Nationalist theatre - Pakistan / India style

Rafique Gangat, Karachi

Mdeintjeskop  Courier, Volume I/1994

Click the link to see the video:

 http://www.wimp.com/indiapakistan

The Wagah border crossing is used by foreigners travelling overland and by official Pakistani and Indian delegations. Ordinary citizens and goods usually cross by train at a point down the border or by air. Otherwise the main event at Wagah is the sunrise/sunset flag lowering ceremony, for which the Indian and Pakistani border guards have workedout an elaborate coordinated choreography.

The flag raising/lowering ceremony begins at precisely 5.30 am/5.30 pm daily and lasts for about ten minutes. Sizeable crowds gather on both sides of the border, providing a fascinating study in national difference. On the Pakistani side most of the women wear chadars and burgas. On the Indian side the women are mostly uncovered and many of them wear saris. The Pakistani border guards are army Rangers, with a prescribed minimum height of six feet. The Indian border guards are mostly Sikh and about equally statuesque.

The Pakistani and Indian detachments meet monthly to coordinate joint activities such as the sunrise and sunset flag ceremonies. As a result the ceremonies are precisely choreographed, with each side performing the mirror image of the other's actions. It begins with one Pakistani and one Indian soldier goose-stepping towards each other from a point about thirty yards back from the border. A few yards short of it they stop and perform a unison one quarter turn.

Both now stand at attention, bodies perpendicular to the border, staring fixedly at each other over their rear shoulders. They are then joined by two or three others from each side, and the ritual proceeds towards its conclusion, with much symmetrical stamping, wheeling, shouting and saluting. Each side has a bugler, who plays in perfect unison with the other as the two flags come down.

The Wagah flag ceremony is a piece of nationalist theatre. It states the central feature of Indian and Pakistani nationalism, that each country defines itself in opposition to the other. The different costumes of the principal actors (soldiers) and extras (civilians) on each side, the different flags, the ritualised mirror play of the Indian and Pakistani soldiers, all dramatise and in a sense justify the political fact that India and Pakistan are two distinct and mutually antagonistic countries. The fact that the border is in fact not crossed by ordinary Indians or Pakistanis only adds to the ritual quality of the scene. This is pure theatre of difference, divorced from everyday life just as the Indian and Pakistani people are divorced from one another.

In Plato's "Symposium" a number of distinguished historical figures, including Socrates and the playwright Aristophanes, gather at a dinner party to discuss, among other things, the nature of love. Aristophanes argues that in the beginning there was no gender: the human person was a perfect androgynous whole. At the beginning of history, however, these wholes were split into male and female halves. Ever since, according to Aristophanes, human beings have been searching for their surrendered other halves. The cloying English cliche "my other half" referring to one's spouse, itself refers back to Plato's mythical explanation of romantic attraction between the sexes.

There are many obvious differences between Indian/Pakistani nationalism and the theory of love which Plato attributes to Aristophanes. I find it suggestive to compare the two, nevertheless, because in both theories an original whole was split into radically different halves. The twist in Pakistani nationalism is that unlike gender in the "Symposium" the radical distinction between Hindus and Muslims is said to have always been the case. Where Aristophanes argues that men and women are drawn to one another from a desire to recapture primeval union, Pakistani nationalists from Jinnah onwards have argued that Pakistan must exist because of a primeval antagonism between two peoples who, by definition, were never one.

The flag ceremony at Wagah is a dramatisation of the corollary, that the two states define themselves primarily in relation to each other. Each is that which the other is not.