I owe a debt of gratitude to Pakistan

I'm not the person I would have been had I never visited Pakistan. I am connected in a way that can never be severed.

I have been visiting Pakistan for decades to document the cultural patterns and changes. Over that period, I have learned to consider many of the people as very dear friends. Before I turned up in the loveliest little village in the Punjab province, I had a history in Pakistan that began when my mother, a medical anthropologist from the United Kingdom, dragged me and my sister to Lahore as teenagers.

Those adolescent experiences, it turns out, were the first steps in a lifetime intricately connected to Pakistan, particularly Punjab. I'm not the person I would have been had I never visited Pakistan. I like to think that those people who have put up with me for multiple decades have also been transformed in some subtle ways as a consequence of our interactions.

My first Eid-ul-Fitr in the Attock district, Punjab in 1998. It was only after sharing the fasting with local people that I finally understood how special Eid really is.

In anthropology, we have a concept that helps us describe some aspects of this process of mutual transformation. It's called partible personhood (also dividuality). McKim Marriott (1976) came up with this idea while working in India, while Marilyn Strathern (1988) used it to good effect to help understand the Highland Papuan community she worked with in Melanesia. The idea is simple: we are the result of our interactions with others. This helped Marriott understand the logic underpinning ‘untouchability’— if a Dalit and a Brahmin interact, then a little part of them is transmitted to the other and in effect, they each become a bit more of the ‘other’. In a cultural system wherein Brahmins consider Dalits to be impure, then physical and social distance makes sense. However repugnant the consequences, they are logically consistent with some fundamental ideas of the person.

Along with one of my best friends in Attock district. Malik Asif and his family have been looking after me for more than 20 years.

I feel attached to Pakistan and have a deep and abiding affection for the country and its people. I have built a career on being able to publish on aspects of Pakistani politics and culture. That wouldn't have been possible without people's generosity and patience. I owe someone a rather massive debt. Exactly who should be included in that 'debt register' is less clear. Is it anyone who grew up in Pakistan? Anyone of Pakistani origin? Do I owe the people I know personally? Do I owe the bureaucrats whose names I will never know for giving me permission to even be in the country? What do I owe people in the security services? I may not agree with their politics, but I can't deny that some of them have put their lives on the line to ensure that I come home safely to my family.

I honestly can't satisfactorily reconcile my debt to the people with whom I work. It's a debt that can never be repaid. In truth, I have come to cherish the debt because it reminds me that even though I am not, and will never be, a Pakistani, I am connected to Pakistan in a way that can never be severed. Who I am, for better or worse, is a consequence of a lifetime of giving and taking with people from around the world, and that has sealed my fate as a chronic debtor, particularly to Pakistan.

 

This blog originally appeared on AKU blogs.