Incredibly sad that so many people in the imperial core can only learn about history when their superhero entertainment slop barely mentioned it. Watchmen had a scene showing the Tulsa massacre and millions of white people were like, “Wait, that happened?” I guess we need Spider Man 9 to have a scene detailing the Iran-Contra scandal for most people to realize that Reagan wasn’t a great guy.
I legit wasn’t taught about that in school either, even in world history classes. The closest mention of the India-Pakistan split came from I think a movie of the life of Gandhi. Yes, fucking movies were a significant part of my education. American education is a straight up joke
The American education system is trash and skips over the crimes of imperialism.
Even that framing is wrong. It was not part of “India”, an Indian nation let along the nation we have today didn’t exist until the same time as Pakistan. There was the British Raj, the Princely States, and other protectorates. How did the show handle it?
There’s an offhand reference to the Raj being the state before the separation, but it’s easily forgettable, especially if you aren’t familiar with what that was.
A plot point revolves the hero’s grandmother using superhero powers to find her way back to the last train to Karachi as a toddler. The hero experiences some flashbacks to this scene - people making tough decisions and splitting families, people climbing on top of trains since they’re so full.
The same grandma has a line that’s something like “I am a Pakistani but my heart lives in India” in the modern day.
I wonder how accurate that is. Like would someone in that situation consider it India so much as their home being claimed by India. Like an Irish Republican saying “I am Irish, but my heart lives in the United Kingdom” referring to their being born in Belfast. It’s like that’s still sticking to the idea of nations as monadic solid things, while talking about how colonialism and borders suck. Contradictory liberal stuff
In India today we would say the British Raj was India. We call the partition the Partition of India
Yeah but is the lamentation as much that they got taken from India or that these two distinct entities with hard borders exist with peoples homes falling into one or the other? Do Pakistanis who had been in forced population transfers think of their old homes as Indian, or Pakistan/Muslim parts of the subcontinent that are occupied? Cause a better example than Ireland I realize would be Palestinians living mere miles from their homes taken during the Nakba, and I’m hard-pressed to think of one who would call their house that is currently occupied by settlers “Israel”. It concedes the legitimacy of the theft of land
Honestly I’m not sure how it is thought of in Pakistan or Bangladesh. I was just sharing how it is thought of in India. There are territories still in dispute so people would say those areas are occupied I guess. My roommate is Pakistani so I’ll ask him later today though
Funnily enough my grandfather got held up at the airport in Europe because his passport said his birth city was in India. Which was not the case anymore so the staff thought it was fake or something
It was not part of “India”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_subcontinent
actually nvm your comment still makes sense
Yeah I made sure to specify. After all India is named after the Indus river which doesn’t even run through the nation of India save for contested Kashmir. So acquiescing to the idea of a nation state of India as possessing intrinsic borders based on the sub-continent is weird
Yeah it sucks but what do you expect? The American education system does not touch any of this. People who live in the most propaganda soaked nation in history aren’t going to have knowledge of stuff they aren’t supposed to.
