This Land Is My Land

A global citizen who has navigated multiple identities and questions of belonging through her life, FATIMA BHUTTO shares her vision of a borderless world as she sets out to capture the essence of the Indian subcontinent

I was born in Kabul, Afghanistan, thirty-four years ago.

I was born to an Afghan mother and a Pakistani father.

My grandmother was Iranian but grew up in Pune. My grandfather was Sindhi, though he studied—in the days before passports and city visas—between Bombay and Karachi.

In my family, deep in the blood, is woven every strand of the subcontinent: India, Pakistan, and through history and circumstance, Bangladesh too.

What do we speak of when we speak of our past, our once united, long ago South Asian self? Before a British lawyer who had never before stepped on our land drew lines across a map, to be a part of the subcontinent must have meant something whole, something true. Something that, before it travelled in us, was born of our common soil. Cyril Radcliffe cut us in half. Eventually, like us, he too went mad.

What is the essence of the subcontinent?

I know you want me to say brotherhood, language, love, loss, the violent longing for place and meaning that exists in all three of our separated countries, torn apart and orphaned, birthed in six weeks.

Six weeks.

That’s how long it took to divide India, shattering what would have been the largest, fiercest, strongest country on earth.

Great Britain, post-Brexit, wants two years to negotiate their separation from the European Union—and this for a severance where no borders will actually be broken, no families will be divided, no ethnicities or religious groups unravelled and forever untangled from each other. They dismantled us in six weeks, not even giving us the courtesy of a few months to pose a thoughtful, kind farewell. Two years to end a bureaucracy, six weeks to divide a soul.