WE, in South Asia, are proud inheritors of a legacy of shared experience based on over nine thousand years of minutely analyzed archaeological determinism in our material cultures. Our cultures are marked with the vital symbols and motifs of a dynamic continuity, etched deep into the ethos of this long shared experience since prehistory. There were moments in the historical process when many of us existed under one unified and approximate centralized government – during the periods of Ashoka, Alauddin Khilji, the early Mughals and even under British imperial rule. But such centralized governance was self-sustaining and successful only when the diversity of ecosystems, of ethnology and of regional trade was best understood, and when this was imaginatively transformed into coherent state policies.

I would be the last person to deny the existence of significant variations across South Asia – whether such variations occur in the fragile ecology of the Himalayan mountain systems in Nepal, Bhutan and Kashmir; in the lush green quasi-tropical expanse of forests in the Himalayan foothills, the Nepalese Terai, central Sri Lanka and the Deccan; in the lunar landscape of the plateaux stretching across Balochistan; in the expanse of arid dunes gleaming desert silver in the Great Thar; in the flat alluvial delta lands layered with tropical jungle in the Sundarbans; or in the paradise sun-soaked island archipelagos of the Maldives and the Laccadives. South Asia is a treasure of geographical diversities and that diverse cultural mosaic is the essence of our shared cultural identity – may one dare to say, of one sacred geography – or at least a series of smaller interlocking ritual geographies.

 

Political boundaries need not be an obstacle to allowing the flourishing of a shared historical and cultural identity. The experience of Europe in the past few decades has almost certainly proved that. But unfortunately these very political boundaries have appeared as insurmountable obstacles within the span of our lifetime in South Asia. Under such circumstances, I find the Sasian journey – one spurred by a deep desire to culturally assimilate ourselves into an interactive single entity – will emerge as a journey of long pain and frequent disappointments.

Fortunately, it is also one marked by an almost inhuman persistence in the South Asian peoples and a desire to move forward and to attempt what is presently impossible – a desire to reactivate the diverse regional, ethnic and natural marketing matrixes across the South Asian heartland, and somehow miraculously to transform it into a circumstance that would allow us to function one day in the future as a culturally integrated whole. Economic necessity dictates this. Unless we are able to excavate and revitalize the threads of our underlying dormant legacy of cultural and economic interaction, unless we are able to fully grasp our mutual interdependence, South Asia cannot and will not rise to fulfil the potential of our combined historical destinies.

It is not as if I inherently believe that South Asian governments would stand up and move forward of their own accord to fulfil a composite South Asian destiny. I do, however, possess a deep-seated conviction that the will of history will allow us space for an escalating interaction and the opportunity to breathe freely again. This clearly didn’t happen in the bilateral India-Pakistan talks held over a decade ago in Agra.

On my return from Agra, I actually cried. It was so demeaning to have to return, having achieved nothing. Achieving healthy bilateral relations at Agra was a historical debt that we owed to South Asia’s ghost cities – those wonderful cultural mosaics overflowing with pockets of poverty for over the last one hundred years – Delhi, Lahore, Ahmedabad, Mumbai, Kathmandu, Kolkata and Dhaka. All these are ghost cities today, a string of urban monuments to the inhumanity and the cultural atrocities of 1947. What had stood before in their place a hundred years ago were cities that were once thriving multicultural entities with a developed legacy of traditions encasing interdependence, tolerance and creativity.

The combined forces of history and the petulance of politicians and religious extremists dressed in the vestments of an acute post-imperialist nationalism facilitated our separation. Administrative arrangements to rationalize governance and the development of communities is one thing; erecting permanent Berlin walls across the heart of South Asia is yet another.

 

The creation of my country, Pakistan, itself poses cultural dilemmas which have not been resolved, either at home or even in India today with respect to the relevance of the contours of South Asia’s sacred geography. Understanding the past is the key to unlocking our current dilemmas with respect to who we are, where we come from and where we are going. Even developed historiography and historians of pre-history in India have been unable to effectively answer questions such as those relating to the indigenous peoples of South Asia.

Sometimes pre-1947 historiography places a freeze on our ability to think. The late discovery of the Indus Valley civilization by Sir John Marshall and a team of archaeologists just prior to partition has prevented an analysis of the Indus Valley culture as being a composite multi-river system that included the Indus, the Hakra running parallel to it, and the almost mythical Saraswati which branched off presumably from the Jamuna and every once in a while reappears today, sometimes as the Ghaggar and the Looni in Rajasthan, culminating in the then fertile forested delta land of what is now the Rann of Kutch. How this multi-river civilization related to cultural developments in the Gangetic region and in Central India, still remains a mystery.

 

We lose our consciousness of the spread in interaction of cultures and civilizations in prehistory and join the Indians in celebrating the most visible symbols of this civilization – the Dancing Girl and the Priest King of Mohenjo Daro. How many people in India today are aware that the western piedmont of the Indus, the land leading to the plateau and mountain ranges of Central Balochistan is one of the crucial elements interacting in the genesis of the Indus Valley civilization?

Successive archaeological layers of cultural materials had been unearthed from the earlier Kot Diji culture (3000-2500 BC), the earlier Amri culture (3500-2700 BC), going backward through the findings of earlier layers such as those characterized by Faiz Mohammad as grey ware in the Quetta region and the dating of the Mehargarh piedmont culture from about 7500 BC through successive and continuous cultures down to the Indus Valley civilization.

The culturally conscious Indian has largely punched a stopwatch on the genesis of civilization in the Harappan period, and has a visible gap for the earlier five thousand years that reflect the interaction of the Zagros, the Eastern Iranian plateau and Central Asia with the vast region west of the Trans-Indus located in Pakistan today. Given that the migration of the Indo-Aryans almost certainly came through this region, is it surprising therefore that we make little real sense with respect to the Aryan migration into South Asia and its linkages and interaction with the indigenous populations of the multi-river Indus Valley culture? How on earth do we expect to explain how the region of the Trans-Indus interacted with the Gangetic plain, or even with the matrix of South Indian cultures at this period in prehistory? As a consequence we weave myths, sometimes directly linked to our preconceived religious beliefs. Even large strands of the Indus-Vedic religion have been submerged in the interests of understanding their later Gangetic counterparts. What we end up with is not an understanding of prehistory, but an unhistoric reaffirmation of our religion, injudiciously filtered through lenses such as the epics and a culture of sustained warfare.

 

In Pakistan the situation is no different. In the dictator Zia-ul-Haq’s time, all doctoral theses relating to prehistory and history before the Arab invasion of Sindh by the young Umayyad General Mohammad bin Qasim (712 AD), were denied access to research and supervision. The site of a large lingam temple at Bhambhore unfortunately coincided with the upper layer of the Grand Mosque of Bhambhore, built presumably under the Arab domination of Sindh and Multan. As a consequence, the archaeologist F.A. Khan quietly reburied the lingams on the same site in the 1960s, leaving the evidence for archaeological rationalism to rediscover at a future date.

Such are the obstacles in both India and Pakistan that efface our joint legacies and constitute formidable obstacles to reconstituting the interactive matrixes of our common heritage. I hardly need to point out that much the same exercise is being carried out in other parts of South Asia. It would be a tragedy to lose that common heritage – but to retain it is one of the essential components of our present Sasian journey. The printing of history textbooks by the Punjab Textbook Board in Pakistan today that state that Pakistan was formed in 712 AD and that the Mughal Empire was part of its greatest achievements, indicates the kind of pedestrian historicism with which we seek to poison South Asia’s young.

 

The essence of the Sasian journey is thus to reconstitute our collective memory of our interdependent legacy and to subject it to a powerful series of adaptive reuses that can form the basis for our move forward in an era when South Asia comprises over half a dozen new administrative units created in the 20th century. But this would be viable only when these autonomous units engage in a resumption of the kind of relationships – ethnic, historical and economic – that characterized a ten millennia history of coexistence. A failure to transcend current political boundaries and create a common market of ideas and economic interaction will lead to the kind of sporadic failures that characterize South Asian bilateral relations.

To enlarge the resultant osmosis to include all the states in South Asia – whether it be Myanmar or Afghanistan – would be a move towards restoring all the component parts of a multicultural mosaic that would in no small way help revitalize the oneness of South Asia. The Sasian journey thus becomes an act of restoration, of conservation and a new unbridled creativity in pursuit of South Asia. Let us move forward on that path.