In our second-to-last region, India, our scholars were lucky enough to hear from oral historian, social activist, and documentarian Sohail Hashmi. Speaking to our students at Baret’s Morning Program, Hashmi encouraged them to try to imagine any one of the cities they’d journeyed through without migrants. What would we be left with?, he asked. Some homes, some villagers, some upper-class folks. A village, Hashmi said.

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This was no mere hypothetical. To illustrate the point of his question, Hashmi gave our scholars a run through India’s history: paper arrived in India as a result of migrants. Though Indians were cultivating cotton for 5000 years, they did not use a loom or a spinning wheel to create fabric that was uniform or of fine quality until it was introduced by migrants. And if one looks at the more ancient buildings in New Delhi, one can see they are built with massive blocks of stone: the technology that enabled that, limestone plaster, came from migrants as well.

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Hashmi’s point was not that Indians never came up with anything themselves, but that any civilization relies on and benefits from an exchange of culture and technology. His thesis was that these new technologies and cultural elements are what transform a settlement into a city. With the influence of outsiders, even the language changes, as the words for these new technologies and ideas are integrated into the language from the culture that introduced them. The development of the language of Urdu, Hashmi said, was the result of this mixture, this melting pot, if you will. 

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And so a new language is created not by one person or one place, or one country or culture, but in shrines, markets, and armies, in colleges and universities and schools: places where ideas are exchanged and cultures are mixed.

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Hashmi’s point may be controversial, but it is a serious one: if a city is made by these kinds of interactions and cosmopolitan exchanges, any city that starts to act provincially, by demanding people act or speak in one way, no longer has aspirations to be a city: it wants to be a parochial village. And it is the extent to which a city accepts and integrates its migrants, to which its people and institutions engage in cultural cross-pollination, that makes it a city or not a city. And thus buildings do not a city make. 

Perhaps that is one thing we can do, as scholars, with the opportunity we’ve had to become global citizens: to share our story with others and show others that a better world is possible. A world where ideas are exchanged freely, where people can love who they want, go where they please, and be who they really are in the presence of others.

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But in order to become global citizens, it is not enough to be cosmopolitan ourselves: we will have to talk to others who disagree with us. Responding to a question from another scholar, Lia, Hashmi said that without these exchanges, “there is no possibility of any progress. We can stay in our small watertight compartment, and we can drown in this compartment, or we can break out.” 

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What we heard was a call to action: no matter the source of all the internecine conflict and xenophobia, it is all of our responsibilities to create a safer, more inclusive world. It is the words of thinkers like Sohail Hashmi that will ring in our ears as we do our part to turn villages into cities, and to ensure the protection of cosmopolitan values of liberty, inclusion, and the preservation of human rights. 

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Otherwise, he said, we will be giving up “everything that makes sense, and moving towards the Dark Ages which we have taken so long to come out of.” These words did not shake us, as every generation must face its challenges, and we are no different. In a few short weeks, we will go out into the world, our Baret year having come to a close, where the world is waiting for leaders, changemakers, and thinkers like us.

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