Malinda Words: Sapan and voices that erase borders

Apoorva Mudgal and Ria Modak

South Asia is a region. It is a region made of countries and therefore a territory parcelled by lines. Borders. It wasn’t always like that and maybe in time to come it won’t be like how it is today. Maps are made. They are amended. The work of cartographers never ends.

Not too long ago, there wasn’t a country called Bangladesh. There may have been notions of belonging to a territory but the boundaries were not inked. Nor were they associated with passports and visas. Not too long ago, we didn’t have a Pakistan. We didn’t have an India either. Not even a ‘Sri Lanka.’ Of course being an island, territoriality was fixed, and yet within this island there were regions and regional lords who had different kinds of relationships with a supreme ruler most times but not always.

There are countries now. There are claims of friendship, there’s talk of mechanisms that make for cross-border cooperation. And there are tensions which challenge such initiatives. We don’t need to spell them out, do we?

Nations have borders. Territorial integrity is an important part of a nation’s definition. Boundary lines therefore acquire significance. They are held sacrosanct. Sure, they can and will change (just consider how the map of Europe has changed over the last 100 years and how the USA expanded since Independence). For now they seem fixed.

Borders are lines on a piece of paper but they are imagined as walls. They are not really marked on the earth end-to-end except in the case of islands where the sea does the job, but then again how do you draw maritime boundaries in water, one may ask.

Over time, people get emotional over borders. An inch taken or given or the threat of conceding or the will to obtain raises ire, creates the spectre of conflict-escalation to the point of war. Wars end. People die. Resources are wasted. People are impoverished. Sometimes lines are redrawn and sometimes they remain.

For all the rhetoric about nation, territorial integrity, honour and dignity which demand the defence of lines with lives, borders are also porous. A couple of weeks ago, during a webinar organised by the Southasia Peace Action Network (Sapan) on the trafficking of women and children it was made clear that national boundaries can be retired for certain kinds of activities. It cannot happen if there’s no complicity at some level among officials and even agreement among them, regardless of their nationalities.

There’s so much to gain from cooperation and so much that meaningless antipathies take away. For example, Sigma Huda, the first UN Special Rapporteur on Trafficking in Persons, pointed out that although a Convention was signed by SAARC countries in 2002 (the SAARC Convention on Preventing and Combating Trafficking in Women and Children for Prostitution of), implementation has been extremely disappointing. The reasons are external to the issue, the perceived walls are simply foreboding and formidable.

Sapan’s programs, such as the above mentioned webinar, address these issues. The call is not for a borderless larger South Asian Union, but an invitation to consider the fact that this side of that ‘ideal’ which perhaps some dream of, there’s much to be won for all peoples in the region.

There’s commonality and that’s not only about history. Large sections of the populations in these countries suffer from similarly pernicious structures of domination and exploitation. Climate change is border-insensitive. Identity-politics is not the preserve of a single nation in South Asia, it is a plague at times which holds and pushes back in various forms.

There are ample reasons for despair. And there are ample reasons to hope.

A few days ago, some members of Sapan as well as others who identify with the group’s objectives met in New York City informally to talk about unities and commonalities. Almost all of them are not only concerned about sabre-rattling and the shrill whipping of anxieties over matters that are largely peripheral to the vast majority of peoples in the region, they actually do something about it. In their own way. When they can. Where they can.

Sapan does good work. That’s enough for now. What was most empowering and illuminating even was what two young South Asians, one about to start her doctoral studies, Ria Modak, and another who works as an architect, Apoorva Mudgal, gifted that small but lively and soft group of people. Apoorva sang. Ria accompanied her on the guitar. It was a song composed to a poem by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, ‘Nahin nigaah mein manzil to justajoo hi sahi…(If the end is not in sight).’

‘If the end is not in sight, then perhaps the quest is enough,’ so the poem goes, ‘if our union is not to be perhaps its desire is enough,’ it continues. We don’t know how long the road is, what roadblocks with delay us, what landmines have been buried along the paths, what snipers hide behind what trees, but again, as Faiz once said, it is alright that the feet bleed because some flowers may still bloom as those who undertake journeys water the desert with their blood.

There are times when an unexpected incident makes countries or rather their leaders insist ‘we will not talk,’ as Been Sarwar, the indefatigable force that expands Sapan’s territory of hope mentioned at a similar gathering a couple of days later near Princeton, New Jersey. They turn lines into barricades and walls. It doesn’t stop the music.

Faiz wrote in Urdu. I don’t understand a word. I am not a connoisseur of music. Apoorva and Ria made my multiple ignorances irrelevant. Faiz was born in ‘British’ India in 1911. He died in Lahore, Pakistan in 1984. He still lives all over the world. He even visited New York just a few days ago. His words, work, hopes and celebrations floated across time and continent, settled in the hearts of two exceptionally gifted musicians who shared that love with everyone.

Walls collapsed. Borders disappeared. This too happens in ‘South Asia.’ Thanks to Faiz, to poets and poetry, the work of groups like Sapan, and beautiful young people like Apoorva and Ria.

malindadocs@gmail.com

['The Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is 193rd article in the new series. Links to previous articles are given below]

13 August 2023

Sapan and voices that erase borders

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