Dear all,

Writing this as protests erupt across the country feels like the kind of thing I’d regard as heavy-handed, if I hadn’t already said I would do it. I discuss Partition below, feel free to skip as it is a harrowing topic. I’m likely to return to this, but maybe not next week. I’m not that much of a masochist.

These days I introduce myself as south Indian. I think this is because I’m trying to figure out how to position myself, but it’s also because I don’t think anyone would meaningfully ever refer to themselves as ‘European’.

I say this because the cultures and populations of Indian states are often as large as western European countries (ee post-script for some minor illustration). We do not blink when people call themselves Belgian, Dutch, Portuguese. But I hesitate to even say I’m Telugu. South Indian is about as far as I’m willing to go.

So what does it mean to be ‘Indian’? Here’s one awful way to do it in 1947 - live in the subcontinent but not in Pakistan. Simple, then, to also define Pakistani - the same, but not in India. The border between India and Pakistan (at that time East and West Pakistan) became what determined your allegiance. It was a border drawn first in blood, then in ink, and then again in blood. It was drawn not just by one person but an entire organisational apparatus that cared little and less for those who lived in the subcontinent, except perhaps as intellectual exercises. It was a scheme astonishing in its scale, its lack of any foresight, and its utter lack of consideration for the host of voices that said over and over - this is a bad idea.

In June 1947, Partition was agreed upon by three parties - the Indian National Congress, the Muslim League, and the British government. The British government appointed a lawyer to oversee this process, to be completed by August 15, 1947. So he did.

Famously, Cyril Radcliffe was given only five weeks to partition a subcontinent he had never visited, to which he never returned after completing his task. He spend those weeks drawing and shitting, presumably, as his dysentery is marginally more amusing than the rest of this letter.

Lahore, by the way, is some 425 kilometers from Delhi. There are places in India much further away from our capital. No one living either in Delhi or Lahore - two of the most important cities in the country - expected to be cut off from Lahore or Delhi. Why would they? No one expects London to be cut off from Manchester, or Paris to be inaccessible to Marseille (Vichy France, I suppose, notwithstanding).

Yet the borders were announced, and it triggered a mass panic. There had already been communal riots across India for some time by then. In Punjab, there had been indiscriminate killing by people of all religions, of people of all religions. Beyond a point, it becomes not just crass but also inhumane to compare the scales of such violence, except to say that we must acknowledge it.

Between 12 and 20 million people migrated between India and Pakistan. The trail of migrants was said to be kilometers long. The trains meant to transport people travelling from one place to the other were sites of such massacre that to repeat them takes more spine and stomach than I have in me. Suffice it to say that most who survived it chose to simply never think of it again, as if it were the only possible response.

In 1948, the United Nations voted on a partition plan for Palestine. The ensuing civil war between the Jewish and Palestinian communities resulted in about 750,000 Palestinians being expelled from their homes, again by a border drawn by people not from their country. The British, which had been in charge of the area prior to the border, withdrew their forces from the area and simply washed their hands of all responsibility.

Now, you can travel from London to Edinburgh without anyone checking your passport. From Lisbon to Rome, Vienna to Berlin, no meaningful border prevents the movement of people. Of course, the populace of Great Britain is quite committed to borders and decided to enforce the one it had with Europe in 2016.

Still. Even before October 7, 2023, Palestinians could not travel freely in their own land. Indians and Pakistanis are more beholden to both our own and to European borders than Europeans are to ours. I have seen the border between India and Pakistan for myself. It is a fence separating one part of the Kutchchi desert from another. The desert doesn’t care about the fence.

Next week, Florence and the Machine’s latest album and why I like her work so much.

Cheers,

mvs

PS The last census conducted in India was 2011, so I will use those horribly outdated figures. In 2011, the population of Telangana was about 35 million people. The population of Poland around the same time was about 38 million people. Tamil Nadu had some 72 million people, compared to France’s 64 million. My point here is not to argue that the densities of population are comparable, but that the histories that emerge from these cultures are comparable. The literature, art, martial excellence and civilisational progress of any state in India easily match those of countries in western Europe.