So assiduously are the subcontinent’s nation states building walls that they threaten to overshadow centuries of a shared multicultural history.
In the early 1980s, when I was about 10 years old, I moved to Bangladesh with my family. Originally from Bihar, my diplomat father had been transferred to Dhaka from Geneva. One weekend, our family took a road trip from Dhaka to Sylhet, in the country’s north-east. I learnt that we would be passing close to the India–Bangladesh border.
Even at that age, I had gathered that relations between the two countries were not warm. So I was eager to see what this border looked like. It was an anti-climax. Far from the insurmountable barrier that my childish imagination had conjured up, the border turned out to be a short white line and an innocuous road divider. Moreover, the terrain on both sides was identical, challenging my preconception that my homeland was very different.
