A couple of years ago, while living and researching in Bhuj, the capital of Kutch District in Gujarat state, I became interested in purchasing some recorded qafis. This haunting poetic genre is originally from Sindh, but remains popular among the Muslim pastoralists of northern Kutch, sung in the wide expanses of the Great Rann of Kutch. Although Sindh is a mere 140 kilometres away from Bhuj, I had found few overt traces of the Pakistani province. The qafi, however, remains a rich source of regional, crossborder history for both Kutch and Sindh.
It seemed, however, that transborder references were somewhat taboo in public, and none of the well-stocked music shops had what I was looking for. Finally, directed to a narrow lane of stalls tucked away behind the main market street, I found what I was looking for. Here were all kinds of smuggled and second-hand goods – leather, electronics, Islamic literature, cassettes of music and religious discourses, cloth and a myriad other sundries. Amidst tall stacks of cheap copies of music cassettes from popular Indian films, I also found an equally large selection of music from across the frontier – popular Pakistani singers singing in Urdu and Sindhi, some of whom were even born in Kutch, the shop owners said with pride. This narrow row of shops, in the heart of Bhuj and yet somewhat hidden, was a transformed space. Here, Kutch was no longer insulated from its historical linkages – Sindh thrived here, most notably in its folk music. But it was hidden away; one would not stumble upon these stalls or their wares unbidden.
As with goods, I found it remarkable how little Sindh came up for discussion in Kutch. Certainly, political oratory in Gujarat regularly refers to Pakistan. But it is generalising and rhetorical, used to extract political mileage by advocates of right-wing Hindu nationalism – such as the representation of Islam, Pakistan and, by extension, Indian Muslims in general, as isomorphic and therefore 'other'. Nowhere does one find reference to cultural traits that are shared in fact shared by Sindh and Kutch.
It is not difficult to understand why this is so. Classification and boundary-making, both real and epistemological, are at the heart of constructing identities. Modern territorial nation states are ideologically invested in imagining themselves to be territorially discrete and internally homogenous. After the separation of Pakistan in 1947, Kutch gained new significance as a strategic border territory; it lay on a newly defined boundary that needed to be naturalised and legitimised at all costs. In Kutch, and Gujarat more generally, this has been done through a relatively consistent 'othering' of Pakistan and Muslims within Gujarat, particularly pronounced after the 2002 anti-Muslim pogroms in the state. This has generated a peculiar ambivalence in Kutch about adjacent Sindh: they are immediate neighbours, they share historical and cultural ties, but they now lie across a problematic boundary.