- History for Peace
- 8 minutes ago
- 24 min read
I will begin by recounting an experience that we had in November 2022 when we did a workshop at Shantiniketan—a small university town near Kolkata—with school children studying in classes 4 and 5. We conducted a workshop where we made multiple cards that could be classified into two broad categories—national identities (Indian, German, British etc.) and non-national identities (religious identities, linguistic identities, caste Identities and so on). We had three boxes—A, B and C and they were labelled as follows:
Box A was labelled ‘Indian’.
Box B was labelled ‘non-Indian’.
Box C was labelled ‘Could be Indian or non-Indian’.
We asked the children to draw one card each and to decide which box was best suited to the card they picked. We found that for children, the straightforward national identities were least confusing. They knew that a card which said, ‘German’, would go in box B, the non-Indian box or the card which said ‘Indian’ would go in box A, the one labelled Indian. So those who got cards that said either Indian, German or Japanese put them in box A or box B depending on what was written on the card without any hesitation.
Interestingly, some of the non-national identities created no troubles either—cards labelled Bengali, Tamil or Hindu went to box A without much thought; it didn't generate much conversation. In their imagination, we realised, a Bengali or a Hindu or a Tamil was essentially and absolutely Indian.
Tista—my colleague who was conducting the workshop—told us that a boy who picked a card that said, ‘Muslim’ had a very confusing time. He took time to decide and then he put the card in box C which was labelled, ‘Could be Indian or non-Indian.’ But shortly after that, he asked if he could alter his choice. When we agreed to let him change it, he put the card in Box B, ‘Non-Indian.’ Similarly, cards labelled Christian—and very surprisingly—Jain went to Box B. We realized that this little Bengali kid didn't know what Jain was—he was unfamiliar with the word and the religion.
He was a class four student who along with his peers was a student in Santiniketan Sishutirtha, an English medium co-educational school founded and run by Sudripta Tagore, following the CBSE curriculum. There were 17 children attending our session—16 of them were Hindu and one of them was Muslim. It is difficult to locate their class position but at least one among them had recently gone abroad for school holidays and another girl had recently come back from the USA after her engineer parents relocated to India during the COVID pandemic.
Sishutirtha is a profit-making enterprise—the fees not only cover the expenses of the school but also bears some of the costs for an adjacent orphanage founded by Sudripta Tagore's father, Supriyo Tagore. They are part of the family of the famous Tagores. Hence one could say that the children belong to the upper-middle class who can afford a relatively expensive education. However, the school website does not mention its fees and Mr. Tagore did not entertain any direct question related to it.
The exercise described above was an attempt to initiate conversation around the idea of India and being Indian. We had gone to the school to introduce three history books—Deshbhag (Partition) written by me; Desher Bhasha (The Language of Our Country) written by Debarati Bagchi; and Desher Manush (The People of Our Country), written by Dista Das. The books are a part of a series which we call Itihashe Hathekhori or First History Lessons, meant for middle-school children. The series has a total of nine books, each dealing with a theme or historical event. These are not textbooks. We wanted the books to be a leisurely and fun read and hence tried to write in an accessible language, incorporating multiple colour illustrations. We write the books in Bangla but we translate them into English and Assamese as a part of the project. Historian Prachi Deshpande has recently translated the first three books into Marathi. We are also in conversation with Eklavya to translate these books in Hindi.
The first three books provoke conversations about nation, nationalism and national belonging—at least that was our intention when we conceived them. These books aimed to point out that what we understand as India and Indian are not something given, sacrosanct or part of a monolithic set of ideas. They are historically produced ideas and may hold different implications and meanings for different people depending on their religion, caste, class, gender, linguistic and regional identities. Moreover, these ‘other identities’ may not always sit well with the national identity like it happened in East Pakistan (present Bangladesh)—being Bengali and being Pakistani became irreconcilable identities to many, creating new national identities. Similarly, we have seen how in our country being of a particular religion is often interpreted as being anti-national in bureaucratic, legislative and political policies and practices.
Indeed, these books were conceived in 2021 when West Bengal was gearing up for the state elections. Some of you who are from Bengal would remember that this was a very intense election and it was very communally charged. There was palpable fear that a right-wing party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, would come to power.
The BJP continuously invoked the Partition of 1947, Bangladeshi ‘infiltration’ and the need for NRC, National Register of Citizens in West Bengal as electoral agendas. The state also witnessed a series of localized communal riots, intensifying the polarization further. In this context, we wrote the first three books simply to convey the following:
The partition of British India was experienced diversely by various groups of people and their experiences were shaped by their caste location, gender location, religion and regional locations. We harped on this point to combat the linear narrative that was circulating on social media and was being repeated by various political leaders projecting one community as the victim and one as perpetrator of Partition violence in Bengal. At that point in time there were events being held in Bengal to commemorate Gopal Patha—a notorious Hindu right wing murderer—where he was fashioned into a hero of the 1946 Great Calcutta Riot, one of the worst riots that the city has ever witnessed. We wanted to combat that.
Secondly, the Partition—broadly based on two nation theory—shaped the idea of ‘Indian’. Consequently, the Citizenship Act of 1955 has undergone several amendments, the latest being the 2019 amendment, which has increasingly narrowed down the scope of who can and who cannot be Indian. Coupled with the initiative of preparing the National Register of Citizens, amending the Citizenship Act has been discriminatory towards Muslims and Dalits of Eastern India. By incorporating experiences of individuals who had been detained or deported on the suspicion of being illegal immigrants from East Pakistan or Bangladesh both books on Partition and Citizenship show the disjuncture between the official and the experiential meanings of being Indian.
These books seek to understand the construction and fault lines of national identity where looking through religion is not always enough. Linguistic identity, for instance, is entangled with religious and national identity as well as regional identities. It has historically shaped the sense of belonging in South Asia. If you look at history, the overlapping of linguistic, regional and religious identities is problematic and our book, Desher Bhasha (Language of Our Country) tried to problematize this while focusing on the Eastern region—particularly East Pakistan-Bangladesh—to see how identities clashed. The purpose of the exercise I described just a few minutes ago, therefore, was to teach children about the category, ‘Indian’ and to make them realize how multiple identities may overlap or may be in conflict with each other.
As we discussed their responses, we were quick to realize how most caste identities belonged to box C. Similar was the case for linguistic identities: a Bengali could be an Indian or a Bangladeshi or even a citizen of the USA or UK. Similarly, a Muslim could be an Indian or could be a citizen of several other countries. So could a Hindu. Some of the kids knew Bengali Hindus who were from Bangladesh. They had Muslim Indian friends, neighbours, domestic helps, parents and colleagues. Nepalis were not only in Nepal but many stay in Darjeeling. Once they got a little hint, they had so much information to share. They realized that only those who had labels like German, Japanese, British or Pakistani—labels that identified them with a particular nationality—would be non-Indian (Box B).
Dijottama—the girl who had recently returned to India from the USA—was quick to point out that such neat division was only possible because India did not offer dual citizenship unlike many other countries. When we asked her to discuss her opinion on dual citizenship further, she told us how much she missed her American home, friends and school. Though she had an Indian passport, she did not like it here. She felt more at home in the USA and dual citizenship would make her both an Indian and an American. Being Indian would satisfy her parents and her grandparents. Being American would describe her better, she felt.
Where one belongs is shaped by the experiences they have and those experiences often depend on the multiple identities that they carry with them. This fairly complex idea was by now successfully conveyed in a conversational manner through tangible experiences and our little exercise. Once the discussion was over, we asked the children to draw something that would go with the theme of our book—Desher Manush (The People of Our Country).
The childrens' imaginations about Desher Manush were varied. By drawing a soldier and a policeman along with the Indian flag, [2] [as3] some children connected the nation with the question of security. None of them came from families of soldiers or policemen though. When we asked them why they drew soldiers/policemen, they replied that they were in awe of them—they wanted to become like them and protect the country. The distinction between soldier and police was not clear to them but we may say that this was an aspirational imagination of who the correct, the proper, the true Indian is.
We also found one image that gave importance to India by putting the Indian flag in it. The theme of the image on the left side shows a conflation of India with Hindu—an idea our books challenge—putting an Indian flag and Om together. Along with the flag and the Om symbol, there are diyas creating a temple effect. The student told us she had just returned from Rajasthan, so her image also featured a newly married Rajasthani couple. The combination of temple, marriage and Indian flag clearly spells a Hindu India coming together in this image.
Another illustration that we found quite striking is where we can see a labourer carrying something. The young illustrator locates the labourer in India by drawing the Indian map in the background. Apart from the figure being a man, a labourer and an Indian we don't know much about him in terms of religion, caste, region. There is no attempt to describe how this labourer would look. We can only see in a silhouette. This was drawn by Atif, the only Muslim kid in the entire school but he refused to talk much about this illustration. He only said that he had seen villagers carrying coal and broken bricks and rocks, that he imagined poor labourers when he thought of people of our country and therefore, put him in the foreground of the map. Nothing grand, nothing romantic, nothing aspirational—it was quite striking to us.
The ordinariness of the people of our country is also evident from the following two illustrations—that of a farmer and that of villagers of Ballabhpur. Ballabhpur is a village near Shantiniketan where we were having this workshop. Here it is important to note the Bengali word desh means both the nation and the ancestral village. Oindrila who has drawn these villagers from Ballabhpur told us that her family is originally from there. In other words, Ballabhpur is a desh (ancestral home) which also is in India, the desh in the sense of nation state. She has drawn the villagers of Ballabhpur. By not putting any marker to symbolize India, these two illustrations gave prominence to the local or regional sense of belonging where the immediate surroundings became important rather than the abstract idea of the nation.
The final illustration is by Dijottama—the girl who returned from the US—which depicts, in my reading, both longing and belonging. Her best friend Mishti is playing at Jollyman Park where they used to play together and now Mishti probably plays alone. The illustration is full of detail, landmarks like YMCA, the trees and the house with the chimney. All of these do tell us how vivid Dijottama’s memories in the US are and how much she missed her US home. By putting the flag of the USA, she locates Mishti and surroundings in the country. Mishti belongs there. Dijottama longs to belong there. The illustration and the exercises at the beginning of the workshop provided us with useful entry points for all three books that we had intended to discuss.
We could now easily move to the experiences of Deshraj, a young boy who migrated from Pakistani Punjab to India immediately after Partition and Karim Nasir, a Bengali Muslim cultivator who was deported from Assam to East Pakistan in 1964 on the suspicion of being an illegal immigrant. Their life-stories are included in the book on Partition and together they indicate the diversity of partition experiences across region and religion. In both cases, belonging had a very tangible materiality. Let me elaborate this point by reading out the section on Deshraj (translation by Arunava Sinha) -
How old could Deshraj have been when British India was partitioned? Maybe thirteen or fourteen? He was in Class Seven at the time, in a village school in Punjab. His father and grandfather had spent their entire lives in that same village. But Radcliffe's design resulted in their village being part of Pakistan. That year great trouble had erupted all across Punjab with the advent of summer. The British were leaving India, the country would be partitioned, Punjab would be split into two-this news, along with various rumours, had made the people restless and agitated. Despite living together for generations, the Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims suddenly began fighting with one another. When neither the police nor the military could stop them, Jinnah and Nehru devised a peculiar solution: the Hindu and Sikh families from the villages and towns that had gone to Pakistan would be brought to India. And the Muslims living in the Indian half of Punjab would be taken to Pakistan. The armies of the two countries would jointly organize this movement across the border. There was, however, no such understanding for an exchange of people between the two Bengals. But I'll come to that later.
Following Nehru's and Jinnah's plan, the police and the military arrived one day in Deshraj's little village. At dawn on 25 August, a sleepy Deshraj clutched his mother's and brother's hands and followed the forces to India. Thousands of others from the neighbouring villages accompanied them. The procession consisted of nearly 50,000 people, along with their cows and buffaloes and bundles of clothes and utensils. After travelling for four days on foot, they arrived at a town named Fazilka. The Radcliffe Line ran right next to it, and Fazilka was on the Indian side.
So, they had reached India. Now what? Deshraj's family had neither friends nor relatives in this country. His mother and brother were told of opportunities for work and a home in Saharanpur, in the United Provinces. So that is where they decided to go. Deshraj and his family got on the train. But luck was against them, for it began to rain torrentially soon after the train set off, and it could go no further. It was September, the rainy season, and in the middle of it all the country was being partitioned. There seemed to be no end to human suffering Deshraj and his family spent several nights in Ambala station in Punjab while it rained incessantly. Then, suddenly, a goods train arrived. It could take everyone who had come from Pakistan, just like Deshraj and his family, to Delhi. They got on. What difference did it make to them whether they went to Delhi or to Saharanpur—both were equally unknown to them.
The goods train crawled along and eventually got to Delhi. Deshraj and his family had to take shelter in the station all over again. A team of bureaucrats arrived and told them that arrangements for food and lodging would soon be made, but till then they would have to wait at the station. The Wabel Canteen was a stone’s throw away from the station. For the time being, that was where arrangements were made to feed the refugees. Rice would be cooked in enormous pots all day long, while more pots held bubbling-hot daal. Morning, noon or night, no matter when they went, everyone was given a plate of rice and a large spoonful of daal. But Deshraj and his family were from Punjab, their village was surrounded by fields of wheat, they were used to eating rotis made from wheat. How were they supposed to savour rice day after day? After a week of this existence, Deshraj’s family heard that if they went to Jhansi, then their problems would be solved. There, the government was apparently giving wheat-bread twice a day to those who had come from Pakistan, like them. At once they got on to yet another train. This time, they were on their way to Jhansi in the Central Provinces.
You may be wondering why these people, in the middle of all that trouble and turmoil, couldn’t be happy with their two hot meals a day. Why did they have to go off in search of wheat-bread? But that’s what human beings are like. When the world is turned upside down, when everyday life changes beyond recognition, we humans find security in familiar foods and clothes, in old toys, in the neem tree in the yard. We get great comfort in knowing that even though everything else has changed, one or two things remain the same. But Deshraj and his family got no such comfort in Jhansi either. The news had been correct, and rotis were indeed being served in the government camps in Jhansi. But alas, this was thick flatbread, made of millet—not wheat! Delhi now seemed much better in comparison. The capital of the country, after all, with many more opportunities for work. So, after staying in Jhansi for a couple of days, Deshraj and his family set off again for Delhi. Several months of their lives were lost between the Partition and their search for hot rotis. Finally, that winter, they found shelter in a Delhi camp, where they could make their own hot rotis at the clay oven. Perhaps in the taste of those rotis Deshraj finally found a trace of the village he had left behind.
For Deshraj, when the world had turned upside down and they were trying to get a foothold in a new country, all they wanted was hot roti made of wheat in their meals. They were from Punjab. They were wheat-eating people. Among all the upheavals, they searched for stability in food. After coming to the Indian side, they moved from Amritsar—first, they reached Fazilka, from there, they were taken to Jalandhar and from there they went to Delhi, then to Jhansi and back to Delhi again. Much of this travel happened in search of roti because without that, they felt lost. Holding on to food habits gave them some anchor at a time of uncertainty. Once they could make the rotis, they felt some sense of belonging albeit they were living in a camp.
For Karim Nasir, Assam remained home and he refused any national identity—it conflicted with his Assamese identity. The paddy fields on the other side of the border gave tangible meanings to his loss. He longed to cross the border. Nasir’s family came from Mymensingh and they moved from Mymensingh to Assam in the colonial period. In 1947, there was an attempt to push all the Bengali Muslims to East Pakistan and in ’64, Nasir was forced to leave his paddy field—right before he was about to cut the paddy—and go to East Pakistan. Since then, he would say, ‘I am neither Indian nor Pakistani, I am Assamese.’ He would often walk to the barbed wire border to see the paddy field, visible from both sides of the border. Those were the paddy fields he belonged to.
Karim Nasir's story opened up a conversation about Assam. When discussing CAA and NRC, you have to discuss Assam. It is the laboratory of these projects and there are historical reasons for it. Bengal and Assam’s histories are connected. In all nine books we have tried to both connect and disconnect these overlapping histories and showcase the tensions that lie in interactions of the past. This is also the reason why our books were first translated into Assamese and later, Hindi. After Bengal, we wanted to reach out to the Assamese children.
Assam is the only state where NRC has been implemented with a disastrous consequence for the Muslims, Dalits and poor migrant workers from the rest of the country, particularly from West Bengal.
Assam is a complex story where the fear of ‘infiltration’ from East Pakistan/Bangladesh had run high since 1947, resulting in violence, protest and finally, the implementation of NRC along with the 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act. Who is Assamese and therefore, an Indian has been a burning question. Could someone like Karim Nasir, a Bengali Muslim, be an Assamese? Could Gangadhar, an unlettered Dalit Bengali labourer from West Bengal be Assamese? What about Haseena Bano? She was a Bengali Muslim woman who was born in Barpeta district of Assam. married a Bengali Muslim from Assam and was still taken to prison on suspicion of being Bangladeshi—only to be released a couple of months later after verifying the documents she submitted.
The book People of Our Country (by Tista Das) responded to these questions and elaborated how regular legal and bureaucratic harassment of poor marginal people disrupt their sense of national belonging.
Assam was also useful for discussing how linguistic identities had disrupted or complicated national and regional identities. The Bengal delta encompassing West Bengal, Assam and East Pakistan/Bangladesh had witnessed the making and unmaking of national and provincial boundaries where linguistic identities had played a central role. An individual has many identities and at a particular historical moment, one may become more prominent than others, shaping their sense of belonging and unbelonging. This fairly complex idea was no longer so abstract to the children of Sishutirtha—they were now able to explain this idea using examples from their familiar world and contemporary surroundings.
Apart from this school, we have conducted ten more workshops with children till date to introduce our books. All these workshops had been with underprivileged children living in various slums of Calcutta and its outskirts. They go to regular schools but our point of contact has been the activists who run several free tutorial homes to provide additional assistance to these kids. To call them tutorial homes is reductionist because these are much more than just that—for example, they run gender sensitization programmes educating students about the fault lines of caste, gender and their intersections. One of the schools we worked closely with—Rokeya Shiksha Kendra—have been at the forefront of organizing movements against NRC/CAA.
These schools are run by activists who have a certain inclination. The other school we work with is in Kalighat—Batighar Pathshala. Most students are children of sex-workers and apart from the regular curriculum, Batighar gives them training in music, dance, theatre, and even football!
There is a difference between these children and the Sishutirtha students—Shishu Tirtha kids are better off, much better off. They are upper middle class as compared to the students of Rokeya and Batighar who are first generation learners living in slums of Kolkata. But despite these apparent differences, we also noticed similarities. Both sets of students make sense of whatever we were reading to them in a similar way—by connecting it with their surroundings, with their present.
At one workshop after I presented these three books, many children chose to illustrate the theme, ‘Migration’—a very relevant theme for all three books, particularly Deshbhag (Partition) and Desher Manush (People of Our Country) because they directly discuss forced migration. Deshraj and Karim Nasir’s story reminded the children of rural-urban migration—something they had experienced themselves.
I will discuss two illustrations. The first is by Imtara Khatun, a sixth standard student, who drew a bus carrying passengers. When asked why, she told us that this bus was going from Kolkata to Malda (a district in North Bengal). Imtara’s family migrated from rural Malda to Kolkata in search of jobs and they occasionally go back to meet their relatives. Loknath Travels—a private bus-owning company—operates on this route and this is the transport they take to go to Malda from Salt Lake, Kolkata.
The next illustration is drawn by Mongal Paik, another sixth standard student. After finishing the illustration, he named it Gram theke shohor aashar shomoy (At the time of coming to the city from the village). It depicts two men with their luggage, a train and the station labelled Joynagar—located in South Bengal, it is the nearest railway station to Mongol’s ancestral village. Mongol told us how intensely he missed his village. He hated the school in Kolkata. No other boy would talk to him. His best friend was in the village. The village had ponds where they had so much fun. Sometimes, he video calls his best friend—but only when his mother has enough data for a video-call, which is very rare.
Such illustrations and conversations with the children taught us something important—children often make sense of the past through their lived experience. Even though Partition, the making of India and Pakistan and consequent refugee migration were new information to most of them, those who had remembered their own migration from village to city made sense of the books through their own experiences. People move for varied reasons and across different distances. They had experienced such migrations themselves. They missed their ancestral homes but the city also had some entertainment to offer to some of them.
From 2023, we have tried to keep this in mind while selecting the topics for our books. Moreover, now we do not do workshops after publication, we also do workshops with children while we are writing and while the illustrations are happening. These are small-scale workshops and so we can also actively incorporate their ideas, their suggestions and I tell you, the children can be brutal with their input. This year there is a book on games and sports. We had to rewrite an entire chapter at the very last moment because three children insisted that they hated the chapter and that we had to change it. So, we did rewrite it. Some of the illustrations in these years’ books are also initially sketched by the children and then reworked by our scroll painters.
It is true that the child reader that we have in mind is not a monolithic figure—their experiences are diverse. But since 2023, we have tried to focus more on the histories of everyday and the ordinary. We also often talk about the contemporary to make the past more relatable. As a historian, sometimes I feel uncomfortable with this because it may give the impression of linearity and it may read anachronistic at times. The contemporary and the past are connected in a non-linear way. Connections are constructed by various stakeholders in different ways. Looking for linear connections may make us look at the past through the binary lens of similarity and dissimilarity.
But for now, we have taken the strategy of doing, of looking, of trying to connect, trying to go to the bigger histories from the small, the mundane and the surroundings. We realized that this could help make the children curious about the past. We are open to conversations and we have discussions among ourselves about what is the right way. When we conceived this project, it was also a kind of a knee-jerk reaction to a political moment.
As many of you know, there has been a lot of conversation around how the NCERT textbooks have been revised and how state-level textbooks have been manipulated. We thought that we had given up on people of our generation, or those slightly younger than us. We were almost sure that in 2021 the BJP would come to power. And so, we thought that we should target the younger generation, the non-voters.
We have been writing PhDs and publishing papers and so on. In fact, we are supposed to do that now too. That is our job description. But since 2022, we have also been thinking about how to make children curious about the past. So, at times we also think that it is okay if they connect it to their present. If, upon learning about Partition migration, they think of migration from Malda to Kolkata—that’s fine! While listening to refugee narratives that narrate their longing for ‘home’, if they think of how they miss their best friends in a village of Bengal, it is fine. The next step is to introduce them to how one can use this to introduce them to the writing of history—to the bigger stories.
In the last two years, we have written histories of tea, a commodity familiar to every child. We have written about the river—coming from Bengal and Assam river is something also quite familiar. War was a suggestion from the school teachers because they said that children are obsessed with war. Students are always watching violent videos or playing war games; so a book on war would be relevant. When the Bangla book was published, we did workshops discussing the Ukraine war. The English book was supposed to go to print on the 8th of October last year (2023) but the events on the 7th of October changed everything for us. We had to write something and our translator, Arunava Sinha, was generous enough to translate a note we had prepared. We were only trying to explain that one cannot view the 7th of October in isolation; one has to remember that it’s part of a long struggle.
This year, we have worked on food, attire and sports, focusing on things that are very everyday. However, there is a common factor—borders. The first three books looked at how national borders are constructed. For the next three books we wanted to show how borders were transgressed through the movement of commodity, through rivers and through war. This year we wanted to look at how borders were created through food, clothes and sport. We also wanted to show how all three could bring people together with the example of citizenship protests, COVID canteens and the farmers’ protests.
We also wanted to highlight our illustrators—Ranjit and Sirajudaulla Chitrakar. They are scroll painters from Pingla in Medinipur. They practise a form of traditional painting and at the end of every book we introduce them and their form of painting. They are Muslims by religion. They usually don’t do illustrations like this. They usually draw Hindu Gods and Goddesses, compose songs and perform them. Ranjit Chitrakar has a Muslim name too—Bahar Chitrakar. However, his son Sirajudaulla only keeps one name. This is because when Sirajudaulla was born, identity cards had to be made and having two names would create confusions for the bureaucracy.
The chitrakars belong to a syncretic tradition. On the one hand they face backlash from conservative Muslims. On the other hand, they are appropriated by other traditions as ‘good Muslims.’ The grand consecration of the Ram Mandir also featured a Ramayana illustration made by scroll painters. We think this complex tradition adds an additional dimension to our project.
Question and Answer Session
Audience Member 1: Thank you for your insightful presentation. I had a question about the child’s drawing that showed a newly married couple with an Om in the background. The child who drew it was Hindu, right?
I have grown up witnessing festivals as a happy environment—for everyone. On Diwali I would distribute sweets to my Muslim friends and they would bring me Biryani on Eid. If it were a Muslim kid who drew an image of Eid in front of the Indian flag, it would be interpreted as his dual sense of identity as Muslim and Indian. But both Diwali and Eid, I would like to say, are Indian festivals. The child is just drawing what they see around them, just like the student who went to Rajasthan did. You said that you interpreted the Om and the flag with the student’s association of a Hindu India. But would you consider the example of Eid and the Indian flag, a Muslim India?
Anwesha Sengupta: The structures in the painting, the young illustrator said, were temples. Seeing the Om, the Indian flag and the temple pointed me in the direction of a Hindu Hindustan. We also see Indian flags over mosques but as Priyadarshini pointed out before me—the intention is different.
A Hindu India represents a dominant idea—that India belongs to Hindus. That is the power speaking. When Muslims put a flag over their mosques, as many did during the CAA protests, it is an assertion that they too belong to India. It is a group of people who have been marginalized asserting their belonging. This is a group of people who are the dominant voice. They are saying, this is my country. There is a difference in the power equation.
You don’t seem satisfied with my answer but we can perhaps continue this conversation later.
Audience Member 2: I wanted to ask you about the NRC. Whenever we read the government’s perspective, they make it seem like it is so strange that one has no proof of their residence in India after being here for 20-25 years. Hence, these people should be deported to their ‘original’ countries.
We are such a massive country already with so many people—how can we accommodate more? It is something that is happening now triggering conversations like, ‘Who is Indian? Who is not Indian?’and there is another radical strain of this conversation that advocates for a borderless world. Where do we stand? Can we accept everybody within the borders to be Indian?
AS: When we accept the idea of a nation-state, we accept that there are Indians and non-Indians i.e. foreigners. What you are asking is, why should we accommodate foreigners? It is difficult to draw clear boundaries between Indian and foreign.
In Assam, they have a category of D-Voters or doubtful voters. How these D-Voters are identified is up for debate. The family members of the only Muslim Chief Minister of Assam were identified as D-Voters. Moreover, people lose their documents especially because Assam is a very flood-prone area.
Documentation itself is a very elite construct. Only those who have more or less stable lives can afford to have their papers in place. Our books mention two stories that may be relevant here:
Gangadhar migrated from Bankura in West Bengal to Assam for work. Because of the peculiar nature of Partition, Dalit Hindus on the eastern side migrated much later. NRC not only makes the Muslims fearful but Dalits too. Since most of them like Gangadhar migrated only in the 60s and 70s, they are scared of the NRC. Gangadhar of Bankura, a migrant labourer in Assam, was placed in a detention camp because he was not carrying papers to prove his Indianness.
Haseena Bano, whose example I gave earlier in my talk—born to Assamese parents, married to an Assamese man was placed in a camp for a few months. None of her family members were but she was—all because someone in the neighbourhood suspected that she was a foreigner.
CAA coupled with NRC creates an additional possibility that Muslims would be discriminated against.
Audience Member 3: I have a question about the artwork you showed us drawn by the only Muslim student in your workshop at Sishutirtha. Why would he draw a labourer? He could have drawn himself, a fellow Muslim or anybody around him. Why a labourer?
AS: We tried to talk more about this picture. He just said he has always seen people like this. It is interesting because we often assume that in such a communally sensitive situation, Muslim identity would be most important to a Muslim child. More so, because he was in a class or rather, in a school where he was the only Muslim child.
Shantiniketan is surrounded by villages and there they do meet people—they meet villagers, they meet labourers. The man in the picture could have been a Muslim or not. We can interpret this image in illustration in so many ways. By making a black figure, he highlighted only profession, only class. That was striking to me but I don't have any direct answer to you why he didn't draw something or someone else.
Audience Member 4: Could you share how students interacted with war through their illustrations?
AS: We had some sessions with children for our book on war. Some children do enjoy war. After a lot of discussion we had a performance on war. Some children even aspire to join the army to protect India, to fight Pakistan. These grand ideas on social media do make you think that sometimes children are patriotic in a jingoistic sense.
We would have our workshops during weekends. Children—and these are underprivileged children—would come wearing their best clothes. Often that would be a military style of dress. On other occasions some children do depict the violence of war. I don’t have it with me but I recall a vivid drawing. The girl divided the page in half. On the left, there was a lush green tree and children were playing near it. On the right, she used only black and white—the trees had fallen and the children were lying there, dead. We also encountered such images.