Living on the Margins. Minorities in South Asia - EURAC

The Self in the Other: Shared Pasts and Other Stories
In spite of attempts by the state to re-order the unacceptable past, fragments of that
forgotten past sneak into collective memory and create disturbance. The repressed
‘others’ in the national self are ruthlessly crushed by the state, which names them
‘traitors’, ‘anti-nationals’ and outsiders. These outsiders reside within the territory of the
state – they are the strangers within. They represent an uncomfortable continuity with the
past and refuse to be welded into acoherent and homogenized new wholeness. These are
the regional and ethnic entities that participate less in the power of the Centre, and
remember their connections to earlier belongings, long before the nation-state ever
emerged. They hold on to their languages, their unique cultural expressions, and their
own political and social vocabularies. They resist the Centre’s pressures to forcibly weld
them into the new imaginary of the state/nation. And they are duly punished, as the
militaries of the state appear with full force to make them forget forever who they once
were and who they wanted to be.
But in a dialectical way, the very instruments of power used to make them forget, become
tools which help them remember. The more the Indians tried to cling to what was
becoming Pakistan and drifting away, the more strongly did the new entity assert its
independence and broke all ties, not only political and economic, but cultural, social and
emotional. The more violent and angry its break, the more vociferously Pakistan enacted
and re-enacted its separation. In the same way, the more the Pakistani military tried to
hold on to East Pakistan, drenching every home there in blood and semen, intruding into
every space where nothing but hate prevailed for it, the more angrily did the Bengalis
push it out, never to let it in again. Harsh memories on all sides, made harsher with every
passing year, created many tales of blood and gore, tales that eventually found their way
only partially and in sanitized form into history textbooks as officially sanctioned truth.
Each sorrow on one side was a triumph on the other, every loss on one side was a symbol
of victory on the other. Some stories are silenced as they disrupt the official truth, others
find their way into obscure accounts that do not see the light of day. But lying deep
somewhere in the conscious and unconscious memories of ordinary people, are tales not
told in textbooks. These are poignant tales of love across the nation’s divides, stories of
friendship and bonds beyond the borders, narratives of common hopes and dreams shared
with the Other.
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