All these Indias

Some years ago I went to a dinner party in Lucknow, capital of India’s Uttar Pradesh, where the hosts and their guests were Hindus who as children had fled Lahore in 1947 at the time of Partition. A week later I was in Lahore, capital of Pakistan’s Punjab, and found myself in a house where the other diners were Muslim refugees who at a similar age had come from Lucknow. Midway through the second meal, I suddenly realised how similar the two groups of middle-class professional people were. Lawyers, teachers, booksellers and architects, they shared the same tastes and the same worries, their chief anxiety being that their belligerent governments had both recently acquired nuclear weapons. The dinner parties might have been interchangeable, but for the whisky in Lucknow and the orange juice in Lahore.

As my friends talked of the tragedy of partition, I wondered at its futility. Did not these groups demonstrate that it had been unnecessary as well as tragic because they were essentially the same people, Indians who happened to have different faiths? Only afterwards did I realise that this was an illusion, that I had simply come across one of those increasingly rare intersections of Indian and Pakistani life. Those Hindus in Lucknow had nothing in common with their militant co-religionists who had destroyed a mosque on the grounds that the god Ram had been born on its site and who in 2002 massacred thousands of Muslims in Gujarat. Nor did the Muslim advocates I met in Lahore share much beyond their profession with the lawyers who earlier this month applauded murder and garlanded the assassin of Salmaan Taseer, the governor of the Punjab who was killed because he had criticised the blasphemy laws of Pakistan.