Q.

How has the incorporation of oral testimonies, literary works and broad field of
memory studies altered the trajectory in Partition studies?

The Partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 following the process of

decolonization and the level of political dramas involved in the making of two
separate and hostile nations of ‘India’ and ‘Pakistan’ ( and later East Pakistan or
Bangladesh), and the inseparable human costs as a result of this experiment of
‘identity making’ has few parallels in modern world history. Hindu, Sikh and Islam
suddenly became a national identifier, overnight certain people of a particular
religious affiliation were reduced to minority or worse an enemy of the newly
created ‘state’, which resulted in a mass exodus of millions of people across either
side of the border. This were hardly peaceful times and communally charged
groups freely took to the streets on murderous rampage- mercilessly killing,
raping and looting anyone professing the other religion. Women, children and
even the elderly were not spared, such was the degree of violence experienced in
individual levels. The cause for such an event of unfathomable degree of violence
remains a serious topic for the many scholars attempting on Partition study.
Partition Historiography immediately after the event tended to analyze more on
the political angle of the story, its sources were elitist and mega-narratives were
employed to understand the event.
Earlier the event was understood as a result of a ‘clash of civilization’, a deeply
rooted structural hostility between the Islamic system which provided little to no
room for incorporating any different civilizational experience. Similarly, the
colonial import of various Western post-Enlightenment ideas in the form of
liberalism, secularism, etc. or ‘modernity’ in the words of David Gilmartin played a
central position in recognizing religion as an agent of historical change.
Projections of “Hinduism” and “Islam” as distinct, internally coherent yet mutually
opposing systems in fact themselves had their origins, as many historians have
argued, in a vision of “religion” that has far less to do with the longer-term story of
Hindu-Muslim relations in India than with the structures of thought brought to
India by nineteenth-century European thinkers, which deeply shaped British
colonial (and ultimately much Indian) thinking, defining a particular understanding
of India’s distinctive religious history1. Mutual communal animosity between
Hindu, Sikh and Muslim has always been a recurring theme as causal explanation
when revisiting the partition question, elite politics of the time echoed with similar
colors. The catch phrase, “‘The League for partition’ and ‘the Congress for unity’”
in writings of Asim Roy( echoing Percival Spear) merely reflects the widely
agreed understanding that more or less favored archival sources on one side of the
border and largely neglecting Congress’ majoritarian policy and its dedication in
preserving the Hindu status quo.2 Nationalist historiography were quick to place
the blame on individual political leaders, their ideological and personal level
differences were projected as an acute causal explanation that eventually
precipitated partition. Dube, however by citing examples of Maulana Abul Kalam
Azad’s hitherto censored pages released only in 1988, and the works of Ayesha
Jalal which provides an alternative understanding of Jinnah’s mind, cautions us of
the very dynamic nature of partition as an event and the possibility of being
trapped within one particular narrative.

POST COLONIALISM AND THE CHANGING PARTITION NARRATIVE

The 1990s experienced a major paradigm shift in Partition Historiography, away

from the elitist- statist narratives of understanding the event as a necessary but
unfortunate outcome of a giant project of modern nation-making. This turn of
event began by abandoning the earlier obsession with ‘causal explanation’ and the
focus was redirected into the ‘effects’ of partition on the lives of the various
individuals directly exposed to the unimaginable, although no agreed consensus
was obtained as to the issue of ‘cause’. Subaltern and feminist scholarships started
gaining firm grounds in the partition study taking the focus away from the official
state archives to the actual lived experiences accounted in the form of oral
testimonies, memoirs, popular literature, and movie screens, etc. Localized
violence especially directed against women to violate her modesty, and the other
fuzzy, gray areas of the partition experience has been a major trope of this
approach which serves as an antithesis to the statist mega-narratives. Works of
feminist scholars such as Kamala Bhasin, Ritu Menon and Urvashi Butalia on oral
history played a very crucial role in providing an alternative outlook against the
dominant nationalist accounts and were increasingly being confronted with
questions of sexuality, and violence inflicted on the female bodies into the
forefront of Partition Historiography.3

1
David Gilmartin (2015). The Historiography of India's Partition: Between Civilization and Modernity. The Journal of Asian
Studies, 74, pp 24
2
[ CITATION Dub \l 1033 ] pp 58
3
[ CITATION Dub \l 1033 ] pp 62
 I

Butalia, borrowing Marianne Hirsch’s term ‘post-memory’ penned down an oral

history account to depict a very accurate picture of the traumas of the partition
violence that transcended generations in the form of a collective imaginative
memories which nevertheless affected the lives of the people involved. This she
does, not just by noting the hesitant voices but also by exploring the areas of
silence (whether self-imposed or directed by the state structure). Butalia showed
the complexity of the actual experiences of partition, not only in its immense
individual variation, but perhaps most importantly in the differences of age,
gender, class, and caste. In telling the stories of women, children, and Dalits,
Butalia thus probed not only partition’s violence, but the violence implicit in the
imposition of official narratives on partition’s meanings.4 Bhasin and Menon has
also made sexual violence as the primary site for investigation, they see sexual
crimes against women and children as not just an irrational act of a turbulent time
but as an act deeply embedded in the socio-cultural realm licensed within
patriarchal consensus to which the state is very much in complicity. Dube’s article
recounts the story of the ‘abducted women’, and the repatriation policy of the
independent states of India and Pakistan were not seen as acts of state benevolence
rather the stark contrasts could be seen in the implementation process. Where many
of the abducted women by now leading settled lives quickly realized their
individual choice did not matter, and their value were reduced to just her child
bearing capacities. These were not isolated incidents but were very much within
the purview of patriarchy where women were only identified in relation to the
husband, or father therefore the brandings of ‘abducted women’ exemplified
capturing or owning another men’s property; thereby the body of the ‘abducted
women’ becomes a site of moral contestation. Even much later, collective
imagination has heightened the sense of insecurity among the minorities especially
women, Nida Kirmani investigating memories (actual or imaginative) and
insecurities in a Muslim ghetto in Delhi recounts one women respondent’s remarks
referring to the Gujarat riots-
In Gujarat, look what they did to women. Why? Because “we have to punish Muslims”. It’s the same
with Muslims if they can. If they get hold of their [Hindu] women, then they will do the same thing. They
won’t think that they are being cruel to a woman. They will just think that they are hurting the group.
Women are attacked from all sides…I think that with communalism, fighting, riots, with whatever
happens, women are the ones who suffer the most…I am not saying it’s just about Muslims. If any group
gets the chance, then they will make women suffer. 5

4
David Gilmartin (2015). The Historiography of India's Partition: Between Civilization and Modernity. The Journal of Asian
Studies, 74, pp 27

5
[ CITATION Kir08 \l 1033 ] pp 62
Similarly, Gyanendra Pandey of the subaltern school stressed the responsibility of
the historian to overtly challenge dominant “nationalist” visions, with their
emphases on the “objectified, frozen, and enumerated communities” that the
“modernizing” states of the twentieth century—colonial and national alike—had
used to develop their authority.6 For Pandey, in the memory of a partition survivor
there were no distinctive lines between ‘Independence’ and the mass migrations,
chaos and violence in the local levels were inextricably interwind. Partition as an
event should actually be understood by keeping in mind the significance of
individual players as agents of change. He argued that Partition historiography
needed to “look at Partition not simply as a happening, but as a category of
understanding a happening.”7 Much has been recovered by the new shift in
partition historiography, issues of Dalit politics hitherto understood as being only a
marginal player in the nationalist subset, new understanding now shows us of their
efforts to distance themselves from Congress’ politics and instead saw the whole
partition drama as an issue between two mutually opposing communities i.e.
Hindus and Muslims. Examples of Dalit women left unmolested in the height of
the partition riots lends some credibility to this argument.

II

Partition of the Indian sub-continent is no doubt a great event in term of the

intensity of human sufferings and it is only fair to undertake a spectrum of analysis
to come into any reasonable conclusive understanding of an event of such scale.
Ian Talbot’s study of the post partition cities of Amritsar and Lahore (in both sides
of India and Pakistan) is another example of divergence from the nationalist
narrative heavily coated with the usual signs of being objectified, enumerated and
extremely reductionist; it offers a unique view of the economic and socio-cultural
reformulations caused by partition. By finding a ‘human face’ amidst the chaos of
the rebuilding projects in the erstwhile prosperous cities, Talbot tries to locate the
new social relationships being built as a result of the huge exchange of populations
across both side of the border. Immigration in huge numbers to the newly created
state of Pakistan, leading to the creation of a new nexus of social relations by
supplanting a North Indian Urdu culture was one of the many changes seen in the
social level. These changes are important as it reflects a lingering social pattern as
is most evident immediately after partition in very private issues like ‘marriage’,
where the newly migrated families unconsciously forge a new identity by
expressing reluctance to get into matrimonial alliance with the locals and their
6
[ CITATION Dav15 \l 1033 ] pp 26
7
[ CITATION Dub \l 1033 ] pp 68
preference to marry off their children with people sharing some form of
geographical and cultural proximity in their previous lives across the border.

Another peculiar story of the aftermath and effects of Partition draws our attention
to the eastern city of Calcutta where the division of Bengal into East and West
created a significantly large numbers of refugee population. And their story of
rehabilitation is indeed a very unique one, the center being reluctant to provide
adequate funds to rehabilitate the new East Bengali migrants unlike their Western
Indian counterparts and the limited resources of the state government caused the
refugees to take matters into their own hands. Uditi Sen’s study of the Bijoygarh
refugee colony in the outskirts of Calcutta and the eventual formation of an East
Bengali refugee identity is another exercise of using oral testimonies and memories
in shaping a political identity. For a historian of Partition these are huge repository
for understanding the event from the perspective of the ‘local’ through its human
agencies sharing a collective emotional trauma and social disruptions caused by the
event which precipitated into an identity. Starting out as a squatter’s colony
founded by means of forceful acquisition, how Bijoygarh and the other refugee
colonies fought to legitimize their claim over the illegally acquired lands is largely
credited to the organizational skills of its leaders. Desperate and hungry for a place
to live, its leaders sought all sorts of ways to gain legitimacy but the most common
strategy employed was by invoking emotions and sympathy of fellow East
Bengalis placed in high bureaucratic positions thereby creating an emotional
solidarity. These squatter’s colonies were also seen as inherently anti-
establishment and became a hot-bed for communist politics in many. However,
Bijoygarh is a success story and largely avoided similar fate because of its leader’s
proximity with the political classes and it’s close East Bengali confidants in high
places. Most of the settlers in these colonies were educated ‘bhadralok’ middle
classes and they clung desperately to this notion of respectability as sign of pride,
for standing up for their own well being and their refusal to live by government
handouts. Caste and class became important once things got better, and people
commanding less in terms of education and respectability were seen as inferior.
These revelations are due entirely to the shift in historiography away from large
narratives to a more localized micro narrative which renders a somewhat familiar
humanely touch.

III

Memories as sources for oral history need not be factually correct, unlike statist
narratives it doesn’t have an authority for validation, in other words it is open to
diverse interpretations. Zeba Rizvi’s memories of partition is one such example,
Zeba being only a young girl during the event hardly recalled any incident worthy
of remembering and instead conclusive understanding of the period was obtained
through her years of emotional scars about having to abandon her ancestral home
and the uncertainties she faced as a middle class Muslim woman later. Her clearly
arranged memories for the purpose of interview is one in Hirsch’s ‘post-memory’
frame, her mixed emotions of the event is seen through her literary works where
she nostalgically laments the loss of secularism.8 Deepra Dandekar cautions us of
the difficulty of taking oral narratives and literary expressions as the ‘other’ to
nationalist narratives, “ While the official discourse on Partition has percolated
deep within South Asian society, these publicly accessed oral narratives also run
the risk of being coopted by nationalism or being characterized by its subversion.
They provide a commentary on nation-making through biographical events,
memories and abstract emotions contextualized within discourse and expressed
creatively. Zeba’s secularism-pyar is politically entrenched within an articulate
class of educated and elite Hindus and Muslims who subscribe to Nehruvian ideas
of secularism. Inadvertently, therefore, her interview re-inscribes structural power
in ways that corresponded with her social and emotional context at the time of her
interview, while at the same time subverting religious and gendered spaces of
political entitlement through the political nature of her artistic expression.”9

Much remains to be done before it can confidently be said that partition’s place in
South Asia’s history has been understood. We have yet to grasp fully partition’s
impact on gender relations, household structures, and caste practices, let alone
religious behavior, and more demanding work needs to be done before we can be
sure how partition affected the economy, demography, and processes of
urbanization across South Asia.10 The politics that precipitated partition violence is
far from over, in India the rise of Hindu nationalism has further elevated the fears
of minorities of another partition like event. And time and again the ripples of 1947
is felt, it would be no exaggeration to categorize the Sikh massacre of 1984, the
Babri Masjid demolition (1992-93), and the Gujarat pogroms (2002) under
‘happenings’ of similar nature.

Ningthoujam Suresh Meitei

MPhil History IInd semester
S194DHS05
8
[ CITATION Dee19 \l 1033 ]
9
[ CITATION Dee19 \l 1033 ] pp.12
10
[ CITATION Joy14 \l 1033 ] pp. 312
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Talbot, Ian. "A Tale of Two Cities: The Aftermath of Partition for Lahore and Amritsar 1947-1957."
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