Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Music Good morning and welcome back to the lecture series on partition of India in print media and cinema. We are discussing home and nostalgia. Today we are going to talk about cartographic lines and the politics of map making. So before I start with this topic which is in fact very interesting, it is a burning topic, it is an urgent topic. It is certainly something that needs to be examined and discussed.
Further, we should, we might start with how Baudrillard thinks of map. He is looking at the work by Borges and Borges calls map as the mad project, the mad project of map making. So, map making is according to George Louis Borges, a mad project which tries to cover everything about a land and thereby claims that it is capable of unravelling of knowing all the realities, all the intricate realities belonging to a certain geographical space.
And then in the discussion of simulation and simulacrum. Javadrila talks about how the simulacrum precedes the real and in fact there is a point where real finding the real is a crisis because there is no real as such. It is a simulacrum without an original reference. So map, we make a map of a land and then the map precedes the territory. That's the point.
Kind of postmodern situation or reality that we are inhabiting. So cartography or a cartographic project entails you know expressing the known physical features of a geographical space through the making of maps, charts, three dimensional models and so on. So there is a study of. You know there is a process or there is some bias, some influence and agenda that goes into the map making process and this urgently calls for the maps deconstruction.
So the central tenet of deconstructionism or the central the basic premise of deconstructing a map is that the map has some. power that needs to be dismantled, that needs to be unpacked and further examined. So cultural influences dominate map making. The abstracts on maps and the map making society itself describe the social influences on the production of maps. So the process of making a map is not transparent, it is not neutral and a disinterested one.
So, in the process of making a map, the nation state or the body politic engages in the consolidation of a group of people into a nation in order to, you know, in order to hold them together as part of a common territory. So, it certainly reminds us of Benedict Anderson's essay. Where he says that nation is an imagined community and it is holding people together. I mean there is no organic glue that holds people together apart from this project of map making which is which enables a group of people at the expense of perhaps jeopardizing the positions of several others.
that inhabit in the fringes. So, historically if we see that map making was associated with the colonial. So, who makes the map, who looks at the territory and simulates it in the map and who is being mapped is very important in this entire question. According to deconstructionist models cartography was used for strategic purposes associated with imperialism and it was an instrument and so it was instrumental and represented power. Especially, when we look at the context of Africa.
So, depiction of Africa has been interpreted as imperialistic and a symbol of subjugation. The way Africa is mapped symbolizes its subjugation due to the diminished proportions of certain regions as compared especially with Europe. So, in the case of Africa, maps would further imperialism.
and the process of colonization through showing basic information such as roads, natural resources, settlements and communities. When all these things were mapped or represented in a two-dimensional way, it made European commerce in Africa possible. It in fact facilitated European commerce in Africa by showing potential commercial routes and made thereby extraction of natural resources possible easier through depicting the location of these valuable resources.
So maps also enable if we historically look map making is also associated and enables the process of military conquest. So, it gives any military body more efficiency, more precision and so, imperial nations have always used maps to put their conquests on display. So, the plan when we talk, when we have this background and we try to locate the partition of India against this scenario or this observation.
The plan to partition India was announced on June 3, 1947, but the new border was not made public until as late as 17th of August, two days even after partition had actually taken place. So, at the start of the period, at the very you know in the immediate period after partition, India and Pakistan were not commonly understood as entirely separate nation states, there were many spaces of you know liminal existences, there were many overlaps and there were a lot of chaos and confusion. But this entire process of like I said two nations separate existences was fraught with ambiguity complications and complicated ideological conceptions that. Really made a lot of people residing in the borderland areas as nowhere people. They were made as Toba Tik Singh and they did not know where their, for a while they did not know where their land belonged, where their homes belonged really, which country they belong to.
So, Indians rallied behind local political leaders and research shows that ordinary people were mailing. The political leaders maps, they were suggesting maps based on what suits them of course. And they often sketched these maps on paper and sometimes even carved them in wood expressing their hopes for the future of their country.
So at the same time the real lines that would divide the colony were drawn by someone totally external to the system, to the ecosystem, to the cosmos, to the ethos. of the subcontinent, someone called Sir Cyril Radcliffe, who had never come to India before. He had not much idea about India, and yet he was taking such a momentous decision. So army cartographers from the Indian side, the army cartographers had chosen to draw map features that would ultimately have greater influence over the partition line than any political, social, or political party. or ecological relationships.
Indeed, so the final border would separate many people from their homelands, from their families, communities, provoking a mass migration of millions of people. So, we have seen this case of a brothel being partitioned in the film Begum Jaan, where all the women vociferously and very passionately fight against this decision, because the brothel is their home. Most of them are partition rape victims and do not have a home to go. They have resorted to flesh trade and that is how they make their living.
So, if the house is snatched away, if the house is in fact demolished or appropriated, they are rendered a homeless status. And the women fight like queens till the end, defending their position and, you know, vindicating their rights and voicing against the decision, the governmental decision or the state's decision imposed from above. So, this has been a case for many where the line, the arbitrary Radcliffe line went through houses and through people's property. It actually hearkens back and exposes, further exposes the insanity of this decision about partitioning the subcontinent. So, the idea that India's Muslims should be considered a nation apart from followers of other religions.
So, a point where people started thinking in terms of Muslims and then the others were non-Muslims. And this way of thinking was first recorded in 1888. Muslim as a nation was first attached to a territory. Muslim people purely belonging to one specific geographical territory was a kind of idea that started getting some kind of encouragement from the authorities in the 1930s. And the first call to in fact separate and to create an independent state was put forward in 1933. So, in 1947 the nation state of Pakistan was carved out of the British Indian Empire. India's Muslim leaders did not only imbue an existing nationalism with aspirations towards statehood, they were actually defining and overseeing, supervising the process of producing this nationalism.
They were mapping their claim to a certain territory and this territory would later be solidified and claimed as a separate nation state. So this is where we see how map making is intricately linked with the question of power and the two cannot be divorced in fact. So this entire process took 59 years and maps did not just document this. transformation of Muslim separate electorate to, you know, from separate electorate to the process of having an actual separate land as Muslim nation for Muslim people. But this map in this entire journey was a key enabler.
It enabled the process. Contentions over the India-Pakistan border have led to three wars since the partition and there have been frequent standoffs between the two nuclear armed countries and an ongoing occupation of Kashmir, which is today known as the most militarized religion on earth. So cartography is used to develop and translate imperial, political and religious ideas.
into geographical or into geographic imaginaries and these imaginaries produce effects on the ground. Radcliffe did not know about India and this was considered as an asset in the boundary making process and this is because all the three parties involved the plenipotentiary, the the British Raj or the British representatives, the Congress representatives and you know The stakeholders from Muslim League thought that a neutral person who had never studied or visited India before was bound to give a decision that would not be predisposed, that would not be inclined or biased to one party or the other. This was done, a neutral person, an unknown person was brought.
Presumably for the sake of neutrality or lack of objectivity, so no one gains over the other. So the members of the Punjab Boundary Commission held public hearings where all concerned parties were asked to propose how they would like Punjab to be partitioned. This process was however very elitist and we have already discussed this in some of our earlier lectures if we could remember the process of partitioning.
was rife with elitism, with casteism. Influential groups with more, with access to more resources such as the congressmen, the Muslim League leaders, they could present their case in person. Not everyone could represent or could voice out their case.
Not everyone would be heard. So, the ones with less political clout such as the Dalits that had no you know no resources whatsoever could only submit their arguments in writing. So, the case of the Dalits are peculiar first they do not have much political knowledge, they did not have a lot of access to newspapers.
We see the situation of the asylum in Taubatik Singh. right where the inmates in an asylum, in a madhouse are in a way analogical with the case of the villagers, the rural people, the laymen who would not read newspapers, who could not and who could not interpret the larger political scenario. So, their misplaced notions were misused, their wrong notions, their lack of understanding agency was misused by several major political parties and they gave votes without knowing what they were voting for unless there was a time where they saw themselves completely jeopardized. So, we see that situation many lost their villages, many became they lost their Tobatek Singh and they became Tobatek Singh thereby they died in the no man's land. The repercussions of partition keep.
You know, haunting to these people. For these people, it is still a burning reality. For the Dalits, the aftermath is never gone. So the Dalits could not submit their arguments in writing. And Radcliffe drew out the boundaries on maps with inadequate detail, with no first-hand knowledge of the territory, nor with any input from the people who actually lived there often.
from the lower rungs of the ladder and with only textual and visual references. So all Radcliffe had in his hand were the surveys and the statistics that were compiled by British agencies which was not much, which is not much. So Mountbatten says in one of his last exchanges with officials in London before India's partition, let the Indians have the joy of the Independence Day. of the Independence Day, they can face the misery of the situation later.
Mountbatten's decision to keep the borders as secret would mean that even as the dominions of India and Pakistan illegally came into existence through this separation and the independence celebrations took hold of the subcontinent, this temporary frenzy making people forget about the larger consequences. And what would happen in the long run, the leaders still until sometime the leaders of the new state did not know the extents of the territory where India ended and Pakistan or East Pakistan or West Pakistan began. And so the population, what exactly is the population that they governed. So the public at last did not know which state their homes fell into especially. This was the case of the borderlands.
So Dawn which is a newspaper founded by M.A. Jinnah and which was Muslim League's mouthpiece declared this Radcliffe line as territorial Murder. The cleaving of Indian territorial space ruptured its unravelling body. Politic. And so, confusion surrounded, confusion pervading in the borders gave way to or broke out into violence.
It led, waved way to violence. So groups were starting to discover what side of the border their communities fell on. So, we see here something very interesting.
On the one hand, an official decision has been imposed on the people, and on the other, once people, once this decision starts unfurling and people wake up to the reality, the reality dawns upon them, they want to negotiate and bargain with this reality. So, they want to get a few inches more than what has been, you know, sanctioned by the borderline or, you know, take away. And this was a tendency from both parties. So people set out to affirm or contest the contours that Radcliffe suggested or designed. And this led to ensuing murder, rampant cases of rapes, which were deployed in order to.
to scare people, to make people afraid and thereby eliminate them, drive out and finally lay claim on the territory which was supposed to be occupied by opposing ethnicity or opposing ethnic or communal groups. This would be more, you know, pertinent in cases where, I mean, let us say a Hindu minority still resides. In a land that is declared as part of India, but still bordering with Pakistan, so if some villages are destroyed and people killed, then people would automatically vacate them, abandon them and it would be part of, it would become part of Pakistan and vice versa. In the case of India, I mean people had the same endeavour.
to scare people and make people evacuate. So, they could occupy the evacuees property and lands. So, proper borders were marked on the ground. So, people were trying to negotiate and make you know play around with the Radcliffe line now. The proper borders were marked on the ground using dead bodies as the dead thereby became signals to the living of the construction of ethnic boundaries.
These would be lined up. to etch out a boundary and the part of and it would give people you know. So that is how people would claim the land that they wanted to be part of their own country, the extra land that they wanted to be part of their own country. So religious groups who found themselves in the minority abandoned their homes and began to move. They packed together in trains, they started moving in food.
huge kafilas or caravans and they moved to the country where their community would be considered as would their community would form the majority. So, the border demarcated on the basis of ascertaining the contiguous majority areas of Muslims and non-Muslims acted as a filter through which either side could only identify the other by their religious affiliation. So, emergence of a material formation such as the border, once the border comes into play, it has been juridically and you know legitimately given you know a real form, a real existence.
It has it is backed by law maker. It cannot be denied anymore, the border therefore, exists people might want to play around tamper with it, but it still exists and with the emergence of this border, which is derived from a particular marker of identity, which is religion. So, a certain religion belongs to this side and the other religion belongs to the other side and it is a common understanding that the two religions do not share harmonious relationship.
hence the border and this leads to the ascendance of that marker in the constitution of the body politic. So, what defines the body politic is the Not being the other, this is something I remember I was talking another day, how nations are very deridean more than defining themselves as who they are, they often define themselves as in terms of negations for that they are not the neighbors, right. So, their own meanings are thereby deferred, they want to you know capture. a sense about themselves through a grammar of hatred, a grammar of difference at least, and opposition, a grammar of rivalry, a grammar of opposition to abutting nations that are not one another. That is what primarily and fundamentally define them.
So the sanctity of this body politic called the nation could be preserved only through transference and obliteration of bodies who did not fit. moulds. So, the immediate desire becomes to make it a pure space and that endangers the minority. They have to be uprooted, they have to be sent across the other side because the definition of the pure definition cannot be met by these people that are not the minority.
that in fact these people endanger the pure definition. And so they it is only through their transference through giving a signal to them in the extreme case killing them or in a less extreme case giving an adverse signal and thereby telling them to abandon to evacuate. It is only through. Such imperatives and such efforts that a body politic can further you know restore and celebrates and celebrate its meaning and celebrate its definition in opposition to the abutting body politic. So, Radcliffe's map is symbolic of British imperialism and Orientalism.
In South Asia it flattened people and lands into legitimate taxonomies. So and it was callously applied from a distance and the Radcliffe line is imbued with power in that its declarations took precedence over the demands and the realities of the common people. understandings or their aspirations, what they wanted, what the poor people, the lay men wanted was never taken into consideration. So the map's power is enabled by it, by the map being a product of the broader legal framework of British imperial control. So the British map making is a maturation of the different You know different policies that the colonizers made in the early 20th century at the turn of the century policies such as more limited reforms and Montagu, Montagu, Shillingsford reforms then the government of India act and the communal award all the communal award all these things were.
They were creating separate electorates and the divisions had begun which translated on the map finally in 1947. They translated on the map in 1947. So we see the map's power. So we see that the survey map which is produced as an instrument to aid British administration depicts. Punjab very interestingly as a land which is home to infrastructures. So the version of Punjab's map that aided British administration would show infrastructures more than people or rather than people.
So Radcliffe held the preservation of infrastructural links as the only criteria in determining the new border. So when the border was drawn only the infrastructures and not the social relations were considered. So, Mathieu Edney states that meaning is invested in all aspects of cartography in the instrumentation and technology is wielded by the geographer, in the social relations within which maps are made and used and in the cultural expectations which define and which are defined by the map image. Edney writes in his detailed history of British cartography. In South Asia that many aspects of India societies and cultures remained beyond British experience and that India could never be entirely and perfectly known by the colonizers.
So the British merely were mapping the India that they perceived and that they had governed that was known to them. And so the India these maps depicted was later taken up. uncritically.
And what so what is paradoxical is that the way the Britishers had conceived and transcribed their understanding of India onto a map was unproblematically and very simplistically carried forward and it was bequeathed to the nationalist, the Indian nationalist leaders and they conceived the idea of independent India. from this map. The India these maps depicted was later taken up uncritically by nationalist leaders as a conception which preceded the Raj.
So, it served as the territorial foundation for the aspirations and demands of their movements. So, we see that the British India's map It is almost naturalized, it is rendered an ahistorical status as though it was the map that defined India even before the British Raj, but that was never the case. Maps continue to be the dominant method of communicating special information, though they are now updated and circulated at an incredible speed due to the And so, the India-Pakistan border, although clearly visible from space, still continues to be negotiated on the maps. So, this is also something very critical and an important, you know, point in our concerned study here.
The users in India are shown a custom world map where all of the Kashmir, you know, the And, the region that is currently occupied by Pakistan and China are depicted as part of India with a solid outline. On the other hand, the Pakistanis show the global variant of the map which depicts the various contestations over Kashmir and they use the dashed lines, not the solid lines. So, these shifting borders.
This shifting border on Google Maps demonstrates that even the most authorial sources of maps can offer information that are congruent with the ground reality and so they rather serve the purpose of local nationalisms. So, when we talk of reality, we see… In the context of simulacrum and reality, critics such as Deleuze and Guattari would say that when we try to probe into reality, we must think of a group's fantasy. What a collective fantasy, you know, conjures becomes reality.
So, the question of fancy and fantasy is simplistically related with the real and reality. So, in a critic of Anderson's notion of an imagined community, Parthochatterji asks if nationalists in the rest of the world have to choose their imagined community from certain modular forms that are already available to them from Europe and Americas. What do they have left to imagine?
So, when already the models are set forth and pre-given, they are a priori almost and naturalized, is there anything to imagine at all? The map, the concept of map itself is so Americanized and even prior to that it is so Europeanized, it is born of a You know Europe's mastermind in a way. So can anyone even tamper or intervene with this imagination? It is always already there or already always there. So in an attempt to rewrite India in terms of a univocal narrative of modern nationalism which is supposedly secular and hostile to all other forms of identity.
Alternative ideas of self. So, once we have India in our preamble defined in a certain way with certain adjectives or words used for the independent, for the free nation, the independent country was such a secular, it is a republic, it is we use a word like sovereign. So, when we say that socialist we use, so when we use these words, we are thereby making other forms of, we are consolidating one identity for all the people inhabiting this geopolitical space and thereby other forms of identity, alternative ideas of self which are hinged around a are you know centered on or hinged around religion, region, language, ethnicity are rendered a backwards, spurious, reactionary, vestigial and thereby non-existent status. So it is also kind of you know artificially converging people onto. A few reduced meanings about nation, where everyone has to you know identify with that.
On this note, I am going to stop today's lecture and we will meet again for another round of lecture and discussions. Thank you.