Beena Sarwar: INDIA/PAKISTAN: Artists Take On Post-Colonial Partitions

With national boundaries continually being redrawn in the post-colonial world, it’s time to deal with the reality of partitions and find a way "to make peace with our partitioned selves", contends international banker-turned-art curator Hammad Nasar.

Some 15 million refugees were created and between one and two million people were killed during the traumatic Partition of the subcontinent into predominantly Hindu India and predominantly Muslim Pakistan.

"Why is there no memorial?" asks Nasar. "People tell me that’s not our culture. But there are mausoleums for various saints from Kutch to Khyber, we garland graves and photographs, and commemorate death anniversaries."

Over the last 30 years, holocaust museums have been built around the world but until 2007, Partition was not taught as history to British states. "The 9/11 monument museum is already up in New York. When I asked the director why they put it up so quickly, he said memorials are a promise from the past to the future about the present."

The difference, comments the prominent Karachi-based writer and editor Muniza Shamsie, "is that holocaust had clear cut perpetuators and victims. With India and Pakistan, it is not so clear. We have a collective guilt and a collective anger." ..