India and Pakistan are locked in a cultural cold war

EVEN during the darkest moments of India and Pakistan's volatile history — through wars, terrorist attacks and diplomatic breakdowns - artists and activists tried to keep the countries connected.

- KARISHMA MEHROTRA

Mumbai’s plays found an audience in Karachi. Lahore’s painters held shows in New Delhi. Activists walked across the disputed border, past soldiers marching in elaborate drills, hoping to bridge one of the world’s most intractable divides.

“When you travel, and meet the other side, it gives them a human face,” said Suhasini Mulay, an Indian actor and co-founder of the Pakistan-India Peoples’ Forum for Peace and Democracy (PIPFPD).

“All that demonisation that you've been fed — it just begins to melt away.”

But after years of declining relations, punctuated by the latest eruption of violence between the nuclear-armed neighbours, even the smallest cultural exchanges have all but vanished.

In more than a dozen interviews, Indian and Pakistani artists, musicians, diplomats and academics reflected on how the countries became so cut off from one another and how much has been lost.

Trade between India and Pakistan had already shrivelled to almost nothing in recent years. Postal routes were suspended in 2019. The final tightening came last month, after gunmen killed 26 tourists in a meadow near Pahalgam, in Indian-administered Kashmir. Cultural ties, already threadbare, frayed further.

“Even a simple thing like sending a book to a friend across the border is impossible,” said Ritu Menon, an Indian publisher who has helped Pakistani writers come to India.

Salima Hashmi was 4 when her father — the celebrated Pakistani poet, Faiz Ahmed Faiz — moved the family from New Delhi to Lahore in anticipation of the bloody partition of British India in 1947.

“A guy who had never been here drew an unthinking carving line over a gin and tonic,” she said, referring to Cyril Radcliffe, the British judge who divided the subcontinent. “His hand, I’m sure, wavered a bit.”