SHARING CULTURES
I came across someone in London who said he belonged to a group
who used only Anglo Saxon words and refused to use ‘foreign’ words brought over
during the 1066 French Norman invasion.
Stunned I thought, surely the Angles and the Saxons were of German
origin, and 1066? How long does it take
for a culture to be assimilated?
Ethnic identities are once again rising to the fore with Brexit
and the new Trump era. Pakistan also has its own homegrown ethnic tensions. Ethnic diversity and cultural diffusion have
been the enrichers of human societies. Trade, especially the silk route
travelling from Xian to Rome generated so much exchange of not just goods, but
stories, language and customs. Wars also brought cultures into contact for
years at a time, and in the pauses of active warfare, cultural exchanges took
place, and many a friendship was forged, and knowledge exchanged. Migration,
whether by choice or necessity, including the dark periods of slavery, has been
another opportunity for overlapping of cultures. To this we can add the
internet, cinema, pop music and the media.
People who made an art of
travelling, whether Hiuen Tsang from 7THC China , Al Bairuni from 11th C Persia,
Ibn Battuta from 12th C Morocco
, Marco Polo from 14th C Italy, or Rocio Otero from 21st C Spain, would
give testimony to the joy and excitement of encountering people and
places of great diversity.
Yet here we are today, guarding our very recent homogeneity of
languages, cultures and histories. In
the larger canvas of world civilizations, there are none that were unaffected
by another.
Would the Renaissance have happened if the Crusades did not bring
Muslim scholars into contact with their European counterparts? Would Gutenberg
have developed the printing press if the 3rd C Chinese art of
papermaking was not acquired by Muslims of the 8th C and spread to
Europe in the 11th C? Would we be calculating the complex landing of
the Curiosity Rover on Mars if Aryabhata’s 5th C concept of Zero was
not introduced to the western world
through the Muslims of Spain?
The region that is now Pakistan has seen a staggering number of
invaders, settlers and migrants. While
Mehergarh, 7400BC and the Indus Civilizations of 2500 BC remain archaeological conundrums, the almost
4000 years between the arrival of the Aryans to
the migrations during the
partition of India and, one may add, the several million Afghan refugees, can
be seen as an ever shifting movement of people.
The story of the Indus Valley in particular, reads like an odyssey: Aryans
stayed in this region for 500years before moving eastwards, the Persians out of
its 20 satrapies, received the most gold
revenue from this valley, the arrival of the Greeks before and after Alexander,
many of whom chose to settle here, the forays by the Scythians and Parthians;
the Sakas spread all the way down to the south,
the Yuezhi of Dunhuang, China established the long and distinguished
Gandhara culture, the destructive Huns and Mongols; the Turkman, Afghans and Arabs established
themselves first in the western part of India, now Pakistan, before moving through
the only navigable 200 mile corridor of Punjab, into India The British were the only exception who moved
westwards from Calcutta.
In the rising noise of regional nationalism in Pakistan, we drown
out the amazing stories of the Egyptian prince Saiful Muluk who was transported to the
lake in the Swat mountains by a jinn to find the woman of his dreams; we forget
to celebrate that Chitral, with a
population of 250,000 is home to 10 distinct
languages making it the region with the highest linguistic diversity in
the world, and that the Romani or gypsies of the world may originally come from
Ashret in Chitral; that the Khojis are trackers who can trace the whereabouts
of lost or stolen cattle or thieves by the marks they leave in the sand; that
'Murree' known locally as Mai Mari da Asthan may be the "Resting Place of
Mother Mary".
People and places, and their stories are of far greater interest
than containing them in rigid geopolitical boundaries . Time and circumstances
change us all. The current Nizam of Hyderabad, Mukarram Jah whose grandfather
was the world’s richest man, and whose mother was the daughter of the last
Turkish Caliph, exchanged his regal
attire for denims in a sheep station in the Australian Outback. Sultana Begum,
wife of Prince
Mirza Bedar Bukht,descendent of the last Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar,
sells tea in a slum area of Kolkata. The
one changed by choice, the other was changed by circumstances. Yet the heritage
of both will define their stories and they will forever be measured by it.
Seeing Identity as an idea separate from the experience of living, (to
appropriate the argument the philosopher, John Dewey, makes about the art
object ), isolates identity from the human conditions under which it came into
being and from how it will continue to evolve.
Using the analogy of flowers, Dewey says , while it is possible to enjoy
the colour and fragrance of flowers without knowing anything about the plant,
If one wishes to understand it one
must know about the soil , climate, water
and sunlight that enable the flower to grow.
Pakistan is a
land of stories, a tapestry woven by its people, both past and present, both
new dwellers and old. The threads of the tapestry traverse its length and
breadth, and beyond. It cannot be cut into pieces to suit administrative or
political engineering without losing the narrative altogether.
Durriya Kazi
April 2017
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