Taller fences, but borders can’t stop flow of language, memory

The other day, while surfing the Internet, I came across a talk by the philosopher and spiritual teacher Sri M. He was offering a lucid explanation of the ‘Isha Upanishad’, and in the process, shared a curious little story from his younger days.

Back then, still early in his spiritual journey, Sri M’s guru had advised him to spend time with different sects. One such congregation he joined was of the Iskcon monks in then Bombay. Accompanying a group of them on a fund drive for a temple, he happened to meet Haji Mastan, the underworld don. Mastan was generous with his donation, and the conversation soon veered towards his smuggling activity. When asked why he wouldn’t give up his illegal profession, the don offered a sort of philosophical counter. “Does this world belong to God?” he asked. Everyone nodded. “And is everything in it created by God?” Again, everyone agreed. Mastan then expounded that it was man who had created barriers, borders, countries in God’s world. And all that he did was transport goods from one part of God’s world to another. “That doesn’t make me a smuggler, but a businessman,” Mastan smugly said.

Sri M shared this story not to glorify Mastan, of course, but to illustrate, with a touch of humour, the central idea of the ‘Isha Upanishad’ — the indivisible, seamless unity between the self and the supreme. While the deeper philosophy is beyond my remit, the idea of borders struck. Especially at a time when wars, displacements and rising nationalism dominate global discourse.

In a physical sense, what does the border of a nation or a territory mean: is it just a line on the map? Is it a mark of inclusion and, therefore, of exclusion too? Is a border one to be crossed, or one to be feared? Or one that’s imaginary and permeable? Borders evoke images of barbed wire, immigration checkpoints, and long walls slicing through landscapes. In the current climate — thick with fear, identity politics, and suspicion of the ‘other’ — we hear louder and louder calls for stricter borders, taller fences, and yes, “big beautiful walls”. Which makes one wonder about the lines on the map, in the first place.

Exactly 140 years ago, following what is known as the Scramble for Africa for its rich resources, colonial powers sought to parcel out their territories by drawing arbitrary lines on the map of the continent. Quite similar to the Radcliffe Line, which was drawn up by a British lawyer who had never been to India and never even knew how to draw maps. In merely five weeks, Cyril Radcliffe presided over the division of the sub-continent on religious lines. Did that hasty line trigger the horrors of Partition, or was it just a final act in a tragedy already unfolding — one where mental and emotional borders had long since been drawn?

In this context, one line lingers from the book ‘Land of Lost Borders’ by Kate Harris, which recounts her cycling journey along the Silk Road. She writes: “What if borders at their most basic are just desires written onto lands and lives, trying to foist permanence on the fact of flux?” A beautiful short film, ‘Wagah’, by Supriyo Sen, captures an innocent perspective of such divisions. It follows children in a border village, who sell DVDs of the theatrical parade at Wagah border. One boy says, “I looked through binoculars once and saw someone so close that I told him to move aside — only to realise he was standing far way in Pakistan.” Another boy wishes kids from the other side could come and play with them.

For all their arbitrary origins, borderlands are incredibly vibrant spaces. They’re not just where cultures meet — they’re where cultures intertwine. I remember chatting with a cab driver from Kasargod, a district in Kerala that borders Karnataka. Over the next one hour of the journey, I was treated to an impromptu masterclass in local linguistics: a complex, living mosaic of Malayalam, Kannada, Tulu, Konkani, Beary Bhashe, Marathi, and more. He even rang up a friend mid-ride to demonstrate the subtle differences in dialects. It made me wonder about all the other border regions in India — each with its own kaleidoscope of cultural expressions, often overlooked in the noise of parochial language and border politics.

Maybe this is what Jean-Jacques Rousseau was warning us about when he wrote, “The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said ‘this is mine’, and found people naïve enough to believe him — that man was the true founder of civil society.” Borders may serve a purpose and the lines on the map might divide us, but what flows across them — language, memory, story, song — remind us that we were never really separate to begin with.

— The writer is a Bengaluru-based contributor

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