After checking up on my friend earlier this week, I received a song from her by a young Kashmiri artist Yawar Abdal. Sung in Urdu and Kashmiri, Baal Maraeyo is a song that fuses Bahadhur Shah Zafar’s poetry about the pain of exile along with the lament of Kashmiri poet Rasul Mir, who mourns the betrothal of his beloved to another. In Yawar’s music video, the lyrics speak now of another kind of pain, the departure of friends, of separation and the memory of childhood. I was strangely comforted by this exchange and Pulwama, despite dominating headlines, remained in the background.  

Pulwama, however, refused to remain completely in the background when a peer of mine from my postgraduate course sent charged messages and images in our class Whatsapp group. The messages implored Indians to boycott Kashmiri businesses, accused Kashmiris of being traitors, and finally branded me as anti-national when I raised questions regarding the treatment of Kashmiris.

I decided to withdraw from the conversation because we were fixed in our positions and I didn’t want to play the role of that aunty who constantly educates young people on matters that excite their imaginations. There is, admittedly, a significant age difference between us. Also, for me, the glaring fact that unlike her I’m not native to the city of Kolkata/Calcutta is a reminder to me that I need to measure my words carefully. In daily interactions, in many a social situation, I’m always struggling to keep up with cultural nuances and uncertain if I have fully comprehended conversations, songs, films and jokes.

Hesitations and complicated silences are not something most people are comfortable with. There is a preference for quick-fix solutions, simple answers and monolithic identities. News from Bengaluru, where my Kashmiri friend currently lives, appeared on my Twitter timeline last evening, informing me that Karachi Bakery has been targeted by “nationalists” who think the mention of the name of the Pakistani city stands for endorsement of state of Pakistan. The fact the brand was started by a Sindhi refugee remains irrelevant to a cause that seeks to aggrandise itself by targeting visible and vulnerable non-entities, instead of legitimate players such as big businesses that trade with Pakistan and elected representatives who you might think need to be questioned and held accountable in such circumstances.

In 2009, Raj Thackeray’s MNS similarly targeted a brand called Karachi Sweets in different parts of Mumbai. Petitions in the past have sought to erase the name Sindh from our national anthem Jana Gana Mana. It’s almost as if people want to erase the memory of the fact that the geography of this country was once different and for people like myself, geographies are always going to remain complicated legacies.

My family is a refugee family, a fact that many Sindhis do not discuss often enough. Unlike Bengalis and Punjabis, the experience of Sindhi Hindus was not nearly as harrowing. In discussions on Partition, we remain a footnote and in cultural representation, we are neither fully realised authors nor subjects of narratives.

In the 1980s, two significant television series were produced for Doordarshan: Buniyaad spoke of the post-Partition experience and Tamas of the trauma of Partition itself. Both series, made by Sindhis (Ramesh Sippy and Govind Nihalani), centred on Punjabi subjects. The result is that people across the country remain forgetful of the fact that many Sindhis also grew up in refugee colonies, experienced displacement, and continue to remain estranged from Sindhi Muslims (who, by the way, did not drive them out) and their own larger culture. (Nalini Malani’s artwork also references Manto’s Toba Tek Singh and remains uncertain in terms of how it might speak of the Sindhi experience of Partition.)

In the context of nativist politics, Sindhis remain perplexed in terms of the positions they should take and remain silent but in national politics, many of them remain beholden to the BJP and RSS. Which leaves people such as myself wondering if we will ever talk about our complicated histories or will we forever surrender to someone else’s distorted memories of Partition, and someone else’s desired cartography and construction of our identity.

In 2007, I was part of an art project that delved into the cultural and political implications of public memory, image production, censorship, conflict and art. When I travelled to Kashmir with two filmmakers who had made a film on women’s peace initiatives in Kashmir, I had the opportunity to interact with Kashmiri photojournalists, activists, artists, journalists and media students. In more than one conversation, I remember being asked where I was from. A complicated question for me at the best of times, but simply saying I was from Mumbai did not satisfy their curiosity. I remember asking the men who posed this question to me to venture a guess.

In a short while, what seemed at first to have been a playful exchange to them turned into an exasperating and unwinnable exercise. They hopscotched across the map of India and asked if I were Punjabi, Maharashtrian, Tamil, Bengali or Himachali before finally admitting defeat; they couldn’t ascertain my ethnolinguistic identity by my appearance. When I told them that I was Sindhi, a pained expression surfaced briefly on their face. I repeated this exercise with a Kashmiri Pandit I met a year later in Pune and was piqued to notice a similar anxiety. The fact that our identities are not always neatly bounded and contained by maps assumed to represent our destinies was evident to Kashmiris. Most Indians, however, do not think of Sindh and Pakistan when they meet a Sindhi, they usually attempt some silly joke about papads and miserliness because, really, what else is there to say about shrewd, hardnosed Sindhis.  

My own experiences and attempts to fit in across countries (Britain, Kuwait, India) and cities (Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, among others) have remained difficult for me to share. That is at least partly because Sindhis of an earlier generation have never engaged enough with the conversations around Partition. We have moved on individually, accrued wealth, and remained successful by the conventional standards. But we have rarely reflected and introspected upon what Partition has meant for us.

If there are elements in our midst who insist we erase the mention of Karachi from our cities, be assured that in a few years the remaining references to Karachi will disappear from our midst. There’s a building in Mumbai that bears reference to Clifton Beach in Karachi that too will one day give way to a redeveloped project, and a complete amnesia will replace the memory that once tied Mumbai to Karachi. Between 1843 and 1936, the Bombay Presidency was also known as Bombay and Sind and included parts of Konkan, stretches of Gujarat and Karnataka. But these geographies are rarely invoked and in times such as these, only certain events and memories are allowed to take centre-stage for the drama of nationalism to unfold.

For many people who are charged by the passion of nationalism these past few days, Pulwama is a national humiliation to be avenged. The individual stories of the CRPF men remain irrelevant to their nationalist agenda, therefore their disdain for the recent Caravan piece (see Pratap Bhanu Mehta’s warped piece in Indian Express). Nobody is allowed to disrupt the nationalist narrative where there can be only winners and losers, nationalists and anti-nationals, loyalists and traitors, enemies and nativists.

It is not a coincidence that Sikh associations, youths and gurudwaras coordinated efforts so marvellously to protect and ensure the safe return of Kashmiris from places such as Ambala and Dehradun where they were being threatened with physical violence. Kashmiris have reciprocated by offering free services and aid. If, like me, you do not find yourself fitting into the larger frameworks propped up by others with more cultural capital, know that there are many like us who will forge our own idiosyncratic conversations, evoke the memory of diverse personal and shared geographies, remember specific stories, take comfort in the poetry and songs that speak to us and embrace cadences and forgotten legacies when our own are difficult to speak of.  

So, whether the Karachi in Karachi Bakery or Karachi halwa remains or not, I am going to listen Lal Meri Pat, a Sufi song, dedicated to the patron saint of Sindh, written in Saraiki and sung on both sides of the border.