Amaury de Riencourt

Just over 35 years ago, on August 15, 1947, India and Pakistan became independent states. What should have been a joyful occasion was marred by the ghastly slaughter of half a million people and the uprooting of about 15 million men, women and children. Only a few months before, few people had ever heard of the word "Pakistan," a concept invented by a few Muslim intellectuals in 1933 who claimed that there were two distinct nations in India; this idea was then adopted by the Muslim League at its historic meeting in Lahore in 1940 as implying an independent sovereign "homeland" for those Indian Muslims who would choose to opt out of a Hindu-dominated India. This concept, so reminiscent of the idea of a Jewish "homeland" in Palestine (Gunnar Myrdal called it a form of Muslim Zionism), resulted from the primacy of the twentieth century's dominant political "form"--the nation-state within definite geographical boundaries--into whose Procrustean bed the world's diverse populations had to be fitted willy-nilly.