Daily Times

A few days back while I was presenting at a migration conference, I was faced with a pleasantly invoking incident. While I was deeply involved in analyzing the tyranny of the Indo-Pak partition in the middle of my presentation I heard some voices which didn’t match the gloomy context of my discussion. Ooohs, aaahs and uffffs.

It took me a moment to realize that what had made these Indian and Bangladeshi ladies lose their composure this way was an image of Pakistani heart throb Fawad Khan on the presentation screen. Later on, while commenting on my paper, the professor who also happened to be Indian said that when she saw Fawad on my screen she simply couldn’t follow my discussion. “I just thought it would be my dream project if I could do another Phd, this drama Daastan is so close to my heart” she said.

This fandom is not strange at all. Fawad Khan is in India today what Shahrukh Khan was back in the 1990s and 2000s. This familiarity with cinema and television across the border in spite of national animosities says a lot about the similarities we share with our neighbours. I am in an area studies program in New York and interestingly, there are very few Pakistanis in our Urdu language and literature class. Most of the students are either Indian or Bengali. I was initially surprised at the lack of Pakistanis and the large number of Indians and Bengalis in the class. I asked my professor why all these non Pakistanis wanted to learn Urdu. She told me that what divides us in our own lands unites us in foreign lands. This was a simple sentence with a very deep meaning. It carries these realities which we aren’t willing to accept as they are antagonistic to our own jingoism.

Urdu, the national language of Pakistan is the language adopted by Bollywood. The lyrics of Gulzarji and Javed Akhtar receive equal appreciation on both sides of the border. Bollywood is a global industry but the language conjuncture between India and Pakistan cannot be ignored while talking about the popularity of Bollywood in Pakistan and the viewership of Pakistani Television serials in India.

At this point in time when tensions between India and Pakistan are only increasing and Pakistanis are whining about the exclusion of Taj Mahal from UP’s heritage list and the gradual disappearance of Mughal’s from Indian history textbooks, it is important to take what is happening in the land of pure into account. Lahore, which is advertised as a heritage city and attracts tourists from all over the world, is the biggest victim of this dilemma in Pakistan.

Back in 2015, while searching for some old newspapers, I happened to talk to the librarian of more than a century old library Diyal Singh located on Nisbat road in Lahore. The librarian who must have been in his seventies told me that there was a statue of Diyal Singh at the entrance of the library that they removed many years ago because some religiously charged groups attempted to damage it. According to him that damaged statue is still resting in the store room and nobody ever dared to restore it. Although I did not get a chance to sneak in to the library’s store room in order to investigate the truth but even if it is just a story it cannot be disregarded as a mundane practice.

Another heart breaking case is the present condition of Sir Ganga Ram’s Samadhi located at the Ravi road in the same city of Lahore whose many important buildings he designed as executive engineer and he helped building them as a philanthropist. Lahore which was the seat of the Sikh empire founded by Maharaja Ranjeet Singh whose resting place is a beautiful building; a blend of Muslim, Sikh and Hindu architecture, has no mention in the list of ‘Tourist sites of the Walled City of Lahore authority although the building is well maintained and protected. A couple of years ago an NCA student; Umair Khawaja made a documentary named Anjaan Raaste reflecting on the ‘Name change’ wave in Lahore. The documentary highlighted the conflicting perspectives of ordinary citizens, historians and cultural scholars about the renaming (replacing non-Muslim names with Muslim names) of different areas of Lahore. Interviews in the documentary gave a deeper insight to the relationship between nationalism and cultural evolution as perceived by a post-colonial nation.

Now it becomes a significant question that what are we trying to achieve through this erasure of cultural and historical antecedents both in India and in Pakistan. A simple answer could be that we are trying to obliterate those bits and pieces from ‘our’ culture which remind ‘us’ of those hostile unwanted ‘others’ about whom we don’t want to think. However, can we really create this distinction between ‘us’ and ‘other’ while our history is not at all divorced from each other? Instead, we share a common history although written in different and sometimes opposite tones and voices on different sides of the border, which is a completely natural practice.

We direly need to realise that in case of India and Pakistan, whoever tries to wipe out ‘other’ is actually attempting to deteriorate his ‘own’ historical legacy which is desirably or desirably mutual. No matter, if we want to face this fact or choose to turn our back towards it, it will remain unaltered.

Urdu, the national language of Pakistan, is the language adopted by Bollywood. The lyrics of Gulzarji and Javed Akhtar receive equal appreciation on both sides of the border. Bollywood is a global industry. Yet the language conjuncture between India and Pakistan cannot be ignored while talking about the popularity of Bollywood in Pakistan; nor the viewership of Pakistani television serials in India

Pakistani veteran actor and director Shaan Shahid in a recent BBC interview about his upcoming film ‘Arth’, which is a re-adaptation of an old Mahesh Bhatt movie, said it’s high time that the cultural side should take over and we should start building bridges together. He expects his film to be an attempt to bring Pakistani and Indian cinemas together at a different level.

However, keeping in view the current situation and above mentioned incidents it is hard to be optimistic about ‘cultural’ overtaking ‘political’ although such efforts were being made in past through the projects like ‘Aman Ki Asha and ‘Exchange for change’ but their affect died out with time or got over shadowed by political atrocities between two countries.

This Tuesday, in an institutional event in New York, while answering to a question regarding India-Pakistan diplomatic relation, India’s permanent representative to UN Syed Akbaruddin said, “Indian and Pakistan are two different countries with two different philosophies. While India believes in respecting diversity and practice religious and racial equality Pakistan has chosen to be in tolerant about heterogeneity. Perhaps we can’t be friends but we don’t want to be enemies as well rather as they say in Hollywood it would be better if we could become ‘Frenemies.’”But are we actually trying to achieve even that kind of equation with each other is the real question.  A few days back the debate between Maleeha Lodhi and Sushma Swaraj at UN exposed the feelings of both countries for each other to the whole world.

Hence, it is high time to look inwardly in order to strengthen our national selves by making peace with our past for an amicable present. A part of living in postmodern world also means to think beyond the categorical binaries of friends and foes by developing a strategic relationship for future. Ergo, we need to embrace ourselves from such internal conflicts and refrain from this kind of consolidation which is derived from the idea of “what we are not” rather we need to figure out and accept “What we are.”

The writer is Falak Sufi Scholar at Hagop Kevorkian Centre for Near Eastern. Currently pursuing a Masters degree at New York University

Published in Daily Times, November 21^st 2017.