In Acton, the Pakistani Association of Greater Boston is finalizing preparations for a celebration of Pakistan’s Independence Day, complete with live music, kite flying, food and games.

Ammara Nawaz Khan, the organization’s president, said “everyone is trying to hold onto a piece of their homeland” — including Indian vendors and community members at the event who will celebrate their own country’s independence from Great Britain on Aug. 15, a day after Pakistan’s independence day.

Seventy-seven years ago, Great Britain granted India its independence and partitioned the subcontinent along religious lines, creating a Muslim Pakistan apart from a predominantly Hindu India. The partition resulted in the displacement and deaths of millions, complicating freedom celebrations for the descendants of refugees.

“I can show you the border line on a map — it’s very, very definite — but as communities, we’re very similar.”
Ammara Nawaz Khan, president of Pakistani Association of Greater Boston

Khan, who lives and works as a professor of life sciences in southern New Hampshire, was born and raised in Lahore, Pakistan, and immigrated to the United States in 1999 on a student visa. Khan said leaving a conservative country taught her the meaning of freedom — that it can be won and lost, given and just as easily taken away.

She remembered watching women walk alone at night in New York City, a freedom eclipsed by threats of violence in her home country. Months later, after the Sep. 11 attacks, Khan would receive a call from her dean urging her not to wear her cultural clothes on campus for her own safety.

“Whenever you think about Aug. 14, you think about freedom. To every one of us freedom means a different thing — everyone will tell you a different story about Aug. 14 and how they feel about it — but I came here as an immigrant and I have been living here for almost 25 years now and this is my home,” Khan said.

Khan said she grew up hearing stories chronicling the partition from her maternal grandparents, who were displaced from their home in Delhi, India, while their seven children were still in their teens. Their stories are “sad, but laced with hope,” Khan said, recalling how her grandfather’s Indian business partner helped to escort her grandmother and their children onto a train bound for Pakistan.

“It’s very hard for me to define a line showing what is Pakistan and what is India because we have this shared culture, we have this shared history. I can show you the border line on a map — it’s very, very definite — but as communities, we’re very similar,” Khan said.

In Lexington, the United Cricket League coached by Vivek Gupta, an immigrant from Pune, India, has come to symbolize the same cultural emulsion. Gupta said he harbors no illusions about the inevitability of cultural assimilation, especially for the American-born children of immigrants, but he emphasized the importance of finding cultural connection in a foreign country.

In his league, where Pakistani, Indian and Bangladeshi expats play shoulder-to-shoulder, a passion for cricket unites players.

“We can do business together, we can do trade together. I have a lot of friends who are Pakistani: we meet, we share food, we don’t think of the cultural history,” Gupta said. “But, unfortunately, at a political level that cultural baggage exists.”

For Gupta, the context surrounding Indian Independence Day and persistent geopolitical tension in the region are a footnote to his cultural identity and the bright future he envisions for Indians in India and abroad.

“Today, India is prospering. We left Britain behind in economy this year, we are I think the fifth largest economy in the world, and we are looking forward. So it’s like: bygones are bygones, past is past. We don’t want to look back, we are looking forward,” he said.

The United India Association of New England is also preparing for its own celebration of Indian independence, an event called Spirit of India. It isn’t the group’s biggest blockbuster event — president Neela Gandhi said that would be the organization’s Diwali and Holi celebrations, India’s festival of lights and festival of colors — but Independence Day has special significance to older members.

“We keep the mission to preserve our culture as a focus,” Gandhi said.