The Indus and the River Jordan — Lost and Found in the Embers of Empire

As IRVI’s first published article, we wanted to frame the way we plan to think and pursue material change around local and global questions of place, land, built environments, ownership of resources, decolonisation and ecological harmony. Our disconnection with our earth and our fellow people is in a chronic condition which requires immediate attention and a coalition of movements to halt and reverse its further spread. The history of indigenous rootedness and their ancient wisdom in situ with the land, is one rich with lessons to undergird a new epoch of solidarity to combat the rootless, itinerant forces of capital exploitation. The people of place of the River Indus and their indigenous peers worldwide are a blueprint for rediscovering our connection to each other and the earth — to transform our self-destructive social relations into something more recognisably human. A global endeavour to imagine different polities which inscribe the inalienable rights of the people of the land.

A tale as old as time, or at least as old as the British empire; an empire so vast that the sun never set, or more appropriately, so violent that the blood never dried. Exactly nine months to the day before the expiry of the British mandate of Palestine on 14th May 1948 in which 750,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed from their historic land, the British ceded the crown jewels of her empire. On 14th August 1947 India was ruptured. The enshrinement of imagined borders into law divided a previously continuous land. Thereafter it would be sanitised as ‘partition’; its catastrophic aftermath directly displaced 15 million people and caused at least 1 million deaths. Maybe even 2 million, or more. The exact figures will never be known. Communities of all faiths who had lived in harmony for generations devolved into sectarian violence. Communalist habits of thought rooted in British divide and rule tactics suddenly exploded into frenzied brutality. Families who had for so long lived in symbiosis with the land were plucked asunder, de-rooted and cast into placelessness. The Indus River, from which India derives its name, became the main artery of newly formed Pakistan. This muddled mosaic haunts the subcontinent to this day.

The river Jordan winds its way for over 250km from the Anti-Lebanon Mountains to the Dead Sea. Its ancient contours have provided an unfortunately convenient division for the modern machinations of imperial nation-building projects. For millennia the river’s bank stretched uninterrupted, westwards to the Mediterranean. Today, the West Bank is disconnected from its sea-faring cousin, Gaza. The 1948 Nakba (“catastrophe” in Arabic) divided Palestine from the river to the sea. In as much as the Nakba has waxed and waned in intensity, it has remained ever present in the lives of the occupied and besieged Palestinian populations for 75 years — the living and fatal legacy of partition has endured. Palestinians were ripped from their place where they laid their earthy foundations. Ancient olive trees which stood as monuments to earthly resilience and their fruit which brought flavour to their culinary arts for millennia were destroyed in their hundreds of thousands. Israeli encroachment and encirclement prevented Palestinian farmers from reaping the full bounty of their land. The intimate relationships nurtured with their land, derived from their ancestral wisdom and the steady rhythms of their temporal and spiritual lives, have for 75 years been viciously ripped, just like their olive trees from the earth. Israel’s ongoing occupation, dispossession and destruction of the land is a violent assault not just on those still living, but on all those who sowed the seeds before them. Mahmoud Darwish sorrowfully captures this umbilical tethering of a people to tree to earth in his poem The Second Olive Tree.

The olive tree at Sheikh Badin, for decades grew tall and strong from its surrogate soil. And for years its story was lost to time. In the unearthing of these forgotten histories, we may begin to rediscover and reclaim the deep roots that bind our peoples together. For whether Palestinian or Pashtun in times before mandates and imaginary boundaries, Fannon urgently reminds us: “For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity”²

Meanwhile, In Sri Lanka, a sequence of increasingly virulent Tamil pogroms were being carried out by a barbarous Sinhalese majority. ‘Coolies’ (indentured plantation labour from India) and Tamils alike, were subjected to unconscionable brutality. The only thing worse than religious and state sanctioned violence against their communities was the dispossession of their land, the land which provided their dignity and connection to the earth. As Ceylon grasped its independence on the coattails of India, its future lay uncertain in the quagmire of communalistic politics that the Raj had stoked. The dispossession of rightless and placeless racialised communities crescendoed as Tamils were driven north to Jaffna and Coolie plantations became ghettoised sites of mass violence. The Tamil Tigers, notorious for the first strategic use of the suicide bomb emerged as a resistance group of teenagers from the jungles of Jaffna. The Tigers history has much to teach us about a young population with no choices but to lay down and die, stripped from their birth right to their ancestor’s land.

And those on the ground political actors who dare to draw attention to the injustice and political bankruptcy; those who organise and mobilise and resist are branded. One scorching branded iron which distinguishes them from the pitiable domesticated humanitarian subject — they become a terrorist. There is no civil enclosure in these imperial frontiers. It is a false binary which demarcates how the west will view the rest. Men, women and children who seek ownership over their land’s resources and challenge this status quo will always fall into the second camp, where their civility — and humanity, is disregarded.

The wretched of the earth’s shared history of struggle must be revived to start a new global conversation. A conversation which resuscitates the spirit of Bandung to furnish the movements which exist in the tight cleavages of hegemonic power and monopoly violence. Not a pitiful pause of navel-gazing, false platitudes and tokenistic land acknowledgements emitting from the ivory towers of the western academy before the usual colonial menu resumes. This is a conversation of action rooted in the earth and soil. To empower ways of being and knowing which non-state peoples have steadily carried in their genomes, by their navigation and defiance of overarching hierarchies which impinge on their freedoms and consequently the freedoms of us all.

Freedom to use their land as their ancestors did. Freedom to move, to disobey and to transform their social relationships without foreign interference. Freedom to toil in a tortured labour of love from the earth — to the river — to the sea. A freedom to build systems of caring labour without integration into global systems of mechanical, inhuman labour. Individual consent has become a ubiquitous feature of the world from boardrooms to the bedroom. Consent of communities is yet to come. The local custodians of these rivers will rise stronger, together. Mahmoud’s immortal certainty of resilient rebirth sprouts from his faith in his people and his land.

We must integrate their stories, their wisdom and their unfathomable bravery and resilience into our corrupted ways of being. We must check our complicity in their oppression at every turn. The legalised lawlessness of our ruling elite knows no bounds. Crocodile tears for murdered children are of no use to anyone. When our news cycle is no longer saturated with obfuscation of genocidal crimes and un-haunted spaces of coexistence emerge again, like a clearing in a cloud of smoke — remember the smoke. And fight to vanish that smoke wherever it remains. Remember that their intifada is our intifada, and our intifada is theirs.

Works cited:

1: Mahmoud Darwish: Translation of ‘The Second Olive Tree’, Arablit quarterly, March 13th 2016.
2: Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 34.
3: Ghassan Kanafani, The Revolution of 1936-1939, xiv.

The author is British born historian with roots in Pakistan. He is a qualified history teacher with a deep interest in the role of emancipatory education in decolonisation processes.