To expound on the question of the Muslim question in South Asian politics, it may be interesting to evaluate how the Communist movement in late colonial India sought to address the relationship between the question of Muslim minoritization and the nationalist movement. I am rehearsing this history to argue that the most progressive forces in Indian politics somehow reluctantly agreed with the Partition of British India in the end. Also the nationalities question remained a major fracturing feature of Pakistan’s subsequent politics as much as the issue of class difference (emphasized by the communists).

For example, since its independence in 1947 as a homeland for South Asian Muslims, Pakistan has been a configuration of shifting alliances and competing political and social ideologies. Almost 75 years after Independence and 50 years after the creation of Bangladesh in 1971, the Pakistani state has been unable to resolve the national integration of its many cultures and language groups. Rather, Pakistan’s postcolonial history has been one of contestation and conflict around questions of national self-determination of various ethnic groups, while the promised or imagined religious (Muslim) cohesiveness and national belonging have been difficult to achieve, leading to a proliferation of ethnic nationalism and the strengthening of regional identities, which further hinders the emergence of a national culture that democratically includes the diverse voices and languages present in the Pakistani cultural spectrum. Hence, class and the politics of ethnic and national rights remain important if one attempts to understand Pakistan’s post-1947 history from a secular and progressive perspective.

Moving to your observation about visitors from Pakistan, I do understand what you mean regarding the use of new idioms while speaking in Urdu (I can also imagine who used these, but this was cultural and class privilege speaking). Many like us, children of people who had migrated from India, were also switching codes (hum and main) while in private and public spaces. This said, growing up in post-1971 Karachi, some of us also made it a point to link ourselves with struggles for the rights of Sindhi language, for example, or other national languages of Pakistan, in order to undermine the dominance of Urdu, which was the mother tongue of only eight per cent of the population. In this sense, the state sponsorship of Urdu was ironically a different kind of problem for us than the position of Urdu may be in most of India as a “Muslim” language. Aspects of this language issue may also be present in India. However, the Indian state by the 1970s had, by and large, addressed some of the more contested regional and linguistic questions within the framework of the federated nature of the polity.

Responding to your other important point, in a way the creation of Pakistan was partially a haven for middle-class Muslim men from North Indian states who may have feared losing their class privilege if they remained in India. They were also coming from urban cultures and had a more educated family history. Coming to Pakistan meant easier access to institutions of higher learning or to coveted jobs in public and private sectors. To be sure, there was less infrastructural development of areas that became Pakistan: only nine per cent of industry was situated in this part of British India, few universities and only a handful of urban centres (in contrast to the rest which had the capital city of Delhi; the sedimented urban culture of Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras; the industrial city of Ahmedabad, and others). Even jute, the main crop in then East Bengal, was sent to factories in West Bengal. The first jute mill was put up in the early 1950s (with state subsidized investment) near Dhaka by the Adamjees, themselves a Gujarati-speaking merchant family from Bombay. Young men from educated families, like my father or the fathers of my friends, were easily absorbed in the available opportunities that the new country afforded them.

My own biography becomes connected to this story. To be sure, the Bihari ashráf that both of us are talking about may very well have been our own families that for generations had lived, prospered, and buried their dead in the various districts of Bihar. My mother’s family (her father taught at Murshidabad University and then at Calcutta University) was from the Bihar Sharif (Nalanda district) area and had strong Congress and nationalist leanings. My father’s paternal family, as you know, had over the years risen to become established zamindars (landlords) in the Gaya district and eagerly served the Raj while consolidating their feudal claims on the local population, Muslims and Hindus alike. So, a range of political affiliations, allegiances, and alliances that existed among Bihari Muslims were present in our own family. What was also present was (sadly) a keen sense of being unique and above other Muslim groups, castes, and lineages. In a way, the creation of Pakistan and the subsequent migration of some of my relatives (including my father as a young man, but not his parents or his sister who later joined the CPI in Calcutta) sustained this arrogance of ashráf exceptionalism.

Coming to your mention of the non-ashráf Muslims: absent in our childhood stories were references to those Muslims who were not considered our social equals and belonged to lower castes. Marriages — that institution par excellence of reproducing privilege — among this group of Bihari Muslims, until recently even in Pakistan, were exclusively limited to those within the larger kin and lineage, or as my maternal grandmother, the keeper of family honour, would constantly say, hadi main (literally, in the same bone)! However, the new land (Pakistan) made this division difficult to sustain and invariably some who were underprivileged and subordinate would surface as social equals and threaten the symbolic stature of ashráf exclusivity. The newness of the country also meant a certain democratization where age-old customs and taboos could be broken and social station could be contested. As noted above, those who migrated at times did indeed come from more urban milieus than the local population, and “high” and “low” alike reinvented themselves to take advantage of the distribution of evacuee properties and other riches left behind by those (mostly non-Muslims) who were forced to leave their own ancestral lands (the Urdu novella Housing Society by Housing society by Qurrutulain Hyder, captures this extremely well for early Pakistan). The world had changed and the process produced acute anxiety in mohajir (refugee) households, especially when daughters were given in marriage to “others” for financial security rather than social continuity. This is a sensitive topic regarding ashráf and ajlaaf. Even in India, the myth of Muslim ashráf exclusivity needs to be contested by understanding the political strength and struggle for equality by Muslim “subaltern” and “Dalit” groups who are sometimes referred to as razeel (the Momins, for example) or pasmanda, and whose presence and voice threatened and undermined the dominance of Muslim ashráf politics in pre-Independence India and continues to do so today.

TK: It is interesting how our discussion, without any conscious effort on our part, has already overlaid the “institutional logic” of the Partition — “Hindus vs. Muslims” — with so many other lines of difference and connection. This, of course, is central to our effort, as editors, along with our co-editor, Dr Om Dwivedi, in dealing with the Partition in this symposium for JCL. The Partition is a matter that has been too easily reduced to a pan-Muslim and pan-Hindu axis. That has always been the endeavour of Muslim and Hindu communalists, and even those opposed to that discourse — essentially born out of a colonial British discourse of the “two major nations” of pre-Independence India — have often succumbed to it. However, we are already talking of various linguistic and class differences within the so-called “Muslim” circumference itself, the one we are supposed to belong to on both sides of the border. Having grown up in India, and never having visited Pakistan, my siblings and I experienced these matters too, in ways that are similar to what you note and also different. For instance, looking back, I realize that the choice of English as my first language — the language I mostly read and always write in — had a lot to do with what was happening between Urdu and Hindi in the 1960–70s. I was sent to the only “missionary” school in Gaya, as was inevitable, where the language of instruction was English, but we were also taught Hindi and Sanskrit. Urdu was not offered. My parents hired a maulvi to teach us Urdu at home, but that did not work too well: the maulvi taught Urdu largely through religion and a narrow cultural ethics which bored me even at the age of 7, and when my father caught him twisting our ears a bit too often, the tuition was discontinued. My mother took over, but she was too gentle a person to teach us much. At school, I was learning Hindi (Sanskrit came a bit later), but always got low marks in the subject. The reason was clear, as Alok Rai has noted in Hindi Nationalism: despite sharing a common stock, both Urdu and Hindi were being “purified” of each other’s influences in the twentieth century (Rai, 2001). So every time I used an “Urdu” word or construction in my Hindi composition, I lost grades. I did not fully realize it then, because everyone around me, Hindu and Muslim, actually spoke this mixed language, what Gandhiji had called Hindustani. After some time, I essentially gave up on both Urdu and Hindi. English was neutral territory. I knew where I stood with English. I started preferring it to both Hindi and Urdu. I realized all this only much later, on growing up and studying what had happened. Similarly, the class element in my life was something I fully understood only on growing up. My father, for instance, always told us that we were “poor but fiercely independent farmers”, and that my great-grandfather, in the 1870s, walked from the ancestral village, Dhoda, to Patna, about 60 kilometres away, and studied under the street lights there, until he obtained a medical degree. I still have the gold medals he won on graduation from the British-run medical school in Patna. I do not know how many of these stories were true, but I discovered, when I finally visited Dhoda without my father, that the family was one of “three landlord families in the village”. This shocked me to the core of my socialist heart. What, I exclaimed, you mean they had horses, elephants? No, the villager, a distant relative, informed me, they did not have horses or elephants, because no landlord in this area was that rich. But, he clarified, there were three families that had so much land that they hired others to cultivate it, and your great-grandfather’s family was one of them. It made me understand many things I had not fully understood, including that tradition of marrying hadi mein that you note. I recall that when I told my parents that I was going to marry a woman who did not belong to the community, the religion, or even the country, what my father did first of all was to go to his mother, with me, and ask her for her opinion. His father (my grandfather) was long dead. My paternal grandmother was a small but very regal-looking woman, who continued to live in the old house. She looked at my father for a second, then looked at me, and replied: “The times are changing” (literally, Waqt badal rahe hain). “If it is a respectable family, why should we object?” In Urdu, of course. I was radical enough by then to want to object to the notion of a “respectable family”: What? I was about to say. I am marrying a woman, not a family! But then I saw the relief on my father’s face, and shut up for once. This unspoken ashráf background had its consequences too. My father definitely resisted ashráf arrogance, often criticizing people who displayed it, and I think his story about my great-grandfather was a kind of antidote to that inheritance. But even then, in later years, I could see my parents’ circle of friends and acquaintances shrinking. They were never overly social, but they were not reclusive either. In his last ten years or so, my father was almost a total recluse, and my mother also had fewer acquaintances.

When I look back at the friends they had, what I notice is a socio-linguistic shift: their friends of the past, Hindus and Muslims, spoke and acted in ways that they considered shareef (ashráfi). Again, that ashráf element, which also included an Urduized diction. For instance, my father did not like people who swore in any language. He was quite a patriarch, but he did not tolerate any physical violence against women — a couple of times even intervening on the streets to stop some total stranger from being lewd to or mistreating some unknown woman, usually of the working classes, much to my embarrassment as a child. When he spoke of Pakistan, those were the elements he subconsciously highlighted. Our tehzeeb, as he called it. Once he even said, if I remember correctly, “Baradari ke zaida tar shareef log to wahan challe gai” (most shareef people of the community left for Pakistan). He used shareef to mean “decent” but, as we know it is the root for the word ashráf. I now realize, also on the basis of what you said above, that his exposure to Pakistan was mostly through his shareef relatives there. I even imagined Pakistan as Urdu-speaking, before I read up as a teenager! On the other hand, maybe because my grandfather had been a staunch Congress voter from before Independence, my father passed on to us a discourse about Pakistan that most other Muslims around us did not share: he told us, at least a few times, that the people who suffered most from the Partition were Indian Muslims. He was not referring to riots. What he meant was that Indian Muslims lost their share of political and cultural opportunities by being sliced up among three nations. Once I jokingly remarked to him — this was much after the Babri Masjid matter — that maybe the best thing that can happen to Muslims is an akhand bharat (which the BJP dreams of), a “united India”. I was joking, but he replied seriously. Probably, he said. That, I think, must have been a particular position, one that would not be shared by his cousins, uncles, and aunts who moved to Pakistan. What do you think? Also, keeping in mind what we once discussed, I think in Liverpool, what do you think of the “religious-nationalist turn” that many in Pakistan, including some of our cousins, took in the 1980–90s?

KAA: As I shared earlier, the Pakistani state’s response to the national question was to emphasize the unifying discourse of Islam, linked to Urdu as a common language for the Muslims of South Asia. However, the results of the 1970 election (the first election on the basis of adult franchise) clearly signalled toward the issue of national difference, and the creation of Bangladesh undermined the argument for Muslim nationalism. Zia ul Haq’ s martial law and the deposing of civilian rule can be thought as an anti-democratic act (like Indira Gandhi’s emergency), but the subsequent use of state-sponsored Islam was also to create a unifying and universalizing argument to negate the centrifugal forces of national rights in Pakistan. Further, the brutality of the Zia regime notwithstanding — and its after-effects still linger — the resistance to his rule was also prolonged and popular. We ourselves were in college in those days and were aligned with various groups that, although not affiliated with formal political parties, organized forums, theatre groups, and discussion circles, and worked with labour and peasant movements (avoiding the censors and surveillance) to question religious obscurantism (for example, by performing Bertolt Brecht’s Galileo and other plays in Urdu), and the curtailment of civic freedoms.

The issue of our relatives becoming more religious may not be that important. Many did and many did not. I think part of what you witnessed may have been a posturing by Pakistani visitors about their economic condition in a Pakistan that had a more open economic system than India of the 1980s. The Afghan war and the influx of huge US support along with the migration of many to the Gulf states had meant a kind of superficial prosperity in Pakistan, linked to an importation of Gulf- and Saudi-inflected Islamic cultural habits: this was the age when the dupatta gave way slowly to hijab among some middle-class households, which was generally non-existent in South Asian Muslim culture. Somehow women’s bodies become the markers of religious “authenticity”. There was of course the traditional burqa that our grandmothers wore — but this was different. Similarly, the way we celebrated different Muslim rituals started changing, including weddings, funerals, milads, and even saying one’s prayers. Our relatives or other Pakistanis going to India in the 1980s were witnessing a less affluent society (in terms of rampant consumption) and would make superficial comparisons about people not having private cars or electronic gadgets at home. But this implicit downplaying of the status of relatives who had stayed on in India was not always a secular dimension of religious conservatism. And the opening up of India economy and the creation of a large and affluent middle class with all kinds of consumable amenities has made this silly comparison redundant.

TK: This is fascinating, Kamran Bhai, and I agree with you that at least some of the religiosity of Pakistanis visiting India in the 1970s and 1980s had to do with the greater “international” consumerism there, itself tied to Pakistan’s closeness to the US. I recall that Pakistani visitors in those days would have “Western” gadgets, like chargeable torches or fancy cameras, that we in small-town India did not have. And they often liked showing them off too, while buttressing this with a claim of “authentic Muslimness”, which, at least we noted in my immediate family, was increasingly borrowed from the Gulf. All this changed once India “opened up” in the 1990s. But what also changed was the nature of mainstream Hindu nationalism. The current Hindutva wave, for instance, seems to remind me of what I felt, at a distance, was happening in Pakistan under Zia. Even its “justification” is similar: as you noted, Zia’s Islamic turn served also as “a unifying and universalizing argument to negate the centrifugal forces of national rights in Pakistan”. So, looking across the border, let us end with this question: what do you think of the similarities between religion-based nationalisms in these two countries today?

KAA: The religio-nationalist turn in Indian politics undermines its fundamental values in Nehruvian secularism (with all its own problems notwithstanding). Interestingly, it is similar to what was imposed from above in the Zia years; ghosts of that era are still part of Pakistan’s social and political life. However, whenever there have been free elections in Pakistan, the religious right has never been able to garner more than 2–4 per cent of the popular vote. In this sense, there is a distinction that needs to be made from the Indian case where the current government has come through a popular mandate. The imposition of religio-nationalist ideology in Pakistani politics has mostly been championed by unelected or authoritarian governments. This said, ironically in some ways, in today’s Pakistan, some may argue there continues to be censorship of views in society that is at times comparable to the Zia era. At that juncture, the tools of surveillance were less sophisticated (although the brutality of the regime was of course there) and there were ways that civil society, fearless journalists, activists, and intellectuals would dare to speak up. Today the space seems more restricted. The explosion of social media also means that there is populist and right-wing vigilantism through the internet in various forums, and people are regularly silenced and censored if they speak against certain powerful forces.

But let me move toward concluding this argument by saying that this is a difficult history to narrate for all of us, especially our generation whose parents witnessed the division of British India. Of course, the Partition meant different things for those who never left their ancestral lands. However, for those people, especially in Punjab and Bengal, the transfer of population meant a major shift in people’s lives. For families like ours from the Urdu-Hindi belt of north India, coming to Pakistan surely meant a range of adjustments, but the Muslim elite, like my father, did relatively well as there were opportunities for them: they had education and social capital. It is only in their old age that many of my friends’ fathers, after successful careers in the public or private sector, will reminisce about their youth and childhood, about playing with neighbours and friends who were either Sikhs or Hindus, about travelling to different parts of South Asia, whether in the south or north of the subcontinent, of foods, idioms of speech, leisure activities, and much more that had been lost to them. Recently, I interviewed an ageing retired UN official of Pakistani origin, who told me that he completed his school matriculation in the spring of 1947 and travelled from Lahore by train to Bombay to visit his elder brother who was a film producer there, then to Lucknow to be with the eldest brother who was a member of the Communist Party and lived in a commune, then to Madras to visit his other brother who was posted as a junior civil service revenue officer in a small town. Finally, he ended up in Allahabad with his sister, who had married a Hindu man, quite accepted in his enlightened Muslim family, and stayed there until October when the Partition disturbances subsided and he could travel back to Lahore. Partiton resulted in this cosmopolitan world inhabited by the Muslim (and other) middle classes becoming unavailable: a world of travel and movement across regions and spaces which allowed for the ability to experience the diversity and complexity of South Asian culture.

Similarly, once I read a detailed interview of a bidi worker from Kerala, someone active in the labour movement in Karachi, who travelled as a young man in the mid-1940s to Bombay and then to Lyallpur (today’s Faisalabad) where he got radicalized by Sikh communists in the textile industry and then came to Karachi and became a bidi maker. His union was controlled by the Communist Party and even after the Partition the Karachi area he lived in (Soldier Bazaar), with many of his co-workers, was called Stalingrad. Another example that shows the movement and travel by the labouring classes of British India.

I grew up in this Karachi of workers and immigrants. Pakistan was a new experiment for many. The city itself changed its character from a Sindhi, Gujarati, and Baluchi-speaking city which was more than 45 per cent Hindu to a predominantly Urdu-speaking city with an almost 95 per cent Muslim population. The city carries with it traces of tastes, smells, habits, architecture, languages, spoken dialects, and sedimented histories of migration and assimilation from various parts of South Asia. In some ways, my commitment is to this Karachi (which represents a microcosm of the country itself), to its people, and to their history of struggle. Without realizing, surely people like me have socially, culturally, and politically become Pakistanis, not only due to the ideological power of the nation-state, but due to shared histories, memories related to schooling, friends, and the common experiences of the cultural landscapes. Yet, my politics is not a politics of Muslim nationalism and I negate the chauvinistic impulse of mohajir nationalism. Rather, my politics is linked to the struggle for social justice for the people of the country and for the elimination of bigotry and discrimination. This said, in some profound ways, people like me remain uprooted; within one generation all links to our family’s rural roots have been severed. We can live in Pakistan or the US and recreate genealogies, but as for most migrants, the Partition may have cut off our connection to a deep past. It destroyed centuries of continuities and organic linkages. Until my generation at least the Partition has managed to have long tentacles and created disturbing anxieties and uncertainties about who we are or have become. Our living in the West now, for many of us, becomes a part of this long migratory pattern. When our immediate elders pass away, sometimes there is no home to go back to.

TK: True, Kamran Bhai, and that, to me, is part of the justification for this conversation. I am sure it is similar to conversations that many cousins from families like ours, across the borders, can have. But our generation will be the last one capable of this kind of conversation, for we are between our parents, who experienced the Partition, and our children, who were born to people living in seemingly clear-cut nation-states. It also strikes me as significant and significantly sad that our next meeting, if and when it occurs, will inevitably be in the West. And yet, though our generation is the last one that can engage directly with the Partition, having experienced it through its impact on our parents, we know, and the other articles in this issue indicate, that the Partition is not over, its stories not fully told, its ghosts not exorcized by half. The next generations will have to face up to the Partition in their own ways. I can only hope that the interventions and conversations of our generation will help them do so, not add another obstruction, another lack, another grievance. Thank you for your illuminating responses.