In her latest column, Madhu Jain contemplates the arbitrariness of boundaries, both geographical and personal. CelebrateYou UnexpectedBeginnings PrintIssue
My father, LR Sethi, used to have a hut in Gulmarg, halfway up to Khilanmarg. He was an avid horse rider and had even tamed a couple of killer horses there. Kashmir was also home — easy to get to from Rawalpindi where he grew up. His elder brother, known as Little Sethi, had settled in Srinagar, bang in the middle of Lal Chowk. So, yes, Kashmir was home for many of the Sethis, as it was for others who were not indigenous to the region.
Things changed in the ’80s. Militancy reared its head, as it had in Punjab and elsewhere. The equation between the Valley and the rest of the country was being reconfigured. However, the Us and Them divide was not so much in your face, despite the slightly surprising but perennial question: ‘Have you come from India?’ There wasn’t any malice in the query. And one realised that seen through a Kashmiri lens, their ‘paradise on earth’ was another country.
Boundaries between countries are not always easily definable, nor are they definitive — or even logical, especially if they are arbitrarily drawn. British lawyer Sir Cyril Radcliffe, who hitherto had never been to India, was sent here for a few weeks to determine the borders that would, in August 1947, divide the subcontinent into two: India and Pakistan. Decades later, another country was carved out of Pakistan when Bangladesh came into being.
The whimsicality and, yes, irrationality of borders struck me during a visit to Meghalaya a few years ago. Viewed from a high enough vantage point, you could see the terrain of Bangladesh. But what was surreal was the fact that the border actually ran through homes; in one instance placing the bedrooms in one country and the kitchen in the other.
Borders have often been determined miles away, and randomly. As World War II was about to end, its ageing victors Prime Minister Winston Churchill of the United Kingdom, President Franklin D Roosevelt of the United States of America and Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin sat down in February 1945 in Yalta on the Black Sea to discuss the post-war reorganisation of Germany and Europe — and to reset the borders between countries.
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