"Partition is a line on the map." – Tariq Ali
"Politics is a cottage industry" – A. –Ramachandran
The terms "refugee", "exile", "border", and "national identity" are intrinsic to the vocabulary of Third World cultural and political debates. Contemporary concerns of any nature seem heightened in a region beset with conflicts between new associations and old identities. Homelessness, entailing the dramatic loss of power that goes with invisibility, had to be reinvented as a visible cultural contingent.
It seems art is both the memory and the chronicler of what might otherwise pass unnoticed, a medium in which the connections between personal history and broader sweeps of cultural life can be documented. "Mappings: shared histories…a fragile self, an exhibition by Indian and Pakistani artists, consists of semiautobiographical witnessing (whether poeticised or narrated straightforward) of the Pakistani/ Indian experience. It develops at the level of both absurdist comedy and storytelling.