I once came across someone in London who said he belonged to a group who only used Anglo Saxon words and refused to use ‘foreign’ words brought over during the 1066 French Norman invasion. Stunned I thought, surely the Angles and the Saxons were of German origin! And 1066? How long does it take for a culture to be assimilated?

Ethnic identities are once again rising to the fore with Brexit and the new Trump era. Pakistan also has its own homegrown ethnic tensions. Ethnic diversity and cultural diffusion have been the enrichers of human societies. Trade, especially the silk route travelling from Xian to Rome generated so much exchange of not just goods, but stories, language and customs. Wars also brought cultures into contact for years at a time, and in the pauses of active warfare, cultural exchanges took place, many a friendship was forged, and knowledge exchanged. Migration, whether by choice or necessity, including the dark periods of slavery, has been another opportunity for overlapping of cultures. To this we can add the internet, cinema, pop music and the media.

People who made an art of travelling — whether Hiuen Tsang from 7th century China, Al-Biruni.from 11th century Persia, Ibn Battuta from 12th century Morocco, Marco Polo from 14th century Italy or Rocio Otero from 21st century Spain, would give testimony to the joy and excitement of encountering people and places of great diversity.

Yet here we are today, guarding our very recent homogeneity of languages, cultures and histories. In the larger canvas of world civilisations, there are none that were unaffected by another.

“People and places, and their stories are of far greater interest than containing them in rigid geopolitical boundaries. Time and circumstances change us all.

Would the Renaissance have happened if the Crusades did not bring Muslim scholars into contact with their European counterparts? Would Gutenberg have developed the printing press if the 3rd century Chinese art of papermaking was not acquired by Muslims of the 8th century and spread to Europe in the 11th century? Would we be calculating the complex landing of the Curiosity Rover on Mars if Aryabhata’s 5th century concept of Zero was not introduced to the Western world through the Muslims of Spain?

The region that is now Pakistan has seen a staggering number of invaders, settlers and migrants. While the Mehergarh and the Indus Civilisations (of 7400BC and of 2500 BC) remain archaeological conundrums, the almost 4,000 years between the arrival of the Aryans to the migrations during the partition of India and, one may add, the several million Afghan refugees, can be seen as an ever-shifting movement of people.

The story of the Indus Valley, in particular, reads like an odyssey: Aryans stayed in this region for 500 years before they had moved eastwards; the Persians received the most gold revenue from this valley out of their 20 satrapies; the arrival of the Greeks, Scythians and Parthians, the Sakas, the Yuezhi, the Chinese, the Huns and Mongols, the Turkman, Afghans and Arabs who established themselves first in the western part of India (now Pakistan) before they moved through the only navigable 200-mile corridor of Punjab, into India. The British were the only exception who moved westwards from Calcutta.

In the rising noise of regional nationalism in Pakistan, we drown out the amazing stories of the Egyptian prince Saiful Muluk who was transported to the lake in the Swat mountains by a jinn to find the woman of his dreams; we forget to celebrate that Chitral — with a population of 250,000 – is home to 10 distinct languages making it the region with the highest linguistic diversity in the world and that the Romani or gypsies of the world may originally come from Ashret in Chitral; that the Khojis are trackers who can trace the whereabouts of lost or stolen cattle or thieves by the marks they leave in the sand; that ‘Murree’ known locally as Mai Mari da Asthan may be the ‘Resting Place of Mother Mary.’

People and places, and their stories are of far greater interest than containing them in rigid geopolitical boundaries. Time and circumstances change us all. The Nizam of Hyderabad Mukarram Jah –whose grandfather was the world’s richest man, and whose mother was the daughter of the last Turkish Caliph — exchanged his regal attire for denims in a sheep station in the Australian outback. Sultana Begum, wife of Prince Mirza Bedar Bukht, descendent of the last Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar, sells tea in a slum area of Kolkata. The one changed by choice, the other was changed by circumstances. Yet the heritage of both will define their stories and they will forever be measured by it.

Seeing identity as an idea separate from the experience of living (to appropriate the argument the philosopher John Dewey makes about the art object), isolates identity from the human conditions under which it came into being and from how it will continue to evolve. Using the analogy of flowers, Dewey says, while it is possible to enjoy the colour and fragrance of flowers without knowing anything about the plant, if one wishes to understand it one must know about the soil, climate, water and sunlight that enable the flower to grow.

Pakistan is a land of stories, a tapestry woven by its people, both past and present, both new dwellers and old. The threads of the tapestry traverse its length and breadth and beyond. It cannot be cut into pieces to suit administrative or political engineering without losing the narrative altogether.

Durriya Kazi is a Karachi-based artist and heads the department of visual studies at the University of Karachi

Published in Dawn, EOS, April 9th, 2017