Ooh, could I see Pakistan? My mum's from there!
P.S. If you recieved a notification that I followed you, I accidentally unfollowed you while trying to write this ask-
As always, you're a huge inspiration to me, and stay safe, or should I say..
!محفوظ رہو
I am so, so sorry this took so long 😭😭 I got really ambitious with this piece and i had to take a break in between working on this and resting and actual work before i finally felt satisfied posting! There are still technically a lot of mistakes in this, but ultimately i'm really happy with the results, esp considering that i'm trying to be more proactive drawing backgrounds and lighting!
as always, this pakistan oc belongs to my dear friendly @letttalias and the transp edition is below the readme!
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i saw the tags you put on the mongolian tea video and i'm mega intrigued (i love hearing about food from other cultures!!): googling rondijzhu yields no results, and laghman comes up as a type of noodle dish? would you mind talking a bit abt the breakfast from chitral? :D
@albertinesimonet I'm so, so, so sorry for how long it's taken me to answer this 😭 University's been hell, I really want to give this answer the detail it deserves, so I hope you can forgive the fact that it's, like, a month late.
Anyway! I'm so happy someone on Tumblr's taken interest in my tiny river-valley hometown! This entire answer is going to function as me gushing about it now lol. Some context on what I'm about to say is that while Chitral is in Pakistan, it's in the far, far north of it, bordering the Tajik-majority area of Afghanistan and very, very close to Tajikistan. So while Chitral is, through borders, considered part of South Asia, its culture and cuisine is much more similar to more Central Asian ones.
(There's Chitral on a map of Pakistan!)
Another thing worth mentioning is that 'Chitral' itself is a bit of a catch-all term for the general part of Pakistan that speaks a language called 'Khowar' and its dialects, not taking into account the fact that the cultures within the Chitral district vary wildly based on where exactly in the mountains you are. Just saying that so you know to take what I say with a grain of salt, and just know that it's applicable to a specific part in this specific region of the district (think somewhere in the green portion on the map below).
With that said, breakfast in Chitral can be anything, as long as it's hearty! People generally don't have a solid 'lunch', as midday is the best time to get outdoor work done, so big breakfasts are the norm. In summer, it's butter tea (tea with butter and salt boiled into the milk) with dried fruits (I'm a fan of apricots, but dried grapes, peaches and assorted berries are common too) and Chitrali bread (which is very, very thick; I think some people call it tikki but we've just always called it 'Chitrali bread' lol), usually with cottage cheese. You can stuff the Chitrali bread with minced meat (goat or lamb, mostly), cottage cheese or milk curds too!
Winter, though, is where breakfast becomes key, and which is where the foods you asked about come in– in summer, at least, the weather is better so you do have time to eat in the afternoon, but in winter? No chance. In Chitral, winter breakfasts are massive, warm and hearty as hell. Salty butter tea is still a must, coupled with Chitrali bread which, in winter, is usually stuffed. A lot of people choose to add milk curds into the tea, but I never liked doing that, so. Rip.
Other people add dried rondijzhu (which is a very, very rough Anglicisation of a Khowar word so I'm not surprised nothing came up when you Googled it!) to their tea too. Rondijzhu, which is also served generally at breakfast in the winters, is basically just portions of spit-roasted lamb or goat that are really, really heavily salted (Chitral isn't the place to go if you have cholesterol issues) to make sure they last. A lot of people take aside parts of the freshly spit-roasted meat to slice it up into little chunks and dry it seperately to the rest of the rondijzhu, so they can use it as stuffing, in tea, in mantu (steamed dumplings– pretty similar to Chinese bao!), et cetera.
Another use for rondijzhu, and a way to heat it up for breakfast, is by boiling it with khalli, or laghman (they're both the same thing– we call it laghman but I know people in the vicinity of Chitral city call it khalli). It is indeed a type of noodle dish! It's basically just soft wheat noodle soup cooked with usually either minced meat or chunks of mutton or beef and a shitton of herbs. It's more on the brothy side, and so is super warming, especially when served alongside Chitrali bread. Something people (or, at least, we) tend to do is, when boiling the wheat noodles that were cut the night before for the morning laghman, adding rondijzhu to the noodles. This both warms up the rondijzhu and acts kind-of like stock for the laghman broth. You can take the rondijzhu out and eat is seperately, or keep it in the laghman, your choice (I personally prefer having it seperately, but I'm a picky eater by mountain village standards).
That said, laghman isn't strictly a breakfast food. Hell, none of these are. Chitrali bread is eaten with salty butter tea in the afternoon, laghman and rondijzhu are eaten for dinner too, and a lot of other Chitrali food that I haven't mentioned (like harisa, which we stole from the Armenians, or pilau or any variation of taaw meat– meat cooked on a gridle– et cetera) can also work as 'breakfast' food. As long as it fills you up, keeps you warm, and allows you to not die of various vitamin deficiencies, it's perfect as Chitrali breakfast or dinner.
tl;dr: breakfast is a social construct and, in Chitral, food is food no matter what time of the day it is 💖
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I'm really happy to see other people just as invested in India and the potential he has for an awesome character, and I'm saying this as an Indian who grew up in the US and still doesn't know much beyond the British rule, post-partition and the indus Valley civilization.
seriously though, he deserves so much more screentime than what we got! Like no offense, but how does Wy have more screentime than him?
And it's not like Japan has no connections with India either, their connections date back to the 6th century, India sent aid to Japan in 1949 even after independence and the fact that Japan attacked the, and they currently maintain close relations nowadays.
Anyways, how would you write India, Pakistan and Bangladesh's relationship? I hc all three of them to be siblings due to them having similar culture and only existing after the partition
This ask made me so happy that I waited until i got home and was well rested so I could answer it lol. Thank you for this ask. You've brought up a very good question and I apologise in advance for my long essay reply.
I love hws India because I have made this character my own. He's an enormously fascinating character that one person cannot feasibly scratch the surface of, and I think more writers would be pretty excited about him if they considered writing him. I agree, it's crazy that the micronations have more screen time than a country that has had such a long and enduring impact on global history. It's not just India, by the way—you'll notice a shocking lack of characters that would potentially be brown or Black. I don't want to say racism but at some point absence of Asian characters except South East Asian and the near-total absence of African characters really does make you wonder.
I have a list of Hws India headcanons here if you're interested.
I also have some Historical Hetalia and nationverse fics about him including one I'm so proud of called a little box of Cristall. That was a series exploring India and England's early relationship, which I kind of abandoned because there didn’t seem to be any point in doing the kind of research I was doing if there wasn’t much interest from readers. But I'm proud of the fic, anyway.
You're right in mentioning Indo-Japan relations as one that could have easily been adapted into (several) Hetalia storylines. Their bond is very ancient and one of the theatres of World War II against Japan was in India. The Battle of Imphal was voted Britain's Greatest Battle in 2013. It's also made further complicated because Indians were fighting on both sides of that battle. The Japanese were aided by Subhas Chandra Bose's Azad Hind Fauj. The British were of course fighting with Indian soldiers too.
There could have been some incredible storylines involving India and China, and Cold War storylines involving India and Russia and America. Not to mention the India, Britain, and Russia storylines involving The Great Game. I bring up these more popular characters in the context of Hws India because I know that that's really what catches eyeballs in any fandom, not rarepairs and stuff. My particular interest is in the relationship between India and Britain, but I'll get to that in a soon.
How would you write India, Pakistan and Bangladesh's relationship?
...To be honest, I...probably wouldn't. I also headcanon them as siblings, but ones with an extremely fraught past. The wounds of Partition are still too fresh. There are people (literally in my own family) who remember the horrors of that time. The subsequent Indo-Pak wars and the difficult relationship those countries share to this day, makes me hesitant to "Hetaliafy" them. I've grown up in India, and studied Indian history up to the BA level. But I'm very well aware that there is a tremendous amount of propaganda in India regarding Pakistan. I don't know where my biases are, and at the risk of causing serious offence, yeah...I'd rather not even go there. Ditto writing Hws Bangladesh. I think the only way I'd even consider writing these characters is if I was aided by a Pakistani and Bangladeshi writer.
See because as far as my understanding of things goes, and I am sure people will disagree with me, these borders that exist today are artificial. Not at all reflective of the constant flow of migration and cultural exchange that was happening in the area. The India-Bangladesh border is particularly porous, with a lot of undocumented migration going on, but that's how it had always been. India and Pakistan is an altogether separate thing because the Radcliffe Line (a name for parts of the Indo-Pak border and the India-Bangladesh border), was drawn by a British guy who had no fucking clue about India at all, and no idea the communities he was dividing irreparably. My family is half-Sindhi. The province of Sindh is now entirely part of Pakistan, and Hindu Sindhis had to flee during Partition. Growing up all I ever heard from my elder family members was about the things that they lost during Partition. My Sikh friends have told me similar horror stories from their families. The scars are so pervasive that there's a part of Bombay where a refugee camp was set up. To this day, that area is called Chembur Camp. It's now a residential area, but the memory lingers in the name itself. And why? Why did this happen?
India is a very complicated country. I get annoyed with Indians who complain about its problems and compare it to Europe or America, especially the Nordic countries (oh my god) because India deals with its epic problems on an epic scale. This is a country of a billion people, thousands of languages, hundreds of communities both big and small, and diverse in more ways than I think most people out West can actually imagine. Like unless you've lived here and seen the kind of diversity Indians navigate every single day in even the most minute of interactions, you cannot actually comprehend it. So—and again, this is controversial and people will disagree with me—the hard borders of a nation-state have damaged India. I've been in a room full of historians who discussed that "India as a nation state did not exist before the British" and I am inclined to agree. For the good and the bad, this statement rings true to me.
Nation-states are a fairly modern invention. Hard borders which checkpoints and passports, where everyone carries an ID card—these are modern creations. The problem is, nations are by their definition exclusive. In my Masters' class, the one thing that really, really stuck with me, is when our professor said that nations are refugee-building machines. The second you decide who belongs, you decide who doesn't.
India has never been a nation state in this way. There was never a cohesive "national identity". It's why Britain's Divide and Rule policy was so effective here. In fact, historically, India has been a land of refuge for people fleeing persecution. This was true for artists escaping rigid administrations in Persia, it was true for the Parsi community, and in a thousand different ways, it was always continue to be true. India is currently home to the exiled government of Tibet. It's literally home to a whole foreign government. It's a major bone of contention with China. So, India has always been a society that's porous and...I don't want to say "welcoming" but certainly seems to have room for more people, more communities.
People compare India to Europe, as if every state is its own nation with its own language, like Europe. This again, isn't true. Indian states, culturally, are a lot more cohesive than European countries in terms of culture and history. They are not separate entities operating independently of each other and several times in Indian history, they have been governed by a central power.
The point I'm trying to make is that hard borders are a new thing for India. Very new. And the borders between India and Pakistan, and India and Bangladesh? A product of twentieth century politics. There are different ways to be a united nation. I am not sure that nation-states are the only answer. (By the way, India is not the only country with this problem. Many countries in Africa also have these artificial boundaries that have led to shocking loss of life).
All this being said, how do I write about these countries? I don't have the nuance of perspective. Even saying something like "these borders are artificial" could be construed a controversial statement by non-Indians. All I can reasonably say is that a lot of horrible things happened, that should have been avoidable, but weren't, because some British guy sitting several thousand miles away drew a line on a map.
So, I stick to writing about Kabir and Arthur. Because that's what's crystal clear to me.
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