Borders are powerful things: Not just lines on a map, they defy geography, cutting across forest, mountains and seas. A border can slice a building in two and separate a child from their parents.

My grandfather was born in Dhaka –in what is now Bangladesh– four years after the official partition of Bengal by the colonial state in 1905. His subsequent life and career as a filmmaker played out amidst the tumult of the struggle for independence, and the violence of partition. Birth and death. The birth of two nations locked in perennial conflict, defined in opposition, christened in the blood of two million or more. East Pakistan would later break away in 1971, after more blood would be spilt.

Borders are forged in blood. They are like scabs. Some remain bloody for a long time.

I visited Dhaka almost a century after my grandfather’s birth. My father had moved there on a temporary assignment, and we went over to see him. The language was familiar, yet strange, with odd words thrown in. They say ‘basha’ for home not ‘bari.’ The ‘sh’ sounds harsh, like a curse.

One evening we were invited to the house of my father’s employer. He was a wealthy industrialist, living in a palatial bungalow, attended by a large retinue of servants. The food was excellent, and our hosts most gracious. Our host’s son was a good-looking man in his early forties with a cosmopolitan outlook, who had travelled the world, collecting objects and experiences. It was here that I first heard and developed a taste for jazz. In my memory, the bright fresh notes of Take Five and the lilting melancholy of Billie Holiday confabulate with the opulence of the room. There was, however, a sense of deep sadness that pervaded the house, shadows under the eyes of our hosts that spoke of a weariness that sleep cannot cure. Some years before, during a grand dinner with hundreds of guests, their teenage daughter was raped and killed in her room by someone in their employ.

I have never been back to Bangladesh. A few months later when I was visiting my mother in Hyderabad, we received a call from a colleague of my father’s in Dhaka. Hyderabad has its own particular history with borders, but that will come later. He spoke first to my mother, and then asked to speak to me. ‘You have to be strong…you have to very brave’. We took the first flight to Kolkata, and I watched my mother board a flight to go to Dhaka to bring my father back. He had suffered an aneurism and was in a coma. I could not go with her because I had not carried my passport with me. He never came out of the coma and died two weeks later.      

The two incidents are unconnected, except by association. My first time across a border brought me in contact with the death of a girl whom I never met but can never forget. A few months later I was unable to cross that border to accompany and lend support to my mother on possibly the most difficult journey of her life. 

I have crossed many borders since. Bangladesh was perhaps my first international border, and the first time I got a sticker in my passport and a stamp. The summer after my father’s death, I came to the UK to spend time with my sister, who was at Oxford then.  I remember wondering at the time how this country –with its neatly trimmed hedges, little houses, foxes and woodland voles– had ruled an empire and had drawn so many of the lines that we see on the map.

In Journey to Persia (Parasyayatra), Tagore describes the wonder of flight, and how being borne aloft in an aircraft blurs our other senses, reducing earth-bound three-dimensional reality to two-dimensions. He came to hear of the bombing of villages near Baghdad by the British Airforce, noting ‘[t]he men, women and children, there done to death, meet their fate by decree of the upper region of British imperialism, –which finds it so easy thus to shower death because of its distance from its individual victims’.^[1] It is only from a great distance that once can see the world in two dimensions.

When looking at a world map, some of the neatest borders can be found in Northern Africa in the straight lines that divide Egypt from Libya and Sudan, or Algeria form Mali, Niger and Mauritania. I found myself in Ghana in 2016, employed by UCL to serve as a research guide to MSc students on a fieldtrip. I had brought along the Bradt Travel Guide. The section on the history of Ghana begins like this: ‘Ghana, like the other states of Western Africa, is fundamentally a European creation of the late nineteenth century. For this reason it would be thoroughly misleading to write about Ghana as a meaningful entity prior to the colonial era’.^[2] The state cannot exist before its borders are drawn, and before that it cannot have a meaningful history. Borders are indeed powerful things.  

My PhD research took me back to Hyderabad in 2014. In May, at the height of the run-up to the national elections, an incident sparked violence between two religious communities in the Old City. Following the skirmish, the Border Security Force opened fire on a crowd killing three and injuring a further eight. One might wonder why the Border Security Force was brought in for a domestic incident. But this was not without precedent. The army had been called in to deal with riots sparked by the illegal demolition of an ancient mosque in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh, by a mob of right-wing Hindu political activists. A few hundred Hyderabadis lost their lives. But perhaps we have to go back further to understand. When the borders were being drawn between India and Pakistan, the fate of the Nizami State of Hyderabad was not certain, there were many who had no desire to be either Indian or Pakistani. In September 1948, the army of the newly independent Dominion of India marched in. Operation Polo was successful, Hyderabad was annexed with minimal loss of blood following the Nizams surrender. The blood was spilt later with the massacre of thousands, mainly Muslims, over the year that followed. Some borders need to be re-emphasised from time to time. Otherwise people might forget.

Borders are powerful things. They are not just lines on a map. When you give them place to live in your head, you begin to see them everywhere.