Beyond Nostalgia: the India-Pakistan Border
I often imagine what life would be like without borders. Borders have had a very deep impact on my personal life physically and intellectually. Born in Pakistan to a family that migrated from North India two generations ago, I grew up experiencing how borders have caused immense pain and rupture to this day. Being a Muslim, I cannot access my grandparent’s ancestral homes in modern day India nor my cultural heritage in a larger sense due to the political situation between both countries. The Indian Subcontinent was partitioned by the British 75 years ago, yet the political impasse between India and Pakistan still exists and hostility has worsened over the years.
This has resulted in my family, like millions of families whose ancestors migrated in both directions across the new India-Pakistan border, to lose connections to their past and suffer a perpetual void since no closure has been provided after such an epic displacement. Moreover, oral accounts of the generation of my grandparents who suffered most are lost given no commissions were formed by either government to record their experiences. Only recently have some NGOs and universities taken up collecting what is left of those generations’ stories.
To me as an aspiring young scholar the absence of a public commemoration is difficult to accept. Yet, I could never travel to India or research my own history and heritage in the current geopolitical environment. Therefore, the border represents for me an ugly, painful, and artificially constructed barrier that has destroyed lives of millions of people across both India and Pakistan. Furthermore, it continues to propagate an ideology that restricts the flow of certain people, goods, things, and ideas to maintain the status quo.
From this personal anecdote, however, I am optimistic as well and believe that not all is lost because if we avoid the trap of evoking nostalgia and learn an important lesson to move beyond the notions of belonging, we may provide closure to this epic historical event.
Muneeb Ahmed Siddiqui, MA Global History student at the University of Bayreuth
