Jahane Rumi In search of the unsearchable: O, my soul! where would you find your house?

1947 was not just about India’s Independence, it was an initiator of identities imposed from ‘above’. The new postcolonial states ventured to redefine their status through a mix of jingoism, the rewriting of history and the whipping up of the nation-state mantra – essentially Western in concept and practice. The journey of South Asian people therefore, has been fraught with wars, hysteria and state diktat articulating itself through prejudiced educational curricula and state-sponsored historical half-truths.

The shadows of hostility and war have refused to leave South Asia. For sixty years, the spectre of Partition and the Bangladeshi war of liberation continue to fill the public imagination with fear, skepticism and futile xenophobia. What is surprising is that the official worldview has been continuously contested and challenged by the people. A case in point is that, notwithstanding the misgivings and memories of violence during Partition, the people of India and of Pakistan have been warm and friendly to each other. Transnationalism has been articulated by people-to-people contact initiatives, and more importantly, by popular culture that has been shared for centuries, and continues to contain common strands even today.

The bureaucracies have undoubtedly resisted: twisting the arms of peace efforts by imposing visa regimes, building real and imagined iron curtains, and unleashing vicious propaganda now vociferously disseminated by the corporate media. In line with their popular leaders Mahatma Gandhi – who was killed by a Hindu fanatic due to his overtures to Muslims and Pakistan – and Mohammed Ali Jinnah – who is on record as having planned to go on vacation to India and perhaps retire there as well – the people have yearned for peace and friendship.

The relations between India and Pakistan have been aptly described as “a minefield of mutual recriminations, communal antagonisms, and military confrontations.” The policy priorities of each country also display tendencies to counter each other, or to be xenophobic in relation to ‘the other’. Public policy choices have inadequately responded to people’s aspirations and the paramount importance of establishing peace in the region.

It might not be useful to assess the perceptual direction of either government here. Postcolonial states operate in a security-obsessed frame, and focus more on the use of violence rather than on the compact they need to draw with the citizenry. This is where cultural interaction and cross-border initiatives assume immense importance. When the cricket visas were issued after a hiatus of decades in 2005, the exceptional warmth in Lahore astounded visitors from India. In so many ways, formal identities were challenged and shifted around in those days, as thousands thronged the streets and the cricket stadiums of Lahore. Track II diplomacy in the past has also been a favourite among the liberal intelligentsia of the two countries. However, cynicism in view of the failure of that mode of informal diplomacy has also been a part of public discourse.

The interaction of the two countries’ populations has been limited since the past six decades. Today, a miniscule number of families have relatives across the border. Despite aggressive posturing from their inception, India and Pakistan could not stop families from travelling to and fro, meeting relatives, friends and other associates. Wars in 1965 and 1971 exacerbated the divide between Indians and Pakistanis, and such ties were not restored even in the 1980s, when small skirmishes in adverse regions (Siachen, for instance) and tactical posturing (especially Operation Brass Tacks of 2002) were launched.

Prior to the 1965 war, Indian cinema was a major cultural force; since the banning of Indian films,television and later video technologies filled the gap. In Pakistan, General Zia’s oppressive rendition of Islam spelt doom for Pakistan’s previously vibrant and socially representative cinematic industry. While some actors and actresses were outbound for India in search of better opportunity, cultural ties with India were put on the backburner and the only relationship that was promoted was of a competitive kind, mostly in sports such as cricket.

Such interactions served the designs of both governments well, especially for the winning team in cases where the stakes of pride and perception remain high. Indeed, if cricket and the rivalry with India were not hyped-up as the only regional interaction with India, Pakistani cricketers would not have to face a storm of smelly vegetables on their arrival from a defeat handed down by Indian teams.

Thus, the experiment of SAARC and its twenty-something years of existence has been limited and has been held hostage to chauvinism. Politics and history continue to dominate discussions on how culture can transcend national boundaries and mutual hostilities. As a spin-off of official inter-governmental agreements, the SAARC processes have unleashed a large number of unofficial interactions and contacts among various sets of people and institutions, including NGOs, professionals, academics, the media and civil society.

Amid the shifting sands of our globalised life, it is evident that cultural cooperation across imagined and real borders is imminently possible. Cultural exchange, therefore, is not only a lived reality but also an endless, ever-expanding possibility shaping new spaces of resistance against officialdom. It is almost a parallel reality of composite and truncated ‘talks’ that are neither routine nor result-oriented.

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Perhaps the greatest metaphor for Foundation of South Asian Writers and Literature FOSWAL is its moving spirit, the eminent Indian writer Ajeet Caur, who was once a Lahoreite, and left her beloved city in the aftermath of Partition. There is no question that she is an Indian, a Punjabi woman and a creative writer, all layers of multifaceted identities. However, her single-minded pursuit of setting up a South Asian forum and focus on India and Pakistan undermines the compartmentalized nation-state mentality too familiar to us.

The FOSWAL arranged the first ever India-Pakistan writer’s conference in 1987. In fact, most of the participants of Track-II diplomacy recognized FOSWAL as an important component of the dialogue process. Culture has become an important component of the overall potential for any dialogue in South Asia; such is the power of cultural identity, and the specific dynamic supporting regional cohesion that exists in South Asia today. Over time, FOSWAL has created a sizable fraternity of writers, poets, scholars, diplomats, academics and intellectuals through its multifaceted initiatives. It has consistently advocated the ideals of SAARC, particularly in the areas of literature, art and culture as per its mandate. In doing so, FOSWAL has contributed significantly to the overarching objective of peace and prosperity in South Asia, as well as the development of a common and cohesive regional identity. Would it really be that difficult to connect the dots between cultural interaction, agreement and assimilation, and then broad-based recognition and acceptance thereon? Suffice it to say, progressive culture may indeed serve