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Last year, the Pakistani cricket team
spent a month and a half in India on tour, its first such visit in
more than six years. Its first match was in Mohali, a small city in
the Indian state of Punjab. As expected, hoards of fans converged to
watch, but it wasn't the usual Indian cricket audience. India
allowed Pakistanis to cross the border to watch the match, and
nearly 3,000 showed up. In two days, 38 busloads of Pakistani fans,
for the most part Punjabis, crossed the border. Hotel accommodations
became so tight that Indian Punjabis opened up their homes to the
visitors, prompting sentimental newspaper reports of a Punjabi
brotherhood spanning the border. A young Pakistani woman who was
staying with an Indian family told a reporter, "The people here are
so warm and friendly. I wish I could stay here forever." Indian
Punjabi shopkeepers offered their wares to their Pakistani cousins
at huge discounts, at times even for free. This eruption of bonhomie
inspired some fans to declare allegiance--perhaps for the first time
ever--to both national cricket teams. Images broadcast from the
five-day match showed young men with their faces painted with the
saffron, white, and green of the Indian flag on one side, and the
green and white of Pakistan's flag on the other.
Only three years ago, India and
Pakistan stood toe-to-toe on the brink of war. Now, however, a new
impetus for peace, with a specific cultural flavor, is growing.
"It's a reflection of the spirit of Punjabiyat [Punjabiness] that
binds the two Punjabs," said the chief minister of Pakistani Punjab
when asked about the emotional outpouring seen in cross-border
Punjabi gatherings. "The ripples from these meetings will reach the
powers-that-be in both countries, because it shows the direction the
people want to take."
The "two Punjabs" to which the chief
minister referred are the successor states of the unified Punjab of
British India. At the partition of India in 1947, Punjab, a
sprawling province of 30 million people, was split along religious
lines by the departing British, who awarded the predominantly Muslim
western half to Pakistan and the predominantly Hindu and Sikh
eastern half to India. For nearly 60 years--save for wars between
India and Pakistan in 1965 and 1971, and a Sikh insurgency in Indian
Punjab abetted by Pakistan in the 1980s--the two halves have been
frozen apart by the international border that runs between them.
Lately, the ice has begun to thaw,
however, with consequences that may well reverberate beyond the two
provinces. Since 2004, India and Pakistan have been engaged in
intergovernmental talks on a host of complex issues, including the
status of disputed Kashmir and nuclear weapons, and international
attention has been focused on the these official efforts. But
developments taking place outside the international spotlight--not
in Delhi and Islamabad, but in Amritsar and Faisalabad, Lahore and
Ludhiana--could potentially transform the nature of India-Pakistan
relations. In such places, exchanges between ordinary Punjabis could
snowball into a movement that could overcome the longstanding enmity
of these two nuclear-armed neighbors. This effort even has an
official slogan: "Reviving the Spirit of Punjab, Punjabi, and
Punjabiyat."
This Punjabi bonhomie is dismissed by
some as little more than sentimentality. And in truth, the problems
that have undermined previous India-Pakistan peace
initiatives--terrorist attacks, for one--could undermine this
budding effort. The powerful Pakistani military views India as its
archenemy. Within India, where memories of the Sikh insurgency are
still fresh, the movement is bound to inspire ambivalence.
But such skepticism ought not to
blind us to the untapped potential of cultural diplomacy. The two
Punjabs wield disproportionate influence in their respective
countries, and they can call upon a prosperous and culturally active
diaspora in the West, which, through the growing popularity of
Punjabi musical and cultural events, has begun to carve out a
distinct Punjabi sensibility that transcends the national divides
back "home." Most importantly, the incipient people-to-people
contacts between the two Punjabs directly address the core of the
India-Pakistan conflict: the problem of incompatible national
identities.
The Great Divide
Talk of Punjabi brotherhood might
seem strange to those whose knowledge of the history of the
subcontinent derives from Richard Attenborough's film Gandhi. In its
moving final scenes, two seemingly endless streams of refugees
trudge in opposite directions, illustrating the scale of human
displacement that occurred with partition. Punjab was
disproportionately affected by this great upheaval because, like
Bengal, it was a religiously plural province with a slim Muslim
majority. In the Punjab of 1947, 54 percent of the population was
Muslim, the rest Hindu and Sikh.
As the British quit India, they
carved up the provinces of Punjab and Bengal and gave half of each
to India and to newly created Pakistan. This division was an attempt
to reconcile the incompatible demands of two nationalist struggles:
the Indian freedom movement and the Pakistan movement. Mahatma
Gandhi's Indian National Congress fought for independence from
British colonial rule, as did Mohammad Ali Jinnah's Muslim League.
But where the Congress sought to preserve India as a multireligious,
secular nation, the League demanded the creation of a separate
nation-state, which, it argued, was the only way to preserve the
political interests of India's Muslims. The Muslim League equated
Islam with nationality, and its leadership believed that this
nationality would be imperiled in an India in which Muslims formed a
minority and could always be outvoted. Partition thus had the effect
of privileging one type of community affiliation (religion) over
others (ethnolinguistic, territorial).
The departing British partitioned
Punjab down to the district level, conducting a sort of religious
gerrymander. As Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs were forced from their
homes, partition's bloody excesses tore Punjab apart, and neighbor
turned on neighbor. Although exact figures for Punjab alone are not
known, more than a million people altogether perished during
partition, and between 12 and 18 million people were displaced. Many
were raped, maimed, tortured, or killed. These traumas were seared
into the region's collective memory. As the late poet Amrita Pritam
would write during that terrible year, in one of the most revered
verses of modern Punjabi literature: "Today I say to Waris Shah /
Speak from your grave.... Arise, O friend of the afflicted; arise
and see the state of Punjab / Corpses strewn on fields, and the
Chenaab flowing with much blood."
From "Ancient" Hatreds to Ancient
Ties
In the intervening decades, the fact
that partition ruptured the ethnoreligious fabric of the Punjab was
lost in what came to be understood as the "natural" national
existence of the two Punjabs, that is, as a Pakistani Muslim Punjab
and an Indian Hindu and Sikh Punjab. Viewed from the perspective of
Punjabi cultural and political history, however, partition was
anomalous. Partition's toll of religious violence was so heavy in
the Punjab precisely because of its earlier history of religious
coexistence. Because the three communities--Muslim, Hindu, and
Sikh--were so closely intertwined, partition could only be
accomplished by the knife.
While undivided Punjab, particularly
from the 1920s up to 1947, had its share of religious conflict, the
region's history can be viewed through the prism of cultural
connections rather than religious divisions. In the decades leading
up to partition, Punjabi elites had in fact rejected the premise of
religious partition. Up until 1946, they maintained an allegiance to
the cross-community Unionist Party. The Unionists had little
interest in the proposed establishment of Pakistan, as it would have
meant the division of Punjab. Nor did they wish to be entirely
subsumed within an India dominated by the Congress Party. Punjab's
Unionists argued instead for an autonomous state--with its own prime
minister--in a broader Indian federation. This chapter in Punjab's
history has been downplayed in the later political narratives and
official histories of India and Pakistan.
Earlier periods in Punjab history,
moreover, appear to have offered more fluid definitions of religious
identity than that which came to preoccupy people in the
mid-twentieth century. The region's strong tradition of Sufism is a
good example. Sufi Islamic practice emphasizes a spirituality of
direct, often mystical, connection with God. Its meditative
practices draw upon local idioms and imagery, permitting great
cultural inclusiveness. The Sikh religion, native to Punjab,
incorporated the Islamic idea of one God with Hindu philosophies of
reincarnation and the illusory nature of life's experiences. Perhaps
most importantly, Sikhism's founder emphasized the essential unity
of Islam and Hinduism, and presented his new faith as a syncretic
path. The Punjabiyat movement emphasizes this historical legacy in
which individuals were not tied to a single, immobile identity. The
movement's invocation of Punjabi literature that emphasizes unity,
harmony, and the possibilities of coexistence thus allows people to
transcend the division of partition and reclaim a culture they
share.
Punjabis take their literature very
seriously, seeing it as nearly sacred, and its appeal--particularly
that of some older canonical texts--cuts across religious
differences. One often cited example of this allegiance to
Punjabi-ness lies in the story of Udham Singh. Now revered in India
as a freedom fighter in the struggle against the British Raj, Singh
stood trial for the assassination of the British lieutenant governor
of Punjab, Michael O'Dwyer. O'Dwyer had overseen the infamous
Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919--in which British troops in
Amritsar opened fire on a crowd of unarmed protestors, killing at
least 400 men, women, and children. On the witness stand, Udham
Singh refused to give his real name. Instead, he insisted on calling
himself "Ram Mohammad Singh," by this means summoning the three
religions of undivided Punjab. Moreover, Singh refused to swear on
the Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, or the Sikh scriptures, maintaining
that his allegiance was to an eighteenth-century Punjabi love story,
Heer-Ranjha, by the poet and writer Waris Shah. Heer-Ranjha tells
the story of a tragic romance between a boy and girl of different
tribes. Ranjha, the hero, follows religious practices that could be
viewed as either Hindu or Muslim. Most importantly, the tale is
popular across religious communities as a story perceived to be
quintessentially Punjabi. When Punjabis refer to this tale, they see
it not as a justification for ancient hatreds but as a demonstration
of ancient ties.
The New Spirit of Punjabiyat
Drawing upon this older history of
affinity, the new spirit of Punjabiyat has been nurtured by
activists and intellectuals on both sides of the border as well as
by the Punjabi diaspora. Their efforts range from musical, literary,
and dramatic exchanges to sporting matches and cooperative policy
studies examining trade potential. Some of these efforts have
recently received governmental support at the provincial level on
both sides of the border. Taken together, they point to...
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