Content warning: strong language
I'm going to speak to you about a book I've written, called Shadows at Noon. It's a bit of a large book, which is why some people might think it is daunting, but in fact it's not daunting at all because it's got a huge (and somewhat controversial) overarching argument. This argument is that although one nation in South Asia became three after the dissolution of the British Raj in the Indian subcontinent, they remain very similar. After the partition of India in 1947, where India and Pakistan (both the eastern and western sides) were created, and after the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971, when present-day Bangladesh (formerly East Pakistan) separated from what was then West Pakistan, one nation had become three. However, these three bits of the subcontinent did not fly off into distant parts of the universe. They, in fact, remained together in more ways than one. They remained very alike in ways that no historian or scholar has really tried to work through.
Shadows at Noon does that work, but in a way that is a little bit funny, and also a little bit systematic. It does so not only in the political domain, but also in spheres of life like culture and society and also Hollywood. You can read it in lots of ways. You could start, if you like, with Chapter Seven on Hollywood, and then go back to Chapter Five on the household, the joint family. Or you can read straight from the beginning to the end as my editor would like. As for me, I don't really mind how you read it. It is a book written for readers, not for me, although I wrote it because I had questions.
It is a book filled with stories of people – not just of great people, like Jinnah or Gandhi, people you may have heard about, but also stories of ordinary folk. Now, you may ask what I mean by the term ‘ordinary’, because no person is ordinary in their own right, in their own eyes. When I mean ordinary, I suppose I mean people who are not heard of, in general, by the wider public.
There are two stories I want to tell you in relation to this wider process of one becoming three. The first one I've picked is an extreme story, focused on a character called Train Lady in the book. It's obviously an alias, an extreme alias, because I wanted to strip her of every possible identifier of her location, status and so on. Train Lady was born in Calcutta (present-day Kolkata), which is a very cosmopolitan city. It has all manner of Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Armenians, people called Biharis, Urdu-speaking Muslims, people from Lucknow, people from up-country, English-speaking people and people from all over the country who’ve migrated to the city for work. It is a very interesting place in its own right.
Train Lady's mother lived in this city and Train Lady's father lived, for work-reasons, in Dhaka – in what would later become Bangladesh. Train Lady's mother loved Calcutta and so, despite riots against Muslims in 1948, in 1951, and in 1964, she did not move. She did not want to move from a city in which there were very different types of people, into one where, as she described, there were only Bengalis, speaking only Bengali. So, for the time being, she did not move.
We don't know exactly when she eventually had to move because stories, oral histories, are never that symmetrical and seamless. However, she did move in the end, soon after the Bangladesh Liberation War broke out in 1971. She was very resourceful and managed to get her whole family to Pakistan for safety, despite the small number of spaces that had been made available. At this point, the immediate family broke down because Train Lady’s father chose to stay in what would become Bangladesh instead of going to Pakistan. Train Lady and her whole family went to Karachi, which is in Pakistan, and her father stayed in Bangladesh.
Now Train Lady herself, when she grew up, got married and had her own children. She spent her entire life travelling – which is why I call her Train Lady. She's travelled hundreds of times across those three borders. She's travelled so much, yet she's still very frightened that she'll fall foul of legal issues, although she hasn't. In her mind, she's frightened of those borders despite having lived across them all at one time or another. She's travelled to places like shrines, but she's also travelled to see relatives like her aunt in Kolkata and relatives in Dhaka. She's visited shrines in Bangladesh, and she keeps going backwards and forwards. She also goes to see the Taj and other monuments in India.
It seems to me as though, in her travelling, she's trying to create something like putting those three countries back into one again. Or at least, perhaps she is trying to recreate a past again that is more bearable to her because her family is scattered across these three borders that are so dangerous to cross.
The next story I want to tell you is that of a young man called Saif. He's what becomes known as a Bihari in Bangladesh after the Liberation War. Bihari is almost a derogatory term for people who speak a certain language, Urdu, a North Indian language. Biharis are people who migrated – before or after the first partition – to East Pakistan (present-day Bangladesh) to do various kinds of work. It was like the first partition was forgotten, and they all have suddenly become Bihari, this topic of controversy.
Saif was a young man when a film came out called ‘Swapna Bhoomi’ or ‘Golden Land’ – Bengal is often called ‘the Golden Land’ because it has so many rivers that if you fly over it, it literally looks golden. This film was the first to portray Biharis in a sympathetic light. When Saif went to see this movie with a group who he didn't know that well, he assumed he was going with like-minded people. After the film, they went to a place to drink tea – this is a very common practice across South Asia, you go and drink tea after a movie and discuss it. Immediately, one guy who was Bengali-speaking swore and said: “You know, those fucking Bihari bastards, what the hell are they doing in the country? And this film is useless. I mean, what kind of rubbish are they talking about? These damn Bihari people, you should get out of this country in the first place.”
Saif said nothing. A major ruckus broke out between the remaining people who were there after this young, foul-mouthed photographer went away. And Saif said nothing, he just sat there. Eventually he spoke, and said quietly, almost as if he was speaking to himself: “How many monsoons would it take to wash away this blood?”
This phrase is from a poem by the famous poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz, who is adored across all three nations by anyone who writes poetry or thinks about poetry. Again, you can see how the three nations think together, build images together. But at the same time, you can see how in Saif’s case and in so many other cases, nationalism creates this kind of cruelty and bigotry when one becomes three.
Joya Chatterji FBA is Professor of South Asian History and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.
