5 - Living on the Edge

Summary

When I reached Skardu, I was received like Nelson Mandela when he got out of prison. I touched the soil of my ancestral land.

When the RAW [Research and Analysis Wing, India’s foreign intelligence agency] tried to question me on my return from Pakistan, I told them I’m not a 1947 type of person. I’m not a trespasser; I have a passport.

This is how a prominent Balti cultural activist in Kargil described his arrival in Baltistan in 2007 and then his return to Kargil. A fragment from a longer narrative of his first visit to his ancestral homeland, the first quote, by invoking the metaphor of Nelson Mandela’s release from prison expresses the sentiment of freedom in being able to visit Skardu. Yet, as we read in the second quote, he unequivocally expresses a sense of belonging to India through the possession of a passport considered a key document of citizenship while remarking on his interrogation by the Indian intelligence agency upon his return to India. By saying ‘I am not a 1947 type of person’, he was perhaps alluding to the difficulties experienced by Muslims seeking to return to India in the years following the partition when India introduced the emergency permit system in 1948.

This Balti poet is an example of ‘cross-border settlers’ – a category of people whose location on one side or the other of a border between two nation states was not shaped by the ‘new border’. This category, I suggest, also includes those who were already living on one side before the drawing up of the de facto border and chose not to go back. Their predicaments of belonging are distinct from ‘partition refugees’ who voluntarily migrated to the other side. Cross-border settlers embody seemingly contradictory emotions, of longing for one place but belonging to another. Liisa Malkki points to the ‘metaphoric practices’ that make identity between people and place appear ‘naturalised’. A recurrent practice and motif is to demonstrate loyalty to the nation through emotional ties to its soil. Cross-border dwellers in Kargil challenge this naturalised identity between people and place. The poet touches the soil of his ancestral land, Baltistan, but expresses belonging to India.