The Metamorphosing Indian Subcontinent · Heeba Hasan

Written by Heeba Hasan · Artwork by Sophie Hoet

‘Today’ is a liminal space, a certain dance of eternity with presence, a back and forth push of a pendulum – one moment I am in British India walking through Karachi Library or the Mohatta Palace, the next I am in Indian Britain walking along Edgware Road, hearing my friends tell me they live in a part of London only inhabited by desis. Today we stand like strangers to the present moment, seeing it as an amalgamation of multiple pasts. When we inspect it we act like foreigners looking at an item and wondering what it does, where it came from, where it plans to go: as I see the shackles of the past and notions of the future enrapturing the world, I can’t help but wonder where this transition is taking us, how the politics and balance of power will shift now, and to ponder on what Time has done to the Indian Subcontinent.

As Covid-19 established the helplessness of even the greatest powers in the face of a mere disease, and as the West and the East seem once again on the brink of war, the shuffle of cards seems inevitable – everyone senses this doomsday but there are only whispers: ‘balance of power’, ‘third world war’, ‘rising Asia’. We converse around the elephant in the room (the sheer impossibility of the world remaining as it is), give it many names

in many languages, define it in a flexible palette of shapes, sizes and colours, but nobody dares to imagine. We all know but do we feel? Can we comprehend?

Close your eyes and let me transport you back to an Indian market place in 1700. Swift and passionate Punjabi bounces off the walls in Inner Lahore, where sounds echo in large tall chambers with their carved doors and kaleidoscopic windows. In 1700 India was the richest country in the world. We would soon be captives to the anglicised accents of the West but we had once been swimming in an ocean of beautiful, breathing, growing identities creating a force of culture that was the Indian subcontinent.

My language, Urdu, was the child of Indian flexibility born of Turkish, Persian, Arabic and Hindi: an evolved form of Brijh Bhasha. It contains elements of all these worlds within it, acting in itself as a bridge – not strict and prescriptive but gentle, fathoming, pliable, and compassionate. Perhaps, back then, society was just like this.

There is a flurry of sound all around you: some singing, some chanting, some haggle, some play, some sit and breathe it in with their chai and chaat at a roadside cafe. They offer it to you and you take it in. This is pride and not shame. There is no desire to anglicise. Everyone is dressed in flowy cotton kurtas to stand under the sun, to roam the streets, and all you hear is the dark thick eastern accent. Only authenticity, richness, and pride.

But that was 1700. My mind is brought back to the present predicament. Explicitly - terrorist; implicitly - uncultured, uncivilised, uneducated, in need of Western aid and prescriptions: simply not enough. What do you hear in the streets now? Silence. Cultural scarcity in place of richness, silence in place of song, fragile conversation, inhibited play. Watered down, diffused, diluted! The markets here are afraid to embrace themselves; my people stumble on their own tongues, trying to speak correctly. There is no more of that self assured rumble in the marketplace but one is almost too afraid, too eager, to be right. This land reeks of frustration, of inert bodies brimming with repressed passions. As we are unhappy with our own selves, we constantly tussle between our truth and our aspirations; we accept how the world treats us. We label ourselves jahil - uncivilised - and we give up. We submit to the power structures, the role of the underdog, and forget our own strength. It is bred, perhaps, from

those long years bearing white bodies on our brown backs across the Indus. The current situation of globalisation seems to be bringing a shift, however, catalysed by the pandemic. It helps to uncover our divide, to show us how small the distance between the West and the East really is, and how strong the armaments of the West truly are – they are not infallible, as helpless as any in the face of adversity, as insecure and afraid of being overpowered, as human, as evil, as good- indeed, as jahil. This is a time of great questioning. Let us imagine once again.

All this day-dreaming may sound fanciful but shifts have always been dramatic in the past and change is both predictable and rapid. Not too long ago we had empires, kingdoms, ships, and letters. Wars were fought with arrows and swords. In today’s age, all we need to oppress or impress our neighbours is a strategic plan, diplomatic power, and the best technology. Every country’s battlefields, manners, situations, and understandings of each other have changed. The shared colonial ages and the two world wars have taught a lot to a wide variety of countries and have served the rest with immense power. Although the imagined future could seem strange it is not entirely foreign to us: we have seen these images before, they are still fresh in the mind’s eye and history always promises to repeat itself.