fter a couple’s divorce or the passing away of parents, the belongings of a house are divided through mutual agreement, prolonged feuds or court settlements. Something similar took place in 1947 with the Partition of India. The subcontinent, which could be described by paraphrasing David Grossman, is a “state that lacks agreed-upon borders” – a region of nations with a disputed notion of shared history.

Soon after independence and the emergence of two states, common resources were split. This included the army, bureaucracy, physical infrastructure, public records, funds and objects of cultural heritage. Thus, the Dancing Girl and Priest King – both excavated from Mohenjo-Daro – are housed, respectively, in New Delhi’s National Museum and in the National Museum of Karachi. Similarly, the sculptures found in the northern parts of Pakistan are distributed between museums in India and Pakistan. The same applies to places of worship, palaces, forts and archaeological sites across both countries. Objects of devotion, manuscripts, miniatures and archives from later periods, such as the Mauryan dynasty, Gupta kingdom, Sultanate period, Mughal Empire and British Raj, are now owned based on their physical location.

But a work of cultural production can be possessed in multiple ways: physically as well as virtually. In the past, a single individual, institution or state could hold on to an object of creative expression. But in the age of mechanical reproduction, the image of an artwork has assumed more significance than its physical presence. It is preserved in printed format, becomes global through the internet and is thus accessible across classes, locations and restrictions.

However, there is a difference between a printed book and a virtual image. The time and effort it takes to produce a book – say, on art history – is far greater than uploading a post on a social media platform. The same applies to its lifespan and credibility. What is included in a book has a longer duration and greater authenticity than what appears on someone’s Facebook, Instagram, or X account.

Since 1947, a number of books – mostly in English – have been published on the art and artists of Pakistan. Jalal Uddin Ahmed’s Art in Pakistan was followed by a range of important texts, including Painting in Pakistan by Ijaz-ul Hassan; Marcella Nesom Sirhandi’s Contemporary Painting in Pakistan; Image and Identity by Dr Akbar Naqvi; Modernism and the Art of Muslim South Asia by Iftikhar Dadi; Art and Polemic in Pakistan by Virginia Whiles; Modern Art in Pakistan by Simone Wille; and The Eye Still Seeks by Salima Hashmi. Yet, apart from the first two – Ahmed’s Art in Pakistan and Hassan’s Painting in Pakistan – none mention the presence or contribution of artists from the former East Pakistan (today’s Bangladesh).

Ahmed’s book was first published in 1954, with subsequent editions in 1962 and 1964, during a time when East Pakistan was still part of the Republic. Hence, its inclusion was natural. Ijaz-ul Hassan’s book, however, appeared in 1991, twenty years after the independence of Bangladesh. Despite this, Hassan acknowledged that chapter of shared history, which has since been – consciously or carelessly – excluded by later authors as well as the custodians of Pakistan’s official historical narrative.

This streak of forgetfulness deserves deeper scrutiny. Not only in our books, but in our broader discourse on art, culture and literature, the creative practices from the former East Pakistan have been erased. This exclusion cannot be attributed to differences in sensibility or poetics—for the modernist canvases of artists such as Zain-ul Abedin, Qamarul Hasan, Hameed-ur Rahman, M Kibria and Murtaza Bashir are comparable to those of their West Pakistani contemporaries like Shakir Ali, S Safdar, Kutub Sheikh and Ahmed Pervaiz.

It is the unbearable memory of what occurred in 1971 that makes it difficult for narrators to incorporate that part of history into their accounts.

It is the unbearable memory of what occurred in 1971 that makes it difficult for narrators to incorporate that part of history into their accounts.

The obliviousness of the past is not confined to one side alone. In the revised history of Bangladeshi art as well, there exists a marginalised space for artists who had established themselves prior to 1971. Similarly, Pakistan has informally disassociated itself from artists who lived in Lahore and were active in undivided India before migrating to India in 1947. As a result, figures such as Satish Gujral, BC Sanyal and SN Gupta receive no mention in Pakistani books on art history. The sole exception is Amrita Sher-Gil, who, having died in 1941, is (unfortunately or fortunately) claimed by both states.

In the absence of written acknowledgement, the physical presence of these ‘sliced-off’ parts of shared history are preserved in state museums. At New Delhi’s National Gallery of Modern Art, one encounters painting after painting by AR Chughtai. Likewise, the Lahore Museum proudly displays works by Amrita Sher-Gil, Abanindranath Tagore, AK Haldar, Nandalal Bose, Rabindranath Tagore and other artists of the Bengal School. Additionally, prints and paintings from the former East Pakistan can still be found in some public spaces.

Intriguingly, in comparison to historians and writers on art, visual artists’ responses to Partition have been peculiar. In fact, the Partition of the Indian subcontinent repeated itself – but instead of occurring “the second time as farce,” it resulted in collective amnesia. In the pictorial arts of the region, the brutal recollections of Partition are not a major subject of visualisation, examination or reflection. Artists have largely been reluctant to engage with the political divide of 1947 and the carnage, exodus and displacement that followed.

Even when addressed by a few, especially those who personally experienced migration, like Krishan Khanna and Satish Gujral, depictions of Partition have tended to be illustrative and formal in nature, not dissimilar to what emerged in this part of the subcontinent. Rare black-and-white photographs of peasants arriving in Pakistan with surviving family members and sparse possessions provided pictorial cues to painters who attempted to tackle the subject. A similar silence surrounds the events of 1971, except for Ijaz-ul Hassan, who addressed the separation of East Pakistan and the atrocities that followed.

By and large, the second Partition (of 1971) has all but disappeared from the visual arts of Pakistan. In Bangladesh, however, echoes of it can be spotted in popular rickshaw paintings, where real events and historical figures are transformed into mythical episodes and monstrous characters – a means of veiling the painful past. Since 1971, efforts have also been made to assert that present-day Pakistan was always an independent ethnographic entity, free of Bengal’s yoke and outside the enormous shadow of India.

An official Urdu-language magazine on art and culture, Saqafat, published by the Pakistan National Council of the Arts in the early 1970s, advanced this thesis. It drew on archaeological findings from Mehrgarh, Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa as historical evidence, tactics employed to justify the secession of East Bengal.

Creative individuals, unlike social scientists, are neither trained nor expected to adopt a research-based approach when dealing with such subjects. Their perspectives are partial, multi-layered – hence, more real and lasting. The Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin, in his essay I Am Afraid, writes: “True literature can exist only when it is created, not by diligent and reliable officials, but by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels and sceptics.”

Partition and the carnage associated with it are not unique to this region. Many other countries have witnessed even greater wars, genocides and conflicts. Germany, for instance, exterminated six million Jews during World War II, inflicted devastation upon its own population and ultimately found itself divided into four occupied zones, administered by the UK, France, the US and the USSR.

The German novelist Günter Grass addressed this historical trauma by weaving an individual’s existential crisis into his narratives. Similarly, German artist Anselm Kiefer has created work that resonates with the horrors of war – depicting fallen planes, burnt libraries, abandoned bones, disused structures, mouldy tools and scorched fields. These evoke a sense of battle and bloodshed that is not only historical or external, but internal – and capable of resurfacing anywhere in the world, as is being witnessed in Gaza today.

The writer is a visual artist, an art critic, a curator and a professor at the School of Visual Arts and Design, Beaconhouse National University, Lahore. He can be contacted on quddusmirza@gmail.com