The Cambridge Public Library showcased a local filmmaker’s documentary on national political identity in an event on Monday, Dec. 8. South Asia Bound: The Cost of National Identity, filmed in Pakistan over the summer, examines how state narratives built on a myth of unity often overshadow the region’s vast cultural, ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity.
Filmmaker Zac Colah, a senior at Tufts University, screened the film and participated in a discussion about it with Beena Sarwar, a Cambridge resident who is founder and editor of Sapan News. The event host was the Southasia Peace Action Network and brought together a diverse audience from around the Boston area.
The film traces how the British Empire’s 1947 partition of India and Pakistan created a situation where governments crafted myths of national unity that often overshadow the region’s vast cultural, ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity. Colah built his film around four prominent Pakistani scholars and cultural figures: Salima Hashmi, an artist and former dean at the National College of Arts in Lahore; Aasim Sajjad Akhtar, a political economist in Islamabad; Taimur Rahman, a musician and political activist; and Furrukh Khan, academic and anthropologist, also in Lahore. Colah narrates the movie.
Their insights frame the documentary’s core inquiry into how national identities in India and Pakistan are built through exclusionary narratives inherited from 1947.
“To define a ‘them’ is also to create an ‘us,’” Colah said after the event. “And that process, especially when done by the state, is responsible for so much suffering across South Asia, from Balochistan to Nagaland.”
The documentary outlines several forms of internal fragmentation. In Pakistan, ethnic groups such as the Baloch, Pashtun, and Sindhi continue to demand autonomy, language rights, and relief from state repression. The post-screening conversation also highlighted structural and social challenges faced by Shia communities. In India, the history and experiences of Kashmiri, Assamese, and Naga communities complicate any claim to a singular national identity. These examples underscore a region-wide struggle between centralized authority and marginalized populations.
Both reflect the lasting influence of British colonial frameworks. Attendees and speakers noted how centralized administration, extractive economic systems, and entrenched caste and class hierarchies remained embedded long after independence. Audience members pointed specifically to Narendra Modi’s right-wing, Hindutva-oriented Bharatiya Janata Party as an example of how postcolonial governments can reinforce these colonial logics to consolidate power.
The film itself briefly highlights how Pakistan economically and politically disenfranchised what was then East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. Colah framed this as part of a broader regional pattern in which postcolonial governments reproduce inherited colonial tools to marginalize their own populations. Artist and educator Salima Hashmi drew a laugh with her comment in the film referring to military hardware as “boys’ toys” while noting the gendered dynamics of war.
‘Outside-in perspective’
Audience member Sami Safiullah, a Planning Committee Member for Muslims for Progressive Values (of which I am also a member), said he appreciated how the documentary highlighted Pakistan’s ethnolinguistic diversity – contrasting with what he calls a “state-sanctioned monolingual, monoreligious, Urdu-Sunni-Muslim identity.”
He hoped that continued public examination of these tensions could help dismantle neocolonial state structures across Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and the region more broadly.
As Colah noted, “When we are outside of South Asia, we can unite in our collective criticisms and hopes for the region.”
Another attendee, Rajiv Tandon, a retired psychiatrist who recently moved to Cambridge from Michigan, said South Asia might have seen a European Union-like regional integration had ethno-religious discrimination not entrenched such deep political divisions.
The diaspora’s “outside-in perspective” is a privilege that should not be taken lightly, added Safiullah.
Several attendees echoed similar sentiments, describing the event as a rare space for South Asians to reflect collectively on identity, heritage, and the political histories often absent from mainstream discourse.
Colah emphasized that this collective space is part of the work. “There’s something special about being in the same room and exploring an idea together,” he said in an interview. “You could feel the power of the collective — and it spans across borders and continents.”
He added that one of the greatest threats young people in Southasia face today is “a lack of access to more critical ways of thinking about the world around us” and he hopes his films can help counter that.
This is a Sapan News syndicated feature published in collaboration with Cambridge Day, available for republication with due credit.
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