Healing the Bloody Line: Suturing Indians and Pakistanis into Hindi Cinema and Pakistani Telesoaps

The asymmetry of political with social, linguistic and cultural borders and the contradiction between national citizenship and cultural belonging is now an established trope in the discussion of borders in Partition Studies. Less examined is the dissolution of political boundaries through non state actors’ using informal or formal tactics like kinship and friendship relations, family visits and pilgrimage tours, cultural exchanges and collaborations, linguistic, regional and cultural associations and cinematic and televisual flows for inclusion exclusion of the “other.” Salter’s metaphor of the suture offers an analogous metaphor for the borders whose scars refuse to heal and continue to regulate intercommunal and international relations on the Indian subcontinent till now. But suture, in its extended meaning, also explains Indians and Pakistanis being stitched into the “other’s” cultural texts to be interpellated as cross-border cinematic or televisual subjects. Through examining the diverse ways that Indians and Pakistanis are sutured as viewers, audience and consumers of each other’s cultural products such as Hindi cinema or Pakistani telesoaps and form cross-border viewing publics, this paper illustrates the process of debordering.