Greetings, once again, comrades. It may be July 4th, but the only fireworks one is likely to see today in India are shells exploding somewhere over Kashmir. I had originally composed a much longer invective to mark this absurd occasion, but upon rereading it, I just felt really down as opposed to indignant or contemplative. Instead of some jargon-filled argument about “bourgeois constructs” and “imagined communities,” I will speak a bit from the conscience and then note some particular features of national consciousness as I have observed it amongst South Asians.
Nation-states are ahistorical and fictitious, yet we go to war over them again and again. Personally, I dig “ahimsa” (non-violence in the Gandhian lexicon), but at the same time, I can’t help feeling that people willing to die for a flag deserve what comes to them. To put a piece of cloth, and that arbitrary set of borders for which it stands, above human life (including one’s own) is the pinnacle of folly.
Nation-states teach us to think of people outside our own nation as less human. We devalue the lives of, in the case of the U.S., non-Americans. What made Americans more upset, the September 11 attacks or the genocide in Darfur? And, not to quantify human suffering, but we all know what’s going on in Darfur to be the more heinous.
Rob, you explicitly said this blog was all about South Asia. And so it is, friends, so it is. Would it surprise you to learn that in the months surrounding the August 14/15, 1947 partition of British India more than 2 million Indians died violently in riots and massacres directly related to the partition? (If you are new to this region, “partition” refers to the division of British India into India and Pakistan, which at the time included contemporary Pakistan as West Pakistan and Bangladesh as East Pakistan. All three countries went to war again in 1971 to detach Bangladesh) I am guessing most of us were unaware that a 1/3 Holocaust occurred, if you will. Think about that, 2 million dead by violence in under a year and we never even heard about it. It would be like wiping out Cleveland, which may sound like a good idea, but we must be reasonable. Looking to my previous point, our ignorance of this matter shows what value white America places on Indian lives. Moving on, why? Why 2 million dead? What was it all for? I defy you to find an answer I can understand.
Here’s what went wrong: there should not have been a partition. Despite occasional violent outbursts between religious and ethnic communities, Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, Punjabis, Maharashtrans, Tamils, Bengalis etc. lived peacefully together for thousands of years in the Indian subcontinent. Sure, there were wars aplenty, but these pitted expansionist warlords against each other and rarely took on a religious or ethnic character. And yet, in 1947, some seedy politicians suddenly decided it could not work and lines must be drawn to separate India’s peoples, particularly Muslims and Hindus. Placing the violent outbreaks of that year in their own twisted narrative, they said the violence proved Hindus and Muslims had always been two separate nations that could not coexist. Few thought about the fact that it was the decision to partition that fuelled much of the violence.
Do Punjabis in India have more in common with Punjabis in Pakistan or with Tamils in southern India? Few would argue the latter. A few weeks ago, I watched “Around the World in 80 Days with Michael Palin” and when traveling from Mumbai to Kolkata by train, he asks the woman sitting next to him what makes India a nation? What unites Indians? She, rather astutely, answers, that the only thing she can think of is the independence struggle. Funny that South Asians let the British, the very people they were fighting, decide what made them Indian. “We are Indian because we fight the British.” Furthermore, it was British historians who first introduced the idea that eternal enmity existed between Muslims and Hindus as a justification for why the British had to keep the peace. These ideas have continued to define South Asia ever since, with bloody results. So, as ridiculous as I might find any nation-state, the system in South Asia has been taken to 11. People who share thousands of years of history, common languages, cultures, customs, etc. begin killing each other in nationalist struggles as soon as, and even before, new borders are drawn. Why do Bengali farmers start killing each other over such an issue? Their lives will continue as always, in poverty and frustration, ignored by any government in power. Yet such stories occur over and over again.
Where 61 years ago, one could walk (and a miserable walk it would have been, but still) from Karachi to Dacca, two international frontiers would have to be crossed now, one of which is the world’s most heavily fortified. So few young South Asians today ever consider this. Pakistanis grow up without the concept that their shell of a nation once formed a much larger whole. Many Indians don't even realize that Hindi and Urdu are essentially the same language. A union between Pakistan and India sounds as insane today as a partition did a few decades ago. I find it amusing to note how the media here chronically defines India as not Pakistan. Pakistan is the evil other, always scheming and threatening India’s beautiful secularism with its own fundamentalism. I can laugh this off, but people here receive this indoctrination from birth and today, what is an Indian if not, not a Pakistani? Once the divisions are in place and a new generation is born knowing no other reality, the damage is irreparable. After a nation-state is formed, no matter how haphazardly it happened, it becomes something for which we are willing to fight and die simply because it is our nation and we are patriotic, are we not? The struggle is legitimate because it is for the nation… even though the nation didn’t exist until last week. And yet, Indians and Pakistanis still bootleg the same crappy Bollywood DVDs (not that all Bollywood is crappy, but almost all of it is, just like Hollywood. In fairness though, I’ve never seen a Bollywood movie as bad as “Kingdom of Heaven”).
So tonight, my friends, while you watch the fireworks, think about what they commemorate. Ask yourself if you have more in common with Jeb, the Klansman from Indiana than Raj in Bangalore who answers the DELL help-line and is just trying to get by. When you read the news tomorrow morning, ask yourself why you care more about the local homicide than the African genocide. India and Pakistan (and Pakistan and Bangladesh) have already shown us where such thinking leads.
Today, I find myself nodding at the national holiday by listening to EXODUS playing “The Scar Spangled Banner.” What they lack in subtlety, they (over)compensate for with sincerity. “America! The violent, the indifferent, God shit his grace on thee. America! The arrogant, the belligerent, will live in infamy.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vyFSVD0Cr4
URGENT ADDENDUM: I ALMOST FORGOT. PLEASE POST YOUR REVIEWS OF "TRANSFORMERS" HERE. NO SPOILERS PLEASE. IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN IT, GO OUT AND DO SO RIGHT NOW, THEN GO HOME AND POST A COMMENT ABOUT IT FOR ME.
NO LOVE FOR DECEPTICON THUGS!
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