Issues of Identity

Over the course of the semester we have discussed a lot about issues of identity and exile. While collecting data for our final project for this course which is a documentary pertaining to the Baluch people, the issues of identity and exile were themes which kept coming up again and again in the interviews of the Baluch nationals, that we conducted. Most of these people have spent at least three to four years studying or living in Punjab now. One thing which was very prominent was the fact that there are not only Baluchis living in Baluchistan i.e. the people who speak Baluchi language but there are people from other ethnicities as well like the Hazara and the Pashtuns. What we came to know about from some of the interviews from the Hazara community was the fact that they had migrated from Uzbekistan to Afghanistan and then from Afghanistan to Baluchistan in the 1880s and then during the Soviet war in the 1980s. Due to the recent sectarian and ethnic violence in Baluchistan a lot of these people have been forced to move to other places like Europe. What is noteworthy is the fact that these people are in constant exile. They cannot associate themselves to a single place because their language and traditions are very different from the place where they are geographically located. What moved me personally was the question that if a Hazara from Baluchistan who is living in Europe is confronted with the question as to who he is, what would his answer be. This raises a lot of questions as to how people identify themselves.