Portraying the “Other” in Textbooks and Movies: The Mental Borders and Their Implications for India–Pakistan Relations

Abstract

ABSTRACTBorders have been traditionally known just as physical cartographic boundaries on maps. However, the epistemological and ontological underpinnings of Border Studies have witnessed constant evolution in the past century. This has brought to the fore the importance of mental borders along with the physical borders. When it comes to a region like South Asia, the lack of regional integration is conspicuous. One of the reasons for this is the existence of mental borders along with rigid physical borders. The paper seeks to understand the process of creation of mental borders between the two South Asian neighbours by probing it from the point of view of school textbooks and cinematic narrative. School textbooks are the most fundamental building blocks of knowledge in any society. Analysis of these texts brings forward the metaphysical construction of mental borders at a very early stage. Subsequently, cinema as a mode of popular culture is an effective tool in order to understand social phenomena from people’s perspective. Here, the process of meaning creation is largely embedded in linguistics and is derived from people’s experiences. The deconstruction of these data sources leads to the understanding of the process of mental border formation.