By
Anam Zakaria
“There’s nothing special about India. It’s
our enemy!” yelled one child. “It’s full of those Hindus. They aren’t good
people,” added another. The rest of the children either laughed along and
slapped each other on the back or were too busy cracking jokes and gossiping
with friends to care about this so called ‘enemy state.’ This was 2011, and we
were sitting in an upper-middle class school in Lahore, the heart of Punjab.
A
couple of years later, as I spoke to students of a similar age-group, seated in
a school in Mumbai, I asked them to tell me about the first thought that came
to their mind when I said Pakistan. A hush fell on the class. Students looked
from one side to the other, presumably wondering how much they could share. To
put them at ease, I told them to share openly. I told them I wouldn’t be
offended. One of them hesitatingly said “war.” Taking the lead, another
responded, “some people say you should never trust a Pakistani, they always
betray you.” “Yes, we have heard it’s a place full of terrorists,” added a
student at the back. When I asked the children how many of them had ever
interacted with a Pakistani or Indian (depending on which country they belonged
to), hardly one or two hands were raised. Yet the opinions they seemed to hold
about the ‘other’ seemed firm, rooted, almost like an intrinsic belief.
I was not surprised. Since 2010, I have
been involved in student exchange programs and initiatives between India and
Pakistan, trying to bring the stereotypes held against the ‘other’ to the forefront
and help students challenge them through greater access to each other. The
India-Pakistan narrative in both countries, and the understanding of the
‘other,’ is marred with suspicion, biases and mistrust. And this only seems to
get worse with time. The more and more Indians and Pakistanis move away from
the bloody divide of 1947, the more entrenched the prejudices tend to become.
In a country like Pakistan where most
Pakistanis spend an entire lifetime without ever coming across a Hindu or Sikh,
the ‘other’ then becomes a figment of the imagination, an imagination fuelled
by filtered oral histories, biased textbooks and media propaganda. In the
following paragraphs, I hope to analyze the impact of each of these on
perceptions and mindsets about the ‘other.’
The first is the role that oral histories
play in sustaining a collective memory of the past, one that is often impacted
by macro level narratives and prejudices. In Pakistan, especially in Punjab,
the Two-Nation theory is overtly and tacitly propagated at all levels. This
means that over and over again, the State reinforces the need for the creation
of Pakistan and the need for separation from the ‘infidel other.’ In order to
do this, stories of bloodshed and of Muslims being killed at the hands of the
‘other’ religion, a religion that ‘we’ could not co-exist with, are constantly
put forward. This reinforcement at the macro level has an impact on private,
personal memories. The traumatic images of blood-strewn trains, massacred
bodies, displaced refugees and bewildered children become etched in the minds Partition
survivors. Earlier memories of co-existence, of friendship, of joint
festivities like Diwali, Baisakhi and Eid, seemed to become absorbed by these
more tragic and violent memories. Often, I found in my interviews with
Partition survivors that even if one had not lost a single family member, they had
come to internalize other people’s stories of trauma and loss and continued to
see the past through that lens. Urvashi Butalia sums this up best when she
states, “Partition refugees often personalize stories of general violence and
trauma, telling and feeling them to be their own, and marking the shifts in
political climate, location, as felt, personal things.”[1]
As a result, the oral histories received
by many of the children I worked with had also been coloured by these bloody
memories. The stories these children heard were of the violence, the divide and
the brutality. Softer memories, fonder episodes of cordial co-existence and
harmony seemed to have no place amidst the linear, black and white master
narratives. It is not like Partition survivors had forgotten the less tragic
memories. Whenever, probed, whenever asked a different set of questions, which
moved beyond the narrow framework of recording Partition atrocities, many
Partition survivors would unfold a magnitude of other stories. They would speak
for hours about their neighbours, about childhood games, school events and
festivities, and many would tell me that they were in fact rescued by people
from the ‘other’ religion. In these moments, this ‘other’ would transform from
a brutal savage monster into a mere human being. Political psychologist Ashis Nandy’s
work further corroborates these accounts. Out of 1500 interviews with Partition
survivors, he found that “40 per cent of his sample called up stories of themselves
and others being helped through the orgy of blood and death by somebody from
the other side.”[2]
However, in the majority of the cases that I witnessed, such stories had not
trickled down into the youth. Instead, the filtered oral histories they received
were only exacerbated by the bloody news about Kashmir conflict, Indo-Pak wars
and terrorism. What this meant was that for many of them, the ‘other’ had
transformed into a looming monster, waiting for them beyond the border. What
point was there then to travel across, or to even want to write a simple letter
to this villain? Most children refused to do any such thing as part of the
exchange programs I was associated with. An intergenerational shift had taken
place, which instead of softening opinions was only hardening them. In Nandy’s
words, “those who had actually faced the violence, those who are direct
victims, the first generation of victims, those who have been subject to the
violence, those who have seen it first-hand, mostly were those who had lesser
prejudice and lesser bitterness about their experience than their own children
and their grandchildren because they lived in communities where the other side
was the majority…they have lived with them and they have very warm memories of
that experience. Many of them have said that those were the best days of their
lives, whereas the children have a packaged view mostly of those violent days
and how the family survived…so they carry more bitterness, more hostility.”[3]
This situation is only compounded by the
mainstream propaganda in society. Not only do many media reports promote a
slanted and misinformed opinion of the ‘other,’ labeling all Pakistanis as
terrorists and all Indians as treacherous infidels wanting to destabilize
Pakistan, state textbooks only worsen this issue. Textbooks in Pakistan
blatantly call Hindus enemies and claim that they can never be friends. Tariq
Rahman, an established Pakistani professor and researcher writes, “Pakistani
textbooks cannot mention Hindus without calling them cunning, scheming,
deceptive or something equally insulting.”[4] Meanwhile, textbooks in
India have often referred to all Muslims as barbarians and depicted them as
savage forces. Teachers, who study from the same textbooks, only exacerbate the
issue with prejudiced teaching practices, further spewing hatred. Though Indian
textbooks have been revised over the years, they too face several issues.
Books, published by the National Council of Education Research and Training
(NCERT, India), have been reformed to eliminate hate sentiment but a closer
look reveals several loopholes. There are jumps between different historical
events, for instance between the Quit India movement and Partition itself,
keeping important information away from children, which could help them
understand how Partition and other significant events unfolded. Information
about Kashmir, 1965 and 1971 war are also missing from the mainstream textbooks
until Class X. While it is a relief to not read about violent and prejudiced
narratives, these omissions only confuse children further and encourage them to
learn about historical events through other sources. With social media being
available in every household, most children end up learning from uninformed
blog posts and subjective, often biased commentary. And since the majority of children
never come across a Pakistani or Indian in their respective countries, such
texts and words became the truth, a truth that shapes their opinions and to
which they cling onto as fact through out their adulthood. It is then perhaps
no wonder that while most children in India have asked me whether I hang out
with Hafiz Saeed or if I know Ajmal Kasab, children in Pakistan seem to blame
every bomb blast on the ‘Hindu infidel’ from across the border. In such a bleak
scenario, is there any way to move forward?
Exchange programmes between young children
and dialogue between all age-groups has been seen as a vital component in
bridging gaps. For most children, especially those below the age group of 17-18
years, opinions are yet not hardline. They are curious, keen to learn, and
merely require the platform to ask questions. As part of my work with the
Citizens Archive of Pakistan (CAP), a local non-profit organization dedicated
to historic and cultural preservation, I was leading the Exchange-for-Change
(EFC) program between 2010-2013. The program connected thousands of children
through a series of letters, postcards, oral histories and a final physical
exchange. Through the 12-month lifeline of the project, I witnessed student
opinions drastically alter. One child approached me a month into the project
and said, “But these Indians are just like us!” The pleasant surprise on her
face was mirrored by many other children across different income-brackets. Later
as I took a delegation of students with me to India, one of them commented upon
our return, “In my class 5 book, I had read about Sikhs slaughtering little
Muslim children. When we crossed the Wagah Border and entered Amritsar, I half
expected them to be holding daggers. But when I saw they were holding garlands
to welcome me instead, that image shattered in front of my eyes.”
My experience with children in India both
for the EFC program and otherwise was no different. In 2012, while visiting a
school in Mumbai, I was surrounded by young children who held up my visitors
tag and tried to guess where I was from. When no one in the audience could
guess correctly, I finally told them I was from Pakistan. While many of the
children began to squeal, inquiring why I wasn’t wearing a burqa, whether
Pakistan had ATMs and if I had ever eaten Pizza, a young child of no more than
six years of age began to run away. When I asked him why he was running, he
told me he was afraid of Ajmal Kasab. He continued to run away until I called
after him and said, “I’m scared of him too!” He stopped in his tracks and
slowly began to walk back. A couple of years later, in 2016, I held a Skype
talk with a school in Mumbai. After an hour worth of conversation, one of the
children remarked, “now I know all Pakistanis are not murderers, now I can
think of going to Pakistan too.” That is what an hour worth of conversation
between Indians and Pakistanis can do, that is the power of dialogue, of
connection.
If such dialogue is allowed, the
mainstream narratives and discourse in society will also begin to change. Media
channels will be keener on programs like Aman ki Asha- also headed by two of
the largest media groups of India and Pakistan- and conspiracy theories and
propaganda will begin to lose their audience. However, in order for the media
to alter its approach, structural changes are important in society. Peace needs
to become a priority. Textbooks need to be revised, hate sentiment challenged.
Pakistan and India are also both at the verge of losing their Partition
generation. It is most important that archives are set up and oral histories
are recorded. For though many in this generation remember and retell stories of
bloodshed, they are the only ones who have witnessed a society when the ‘other’
was not the ‘other,’ when co-dependence was a reality and violence and
brutality was not the only marker of people from another religion. These
narratives will prove to be essential in countering the prejudices prevalent in
India and Pakistan today and will be a crucial way forward in building peace in
the region.
References:
Ashis
Nandy, Pakistan’s latent ‘potentialities,
Radio Open Source. Web: http:/
/radioopensource.org/ashis-nandy-on-pakistans-latent-potentialities/
National
Commission for Justice and Peace (NCJP). Education
Vs Fanatic Literacy, Sanjh Publications, March 2013
Sanhati,
A Psychological Study of India’s Partition,
http://sanhati.com/articles/1299/.
Urvashi
Butalia, Memory, Lived and Forgotten,
The Financial Express, 2007
[2] Nandy,
Ashis, Pakistan’s latent ‘potentialities’, Radio Open Source. Web: http:/
/radioopensource.org/ashis-nandy-on-pakistans-latent-potentialities/ (Last
accessed: 24 November 2014).
[3] A
Psychological Study of India’s Partition’, Sanhati, 21 March 2009,
http://sanhati.com/articles/1299/.
[4] National
Commission for Justice and Peace (NCJP). Education Vs Fanatic Literacy. (Sanjh
Publications, March 2013), p.7.
Anam Zakaria is an author, development professional and educationist based in Islamabad, Pakistan. Her first book, The Footprints of Partition: Narratives of four generations of Pakistanis and Indians, was published by HarperCollins in 2015. Anam has previously worked with The Citizens Archive of Pakistan (CAP) heading their Oral History project and Exchange-for-Change project, collecting narratives of the first and second generation of Pakistanis and opening communication channels between school children in India and Pakistan. She currently works for the Association for the Development of Pakistan (ADP), heading their education sector. Anam is also a teacher of Development Studies and a student of Psychotherapy, with a special interest in trauma and healing in conflict zones.
