Women born and raised in India but married to Pakistanis reveal ambiguities of belonging to divided families and nations

A lot changes when a woman says ‘qabool hai’ in the Subcontinent: her marital status, her residence and sometimes her surname. But for Indian women marrying Pakistanis, it means leaving behind a lot more. Stuck between two identities, what is home for these cross-border brides?





It’s been nearly three decades since Najma flew into Karachi with her Pakistani husband and in-laws after her wedding in Hyderabad in India. After spending her whole life as an Indian, within six months of her marriage, she became a Pakistani citizen.

During her oath-taking ceremony a man drove a hole through her Indian passport using a rod-like machine, destroying it forever. And just like that, Najma had given up her Indian citizenship. In order to travel to India to meet her parents and siblings, she would have to apply for an Indian visa. Recalling that day now, Najma says that she felt lost.

Like Najma, Sadia’s marriage was also arranged in Pakistan. She got married and migrated from India in 1985. But unlike Najma, she had to wait for five years to receive her Pakistani passport. She says that the Pakistani authorities had misplaced her documents. In those five years, Sadia tells me, she lived “illegally”, unable to travel back to India and meet her father. According to Sadia, her “case” set a precedent in her family, and no cross-border marriages were arranged thereafter for her cousins.

People spectate the flag-lowering ceremony at Wagah Border. Cheerful crowds turn up daily to enjoy the thrilling experience and the exercise assumes added significance on red-letter days such as Independence Day | White Star

Sadia’s predicament ended only after her documents were found and she finally acquired a Pakistani passport. Before this, Sadia would often rely on the kindness of her friends to stay in touch with her parents as international calling was expensive and available only with difficulty in the 1980s. Since moving to Pakistan, Sadia had befriended five Indian-born women who had migrated to Pakistan after marriage. She would occasionally send a gift and letter home through them when they travelled to India. Sadia’s father, they told her, would burst into tears at the sight of her handwriting.

The day when she received her Pakistani passport marks an important moment for Sadia. “It was as if I had left home and arrived that day,” she says, recounting how her Indian passport was destroyed in front of her eyes. “As if all routes were blocked, saaray haath pair kat gaye thhe na [my hands and feet were now tied]. Now I’d have to travel to India as a Pakistani.”





AMBIGUITIES OF BELONGING

Every evening, the Wagah-Attari border near Lahore hosts a peculiar ceremony. Indian and Pakistani guards put on a show of quasi-acrobatics on both sides of the white line, with avid spectators cheering them on from the stands, their noise adding to a cacophony of patriotic songs blaring in the background. During the rest of the day, the gates that seem to be theatrical props for this show, witness a more sombre but meaningful procession. Small groups of people walk across the line separating India and Pakistan, with luggage and their passports. No one is cheering for these travellers, but they know that securing permission to cross the border was a huge achievement, made possible by months of patience and hard work.

Among the many people travelling are women who were born and raised in India, but are married to Pakistanis, usually because of kinship ties across the border. Consequently, they have adopted patrilocal residences — living with their husband and in-laws — as is the norm in the Subcontinent. The stories of these women reveal the ambiguities of belonging to divided families and divided nations.

Migrants crossing into Pakistan during Partition | F E Chaudhry, White Star Photo Archives

While Pakistan came into being in 1947, the Radcliffe Line set into motion not just bilateral tensions, but also socio-legal histories and processes that continue to have repercussions today. For this reason, Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, historian and author of The Long Partition and the Making of South Asia, argues that Partition is not a one-time event, but a process.

There was no clear legal definition of a ‘Pakistani citizen’ in 1947. The Pakistan Citizenship Act came into effect in 1951. Of course, even after becoming Pakistani citizens, many had ties in India. People continued to arrive in Pakistan for years after Partition, and wanted to travel back and forth since they had families to visit in India. Sometimes, it was their family members who wanted to travel from India and see them in Pakistan.

A letter to the editor, published in Dawn on October 14, 1969 | Dawn Archives

Visits to the Dawn archives led me to discover a letter to the editor, published on October 14, 1969, that explains the struggles of Indian Muslims who wanted to visit their relatives in Pakistan, and the arduous process of getting a visa to do the same.

The letter starts with the sender, M Yaseen Khan, expressing elation at learning that the government “has extended the period of visa of Indian Muslims from 10 days to one month.” But Khan goes on to elaborate the other difficulties that those planning to visit Pakistan from India still face. “Almost everyone in India who intends to visit this country has to obtain a letter or telegram from a relative in Pakistan that a relative here is seriously ill before he can hope to get a visa,” he writes.

Decades later, some of these restrictions have been eased, but Najma, Sadia and many other women in cross-border marriages are still enmeshed in the paperwork required for an Indian visa, and the strenuous travelling once it has been granted.





NAVIGATING VISAS

Mammo, a 1994 Bollywood film by director Shyam Benegal shows the plight of a fictional character Mehmooda Begum; indeed the fictionalised account rings true for many Pakistani women who can relate to Mehmooda Begum’s struggles. The film depicts the story of the woman, who migrates in 1947 from Panipat to Lahore with her husband. When he passes away, she wants to return to her sister’s home in Bombay and stay with her permanently. She is visiting on a temporary visa. The woman extends her stay, which does not go unnoticed by the police. They send her to Pakistan forcefully, but she manages to enter India again through another stratagem: a death certificate that renders her untraceable — a “chiraagh ka jinn [genie in a lamp]”. As a dead person on paper, she cannot be Indian or Pakistani and escapes surveillance.

There was no clear legal definition of a ‘Pakistani citizen’ in 1947. The Pakistan Citizenship Act came into effect in 1951.

The difficulties dramatised on screen by Benegal in the 1990s, and listed by the complainant in the letter dated 1969, continue to hold true today. On both sides, prospective visitors need to get an endorsement from their relatives, along with a sponsorship certificate that must be signed by a government official.

For a Pakistani citizen submitting an Indian visa application, this sponsorship certificate must come from their Indian relative. The relative, in turn, must get the certificate endorsed by a bureaucrat willing not only to sign the document, but also to give a copy of their identity card and contact details. Along with the sponsorship certificate, utility bills and passport copies of the Indian relative are also required. Any deficiency in this elaborate set of required documents results in the rejection of the visa application. Since Najma’s parents have passed away, her brother has to arrange these documents for her in India when she wants to visit.

Pakistan High Commission in Delhi | AFP

The process does not end with the required documents. Before a visit visa is issued, this lengthy paper trail is verified by the Indian High Commission. The local police officials in India also visit the relative whose details have been submitted by the Pakistani applicant. Once all the facts are checked, the verification is sent back to the Indian High Commission in Pakistan.

Until the early 1990s, the Indian High Commission had an office in Karachi. Now, however, the application has to be sent to the embassy in Islamabad. Earlier, this meant that prospective visitors had to travel to the capital to submit their applications. Around 2004, two courier services became mediators. At their offices in Karachi, they check that all documents are present and that forms are filled correctly. The applicant’s desired courier service then sends the application to Islamabad, and leaves the applicant with the disclaimer that it is not responsible for the final visa decision issued by the Indian High Commission. In 2012, it was decided by the Commission that its counter would only accept applications through those courier services, except in cases of medical or family emergencies.

Badrunnisa, who adopted patrilocal residence in Pakistan in the 1960s, says getting a visa for residents of Karachi was much easier back when the Indian High Commission would be open in the city. She claims she would go there with her documents in the morning, and return with a visa in hand by the evening. Nowadays, she finds the process cumbersome and difficult, complaining that the sponsorship certificate is a recent addition to the application. Moreover, the online form requires one to be computer savvy, which many older individuals like her are not. They then have to locate “agents” — people who make money from assisting with the form and compilation of documents.

The mistreatment of national and religious identities by Narendra Modi’s government has been at the forefront of the news in recent months. With Muslims being treated as an exclusive group and Pakistan being suggested as a ‘country of origin’, there is palpable fear in India.

If the entire process is successful, the visa granted allows visitors to travel to only a few cities in India. For each city, the required documents must be arranged for separately. Najma finds this restriction frustrating. She explains that all her siblings do not live in one city — one of her brothers is in Hyderabad, while her sister lives in Mumbai. She cannot ask every sibling to arrange for a signed sponsorship form along with the copy of a government official’s identity card. Most officials do not trust unknown people with a copy of their identity card; especially considering that it is needed for a Pakistani’s Indian visa application.

Once, when Najma wished to travel for her niece’s wedding, her brother was unsure about whom to approach, and hence she was unable to fulfil the documents required and attend her niece’s special occasion.

The perpetual antagonism between Pakistan and India, where rivalry between the two countries intensifies unexpectedly, often leads applicants into confusion — will they be granted a visa or not? Even when there is stability in Indo-Pak relations, one cannot be sure about being granted a visa. For example, when Najma applied in 2010, her passport was returned after 75 days and her application rejected — without stating a reason.

Sadia, however, says that other times “miracles” do happen. When riots related to the demolition of the Babri Mosque were taking place in the early 1990s, she managed to make an emotional appeal at the embassy, where “a man behind black windows” allowed her to travel to India for two months.

Of course, even after a visa is granted, travelling is subject to certain conditions. First, Pakistani visitors have to reach the specified port of entry/exit in India. The mode of transport has to be chosen carefully because the availability of buses, trains and flights fluctuates constantly. Domestic travel within India also must be planned beforehand because the port of entry/exit is often not the final destination for visitors. In such cases, visitors cannot stay at the port of entry for more than a few hours, because they are often pressed for time and have to register their arrival at the city of their intended stay within 24 hours.

Registration, necessary for a residence permit, is itself a harrowing process, and one that must be repeated again to acquire an exit permit before travellers can leave India.





SHARED IDENTITIES

The histories of these women, or their sentiments for their immediate family members living in India, or the fact that they were Indian citizens once, is seemingly erased when they become Pakistani citizens. As sociologist Nida Kirmani writes in her article, ‘The Ongoing Partition: What Happens When You’re Both Indian and Pakistani’, amnesia is enforced upon people trying to reclaim a shared identity.

As these stories show, a shared identity cannot be claimed in legal terms at all. Bundled into the category of a Pakistani visa applicant and Pakistani visitor, these women’s actual status as post-1947, Indian-born Pakistani citizens is completely overlooked. It is a paradox to have such a history at all. For instance, someone born in India and residing in another country can register as a Person of Indian Origin. But such a document is barred for Pakistani and Bangladeshi citizens.

September 19, 1947, Muslim refugees sit on the roof of an overcrowded coach railway train near New Delhi in trying to flee India | AP file

The mistreatment of national and religious identities by Narendra Modi’s government has been at the forefront of the news in recent months. With Muslims being treated as an exclusive group and Pakistan being suggested as a ‘country of origin’, there is palpable fear in India. Amna felt things were noticeably different when she visited her siblings in Ahmedabad recently. Her Muslim relatives back in India are scared should the state ask for their ancestors’ documents, even though their own passports and aadhar card (identity card) are sufficient proof of citizenship. She asks me rhetorically, “Can you tell me who would have saved such old documents?”

During her visit, Amna asked the neighbours for their Wi-Fi password. She says that they would never refuse in the past, but now they turned down her request. She thinks prevalent discrimination against Muslims has made them fearful about being linked to any Pakistani. It was their belief that the state would trace through the Wi-Fi that a Pakistani is visiting a house near them and this would land them in trouble.

Suspicion for Pakistanis becomes a nuisance for these women. “The rules should be relaxed for us. We are not carrying out any business when we travel, neither are we involved in any kind of politics,” Najma says. “It is only our family that we want to visit...We are not agents.”

While Najma expresses frustration over people being sceptical of women like her in India, even in Pakistan they are never fully accepted. When I ask Badrunnisa how she would identify herself, she answers, “as a Pakistani,” without missing a beat. “I am not even an Indian officially, why would I say Indian?” she asks. “People will call me a spy. If I call myself an Indian, pura khangaal deingey [the authorities would do a full search].”

These attitudes and systems that view these women with scepticism often keep them from visiting their families, making it next to impossible for them to return to India even in times of emergencies.

Amna experienced this when she applied for a visa to meet her ailing mother in 2007. After receiving her visa, she found out that the entry and exit point mandated on her visa had been closed on a temporary basis. An “agent” advised that she travel through the Wagah border instead, through a train that runs from Lahore to Delhi. However, when she reached Wagah, she was stopped from boarding since the entry point on her visa was not Attari. Even though she had to travel urgently, she was asked to go to Islamabad to the Indian High Commission and get the route altered. She ultimately managed to travel to the capital and get the entry and exit point changed. It was changed to Mumbai so that she could avail the quicker option of travelling from Karachi to Mumbai via air. But a day before her flight, her mother passed away.

Such frustrating experiences often deter these women from applying for an Indian visa altogether. Especially in times of conflict between the two neighbours, travelling is considered dangerous. Memories of the 1965 Indo-Pak conflict are fresh in Badrunnisa’s memory as she tells about a trip to Hyderabad in the same year. She was pregnant at the time, and once she reached the city, she asked a relative to send a telegram to her husband who was in Karachi. However, he informed her about the uncertain circumstances, “jang chhirr gayi [war had broken out].”

She feels that, because of the situation, the police were more suspicious of Pakistani visitors in India. Policemen would loudly check on her in the middle of the night, creating a spectacle and waking up even the stray dogs on the streets, who would start barking during these checks. For Badrunnisa, the policemen were “badmaash [mischief mongers]”, who were purposefully creating trouble for her, despite knowing that she couldn’t go anywhere while pregnant. “Where would I have gone?” she asks me, “yeh haalat meri… [in my condition…]”





PARTITIONED SELVES

Such tropes of violence are painful reminders of the violent events of 1947, on which much has already been written. One of the most evocative examples from fiction is Saadat Hasan Manto’s Toba Tek Singh. The story’s title is the nickname of Manto’s fictional character Bishan Singh who is a Sikh inmate at an asylum in Pakistan, about to be transferred to India as part of an agreed exchange of Muslim and non-Muslim asylum inmates. In the asylum, he continuously asks the authorities whether Toba Tek Singh is part of Pakistan or India after Partition but they do not give him a clear reply. As he is being taken across the Wagah checkpoint to Hindustan, he realises that Toba Tek Singh is in Pakistan and refuses to move from no-man’s land — the land between the barbed fences that demarcate the borders of the two new states. Just before dawn, he lets out a scream and falls dead between the two countries.

Sikh pilgrims pray as they take part in a ritual procession at a shrine in Nankana Sahib, on November 7, 2019 | AFP

Gyanendra Pandey, a historian, has coined the term “Partitioned subjects”. It applies to Toba Tek Singh, because he literally dies in no-man’s land, belonging neither to India nor to Pakistan. The women that I have interviewed here are also Partitioned subjects. They grapple with dislocated selves while challenging state-ordained identities through their narrative. Metaphorically situated between two countries since they cannot be both Indian and Pakistani, they try to cope through different strategies.

The most evident of these includes trying their best to be in touch with their family and friends in India. Sadia explains that she had to rely on letters in the 1980s. “Every 15th day, I used to stand and wait for the postman,” she says. Amna explains that a public call office (PCO) near Sabzi Mandi in Karachi was the only place she could go to, to speak to her family in India in the 1990s.

These conversations remind me of my own mother’s stash of old letters and cards, with Indian stamps, collected as memories of her detailed communication with her family across the border. Phone conversations through a PCO could be cut short any time in the 1990s. As someone who has maternal relatives in India, I remember that, even though international calling became available on landlines in the early 2000s, people would not use it much to call India — out of fear that conversations were recorded — whenever rivalry between India and Pakistan intensified.

Today, as the world seals its perimeters amidst a pandemic, millions around the globe are recognising what a privilege it is to travel freely. Others are wondering how long they can last without seeing their loved ones. It is a feeling many of these cross-border brides are all too familiar with.

Virtual modes of communication now help Pakistanis with family in India traverse borders that are difficult to cross physically. Amna remains in touch with her siblings through a group on WhatsApp. She shows the group titled “Happy Family” to me, and reads out jokes shared there in both Gujarati and Hindi, while translating them into Urdu for me. She recounts that a private tutor had to teach her how to read and write Urdu for some time before she got well-versed in the language.

Even now, mailing parcels to family members can be risky. Kainat’s daughter is married to an Indian and lives in Hyderabad in India. Kainat narrates how a parcel containing clothes was held by customs officers in Mumbai. She had sent some clothes to her daughter but, when it went through customs, her son-in-law was told to travel to Mumbai and pay an additional INR 5,000. She complains that he had to purchase a train ticket as well as pay a hefty sum to collect a parcel that only contained clothes. She now tries to navigate through such barriers by asking travellers who are going even as far as the UAE to carry her parcels and mail them directly to her daughter.

Najma also tells me about a trip to the UAE where she met her brother and his family who had arrived from India. They met after 10 years. Of course, this is not a new idea. The Indian tennis player Sania Mirza and her husband, Pakistani cricketer Shoaib Malik, settled in the UAE after their marriage to escape geographical and bureaucratic constraints.

Despite the obstacles in getting a visa and travelling to India, there is no doubt that these women, who were born and grew up in India, feel a strong sense of belonging to the country. They have a unique conception of citizenship because they were once Indians and have “become” Pakistanis because of cross-border marriages.

Amna’s children do not like it when she refers to Indians as “hum log [we]”. Her colleagues also identify her as Indian and often ask her to prepare food for them that is specific to India. For Amna, this further establishes her as being part of a group of “Indians” in a Pakistani city. Through these experiences, she constructs an Indian self that is not different from women who, like her, migrated from India. She tells me how she once had a neighbour who had migrated from a different Indian city. Because of the shared experience, she felt an affinity towards her and would ask her to take care of her children if she had to go out for errands.

Sikh pilgrims stand in a queue to visit the Shrine of Baba Guru Nanak Dev at Gurdwara Darbar Sahib in Kartarpur, on November 9, 2019 | AFP

The categories of Indian and Pakistani become muddled in such a context, which highlights how a material border can try to create two antagonistic identities but cannot alter sentiments. A visa-free corridor between the two countries was inaugurated in November 2019 to allow Sikhs to visit Gurdwara Darbar Sahib in Kartarpur, marking a historic occasion. While the corridor is only a narrow aperture in the Radcliffe Line, it provides much fodder for the imagination for those who hope to meet their families across this very line without unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles.

Today, as the world seals its perimeters amidst a pandemic, millions around the globe are recognising what a privilege it is to travel freely. Others are wondering how long they can last without seeing their loved ones. It is a feeling many of these women are all too familiar with. For they have been going on for years without seeing their families and loved ones; longing for one home, while situated in another.

Names have been changed to protect privacy

Header composed by Leea Contractor

The writer is based in Karachi. She is currently translating a hajj travelogue written by an Indian Muslim in 1950. Her work has been published in The Hindu and The Bangalore Review

Published in Dawn, EOS, April 19th, 2020