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The Two : A Cultural Path to Peace in ? Author(s): Alyssa Ayres Source: World Policy Journal, Vol. 22, No. 4 (Winter, 2005/2006), pp. 63-68 Published by: Duke University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40209996 Accessed: 07-03-2016 06:57 UTC

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This content downloaded from 203.199.211.197 on Mon, 07 Mar 2016 06:57:15 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions S#FT P#WER

Alyssa Ay res is deputy director of the Center for the Advanced Study of at the University of Pennsylvania and managing editor of India Review.

^^^^L The Two Punjabs: A Cultural Path to Peace in ^^^H South Asia? ^^^^^ Alyssa Ayres

Last year, the Pakistani team spent a in cross-border Punjabi gatherings. "The month and a half in India on tour, its first ripples from these meetings will reach the such visit in more than six years. Its first powers-that-be in both countries, because it match was in , a small city in the In- shows the direction the people want to dian state of . As expected, hoards of take." fans converged to watch, but it wasn't the The "two Punjabs" to which the chief usual Indian cricket audience. India allowed minister referred are the successor states of to cross the border to watch the the unified Punjab of British India. At the match, and nearly 3,000 showed up. In two in 1947, Punjab, a sprawl- days, 38 busloads of Pakistani fans, for the ing province of 30 million people, was split most part , crossed the border. Ho- along religious lines by the departing Brit- tel accommodations became so tight that ish, who awarded the predominantly Mus- Indian Punjabis opened up their homes to lim western half to and the pre- the visitors, prompting sentimental newspa- dominantly Hindu and Sikh eastern half to per reports of a Punjabi brotherhood span- India. For nearly 60 years - save for wars be- ning the border. A young Pakistani woman tween India and Pakistan in 1965 and who was staying with an Indian family told 1971, and a Sikh insurgency in Indian Pun- a reporter, "The people here are so warm jab abetted by Pakistan in the 1980s - the and friendly. I wish I could stay here for- two halves have been frozen apart by the in- ever." Indian Punjabi shopkeepers offered ternational border that runs between them. their wares to their Pakistani cousins at Lately, the ice has begun to thaw, how- huge discounts, at times even for free. This ever, with consequences that may well re- eruption of bonhomie inspired some fans to verberate beyond the two provinces. Since declare allegiance - perhaps for the first 2004, India and Pakistan have been engaged time ever - to both national cricket teams. in intergovernmental talks on a host of com- Images broadcast from the five-day match plex issues, including the status of disputed showed young men with their faces painted and nuclear weapons, and interna- with the saffron, white, and green of the In- tional attention has been focused on the dian flag on one side, and the green and these official efforts. But developments tak- white of Pakistan's flag on the other. ing place outside the international spot- Only three years ago, India and Pakistan light - not in and , but in stood toe-to-toe on the brink of war. Now, and , and Ludhi- however, a new impetus for peace, with a ana - could potentially transform the nature specific cultural flavor, is growing. "It's a re- of India-Pakistan relations. In such places, flection of the spirit of Punjabiyat [Punjabi- exchanges between ordinary Punjabis could ness] that binds the two Punjabs," said the snowball into a movement that could over- chief minister of Pakistani Punjab when come the longstanding enmity of these two asked about the emotional outpouring seen nuclear-armed neighbors. This effort even

The Two Punjabs: A Cultural Path to Peace in South Asia? 63

This content downloaded from 203.199.211.197 on Mon, 07 Mar 2016 06:57:15 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions has an official slogan: "Reviving the Spirit two nationalist struggles: the Indian free- of Punjab, Punjabi, and Punjabiyat." dom movement and the Pakistan move- This Punjabi bonhomie is dismissed by ment. Mahatma Gandhi's Indian National some as little more than sentimentality. And Congress fought for independence from in truth, the problems that have under- British colonial rule, as did Mohammad Ali mined previous India-Pakistan peace initia- Jinnah 's Muslim League. But where the tives - terrorist attacks, for one - could un- Congress sought to preserve India as a dermine this budding effort. The powerful multireligious, secular nation, the League Pakistani military views India as its arch- demanded the creation of a separate nation- enemy. Within India, where memories of state, which, it argued, was the only way to the Sikh insurgency are still fresh, the preserve the political interests of India's movement is bound to inspire ambivalence. . The Muslim League equated But such skepticism ought not to blind with , and its leadership believed us to the untapped potential of cultural that this nationality would be imperiled in diplomacy. The two Punjabs wield dispro- an India in which Muslims formed a minor- portionate influence in their respective ity and could always be outvoted. Partition countries, and they can call upon a prosper- thus had the effect of privileging one type of ous and culturally active diaspora in the community affiliation () over others West, which, through the growing popular- (ethnolinguistic, territorial). ity of Punjabi musical and cultural events, The departing British partitioned Pun- has begun to carve out a distinct Punjabi jab down to the district level, conducting a sensibility that transcends the national di- sort of religious gerrymander. As Muslims, vides back "home." Most importantly, the , and were forced from their incipient people-to-people contacts between homes, partition's bloody excesses tore Pun- the two Punjabs directly address the core of jab apart, and neighbor turned on neighbor. the India-Pakistan conflict: the problem of Although exact figures for Punjab alone are incompatible national identities. not known, more than a million people alto- gether perished during partition, and be- The Great Divide tween 12 and 18 million people were dis- Talk of Punjabi brotherhood might seem placed. Many were raped, maimed, tortured, strange to those whose knowledge of the or killed. These traumas were seared into history of the subcontinent derives from the region's collective memory. As the late Richard Attenborough's film Gandhi. In its poet would write during moving final scenes, two seemingly endless that terrible year, in one of the most revered streams of trudge in opposite direc- verses of modern : "Today tions, illustrating the scale of human dis- I say to / Speak from your placement that occurred with partition. grave.... Arise, O friend of the afflicted; arise Punjab was disproportionately affected by and see the state of Punjab / Corpses strewn this great upheaval because, like Bengal, it on fields, and the Chenaab flowing with was a religiously plural province with a slim much blood." Muslim majority. In the Punjab of 1947, 54 percent of the population was Muslim, From "Ancient" Hatreds to Ancient Ties the rest Hindu and Sikh. In the intervening decades, the fact that As the British quit India, they carved partition ruptured the ethnoreligious fabric up the provinces of Punjab and Bengal and of the Punjab was lost in what came to be gave half of each to India and to newly cre- understood as the "natural" national exis- ated Pakistan. This division was an attempt tence of the two Punjabs, that is, as a Paki- to reconcile the incompatible demands of stani Muslim Punjab and an Indian Hindu

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This content downloaded from 203.199.211.197 on Mon, 07 Mar 2016 06:57:15 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions and Sikh Punjab. Viewed from the perspec- movement emphasizes this historical legacy tive of Punjabi cultural and political history, in which individuals were not tied to a sin- however, partition was anomalous. Parti- gle, immobile identity. The movement's in- tion's toll of religious violence was so heavy vocation of Punjabi literature that empha- in the Punjab precisely because of its earlier sizes unity, harmony, and the possibilities of history of religious coexistence. Because the coexistence thus allows people to transcend three communities - Muslim, Hindu, and the division of partition and reclaim a cul- Sikh - were so closely intertwined, partition ture they share. could only be accomplished by the knife. Punjabis take their literature very seri- While undivided Punjab, particularly ously, seeing it as nearly sacred, and its ap- from the 1920s up to 1947, had its share of peal - particularly that of some older canon- religious conflict, the region's history can be ical texts - cuts across religious differences. viewed through the prism of cultural con- One often cited example of this allegiance nections rather than religious divisions. In to Punjabi-ness lies in the story of Udham the decades leading up to partition, Punjabi Singh. Now revered in India as a freedom elites had in fact rejected the premise of re- fighter in the struggle against the British ligious partition. Up until 1946, they main- Raj, Singh stood trial for the assassination of tained an allegiance to the cross-community the British lieutenant governor of Punjab, . The Unionists had little in- Michael O'Dwyer. O'Dwyer had overseen terest in the proposed establishment of Pa- the infamous Jallianwala Bagh massacre of kistan, as it would have meant the division 1919 - in which British troops in Amritsar of Punjab. Nor did they wish to be entirely opened fire on a crowd of unarmed protes- subsumed within an India dominated by the tors, killing at least 400 men, women, and Congress Party. Punjab's Unionists argued children. On the witness stand, Udham instead for an autonomous state - with its Singh refused to give his real name. Instead, own prime minister - in a broader Indian he insisted on calling himself "Ram Mo- federation. This chapter in Punjab's history hammad Singh," by this means summoning has been downplayed in the later political the three of undivided Punjab. narratives and official histories of India and Moreover, Singh refused to swear on the Pakistan. Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, or the Sikh Earlier periods in Punjab history, more- scriptures, maintaining that his allegiance over, appear to have offered more fluid defi- was to an eighteenth-century Punjabi love nitions of religious identity than that which story, Heer-Ranjha, by the poet and writer came to preoccupy people in the mid-twen- Waris Shah. Heer-Ranjha tells the story of a tieth century. The region's strong tradition tragic romance between a boy and girl of of is a good example. Sufi Islamic different . Ranjha, the hero, follows re- practice emphasizes a spirituality of direct, ligious practices that could be viewed as ei- often mystical, connection with God. Its ther Hindu or Muslim. Most importantly, meditative practices draw upon local idioms the tale is popular across religious commu- and imagery, permitting great cultural in- nities as a story perceived to be quintessen- clusiveness. The Sikh religion, native to tially Punjabi. When Punjabis refer to this Punjab, incorporated the Islamic idea of one tale, they see it not as a justification for an- God with Hindu philosophies of reincarna- cient hatreds but as a demonstration of an- tion and the illusory nature of life's experi- cient ties. ences. Perhaps most importantly, 's founder emphasized the essential unity of The New Spirit of Punjabiyat Islam and , and presented his new Drawing upon this older history of affinity, faith as a syncretic path. The Punjabiyat the new spirit of Punjabiyat has been nur-

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This content downloaded from 203.199.211.197 on Mon, 07 Mar 2016 06:57:15 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions tured by activists and intellectuals on both uses an script, while the Punjabi in sides of the border as well as by the Punjabi India uses a script derived from ; diaspora. Their efforts range from musical, the two scripts are not mutually intelligible, literary, and dramatic exchanges to sporting although the spoken language is the same). matches and cooperative policy studies ex- Talks are also underway to formalize educa- amining trade potential. Some of these ef- tional exchanges between two universities in forts have recently received governmental India's Punjab and two in Pakistan's Punjab, support at the provincial level on both sides including a pair of agricultural colleges. of the border. Taken together, they point to The arts are also playing a significant a slowly increasing space in which the pow- role in these ongoing exchanges. Performing er of culture has begun to bridge the divide artists help consolidate a common sense of of religion, so long perceived as a permanent Punjabi heritage by emphasizing local tradi- chasm. Like the international ping-pong tions that transcend religion. The Pakistani games of the early 1970s, which preceded theater troupe Ajoka has performed works the opening to China, the seemingly in- based on the eighteenth-century Sufi mystic nocuous interactions in the name of the , known for his philosophy of spirit of Punjabiyat hold the promise of a harmony among religions, as has the new more peaceful future. sensation . Ajoka A significant area of common interest is played to rave reviews on its first India tour the region's agricultural economy and devel- in 2003, and again last June. Last March, opment needs. The Punjab, a fertile plain Indian and Pakistani troupes collaborated on naturally endowed by five rivers, has long a week-long festival of Punjabi plays in Pa- been known as the of the sub- kistan. Indian Punjabi pop superstar Daler continent, and after partition the two Pun- Mehndi has performed to sold-out audiences jabs continued to be agricultural power- in Pakistani Punjab. The World Punjabi houses in their respective countries. The Conference, a movement founded by the newly created Two Punjabs Centre, located Pakistani litterateur-politician Fakhar Za- in , capital of Indian Punjab, man, has convened well-attended literary and supported by Pakistan's Lahore Univer- conferences in India, Pakistan, and around sity of Management Sciences and India's the world. Since the first conference in Centre for Research in Rural and Industrial 1996, the WPC's activities have gained mo- Development, plans to study the two Pun- mentum, and it now sponsors multiple jabs' trade potential and carry out joint re- events each year. Last year alone, the WPC search in agriculture, health care, and indus- hosted a conference in Pakistan in May, trial and infrastructure development. It also another in July to celebrate Waris Shah, plans to sponsor cultural and literary events and a third in India in September. to create a "common basis" for trust comple- Filmmakers, too, have caught the Pun- menting the agriculture and trade discus- jabiyat spirit. Only a few years ago, Bolly- sions. The initiative has the support of both wood was churning out Kashmir-focused provincial governments, and financial sup- hits with Pakistanis as the enemy. However, port from the Ford Foundation. a recent Bollywood film, Veer-Zara, chroni- A second new institution, the World cles the love of an Indian Punjabi boy for Punjabi Centre, has been established in the a Pakistani Punjabi girl. And a recent Pa- Indian city of to promote Punjabi kistani film, Khamosh Pani, takes as its sub- culture. At the center's inauguration in Feb- ject the painful experience of partition in ruary, proponents showcased new computer the Punjab, with Muslim and Sikh charac- software that translates one Punjabi script to ters searching for answers to the mysteries another. (The Punjabi written in Pakistan surrounding their shared traumatic past.

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This content downloaded from 203.199.211.197 on Mon, 07 Mar 2016 06:57:15 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions The new spirit extends to the world of security concerns, so it is no coincidence sports. In December 2004, the Punjab that the two Punjabs effort has flowered at a Games - a sort of grass-roots Olympiad fea- time of rapprochement between New Delhi turing such traditional games as kabbadt (a and Islamabad. Yet there are reasons why we contact sport) and tug-of-war - pitted teams ought to take a more optimistic view of from both Punjabs against each other in 12 Punjabiyat's possibilities: the movement di- different sports. The Indian Olympic Asso- rectly addresses the problem of incompatible ciation has now created a permanent secre- nationalisms; Punjabis wield disproportion- tariat for the games, and the second round ate influence in both India and Pakistan; the will take place in Lahore, Pakistan, this Feb- effort has a potential demonstration effect; ruary. Meanwhile, the Punjab Cricket Asso- and there are growing domestic constituen- ciation in India has hired the famed Paki- cies in both countries who desire a peaceful stani spin bowler and former captain In- resolution of differences. tikhab Alam to coach the Indian Punjab As Indiana University's Sumit Ganguly team. Asked about his experiences coaching has argued, at the core of the India-Pakistan in India, Alam said that he did not consider confrontation is the issue of incompatible himself foreign, that because he was born : one nonsectarian and the other in India, in , "I am basically a Islamic. Indeed, were the dispute simply Punjabi. The language is [the] same, the territorial, skilled negotiators could theoret- food and culture is [the] same." ically secure a settlement. But any lasting India and Pakistan have also agreed to path to peace between India and Pakistan begin new bus services linking cities in the must find a way - amidst a number of two Punjabs. The first route, which (as of highly contentious disputes, not least over this writing) was scheduled to begin operat- disputed territory and water rights - to ing this January, will connect the major city straightforwardly address the cognitive clash of Indian Punjab, Amritsar, with the major of nationalisms that has resulted in the "un- city of Pakistani Punjab, Lahore. Amritsar ending conflict." The two-Punjabs model and Lahore, only 25 miles apart, were once does precisely this, albeit on a small scale. known as "twin cities," but cross-border Neither sidestepping nor seeking a rollback traffic has been held to a trickle for nearly of partition, Punjabiyat permits both sides 60 years. A second bus service, likely to be- equal claim to a shared past, creating neu- gin once a hotel has been completed and a tral mechanisms for coexistence that do not highway widened, will link Amritsar, the require Punjabi citizens of India or Pakistan holy city of Sikhism, with to subordinate their allegiance to their own in Pakistan, the birthplace of , countries. the religion's founding saint. Skeptics who point to the regional limi- tations of Punjabiyat fail to consider the dis- Can the Two Punjabs Deliver? proportionate influence the two Punjabs Skeptics argue that while the two Punjabs have within their own countries. Punjabis are off to a promising start, their regional make up 50 percent of Pakistan's population focus is too particularistic to have a strong and constitute a disproportionate percentage effect on relations between India and Paki- of the army. According to the Brookings In- stan. How can literary gatherings and feel- stitution's Stephen P. Cohen, 75 percent of good games of tug-of-war in Punjab lead to the army comes from just three districts in the normalization of relations between the Punjab and two bordering districts in the two countries? Indeed, cultural diplomacy Northwest Frontier Province. The officer takes a back seat to traditional diplomacy corps, while more urban and diverse, re- when it comes to territorial disputes and mains disproportionately Punjabi as well.

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This content downloaded from 203.199.211.197 on Mon, 07 Mar 2016 06:57:15 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Punjabi political and business elites domi- siveness of Sindhi saints' poetry has appeal nate the public sphere. Although on the for both Muslim and Hindu . Simi- other side of the border Punjab is just one of lar cultural connections could be forged be- India's 28 states, it projects considerable in- tween and . fluence because of the configuration of In- If India and Pakistan are ever to have dia's current political leadership: the prime normal relations, there will have to be size- minister, the new army chief, and the able vocal constituencies for peaceful coexis- deputy chairman of the Planning Commis- tence on both sides of the border. Until sion (often called the "second most powerful now, Indian and Pakistani "peaceniks" have man in India") are all Punjabi. Moreover, remained outside the mainstream, but this many of those involved in the Punjabiyat ef- is beginning to change. In India, some for- fort have close ties to India's political lead- eign policy realists not previously known for ers. To take just one example, the Centre for harboring rosy views on Pakistan, like the Research in Rural and Industrial Develop- leading strategic analyst C. Mohan, ment counts among the members of its ad- now think Punjabiyat can lead to improved visory board the prime minister, the foreign relations. Assessing Pakistan's constituency minister, one of India's leading industrial- for peace is much more difficult given the ists, and one of India's top economists. role of the army, which has justified its pen- There is also a large and culturally ac- etration of Pakistani politics by holding up tive , settled primarily in India as a perpetual threat. But given the the , Britain, and . The number of Punjabis in the military, there is Academy of the Punjab in North America reason to hope that Punjabiyat may extend (apna) and the closely related Punjab Her- its influence even to the Pakistani army. itage Foundation have taken up publishing The Punjabiyat movement has experi- projects (translating literature from one enced gradual growth from the late 1990s Punjabi script to another) to bring both onward by focusing on a celebration of a Punjabs closer together. They have also con- shared Punjabi heritage. Because its pro- vened numerous conferences focused on moters have not sought to resolve disputes and literature, explicitly between India and Pakistan, Punjabiyat has emphasizing the commonalities across the been able to foster ties of affection and fel- two Punjabs. In 2001, apna published in low feeling between Punjabis on both sides Pakistan the in an Arabic of the border without the constant pressure script, the first such ever to be printed. to "show results." Although the expansion Punjabiyat can have a demonstration ef- of people-to-people ties in the two Punjabs fect on other regions in India and Pakistan, may not be enough in and of itself to guar- leading to wider citizen exchanges between antee peace between India and Pakistan, the two countries. India's -based no long-term resolution to the disputes be- Sindhis have cultural roots in the Pakistani tween the two countries will be possible un- province of Sind. Sindhi, like Punjabi, til more and more ordinary people can look boasts a rich literary heritage stemming across the border and see not a hated enemy, from its Sufi traditions. The spiritual inclu- but a kindred past. •

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