''Before I die, I want to see where I was born,'' my father announced last fall at home in Katonah, N.Y., as our family was celebrating Diwali, the Hindu New Year. With that, my parents and I began making plans to travel to Pakistan. My father and his entire extended family fled from there in 1947, when India gained independence and was partitioned into Muslim Pakistan and mostly Hindu India.
It was not a trip we had been expecting to take. My father's family left Lahore, where they had thought they would live their whole lives, after what the departing British had envisioned as an orderly exchange of minority populations exploded into a cycle of brutality and retaliation engulfing both new countries. They went first to Delhi, arriving with only what they could carry. My father, who was then 5 years old, remembers the tense train journey and the family's difficulties afterward as dispossessed refugees. As adults, my parents joined the Indian diaspora, raising me and my older brother in Sudan, then Abu Dhabi and finally New York. For more than a decade, we have all been Americans.
Until that day last November, I had rarely heard Dad speak about the partition. It was a subject I knew I should not bring up. But now, almost 60 years afterward, he had been captured by the zeitgeist of a generation: all over India and Pakistan, the partition survivors are seizing a last chance to reconcile their contradictory memories -- of terrorized displacement, but also of a rich shared culture that had to be left behind.
Peacemaking between India and Pakistan has become trendy. Chanting symbolic statements, movie stars and members of parliament are stepping across the border at the dusty guard-post village of Wagah. Since last month, Pakistan's national cricket team has been on tour across India, bringing along thousands of cricket-loving fans and being greeted by warm hospitality -- reciprocating Pakistani hospitality when India's team broke the ice by touring in Pakistan last year.
But can people taught for decades to regard one another as enemies really come together? We wondered, in this age of a war on terror, if it was worse to travel to Pakistan as Indians or as Americans.
Flying from Delhi to Lahore after a first stop in India, I was surprised to see the plane full of mostly older people, both Indian and Pakistani.
Becoming an accepted member of a country you do not feel is your home is an immaculate task that can be intangible at times. For Nadira and her family, this task proved to be more difficult than they originally thought. For this Bangladeshi family, obtaining citizenship was problematic, but after the September 11th terrorism attacks, it seemed almost impossible. Immigrants come to the United States for many reasons, including religious freedom, a fresh beginning, or tackling the American Dream. Even though it did not feel like home, Nadira, her sister, and her parents wanted to stay here because returning to Bangladesh was not the best option for them. How did Nadira find the courage to fight for her family’s acceptance in a world that is so brutal?
“We are a nation of immigrants. We are the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the ones who wanted a better life” said former Governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, at the 2012 Republican National Convention. Since its establishment, the United States has grown through immigration, lending to a multicultural society. However, immigration and its government policies have become of great public interest due to illegal immigration at the Mexican border and violent events in the Middle East. For this reason it seems sensible to investigate the lives of immigrants so that U.S. citizens may take a stance on this disputed topic. Regardless of their origins, whether they are from Latin America, Asia, or anywhere else, immigrants seem to encounter similar endeavors. In Jhumpa Lahiri’s collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies, the author depicts the immigration of Indian citizens to the United States. Noting various matters ranging from motives to the cultural identity crisis, Lahiri exposes the struggles and ramifications of American immigration. The collection elucidates the lives of first and second generation
In “My Two Lives”, Jhumpa Lahiri tells of her complicated upbringing in Rhode Island with her Calcutta born-and-raised parents, in which she continually sought a balance between both her Indian and American sides. She explains how she differs from her parents due to immigration, the existent connections to India, and her development as a writer of Indian-American stories. “The Freedom of the Inbetween” written by Sally Dalton-Brown explores the state of limbo, or “being between cultures”, which can make second-generation immigrants feel liberated, or vice versa, trapped within the two (333). This work also discusses how Lahiri writes about her life experiences through her own characters in her books. Charles Hirschman’s “Immigration and the American Century” states that immigrants are shaped by the combination of an adaptation to American...
The people of India and Pakistan hate each other with a burning passion that goes back thousands of years. Because of the constant border wars you had to be stealthy when talking to people. For example if we were both on India's land and were both Indians we could be buddies; on the flip side if you spoke Sindhi, a derived form of Hindi, and I spoke Hindi I can assume you were Pakistani and we would have to fight it out.
Before you begin reading the main narrative of my essay, I want to let you in on some details about my life and myself. I was born in Manhattan, New York and when I was about twenty two days old, I boarded a plane with my parents on a journey across the United States to the city of San Francisco, then to the town of Grass Valley. This is where my grandmother and grandfather resided. They had been telling my parents that the city of Manhattan was no place to raise a child and that we should move to California and live with them. Before making this life changing decision of leaving most of their friends and loved ones in New York to come to California, my parents sent me off to live in India with my uncle. Keep in mind, I was about the age of two when this all happened. The opportunity of leaving me with my uncle gave my parents about a year to think things over and pull themselves together, in efforts to properly raise a child in a country that was so
During the Cold War, many regional conflicts occurred and were noted as the significant battles which later led to decolonization. One of the regional conflicts were India and Pakistan fighting for their independence. In 1947, India was released under Great Britain’s control and gained its independence. However, the country was divided between Muslims and Hindus, which share different religions. Muslims wanted church and state to become unified while Hindus wanted a separation of these two establishments. Since these two ethnic groups disagreed, it was difficult to create a new government. Therefore, India was divided into two nations: India for the Hindus and Pakistan for the Muslims. Hindus and Muslims were racing to the border in order to get to their nation state which led to killing 500,000 people due to rioting. Although, Mohandas Gandhi, an Indian National Congressman, wanted to obtain peace between these two religions. Pakistan refused the H...
The partition of India left the subcontinent divided and devastated. Homes were dislocated as boundaries between the two countries were drawn. Scores of people were uprooted they had to leave behind all their material possessions and move on to be relocated. A couple of decades passed before the subcontinent could accept the reality of the two countries-one of them in two parts and separated by more than two thousand miles. From the late sixties differences between East and West Pakistan got aggravated and the burning cauldron finally exploded in 1971.
Emmanuel S.Nelson writes in the “Writers of the Indian Diaspora: A Bio-Bibliographical Critical Sourcebook” that writers on the Indian Diaspora share a Diaspora consciousness generated by a complex network of historical connections, spiritual affinities, and unifying racial memories, and that this shared sensibility is manifested in the cultural productions of the Indian Diaspora communities around the world. The element of longing, homesickness and a ‘Quest for Identity’ or ‘Roots’ mark the Diaspora
It is through the events in the journey of life that shapes and molds who we are as people. As for me, immigrating to America was one of those milestones that have shaped who I am. Those who have had the opportunity of moving from a different country to America know what a privilege it is. I felt the same honor to know that I would be journeying to the land of opportunity. Without hesitance, I spent the last two months packing and making the final preparations before moving to a new continent. Although it was a bittersweet time, leaving my beloved family behind, I knew that I couldn’t resist the treasure that waited for me in the new land. Coming from a developing nation the high level of sophistication that greeted me on arrival to America made feel like I was in paradise.
Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan is a horrific read. Though the characters and the village of Mano Majra are both fictitious, the reality of the 1947 Partition is not. Approximately one million men, women and children died as a result of communal violence during that time. The cynical part of me says that religious feuds and riots have always been a reality of South Asia – even before the medieval times, so this should not be shocking. But then the rational part of me questions why there are millions of Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and other religious communities living in peace today. If there really was a blood lust which we inherited from our ancestors, we would have all been dead a long time ago.
The inner desire of any immigrant is to be able to leave his or her country without having to leave home. The thought of leaving behind all that was close and of meaning to me arose feelings of discomfort within me. Change is many things; it is scary, it is good, it is necessary for growth but most importantly it is inevitable. So on October eleventh two thousand and eight when my father announced to my family and I the date on which we were to depart on our journey to the culture mosaic society of Canada, change seemed to have landed on our door step. This was the most important day of my life. Immigrating abroad meant changes, many of them, the feelings I recall which were of most relevance to me at the time were anxiousness and excitement. I was excited for a new beginning and anxious about how I would integrate into a whole new world. It was a bittersweet journey to the airport, knowing that these Indian surroundings; the noisy roads, the smell of savoury street food, and the
Until a child is eighteen years old, the parents have full responsibility. They provide a stable and loving environment for their children. As the leaders in a household, caring and loving parents also maintain the bonds that hold the family together. However, absence of loving parental guidance can create tension between family members. Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day shows how war, specifically the partition of India, affects a particular family. The partition of Indian in 1947 created the separate countries of India and Pakistan, consequently ripping families apart. The partition, initiated by India’s independence from Britain, attempted to accommodate irreconcilable religious differences between Muslims and Hindus by forming the Islamic Pakistan. In Clear Light of Day, the Das children’s relationship with their parents causes lasting sibling conflict that mirrors this social and political upheaval of India.
The history of Indo-Pakistani relations has been a dominated by turbulence and bitter rivalry. After the partition in 1947, millions of people migrated to their new home in either the Islamic state of Pakistan or the secular state of India. Only two weeks after independence, India and Pakistan fought a war over Kashmir in 1948. India and Pakistan fought two more wars with each other in 1965 and 1971, with the latter resulting in the creation of Bangladesh. Since then, India and Pakistan have had very hard feelings against each other due to numerous Hindu-Muslim conflicts, the territorial dispute over Kashmir, and other bilateral tensions.
Muslims and Hindus have been living together in Kashmir with peace and harmony. Later when the time came to draw a line between India and Pakistan the issue came to the naked eye when a decision had to be made about Kashmir being a part of India or Pakistan.
Bharati Mukherjee’s story, “Two Ways to Belong in America”, is about two sisters from India who later came to America in search of different ambitions. Growing up they were very similar in their looks and their beliefs, but they have contrasting views on immigration and citizenship. Both girls had been living in the United States for 35 years and only one sister had her citizenship. Bharati decided not to follow Indian traditional values and she married outside of her culture. She had no desire to continue worshipping her culture from her childhood, so she became a United States citizen. Her ideal life goal was to stay in America and transform her life. Mira, on the other hand, married an Indian student and they both earned labor certifications that was crucial for a green card. She wanted to move back to India after retirement because that is where her heart belonged. The author’s tone fluctuates throughout the story. At the beginning of the story her tone is pitiful but then it becomes sympathizing and understanding. She makes it known that she highly disagrees with her sister’s viewpoints but she is still considerate and explains her sister’s thought process. While comparing the two perspectives, the author uses many