Recounting tales of people who live along the Radcliffe Line, noted author and journalist Bishwanath Ghosh’s latest book, “Gazing at Neighbours: Travels Along The Line That Partitioned India” (Tranquebar), was released at the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) in New Delhi this past weekend.
During a conversation with historian, author and convener of INTACH, Swapna Liddle, Ghosh said, “Travelling for this book was highly educating, apart from being challenging at times and fun all the time. I found that the Radcliffe Line is perhaps one of the most peaceful and boring places on earth. You don’t find soldiers pointing guns at each other, but farmers going about their routine.”
Commenting on her perspective about the book, Liddle said, “What really surprises me as a historian is that I thought I knew history, but this book is full of surprises and it’s not just the travelogue but the nice, easy way in which the history comes across and the whole complexity of things that we assume today was amazing for me. And this was not long ago but the fact that it was so fluid even in the 60s that really surprised me.”
The event was graced by Syed Muazzem Ali, High Commissioner of Bangladesh, who said, “When I was posted in Paris, my relatives would come to see the historic border of France and Germany where the two great world wars were fought. Europe has fought thousands of years of wars and today, one moves freely from one side to another. Someday, I hope our next generation will be able to create a similar situation between our borders too. Border is not the final answer, the answer is how we behave each other in a civilised manner. I hope Bishwanath’s book is able to build bricks of affinity between the two countries.”
‘Magical’ memory
In a chat, Ghosh, who took two years to complete the book, reflected on one memory that has stayed with him. “Sipping jaljeera with a BSF officer at a border outpost in Dawki, a village in Meghalaya overlooking the most fertile region of Sylhet in Bangladesh. It was dusk and I sat there gazing at a river and the village nestled along it, as the call of the muezzin rose from that land. It was, to use the cliché, magical.”
On his takeaways from the journey that he undertook on the eastern and western frontiers of the country, the author said, “I now have a new-found respect for Sikhs. Their religion is built and still functions on service and sacrifice; and in spite of being subjected to adversities from time to time, Sikhs are a happy people, which I find truly remarkable.”