Beyond Borders Scotland and Dove Tales, the Association of Scottish Writers for Peace, collaborated on the Beyond Writing Competition, aiming to facilitating dialogue and cultural exchange through the creative writing and storytelling.    

The competition consisted of three rounds; Inspirational Women, Creative Peace and Beyond Borders.  

This piece by Nimisha Menon was shortlisted in Round III: Beyond Borders. The competition’s judge, Jean Rafferty of Dove Tales, described the piece as ‘colourful and emotional, moving from the romance of the spice route and the way it drew people from different countries to India through to the straight line drawn across the sub-continent in 1947 by the British. Her heartfelt description of the emotional fallout from that dividing line made for a resonant and moving piece.’ 

—

Indian Borders. A beautiful Fallacy

She lay tucked away from the rest. With the mighty Himalayas standing guard to her north and deep blue oceans swanking nearly three-quarters of her landmass, India remained cocooned in centuries of blissful isolation, until the Greeks heard of her. They discovered routes to the land that promised them of the frankincense and the myrrh. And, the cartographers began to swoon with their brushes. Soon the word spread and the desert winds carried with them the whiff of the spices and in came the Arabs. With their camelbacks filled with what was then priced higher than the gold, the Arabs rediscovered the sand routes to India.  You see, unlike other countries that had their borders drawn up based on settled civilizations, India’s were sketched, either by nature itself or by distant travellers. 

The spice route to India beckoned them all: the Dutch, French, Portuguese and the British. And, into the bosom of a tropical land along the Malabar Coast of India, the spices forged new borders to the Indian subcontinent. With the discovery of pepper, Europe lost her blandness in her cuisine, India her freedom and Britain her otiose endeavours. With 200 hundred years of colonial rule, the British Empire managed to redefine the Indian borders. This time, however, they were religious. Centuries of secular, peaceful brotherhood between Hindus, Muslims and the Sikhs were lost. Communal love gave way to suspicion, tolerance to mistrust and somewhere the motherland laboured long and hard. 

As the day of withdrawing her rule came close, Britain was to give one parting gift to her former colony after all, a simple line across her subcontinent. Of all the borders etched on the Indian soil, perhaps this remains the telling of them all, the one chalked between India and Pakistan that was once a united nation. And it stayed there like a scar across a face that was once flawless. Radcliff line that divides Indian and Pakistan was drawn by a British lawyer who had never visited the country before. With only 40 days given to complete the task, Mr Radcliff, aided with outdated provincial maps struck the dividing line and thus in the moment of freedom what was meant to be the glorious birth of a new nation, what India got instead was a miscarriage. 

The partition of India displaced 14 million people and brought with it the deaths of more than a million and the heartaches of countless. With mass displacement of this proportion, the Indian subcontinent was doomed for all of eternity. After all, not only had millions lost their homes, but the very notion of a free homeland had become but a distant memory. A mother lost her child, a child grew up too fast, a man lost his brother and a woman’s body became the battleground to settle scores. These are but mere epilogues of the tragedies of the partition that are best left unspoken. Today, even after 72 years of independence, what we have are two nuclear-armed, warring neighbours that yearn for one other, but with renewed distrust. The partition of India remains tragic because it was manmade, because it could have been avoided, because even today the countries bleed. What it brought with it was an agony that no pages of history could contain and casualties that no amount of time could salve. 

Today, museums bear testament to the tragedy that was the partition, but no one dares speak of it, for fear of waking up the ghosts. The wails have become distant in time, but haven’t been forgotten. Buses can ply between the countries, that’s how close they are. Buses ply empty, that’s how far they are. The fishermen of both the countries rot in a distant jail for failing to respect the maritime borders. Little do they know the scars here run so deep, that even still waters fall paler in comparison. A family mourns their lost home, a nation grieves at its own history and humanity hangs its head low in shame and despair. 

Indian borders are a beautiful fallacy because they were never meant to be there. The spices that beckoned the Arabs to this subcontinent brought with it algebra to the Indian shores. The Portuguese left behind tapioca and their delectable Portugal in the Dravidian dialect. The French brought with them their glorious architecture as did the Dutch. As for the British, the curry has become eponymous to their cuisine as has English become to a nation of over 20 official languages and 1658 dialects. The gravest mistake made by mankind hasn’t been in creating borders, but allowing those borders to divide the people inhabiting the land. Today, India and Pakistan remain fraught like rivalling siblings. They cry and mourn the loss of an artist, and celebrate the festivals with fervent vigour. They meet on cricket pitches with frightening competitiveness but on twitter, a yearning love outpours. The present generation may not have borne witness to the horrors of the partition, but remain aware of the newly formed borders. 

India’s partition cannot be undone, history cannot be rewritten, but the present can be a lesson for all of mankind. That borders need not be divisive, that compassion, love and trust need not be stifled within fences, that if art and culture can permeate even through borders of warring nations, isn’t there hope to find peace beyond borders?