The jigsaw puzzle of nationhood

An interesting piece.

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/Opinion/Todays_Features/View_Point/The_jigsaw_puzzle_of_nationhood/articleshow/2276384.cmsIn

• Mukul Kesavan’s somewhat underrated novel looking through Glass, the narrator, having been transported back to 1942, finds himself living through the narratives of Muslim League/Congress politics. Here, he meets a central character called Masroor, an employee at a jigsaw puzzle printing press, who works out his anxieties about the threatening partition of the country by making puzzles based on the map of undivided India. Masroor’s mother, meanwhile, ends up forming a counter to the contending political discourses of that time by forming her own political party, the “Society for the Protection of the Present”.
• Literary readings against the grain notwithstanding, history had its own telos, partition did happen, and the subcontinent is still grappling with the attendant traumatised identities and borders.
• The division was many things, but the residual guilt and burden arising out of Radcliffe’s (a lawyer with no cartographic experience whatsoever) lines inflects South Asia’s imaginings of nationhood even today.
• There were, of course, many partitions, and all remain incomplete, the fuzzy lines of invented geography and maps continuing to be the locus of bloodletting.
• The Durand line, chopping off Afghanistan as part of the Great Game, was in 1893, perhaps the first major one, and for once, thanks to tribal identities, a border that doesn’t really exist.
• The 1905 partition of Bengal was the first amputation along religious lines, foreshadowing both the Hindu and Muslim fundamentalist’s idea of segregation both along territorial and religio-cultural lines. That segregation, and for that matter any notion of nationhood, is part of the narrative of the nation as an “imagined community”. As much a falsification as the idea of sacrosanct boundaries, of the map, per se, defining and constituting the nation.
• Perhaps fittingly, no historical, political or social tract has managed to “contain” the slippages and absurdities of these partitions, these fevered imaginings, better than fiction.
• The savagery in a Manto or a Bhisham Sahni is acutely important to remember, but contemporary writers, hesitant to use the perhaps all-too-ready trope of violence, can posit the indeterminate nature of the nation rather more tangentially like, say, Amitav Ghosh in the seminal Shadowlines, where a character in Calcutta measures a map with a compass and finds, disturbingly, that an obscure town in China is much closer to ‘home’ than a central city in one’s own nation.
• Maps are the imagined nation writ large as it were, an attempt at the spatial concretisation of the myths of the nation. A small example can perhaps suffice, the uninitiated, both in India and Pakistan, would perhaps be somewhat taken aback to realise that their inherited, accepted cartography isn’t quite ‘real’.
• Both countries ‘map’ the entire state of undivided Kashmir, including, obviously, territory under the other’s control, as a part of the nation’s body. Political claims notwithstanding, a more accurate map of the actual territory of the nation is thus confusingly different, parts of the crown, Kashmir, are missing. Masroor’s anxiety about missing pieces of the puzzle, patently, isn’t simply fictional.