Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
The world’s leading professors explain the latest thinking in the humanities and social sciences in just 10 minutes.
Hello everyone. My name is Joya Chatterji. I'm a historian, a Fellow of the British Academy, and for my sins, also a Fellow of Trinity College Cambridge. I'm going to speak to you about a book I've written, which is called ‘Shadows at Noon’. It's a bit of a fat 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. And that argument is that, at the partition of India in 1947, India and Pakistan were created, and Bangladesh was created in 1971 so when one became three, these three bits of the subcontinent did not fly off like three kind of saucers into distant parts of the universe. They, in fact, remained together in more ways than one, and they remained very alike, very similar in ways that no historian or scholar has really tried to work through.
And this book does it, but in a way that is, I think you'll find, a little bit funny and also a little bit systematic. And it does so not only in the political domain, but also in spheres of life like culture and society and also Hollywood. So, you can read 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 go read straight from the beginning to the end as my editor would like. But 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.
So I just wanted to tell you that it's a book written, it's a book peopled with stories. And it's a book peopled with stories not just of great people, like then came Jinnah, and then came Gandhi, and then came so and so – people you may have heard about. But it's peopled with stories of ordinary folk. Now, you may ask what I mean by that term because no person is ordinary in their own point, in their own eyes. But when I mean ordinary, I suppose I mean people who are not heard of, in general, by the wider public.
And there's just two stories I want to tell you in relationship to this wider process of one becoming three. And the first story I've picked is an extreme story, which is of a character that is 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. Now, Train Lady was born in Calcutta [present-day Kolkata], which is a very cosmopolitan city. It has all manner of Hindus and Muslims and Christians and Armenians and people called Biharis and Urdu-speaking Muslims, people from Lucknow, people from up-country, English-speaking people who’ve migrated to the city for work, people from all over the country who've migrated to the city for work. So, 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 become Bangladesh. And Train Lady's mother loved Calcutta. And so, despite riots against Muslims – in 1948, in 1951, in 1964 – she did not move. She did not want to move from a city in which there were very, very different types of people, into which there were what she described as only Bengalis, just Bengali after Bengali, after Bengali – speaking only Bengali. So, she did not move. And we don't know exactly when she moved because stories, oral histories, are never that symmetrical and seamless, but she did move in the end. But when she moved, soon after, the Bangladesh Liberation War broke out. And then she was very resourceful, and she managed to get, I mean, there were a very small number of quotas of seats that Pakistan gave to people who wanted to go to Pakistan for safety, and she was able to get seats for the entire family. At this point, the family broke down because Train Lady’s father said, I'm sorry, but I'm going to Bangladesh. I mean, I'm not leaving Bangladesh and I'm not going to Pakistan. So, Train Lady and her whole family went to Karachi, which is in Pakistan, and the 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 we call her Train Lady, why I call her Train Lady. She's travelled and she's travelled, and she's travelled. She's travelled hundreds of times across those three borders. She's travelled so much. She's very frightened that she'll fall foul of some legal thing, although she hasn't, but in her mind, she's frightened of those borders. She's travelled to places like shrines, but she's also travelled to see relatives like her aunt in Calcutta, 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 and so it seems to me as though, in her travelling, she's trying to create something like putting back those three countries into one again, or at least trying to create a past again together in a way that is more bearable to her because her family is just scattered in this way, across these three borders in which, it's such a danger to try and cross them.
So that's Train Lady’s story. And there's another story, which I hope I can tell you, and I hope I have time, and that's the story of a young man called Seth. He's also what becomes known as a Bihari in Bangladesh after the Liberation War. And Bihari is a kind of, it's almost a derogatory term for people who speak a certain language, which is Urdu – North Indian languages – people who migrated, before or after the first partition, to East Pakistan [present-day Bangladesh] to do various kinds of work that they were skilled at. But it's like the first partition was forgotten, and they all have suddenly become Bihari, although they weren't Bihari at all.
Anyway, Seth was a young man when a film called ‘Swapna Bhoomi’ or ‘Golden Land’ – Bengal is often called the ‘Golden Land’ because it has so many rivers, if you fly over it, it literally looks golden – this film came out and was the first film that portrayed Biharis in a sympathetic light. So when he went to see this movie with a bunch of people, who he didn't know that well, he assumed he was going with like-minded people. And anyway, it turned out after the movie that it wasn't quite like that. So, he went after that, they went to a place to drink tea – it’s a very common thing across South Asia, you go and drink tea after a movie and you kind of discuss it. And immediately, one guy who was Bengali-speaking, he swore and he said: “you know, those fucking Bihari bastards, what the hell are they doing in the country? And this film is useless. I mean it’s, you know, what kind of rubbish are they talking about? These damn Bihari people, you should get out of this country in the first place.”
He said nothing. And then a major kind of ruckus broke out between the remaining people who were there after this young photographer, foul-mouthed, went away. And Seth said nothing, he just sat there. And then eventually he spoke, and then he said quietly, almost as if that he was speaking to himself, and he spoke, he said: “how many monsoons will it take to wash away this blood?”
Now, these lines were 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. So again, you can see how the three nations think together, thinking images together. But at the same time, you can see how in Seth’s case and in so many other cases, nationalism creates this kind of cruelty and bigotry when one becomes three.