Crossing Boundaries

Email

Whatsapp

Facebook

Pinterest

Twitter

Copy link

To commemorate fifty years of Independence in the subcontinent it seems appropriate to cut across the borders which separate Pakistan, India and Bangladesh. This book explores cultural developments in the three countries, in areas of new writings, poetry, theatre, music, cinema, art and architecture. It becomes an update on the cultural process rather than focusing on events of history.

This collection of outstanding essays, containing 45 black and white photographs, includes contributions by authors and artists from all three countries of the subcontinent. Distinguished writers, social historians, art historians, civil servants, architects, a cartoonist, poets, artists, theatre activists and a film maker each give their points of view. They raise fundamental questions regarding language, culture and identity.

The emphasis is on sharing of experiences and of sensibilities. Intizar Husain writes of his own journey across the border, while Krishna Sobti reflects on the manner by which time and memory have transformed this process in writing. Subhash Mukhopadhyay remembers of his meetings with Nazrul and Faiz, while Kabir Chowdhury outlines the rising of a new fervent poetry in Bangladesh. Zohra Segal recalls the heydays of Prithvi theatres, while Madeeha Gauhar brings us up to date with new activism in Pakistan.

Throughout the subcontinent, there remain areas of shared concerns. Theatre and the arts have emerged as powerful means of resistance to growing fundamentalism, and for asserting gender equality. Recent discourse on identity has drawn attention to the notion of the other. Do the three countries of the subcontinent regard each other, after fifty years, - as "the other"? Or can we begin to look beyond our cultural differences towards a sense of integral unity.

Geeti Sen holds a master's degree in the History of Indian Art from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. from the University of Calcutta. She taught art at the Delhi School of Architecture, the JJ School of Arts, Bombay, the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, Jawaharlal Nehru University and the National Institute of Fashion Technology. As art historian she has been invited to visit Italy, Greece, Egypt, France, Germany, Canada, the UK, the USA and Russia, by institutions in these countries.

Her books include an Illustrated History of India for Children (1974), Paintings from the Akbar Nama (1984), Raza Anthology 1980-90 (1993) Image and Imagination: Five Contemporary Artists in India (1996), and Bindu : Space and Time in Raza's Vision (1997). In her capacity as Editor of Publications at the India International Centre, she has edited several volumes of the IIC Quarterly which have been published as books, including The Right to be Human (1987), The Calcutta Psyche (1990), Indigenous Vision (1992), Perceiving India (1993) and Rethinking Russia (1994).

For a generation which grew up in the 1930s and '40s, the great schism of 1947 has remained a traumatic experience. Crossing the border becomes a metaphor for recalling this period in time, in writing, theatre and film. Thus Intizar Husain writes for the first time in this volume, his own journey across the border from Meerut to Lahore-a journey which was undertaken by thousands, in both directions. He confesses at the outset. "My personal memories are fading into collective memory, handed down to us from time immemorial..."

It is curious that in each of these memoirs assembled in the first section, the personal note is subsumed in a collective voice- of fear, anguish, hope and aspirations for the future. This becomes equally true of Zohra Segal's description of the heydeys of the IPTA movement and Prithvi Theatre, when the actors were in- spired by a new agenda, an ideology of nation-building in the '50s. There were other cohesive forces in culture, such as the Progressive Writers' Movement and the Progressive Artists in Bombay. Their collective experience stood in strength, above individual voices from different com- munities as a fleeting moment of unity, of true secular spirit in India.

In the fiftieth year of In- dependence we celebrate the occasion not by recovering India's achievements but by crossing the borders-to find common cause and shared experiences in identity with Pakistan and Bangladesh.