The Two Punjabs: A Cultural Path to Peace in South Asia? 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 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Duke University Press and Sage Publications, Inc. are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to World Policy Journal. http://www.jstor.org 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 India 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 cricket 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 Mohali, a small city in the In- shows the direction the people want to dian state of Punjab. 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 Pakistanis to cross the border to watch the the unified Punjab of British India. At the match, and nearly 3,000 showed up. In two partition of India in 1947, Punjab, a sprawl- days, 38 busloads of Pakistani fans, for the ing province of 30 million people, was split most part Punjabis, 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 Pakistan 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 Kashmir 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 Delhi and Islamabad, but in stood toe-to-toe on the brink of war. Now, Amritsar and Faisalabad, Lahore 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. Muslims. The Muslim League equated Islam But such skepticism ought not to blind with nationality, 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 (religion) 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 Hindus, and Sikhs 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 Amrita Pritam would write during moving final scenes, two seemingly endless that terrible year, in one of the most revered streams of refugees trudge in opposite direc- verses of modern Punjabi literature: "Today tions, illustrating the scale of human dis- I say to Waris Shah / 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 64 WORLD POLICY JOURNAL • WINTER 2005/06 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.