DIVISION AND INCLUSION

“Partition may be created by our leaders. But we all have played an important part in it by not questioning... The partition has not only been created in land but within people. It also divides us in terms of religion, cast system, nationality, class and gender. Partition is not between India and Pakistan, but in between us. We separate Hindu from Muslim, women from men and lower class from the upper class. It is not about India or Pakistan; it is about the partition we have created between ourselves.”

Physical Boundaries can impact social, political, economic and environmental aspects of human life. From January to March, we are investigating on ‘Division and Inclusion’ in our History unit. This unit is about building our perspectives.

We began with an activity. A line was put up and we were split into two groups of girls and boys. We were asked to play tug of war. We got to it, and in the following class discussion we realized that the entire ‘war’ wouldn’t have happened if we had just decided to pick up the border in between. This discussion led us to ponder on how much leaders influence the way we think and our mind-sets. They can make or break a mind-set according to their whims and fancies, especially if the crowd is fickle-minded.

As a part of our Unit we talked to Ms. Samina Mishra, who has written a story based on partition called ‘Hina in the Old City’. She helped us understand the influence of leaders in our life and gave us her perspective about some of the topics which we were investigating. She told us how some people aren’t the owners of their decisions but how they should be. “Influencing people through words is what changes life”. This concept is relevant 70 years ago, today and 70 years from now.

The unit explores how we look at incidents, and how people make us look at them. There is no perspective that can be deemed wrong, every opinion is influenced because the history that we learn or know can be subjective.

Tanvi Amrit- 8B