Revisiting India’s Partition

Revisiting India’s Partition

New Essays on Memory,

Culture, and Politics

Edited by
Amritjit Singh
Nalini Iyer
Rahul K. Gairola

LEXINGTON BOOKS
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Names: Singh, Amritjit. | Iyer, Nalini. | Gairola, Rahul K., 1974-

Title: Revisiting India's partition : new essays on memory, culture, and politics / edited by Amritjit
Singh, Nalini Iyer, Rahul K. Gairola.
Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016008132 (print) | LCCN 2016009339 (ebook) | ISBN 9781498531047 (cloth :
alkaline paper) | ISBN 9781498531054 (electronic)
Subjects: LCSH: India–History–Partition, 1947. | India–History–Partition, 1947–Influence. | South
Asia–Politics and government. | South Asia–Social conditions. | Collective memory–South Asia.
| Memory–Social aspects–South Asia. | Memory–Political aspects–South Asia. | Politics and
culture–South Asia.
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 For our parents,
who are not responsible for any shortcomings in this volume

Kesar Singh Uberoi (1911–1994) and Balbir Kaur (1913–1985)

J. N. Iyer (1931–2009) and Seetha Narayanan
C. Krishna Gairola (1926–2003) and Indira Bhojwani Gairola
 Contents

Preface ix
Introduction: The Long Partition and Beyond xiii
Amritjit Singh, Nalini Iyer, and Rahul K. Gairola

Part I: Approaches to Partition 1

1 Specters of Democracy/ The Gender of Specters: Cultural
Memory and the Indian Partition 3
Radhika Mohanram
2 Lost Homes, Shifting Borders, and the Search for Belonging 21
Jasbir Jain
3 A Will to Say or Unsay: Female Silences and Discursive
Interventions in Partition Narratives 35
Parvinder Mehta
4 Migrations in Absentia: Multinational Digital Advertising
and Manipulation of Partition Trauma 53
Rahul K. Gairola

Part II: Nations and Narrations 71

5 Exorcizing the Ghosts of Times Past: Partition Memoirs as
Testimony 73
Tarun K. Saint
6 Difficult Choices: Work, Family, and Displaced Women in
Partition Writings 91
Debali Mookerjea-Leonard
7 Refugees as Homo Sacers: Partition and the National
Imaginary in The Hungry Tide 107
Amrita Ghosh

Part III: Borders and Borderlands 123

8 Property, Violence, and Displacement: Partition in Sindh 125
Nandita Bhavnani
9 The Long Shadow of 1947: Partition, Violence, and
Displacement in Jammu & Kashmir 143
Ilyas Chattha

vii
viii Contents

10 From Frontiers to Borders: Partition and the Production of

Marginal Spaces in North East India 157
Babyrani Yumnam
11 Looking East: Melodramatic Narrative, Ecotheater, and the
“Forgotten Long March” in Jangam 177
Amit R. Baishya

Part IV: From Pakistan to Bangladesh 195

12 The Never-Ending Partition: Pakistan’s Self-Identification
Dilemma 197
Amber Fatima Riaz
13 Partition and the Bangladeshi Literary Response 217
Kaiser Haq
14 Cosmopolitan Aesthetics in Shakeel Adil Zada’s Baazigar 233
Masood A. Raja
15 The Nexus of Class, Identity, and Politics in the
Representational Economy of Partition: The Case of Hasan
Azizul Huq 245
Md. Rezaul Haque
16 Partition and Beyond: Intizar Husain’s Quest for Meaning
and Vision 261
Tasneem Shahnaaz and Amritjit Singh

Part V: Partitions Within 281

17 Buckle in the Hindu Belt: Contemporary Hindu-Muslim
Violence and the Legacy of Partition in Banaras 283
Jeremy A. Rinker
18 Hyderabad, Partition, and Hindutva: Strategic Revisitings
in Neelkanth’s “Durga” (2005) 305
Nazia Akhtar
19 Partition’s Others: The View from South India 329
Nalini Iyer

Index 343
Contributors 359
 Preface

In Boston, a city of confluences, on the margins of the South Asian Liter-

ary Association (SALA) annual conference in January 2013, the three edi-
tors got into an engaging conversation over dinner about the negative
impact the 1947 Partition continue to have on South Asian populations at
home and abroad. We also noted with a certain sadness and irony how
most literary scholarship on the subject had rarely gone beyond a few
well-known novels, short stories, poems, or films. One of us suggested
the idea of organizing a one-day pre-conference in October 2013 at the
Annual South Asia Conference in Madison, Wisconsin. We were encour-
aged by the generous support we received for our plan from both Ohio
University and Seattle University. The response to our Call for Papers
was even more heartening—seasoned and younger scholars, graduate
students, and even a couple of undergraduates sent us proposals for
papers they wanted to present at the pre-conference. Still others wrote to
us that while they were unable to participate in our daylong conference,
they would consider submitting their work for possible inclusion in an
edited book or be willing to support us in other ways.
The pre-conference brought together a dozen scholars as presenters
and many more as audience participants. We had excellent Q & A ses-
sions and many more informal exchanges over lunch and dinner. By the
end of the day, we were persuaded, as were most participants, that while
Partition studies had virtually been an industry for half a century or
more, many aspects of the exhilarating and tragic events from the 1940s
surrounding India’s independence and its Partition remained unex-
plored. For example, at least two of our presenters in Madison bemoaned
the relatively little attention Bengal and the Northeast had received in
scholarship and fiction, compared with literally hundreds of texts in
multiple genres that explored the many facets of the horrible violence
that had afflicted towns and villages throughout Punjab in 1947. Another
presenter shared her ongoing work on the oral narratives she was collect-
ing from her Sindhi relatives in Mumbai and in North America. More
than ever before, we were persuaded by our Madison exchanges to rec-
ognize the relevance of the “Long Partition” paradigm developed by
Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, who had, as it were, given a fuller
voice to what we were attempting to articulate in Boston nine months
earlier. Several of the participants from the Madison pre-conference are
represented in this volume. However, all three of us already knew that

ix
x Preface

the move from a set of conference papers to a substantive edited collec-

tion of interdisciplinary essays would be a long journey. And yes, it has
been an exciting and sometimes exhausting journey—nearly three years
of seeking Partition scholars across the globe, revisiting the structural
design of our table of contents every six months, vetting each essay and
persuading our contributors to revise (sometimes more than once), non-
stop editing, and eventually finding a wonderfully empathetic editor in
Lindsey Porambo at Lexington Books.
Such a transnational, multiyear project cannot be completed without
the assistance and participation of others. The three editors would like
collectively to thank the following for collegial support of one kind or
another in our work on the volume over three years: Meena Alexander,
Ashna Ali, Ranjit Arab, Tapan and Rekha Basu, Alok Bhalla, Amy Bhatt,
Ellen Bigler, Jaysinh Birjepatil (1933–2015), Devika Chawla, Pradyumna
and Vijay Chauhan, Rey Chow, C. Lok Chua, Girish Dahiya, Rakesh
Desai, Howard Dewald, Abigail Doyle, Marsha Dutton, Robin Field,
Christopher Ian Foster, Robert Franceschini, Radhika Gajjala, Amrita
Ghosh, Alex Gil, Barbara Grueser, Sham Lal and Usha Gupta, Gabriella
Gutierrez y Muhs, John C. Hawley, Anika Holland, Manju Jaidka, Jasbir
Jain, Sonora Jha, Prafulla Kar, Suvir Kaul, Saad Khan, Rita Kothari, Mal-
ashri Lal, David Lelyveld, Auritro Majumdar, Kasia Marciniak, Catherine
Matto, Daphne Metts, Chandra Mohan, Gail Minault, Samina Najmi,
Ashok Puri, Yogesh and Greta Puri, Anisur Rahman, Masood Raja, David
and Judy Ray, Roopika Risam, Roshni Rustomji-Kerns, Sumanyu Satpa-
thy, Kshama Sawant, Tasneem Shahnaaz, Albeena Shakil, S. Shankar,
Carol Shelton, Chetan Singh, Prem, Reshma and Samir Singh, Pavitra
Soram, Yashoda Nandan Singh, Rajini Srikanth, K. L. Tuteja, Kamal Dev
Verma, K. G. Verma, Rajiva and Meera Verma, Richard Rahul Verma,
Bonnie Zare, and Linda Zionkowski. We want to thank Luke Kubacki
and Dylan Rickelman for their splendid assistance with the index.
Collaborative work can be most fulfilling when the team of co-work-
ers can stay focused on shared project goals. The three of us are fortunate
to have enjoyed a working relationship of mutual respect wherein we
have complemented one another’s strengths. Rahul and Amritjit would
like to salute Nalini—the pivot for the project—for her hard work and
organization, as well as for her gentle and persistent directive skills. Nali-
ni and Rahul thank Amritjit for his energy, passion, and vision that have
shaped this project from inception to completion. It is only because of the
countless hours Amritjit spent on soliciting and mentoring several essays
into final shape that our volume has a global scope. Nalini and Amritjit
valued Rahul’s careful analytical response to each essay and his sharp
knowledge of critical theory.
Amritjit Singh would like to thank his parents, Professor Kesar Singh
Uberoi and Mrs. Balbir Kaur for giving him and his five siblings a loving
home and high ideals of education and service before, during, and after
 Preface xi

the Partition—in Rawalpindi, Muktsar, and Ambala Cantonment. He

would like to thank Param, Mona, and Monica Chawla of Long Island for
their wonderful friendship and hospitality that make things happen. He
is also grateful for the support he has received from both Department
Chair Sherrie Gradin and Dean Robert Frank at Ohio University for the
Madison pre-conference. He would also like to thank CIES and USIEF for
the Fulbright-Nehru Fellowship at the University of Delhi for 2014–2015.
A vote of thanks is also to due Associate Dean Brian McCarthy for facili-
tating a Humanities Research Fund grant to help with cover art and the
index.
Nalini Iyer would like to thank her parents, J. N. Iyer and Seetha
Narayanan for inculcating in her a deep sense of history and social jus-
tice. She also thanks her husband, Ganesh Iyer, and daughters, Mallika
and Geetanjali, for their love and support throughout this project. She is
grateful to Seattle University, particularly Provost Isiaah Crawford and
Associate Provost William J. Ehmann, for facilitating a much needed sab-
batical in 2015 to focus on this project.
Rahul Gairola would like to thank his father Professor C. Krishna
Gairola for being a model of dignity and scholarly exactitude and his
siblings, Sapna and Sounjay Gairola, for their love and support. Most of
all, he would like to thank and honor his mother Indira Bhojwani Gairola,
an inspirational figure who has taught him compassion, humility, and
hard work even after losing everything, including her father, during the
Partition violence and the consequent migration. He is also grateful to his
colleagues at Yale, Oxford, CUNY, and the University of Washington,
Seattle, for offering generous feedback that empowered the years of revi-
sion invested in this project.
Megan DeLancey and Anthony “Nick” Johns of Lexington Books have
been both helpful and patient in dealing with production details. Our
greatest debt is of course to our nineteen contributors for their richly
layered and thought provoking contributions, as well as for their pa-
tience with our repeated requests for information and/or for revisions. To
them, we say with William Faulkner, “They endured.”
 Introduction
The Long Partition and Beyond

Amritjit Singh, Nalini Iyer, and Rahul K. Gairola

In Amitav Ghosh’s novel The Shadow Lines (1988), the narrator’s grand-
mother is pondering her upcoming trip to Dhaka in January 1964. Dhaka
was then in East Pakistan, and the grandmother now living in Calcutta
was born in Dhaka when it was part of an undivided Bengal. Her grand-
son imagines that her concerns involve traveling on an airplane, but his
grandmother is in fact wondering what it would be like to cross the
border. She asks her son, the narrator’s father, if there are trenches or
lines that sharply demarcate India from East Pakistan. When she learns
that there are no physical markers that are visible from the sky, she won-
ders, “What was it all for then—Partition and all the killing and every-
thing—if there isn’t something in between?” 1 When her son, a seasoned
traveler, explains that borders are really experienced within airports and
that she would have to fill out forms, the narrator realizes that his grand-
mother “at that moment had not been able to quite understand how her
place of birth had come to be so messily at odds with her nationality.” 2
The grandmother’s bewilderment in Ghosh’s novel resonates with the
emotions that many South Asians continue to face about their “messy”
identities in real life at home and in the diaspora.
Just before the British left India in 1947, they divided the subcontinent
into two nations, India and Pakistan, allegedly in response to the irrecon-
cilable differences between the two major religious communities. The
narrative of such differences between Hindus and Muslims was bolstered
by sweeping assumptions that almost all Muslims supported Moham-
mad Ali Jinnah’s demand for a discrete Muslim homeland based on the
“two-nation theory” whose rationale had been laid out in the 1930s by
figures such as Chaudhry Rahmet Ali and poet Sir Muhammad Iqbal. 3 In
Ghosh’s novel, years after the grandmother’s death, the young protago-
nist revisits her notion of lines, maps, and borders:
I was struck with wonder that there had really been a time, . . . when
people . . . had thought that all maps were the same, that there was a
special enchantment in lines. . . . What had they felt, I wondered, when
they discovered that they had created not a separation, but a yet-undis-

xiii
xiv Amritjit Singh, Nalini Iyer, and Rahul K. Gairola

covered irony . . . a moment when each city was the inverted image of
the other, locked into an irreversible symmetry by the line that was to
set us free—our looking-glass border. 4
Thus he recognizes that you cannot create two nations by simply draw-
ing a line on a map.
In producing the “looking-glass” borders that involved India and Pa-
kistan in 1947 (and India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh since 1971) whose
collective population today is well over 1.5 billion, the departing coloniz-
ers did not care about the impact of such borders on the daily lives of
people within national boundaries—especially the place of religious mi-
norities. Muslims, who formed the overwhelming majority in Pakistan in
1947, became a much smaller minority in independent India than before
and also became the chief targets of anger and suspicion over the Parti-
tion. On the other hand, Hindus, Christians, and/or Sikhs in Pakistan and
Bangladesh have faced even tougher challenges than Muslims in postco-
lonial India that have included coerced conversions, ethnic cleansing, and
forced migrations. In 1947, the departing British ignored the serious is-
sues of communication and functioning that the West and East wings of
Pakistan would face, separated as they were by a thousand miles of inde-
pendent India. The borders were porous and ambiguous, and to this day
many border disputes remain. 5 In any case, the formation of two new
nations did not resolve questions of citizenship, identity, language, cul-
ture, and belonging for diverse groups.
Thus the Partition of British India was an arbitrary political solution to
what were seen or constructed in the postwar 1940s as irreconcilable
differences between the political factions vying for influence while fight-
ing for the shared goal of independence. As Christopher Hitchens has
pointed out, the departing British colonizers left behind dozens of accom-
plished or simmering partitions in their former colonies across the globe,
sometimes for neocolonial economic advantage, or simply to add shine to
their self-image of evenhandedness—Cyprus; Palestine and Israel; Iraq
and Kuwait; Northern Ireland; Somalia, Eritrea, and Ethiopia; etc. Hitch-
ens frames his commentary on these partitions powerfully by using ex-
cerpts from W. H. Auden’s infrequently cited poem, “Partition,” which
evokes Sir Cyril Radcliffe’s hasty partitioning of British India into India
and Pakistan as both clueless and irresponsible. Unnamed in the poem,
Radcliffe gets down to work, “to the task of settling the fate of millions,”
using out of date maps: “And the Census Returns almost certainly incor-
rect/ But there was no time to check them, no time to inspect.” 6 As Hitch-
ens put it,
The true term for this is “betrayal,” as Auden so strongly suggests,
because the only thinkable justification for the occupation of someone
else’s territory and the displacement of someone else’s culture is the
testable, honorable intention of applying an impartial justice, a dis-
 Introduction xv

interested administration, and an even hand as regards bandits and

sectarians. In the absence of such ambitions, or the resolve to complete
them, the British would have done better to stay on their fog-girt island
and not make such high-toned claims for themselves. The peoples of
India would have found their own way, without tutelage and on a
different timetable. 7
But they were not given a chance. As Saros Cowasjee notes with irony in
his introduction to the anthology Orphans of the Storm: Short Stories on the
Partition of India (1995):
Nehru made his tryst with destiny and became India’s first Prime Min-
ister. But what of the “others”?—the tryst of the common people
caught between the greed of politicians for power and the unseemly
haste with which the Labour Government in Britain decided to transfer
power. It is on record that Lord Louis Mountbatten, then Viceroy and
Governor General of India, got his Reforms Commissioner, Mr. V. P.
Menon, to draw up the plan for the division of India in just four hours.
With this plan he himself flew to London and got Mr. Attlee and his
Cabinet to accept it in exactly five minutes. “It is all very well,” says the
historian Leonard Mosley, “to draw up a plan to divide India in four
hours and accept it in five minutes. How, in a land consisting of
250,000,000 Hindus, 90,000,000 Muslims, 10,000,000 Christians and—
particularly—5,000,000 Sikhs, do you implement it?” . . . The imple-
mentation of the plan with neither foresight nor preparedness led to a
holocaust. . . . Foot convoys, some of them 800,000 strong and seventy
miles long, moved between the two dominions. Thousands were
slaughtered on the way; an equal number fell victim to cholera and
other diseases. 8
Cowasjee and others have invoked eyewitness accounts of the hideous
levels of violence that took place during population transfers across the
borders for which the departing colonial government had failed to make
adequate and secure arrangement, presumably because they had not an-
ticipated the huge size of these migrations. Trains packed with murdered
refugees arrived at various stations on both sides of the border, with
messages scribbled on the sides of the carriages reading “A Gift from
Pakistan” or “A Gift from India.” Cowasjee cites one Captain Atkins of
the British army who recalls a road where a convoy had passed: “Every
yard of the way there was a body, some butchered, some dead of cholera.
The vultures had become so bloated by their feasts they could fly no
longer, and the wild dogs so demanding in their taste they ate only the
livers of the corpses littering the road.” 9 In commenting on the horrific
communal violence a year earlier in Calcutta, William Dalrymple cites
Margaret Bourke-White. The American photojournalist, who had wit-
nessed the opening of the gates of a Nazi concentration camp a year
earlier, wrote that Calcutta’s streets “looked like Buchenwald” in August
1946. Sadly, this violence had been instigated by the ruthless Bengal
xvi Amritjit Singh, Nalini Iyer, and Rahul K. Gairola

Chief Minister, H. S. Suhrawardy, a Muslim League leader, who justified

his role by writing in a newspaper that “bloodshed and disorder are not
necessarily evil in themselves, if resorted to for a noble cause.” 10
As part of the longstanding “divide and rule” colonial strategy, the
British had manipulated and exacerbated ethnic, religious, and tribal dif-
ferences in most of their colonies to ensure their own survival in the face
of resistance from emerging freedom movements. In India, the Partition
and the rush to get it done are often attributed to the power struggle
between Nehru, independent India’s first Prime Minister, and Quaid-e-
Azam Jinnah, Pakistan’s first Governor General and its founding father,
and their inability to set aside personal visions of nationality in the inter-
est of compromise. In this version of history, as put forth by Nisid Hajari
in Midnight’s Furies (2015), 11 the British were beneficent, befuddled on-
lookers who attempted yet failed at peacemaking as communal blood-
shed across all borderlines began to spread. Yet such a narrative of Parti-
tion does not quite explain what catalyzed people to perpetrate horrible
communal violence, representing the Indian masses as mere pawns of an
all-powerful departing colonizer. There were greater complexities to this
tragedy, and the factors that influenced the Partition of Punjab along the
border of West Pakistan were vastly different from those that mattered in
Bengal, on the border of India and East Pakistan. Thus, the Partition is a
tragedy of multiple narratives, and any single historical account might
cover just one geographical facet, or the perspective or bias of one partic-
ular region or community.
The Partition resulted in a bloody division of land as well as the rup-
turing of shared histories, cultures, and memories between Muslims, on
the one hand, and Hindus and Sikhs, on the other. The summer of 1947
witnessed the migration of some fourteen million people and the deaths
of at least one million. The nationalist historical accounts—signaled most
famously by Nehru’s “tryst with destiny” speech to India’s Constituent
Assembly on the late evening of January 14, 1947—often present the view
that independence was achieved triumphantly for India and Pakistan
predominantly by Gandhi’s campaign of non-violence, a perspective that
was evoked powerfully by Richard Attenborough in his film Gandhi
(1982). 12 At the same time, this long cherished freedom brought with it
staggering numbers of the dead, mutilated, raped, or forcibly converted.
For years afterwards, the two nations also had to cope with the catas-
trophic consequences of forced migrations as well as other rehabilitation
challenges. These tragic realities on both sides of the borders have left a
lasting mark and wounded memories for millions throughout South Asia
and in South Asian diaspora. Although many historiographical accounts
of Partition focus on the causes of this event and consequently track the
“high politics” of major players such as the Indian National Congress, the
Muslim League, Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, Mas-
ter Tara Singh, and others, much else is pushed aside, silenced, and left
 Introduction xvii

unexamined. The 1947 Partition and its horrible violence continue to

speak to us through the many historical traces that still haunt South
Asian cultures and lives on a daily basis.
Partition remains a strong presence in all kinds of events and deci-
sions in unexpected ways—for example, in a 2015 art exhibit titled After
Midnight: Indian Modernism to Contemporary India, 1947–1997, as well as
the aforementioned 2015 border agreement between India and Bangla-
desh. This art exhibit at Queens Museum in New York City juxtaposed
Indian art from the 1940s through the 1970s with the globalization of
contemporary Indian art after 1997 (the golden anniversary year of In-
dia’s independence) to understand art and nation-building during two
critical periods of paradigm shift in Indian culture and self-definition. 13
In August 2015, India and Bangladesh signed a long-delayed agreement
that would, as the Government of India Ministry of External Affairs de-
clared, reduce border friction and also fulfill “a major humanitarian need
to mitigate the hardships that the residents of the enclaves have had to
endure for over six decades on account of the lack of basic amenities and
facilities that would normally be expected from citizenship of a State.” 14
One would think that the need to mitigate such hardships would have
been quite evident in, say, 1948 or 1972, and yet it took until 2015 for the
two governments finally to ratify the agreement. From our opening ex-
ample referencing Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines to contemporary art
to the normalization of borders left unsettled for decades, it is clear that
South Asians continue to confront in both art and life the unresolved and
tragic consequences of the hastily executed partition of the subcontinent.
Simply put, the Partition is not a bygone occurrence of 1947, but rather an
ongoing event whose historical traces cast a long shadow in the region
and across the globe today. As William Faulkner would say in relation to
the dark legacy of the American South, “The past is never dead. It’s not
even past.” 15

THE LONG PARTITION: A WIDER FOCUS

We recognize that Partition marks “a defining moment that is neither

beginning nor end,” as deftly formulated by Ayesha Jalal. 16 Our volume,
Revisiting India’s Partition, adapts and extends the term “the Long Parti-
tion” as developed by Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar in her afore-
mentioned book, to underscore the ongoing impact of the 1947 Partition
in a variety of domains. Zamindar asks us to consider the Long Partition
beyond the events of 1947 and to “stretch our understanding of ‘Partition
violence’ to include the bureaucratic violence of drawing political boun-
daries and nationalizing identities that became, in some lives, intermin-
able.” 17 In her essay “From Conclusions to Beginnings: My Journey with
‘Partition,’” Rita Kothari concurs with Zamindar and also notes that Par-
xviii Amritjit Singh, Nalini Iyer, and Rahul K. Gairola

tition studies need to move beyond the events of 1947; she proposes that
scholars study partition as “an organizing principle for nations and com-
munities.” 18 Some seventy years after the Partition, our contributors help
us to expand Zamindar’s notion of the Long Partition to examine the
continuing cultural, political, economic, and psychological effects of 1947.
In inviting and selecting essays for this volume, we were alert to the need
to acknowledge that the Partition has made a serious impact on many
regions beyond the typically studied Punjab and Bengal. With this vol-
ume, we join a growing number of Partition scholars who have begun to
explore these other regions and communities affected by Partition. For
example, Siddiq Wahid has recently noted how Ladakh has experienced
multiple partitions that fragmented its Buddhist and Tibetan cultural
links and destabilized its links to Central Asian cultures. 19 Again, it is
necessary to examine and contextualize many events that preceded 1947,
such as the 1905 failed Partition of Bengal, or, as Amit Rahul Baishya
observes in his contribution to this volume, how events like the Forgotten
Long March of 1942 had already exposed the multiple geopolitical fault
lines in the Northeast region of the British Raj. 20 In addition, very sadly,
frequent episodes of sectarian violence all over South Asia continue to
trigger and reinforce the horrible memories of the Partition, both lived
and received, for ordinary citizens, scholars, and artists in both produc-
tive and destructive ways.
On the one hand, such violence continues to feed suspicion and mis-
trust around millions of Muslim citizens in contemporary India who had
not supported the demand for a separate Pakistan and/or did not choose
to move there. The narrative of Muslims as outsiders seems never to end
and many obscurantist, right-wing Hindu organizations are doing all
they can to support and expand that narrative in every possible way. On
the other hand, such violence has inspired and cemented the determina-
tion of activists, scholars, writers, and filmmakers to put up resistance to
the forces of communal hate and to strengthen the workings of the na-
tion’s democratic institutions and processes. This is how Urvashi Butalia
explains the sources of her activist scholarship on the oral narratives of
the Partition in her influential work The Other Side of Silence (2000): “It
took the events of 1984 to make me understand how ever-present Parti-
tion was in our lives, too, to recognize that it could not so easily be put
away inside the covers of history books. I could no longer pretend that
this was a history that belonged to another time, to someone else.” 21
Butalia was a witness to the October–November 1984 violence against
Sikhs in Delhi and elsewhere that was largely orchestrated by the Con-
gress Party in response to Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s assassination
by her own Sikh bodyguards. These security guards were enraged by her
military-style assault in June 1984 on the Darbar Sahib, the Golden Tem-
ple, in Amritsar, the holiest religious site for Sikhs, to flush out armed
militants. 22 Similarly, the nonagenarian Pakistani writer Intizar Husain,
 Introduction xix

the focus of a jointly authored essay by Tasneem Shahnaaz and Amritjit

Singh in our volume, acknowledged how the brutal and repressive meas-
ures taken by West Pakistani political and military leaders against East
Pakistan in responding to the 1970 democratic election results that even-
tually led to the creation of Bangladesh compelled him to confront the
unresolved violence of the 1947 Partition in his novel Basti (1979; English
translation, 1995). In 2014, in looking back at the 1971 situation in East
Pakistan, Husain told Tehmina Qureshi, “It was as if 1947 revisited us
three decades later.” 23 As someone who has spent a lifetime attempting
to make sense of the Partition, Husain told interlocutor Alok Bhalla in
1997 that he finds “what happened in 1947 was so complex, so devastat-
ing, that I have yet to understand it fully.” 24 In the same interview with
Husain, Bhalla challenges all South Asians to get past the never-ending
blame game over the Partition:
As post-colonialists we blame the British, as Pakistanis we blame the
Indians, as Hindus we assert that it is the Muslims who started it all,
etc. But we never look at ourselves and say that we—each of us—
contributed to the nightmare that our lives have become since 1947. Till
we can do that, we shall never be able to bury the dead—or find ways
of living within a peaceful civilization. 25
To this day, most communities in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh have
failed to meet this challenge of overcoming the angers and resentments of
the past. On the contrary, in each country there are forces in place that
seem determined to instigate much more menacing tribalization of the
population based on caste, class, and religious identity. Very little effort
is being made in the contemporary context to distinguish the large Mus-
lim population in India (the second largest in the world within the boun-
daries of any one nation) from Muslims, say, in some parts of the Middle
East. As M. J. Akbar would remind journalist Thomas L. Friedman, Mus-
lims in India are the only large Muslim community in the world that
have—despite their continuing social and economic challenges—enjoyed
a sustained democracy for over six decades and have become part of a
significant middle class because of India’s secular constitution. And even
though Muslims in India do not display the frustrations that Muslims
living in authoritarian societies manifest and have no interest at all in
radical groups such as al-Qaida, most non-Muslims in India appear to
still treat their Muslim compatriots with suspicion and mistrust. 26
The hermeneutic lens of the Long Partition constructs a conflicted
nationhood in the subcontinent, which continues to affect the people of
India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh every day. The diasporas created by
Partition are unique—overnight, neighbors found themselves belonging
to two different nations and one’s brother became his other. Like the
grandmother in Ghosh’s novel, many became reluctant diasporic sub-
jects; others were forcefully evicted and never quite settled in a new
xx Amritjit Singh, Nalini Iyer, and Rahul K. Gairola

home. Their sense of homelessness spurred further dislocations and mi-

grations and radically shaped the social fabric of community politics in
the UK, US, and Canada. As novels like Anita Rau Badami’s Can You
Hear the Nightbird Call? 27 and oral histories gathered by the 1947 Partition
archives ([Link]) in Berkeley, California, testify,
Partition lives on in the memories of children and grandchildren of those
who were uprooted. As Ananya Jahanara Kabir’s work 28 recognizes, the
dialectic of memory and forgetting shapes narratives of Partition not as a
closure or healing of trauma, but rather as a uniquely South Asian way of
narrating Partition. How diasporic Indians confront the shock of recogni-
tion about the high incidence of communal violence in contemporary
India is best illustrated by novelist M. G. Vassanji’s bewildered response
to his ancestral homeland Gujarat, a region that was not directly implicat-
ed in the horrors of the 1947 Partition. Born in Tanzania and a longtime
resident of Canada, Vassanji visited India for the first time in 1993, when
Bombay was coping with the communal violence that followed the 1992
demolition of the Babri Mosque by a Hindu mob spearheaded by BJP
leader L. K. Advani. In his travelogue, A Place Within: Rediscovering India
(2008), which is based on multiple India visits, Vassanji narrates the chal-
lenge he faced in coming to terms with the 2002 violence in Gujarat,
Gandhi’s birthplace:
At yet, in recent times, the bloodiest communal violence, with the most
hideous attacks on the human person, especially on women and chil-
dren, has taken place with some regularity in this ancestral homeland,
among these people I thought I knew, whom I have called—culturally,
ancestrally—my people. For me to come to this realization has been
profoundly shocking. If anything makes me feel alien here, it is my
utter incomprehension of such violence, my inability to shrug it off. My
generalization of Gujarat, too, was naïve, I realize; but, there it is, in
tatters. 29
As Vassanji’s lament demonstrates, the Partition did not fully resolve
political rights or minority representation issues in any of the indepen-
dent nations of South Asia. As evidenced in Rakesh Sharma’s documen-
tary film Final Solution (2003), even in a state such as Gujarat that had not
been directly involved in the 1947 Partition, it was easy to ignite fires of
communal hatred and violence in 2002, fires that continue to burn inter-
mittently throughout the land.
Even more troubling are the territorial tensions between India and
Pakistan that have spilled over into full-scale wars in 1948 and 1965, in
addition to making regular headlines through frequent cross-border inci-
dents of insurgency and violence visited upon civilians. Immediately fol-
lowing emancipation from the British Raj, India and Pakistan went to war
over Kashmir, which had been an autonomous kingdom ruled by a Hin-
du king with a Muslim majority population. While many semi-autono-
 Introduction xxi

mous kingdoms and principalities decided to join either India or Pakistan

in the period leading up to independence, both Kashmir and Hyderabad
(the latter with a strong Muslim Nizam at its helm) held out. When Paki-
stani “irregulars” attacked Kashmir, the ruling Dogra Hindu Maharaja
Hari Singh sought Prime Minister Nehru’s military help and signed an
instrument of accession to India as a condition for Indian military assis-
tance. A promised U.N. referendum on Kashmir never took place, and
the territory has become a warzone pitting rebels seeking an independent
Kashmir against an occupying Indian army that claims to “protect” the
people. 30 In his essay for our volume, Ilyas Chattha exposes the contro-
versial nature of this accession, even as he examines the communal
bloodshed in Jammu in September–November 1947 that led to the migra-
tion of over 200,000 Muslims to Pakistan against the backdrop of continu-
ing cyclical violence in Jammu and Kashmir. As Nazia Akhtar’s essay in
our volume explains, Hyderabad was forcibly incorporated into India in
what the central government described as a “police action” in 1948.
Pakistan had been yoked together as a two-part nation out of the
Muslim-majority areas of Punjab and Bengal, along with several other
areas that comprised West Pakistan. From its inception, Pakistan strug-
gled continuously and often violently with a national identity. Whereas
Indians narrated Partition as a loss, and often used the metaphor of a
house divided, Pakistan attempted, especially in the mid-1970s under
General Zia-ul-Haq, to reinvent itself as part of a continuous Pan-Islamic
heritage and culture aligned with the Arab world—a history that Masood
Raja and Amber Riaz unpack, in distinctive ways, in their respective
essays in this volume. Although they shared a common religious identity,
Punjabis and Bengalis had little in common with each other linguistically
and culturally. Furthermore, the creation of an Islamic republic of Paki-
stan next door contributed to the widely held perception in independent
India of a monolithic Muslim identity that was strongly contradicted by
the diversity of everyday beliefs, attitudes, and practices of Indian Mus-
lims, a large minority analogous in size and potential to African
Americans in the US today. Within Pakistan, fault lines had begun to
emerge as early as 1952 in the still nascent nationalist discourses based in
religion when West Pakistan reiterated its imposition of Urdu as the offi-
cial language upon East Pakistan, whose population deeply cherished
Bengali language and culture. Tensions peaked between East and West
Pakistan in 1970, when West Pakistani leaders refused to honor the elec-
tion results that gave the Awami League of East Pakistan a clear majority
and instead launched a full-scale military attack. Forced to cope with
millions of East Pakistani refugees, India felt compelled to intervene, thus
leading to the formation of the new nation of Bangladesh—a historical
trajectory that poet-scholar Kaiser Haq examines through the lens of liter-
ature and personal experience in his essay for our collection. For Ban-
gladeshis, 1947 did not signal freedom but just a change in imperial mas-
xxii Amritjit Singh, Nalini Iyer, and Rahul K. Gairola

ters—the British left but were replaced, as it were, by Punjabi Muslims

who administered East Pakistan like a colony. For many South Asians,
the tragic events of 1971 unraveled the postcolonial euphoria of Islamic
nation-building in a culturally and geopolitically diverse region where
culture, memory, and faith were intricately interwoven. 31
Even Jinnah, who had been an ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity
for the first three decades of the twentieth century, only gradually
reached his resolve to ask for Pakistan, a separate homeland for Indian
Muslims. As Ayesha Jalal has noted in an interview, 32 it would be errone-
ous to equate Partition with the demand for Pakistan, as Jinnah was in
fact lobbying for a stake in power for Muslims in India once the British
quit. In the 1940s, in order to break the impasse between the Congress
and the Muslim League, both Gandhi and C. Rajagopalachari had em-
braced the idea of dividing the two Muslim-majority states, Punjab and
Bengal, to form a new Muslim homeland—an idea that Jinnah had initial-
ly rejected as “a moth-eaten Pakistan.” As Jalal puts it,
By insisting on a wresting power at a strong center with only the most
nominal concessions to the provincial autonomy demanded by the
Muslim-majority provinces, by endorsing the Hindu Mahasabha’s call
to partition Punjab and Bengal, and above all, by refusing to grant
Muslims the share of power at the all-India level demanded by Jinnah,
the Congress led by Nehru and Patel foreclosed the possibility of keep-
ing India united. Jinnah did miscalculate in believing Gandhi’s voice
was still dominant in the Congress. Such cynical maneuverings by hos-
tile political parties turned into ground realities very quickly, leaving
millions in distress. 33
With the emergence of a new Muslim nation that sat in unease on both
the eastern and western borders of India, it became much easier in many
ways to feed the frenzy of Hindu fundamentalism in postcolonial India.
On January 30, 1948, a zealot named Nathuram Godse—seeing Gandhi as
a figure intent on endlessly appeasing Muslims—assassinated Mahatma
Gandhi as he arrived for the evening prayer meeting at the Birla Mandir
in New Delhi. Muslims throughout India heaved a sigh of relief that
Gandhi’s assassin was not a Muslim—avoiding another bloodbath of
communal violence when the nation was still reeling from the Partition
tragedy.
Hindu reactionary thought had in fact begun to surface in the 1920s—
quite powerfully so with the anonymous publication of V. D. Savarkar’s
monograph Essentials of Hindutva (1923). Savarkar (known affectionately
as Veer Savarkar within the widening right-wing Hindu circles) propa-
gated a distinctive Hindu cultural identity (Hindutva), contradistin-
guished from the identity of Indian Muslims and Christians whose
sources of inspiration and identity were tagged as “foreign.” Savarkar
linked “Hindutva” to “Hindu Rashtra,” a concept of Hindu polity that
 Introduction xxiii

called for the protection of Hindu people and their culture and placed
emphasis on the need to develop political and economic systems rooted
in native thought instead of Western ideas. During the following three
decades, other thinkers and activists such as K. B. Hedgewar, M. S. Gol-
walker, Shyama Prasad Mookerjee, and Deendayal Upadhyaya contrib-
uted variously to these discourses. Such ideological developments would
give rise to to the formation of many Hinducentric organizations such as
the Hindu Mahasabha, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and Shiv
Sena, and eventually to a political party named the Bharatiya Jana Sangh
(rechristened the Bharatiya Janata Party, BJP, in 1980). The BJP had major
electoral success and headed a coalition government in New Delhi from
1998 to 2004 with Atal Bihari Vajpaye as the Prime Minister. Around
1990, a strong desire to place Hindutva at the center of India’s polity and
national identity allowed Hindu fundamentalists to coalesce around re-
claiming the birthplace of Rama, the hero of the ancient Hindu epic Ra-
mayana. Hindu fundamentalists claimed that Emperor Babar, the first
Mughal, had constructed the Babri Masjid on this mythical birthplace of
Rama and destroyed the temple at the site. On December 12, 1992, a
Hindu mob, led by BJP leader L. K. Advani, marched to the historical
mosque and destroyed it with their hands, thus sparking large-scale vio-
lence between Hindus and Muslims across India. In 2002, similar vio-
lence spread when a train carrying Hindu pilgrims marking the tenth
anniversary of the destruction of the Babri Masjid was allegedly set afire
by Muslims at Godhra, Gujarat. Retaliatory violence flared across Guja-
rat, and the erstwhile Chief Minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi, was
widely held responsible for directing and abetting violence against Mus-
lims. Twelve years later, as leader of the Hindu-centered BJP party, Modi
swept the polls to become India’s Prime Minister. Such communal riots
are catalyzed by and have their repercussions on cross-border relations
between India and Pakistan, making the subcontinent one of the most
politically volatile regions in the world. In the South Asian context of the
global “War on Terrorism,” the December 13, 2001, attack on the Parlia-
ment of India, the November 26, 2008, attack on Mumbai, and the contin-
ued violence in Kashmir offer concrete examples of the Long Partition—
examples that are not simply subcontinental political problems but rather
embody global political tensions of the new millennium between the
West and current extremist movements within Islam. 34
All these developments demonstrate that despite the secularist ideals
promulgated by Prime Minister Nehru and others, sectarian tensions had
continued to expand through the decades, pitting Hindus and Muslims
in communal riots throughout the country and reinforcing the “two-na-
tion” sensibilities that had buffered the demands for the Partition in the
first place. No attempt was made to investigate the gargantuan failures of
how the Partition was carried out, and it became common in a Hindu-
majority India to place the blanket blame for the Partition on Muslims,
xxiv Amritjit Singh, Nalini Iyer, and Rahul K. Gairola

ironically even more so on the Muslim citizens who had chosen to stay on
in India! Rana Dasgupta, author of Capital: The Eruption of Delhi (2014),
claims that most South Asians have still not come to terms with the
Partition, for which we may partly blame the absence of monuments,
museums, or devices such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in
South Africa that might have helped that process. In describing the
growth of slums in Delhi and the concomitant land deals of developers
that have marked the steady and ambitious building of the National Cap-
ital Region (NCR), Dasgupta argues that the erudite and syncretic civil-
ization that united Muslims and Hindus in Delhi in the early twentieth
century was destroyed by the 1947 Partition and its turmoil. In fact, Das-
gupta arguably blames the greed, corruption, hubris, and violence of
contemporary Delhi upon the immediate consequences of the Partition—
the departure of so many Muslims and the influx of huge numbers of
bitter and scared Hindu and Sikh refugees from West Punjab.
Those of us who are familiar with short stories like Sadat Hasan Man-
to’s “Khol Do,” Rajinder Singh Bedi’s “Lajwanti,” and Shauna Singh
Baldwin’s “Family Ties,” novels such as Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India
(originally published as Ice-Candy Man) and Shauna Singh Baldwin’s
What the Body Remembers, as well as films like Earth (based on Sidhwa’s
novel and directed by Deepa Mehta) and Khamosh Pani (Silent Waters,
2004, directed by Sabiha Sumar), recognize the poignancy of a frequently
made observation that the Partition played out on the bodies and spirits
of women of all religious backgrounds. Not only did Partition solidify
definitions of what it means to be Hindu, Sikh, or Muslim while minori-
tizing the subcontinent’s other religions like Sufism, Christianity, Juda-
ism, and Zoroastrianism, it also validated violence—especially gendered
violence—as a means of formulating citizenship, ethnicity, and belong-
ing. In Violent Belongings: Partition, Gender, and National Culture in Postco-
lonial India, Kavita Daiya argues that Partition has shaped the discourse
of citizenship and belonging in South Asia and its diaspora since 1947.
She writes, “The Partition constitutes a field of transformation and a dis-
course that became the condition of possibility for the gendered ethni-
cization of citizenship and belonging in postcolonial South Asia.” 35
Several scholars have examined the violence against women perpetu-
ated during Partition. As Butalia has noted, 36 the women were victims of
violence when they were raped, mutilated, killed and when they lost
children, spouses, parents, and siblings. She also underscores the impor-
tance of not just seeing women as victims but also recognizing that wom-
en have agency in these situations as well. Enumerating several stories
from Partition and also afterwards in the violence against Sikhs in 1984
and the Bhagalpur communal violence of 1990, Butalia demonstrates
women’s agency by recognizing that some women chose to die to save
their honor or sometimes participated in violent acts or prevented aid
being given to the “other” victims. Thus women were both victims and
 Introduction xxv

agents of patriarchy during riots. Similarly, it was not just women who
were subject to a variety of violations; so also were men. There were
scores of real life stories of men who were during the Partition forcibly
converted to Islam and circumcised to indicate change of faith. Bapsi
Sidhwa uses this narrative line effectively in her novel Cracking India
(1992) in relation to Hari, a Hindu, who converts to Islam to survive in
Lahore after partition. In Borders and Boundaries, Ritu Menon and Kamla
Bhasin 37 examine the impact of state interventions in returning abducted
women and the trauma that followed for the individuals and their fami-
lies, which add another dimension to gender assaults.
The essays in our volume trace these variant ethnic, nationalist, and
transnational trajectories of postcolonial South Asia in distinctive inter-
disciplinary contexts and provide a multifaceted approach to Partition
and its aftermath. In this collection we have attempted to establish a
dialogue among a diverse group of scholars and perspectives to help
rethink Partition studies in the twenty-first century. Our contributors
have engaged contemporary scholarship and theory from such diverse
fields as trauma studies, postcolonial studies, gender studies, ecocritical
studies, and digital humanities to examine many neglected areas of the
Long Partition. Essays in this collection explore, among other topics, bor-
der issues in the Northeast, the impact of Partition on Southern India
including the police action in Hyderabad, the impact of Partition on post-
colonial politics in Pakistan and Bangladesh, the recasting of Partition
narratives in advertisements by corporations like Google and Coca-Cola,
as well as Partition in Sindh and the Long March from Burma 1943.

THE ESSAYS THEMSELVES

Against the backdrop of growing scholarship on the subject, nineteen

contributors from all across the globe have come together in our volume
to offer a multi-vocal and transnational analysis of Partition, and to push
forward a discussion of the legacy of decolonization in South Asia. In
particular, we have sought to explore new areas of Partition studies be-
yond Punjab and Bengal, and to recognize how generations of South
Asians at home and abroad continue to engage with collective memories
and new art forms, such as graphic narratives of Partition by Vishwajyoti
Ghosh. 38
This book is organized into five sections. The first brings together four
essays on different approaches to Partition studies. Drawing upon
Jacques Derrida’s Spectres of Marx, Radhika Mohanram examines the
links between cultural memory and democracy and in particular how
Partition’s specter haunts Indian democracy. Jasbir Jain examines a varie-
ty of Urdu literary texts by writers such as Sadat Hasan Manto, Tahira
Iqbal, and Sorayya Khan to understand the cultural baggage of terms
xxvi Amritjit Singh, Nalini Iyer, and Rahul K. Gairola

such as refugee or mohajir that articulate our sense of belonging and “at-
homeness.” In unpacking these terms, Jain demonstrates how the past
(the migrations across the Radcliffe Line in either direction) continues to
live in the present. Building on the work of historians such as Gyanendra
Pandey as well as feminist readings of Partition by scholars like Urvashi
Butalia, Parvinder Mehta examines female silence in select texts of Parti-
tion. Such silence must be decoded, she notes, to examine patriarchal
assumptions and female agency in Partition narratives. Rahul K. Gairola
suggests how insights from digital humanities, particularly #DHpoco,
help us think critically of the use of Partition narratives by Coca-Cola and
Google. Taken together, these four essays offer nuanced theoretical ap-
proaches to the Long Partition that might help us in transcending the
Partition’s dark legacy toward new understandings, healing, and recon-
ciliation.
The second section, “Nations and Narrations,” brings together three
essays that focus on specific narratives—from Partition memoirs to a
study of Amitav Ghosh’s novel The Hungry Tide and narratives about
single women in Bengali literature. The essays in this section emphasize
the importance of literary narratives in capturing the trauma of the Long
Partition. Saint’s essay examines a variety of Partition memoirs by Mau-
lana Abdul Azad, Ram Manohar Lohia, and others that have been rele-
gated to the margins of Partition discourses. By refocusing our attention
on these memoirs, Saint invites us to consider their testimonial function-
ality as they bear witness to the trauma of Partition and its persistent
afterlife. Amrita Ghosh’s essay examines the significance of the Morichj-
hapi massacre of Dalit refugees in 1979 and its literary representation in
Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide. Ghosh argues that the dynamics of the
state marginalizes the narratives of Dalits affected by the Long Partition.
Debali Mookerjea-Leonard examines the impact of Partition on middle-
class women who were brought into the workforce following their dis-
placement. Using literary representations from fictional works by Naren-
dranath Mitra, Shaktipada Rajguru, and others, she studies the double
displacement of such women who must navigate the tensions between
familial bonds and work skills and often choose to be displaced once
more.
The four essays in the third section called “Borders and Borderlands”
examine the arbitrary and shifting borders and boundaries that emerged
during Partition and their impact on nation, identity, and belonging.
Building on the work in her book The Making of Exile: Sindhi Hindus and
the Partition of India (2013), Nandita Bhavnani examines the comparative-
ly low levels of violence in Sindh in the summer of 1947 and the role of
landed property as a major catalyst for subsequent violence there. In her
essay, she examines how disputes over property—including Hindu evac-
uee property—shaped the violent conflict between Sindhi Muslims and
muhajirs after the Partition in Sindh. Focusing on Kashmir, Ilyas Chattha
 Introduction xxvii

examines how communal violence led to the production of refugee popu-

lations. He argues that this communal violence played a central role in
defining the ongoing crisis in Jammu and Kashmir as well as in the state-
formation processes in both India and Pakistan. The essays by Babyrani
Yumnam and Amit Rahul Baishya extend the discussion of the Partition
beyond Bengal to Northeastern India and Burma. Yumnam examines
political processes in the Northeast that have received scant attention in
political and academic discourses of Partition and contextualizes her dis-
cussion of political mapmaking as part of the capitalist expansions and
state formations in the region. Baishya studies the “Forgotten Long
March” of Indians from Burma during World War II and explores this
mass displacement through the Assamese novel Jangam by Debendranath
Acharyya.
The fourth section, “From Pakistan to Bangladesh,” explores postcolo-
nial politics in Pakistan and in the formation of Bangladesh. Amber Riaz
examines why the secularist Muslim nation-state imagined by Pakistan’s
founder, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, failed after General Ayub Khan’s reign.
Riaz focuses in particular on the new challenges of self-definition faced
by Pakistan after President Zia-ul-Haq began reframing Pakistan as part
of the pan-Islamic world under the Wahabbi influence imported from
Saudi Arabia. The execution of former Prime Minister Z. A. Bhutto under
Zia ul-Haq had already signaled the end of social democracy and the
hegemony of military dictatorships. Eminent poet and scholar Kaiser
Haq explores the evolution of Bangladeshi literary responses to Partition
and how the Partition in Eastern India differed from what occurred in the
Western borderland, as he weaves into his analysis his own experiences
with the 1971 freedom struggle in Dhaka. Masood A. Raja studies the
longest serialized Urdu novel Baazigar, by Shakeel Adil Zada, published
over a thirty-year period in the magazine Sab Rang, to explore how its
author offers a perspective on the foundational narrative of Pakistan
within a cosmopolitan framework. Tasneem Shahnaaz and Amritjit
Singh’s essay focuses on the works of Intizar Husain to explore his am-
bivalence toward Pakistan, his country, and his position as an autono-
mous artist, which sometimes conflicts with his location as a Pakistani
citizen. In particular, this essay suggests that Husain’s memories of a
utopian life in undivided India and its inclusivity challenges the novel-
ist’s ability to build a new identity as a Pakistani. Md. Rezaul Haque
studies the Partition narratives of Hassan Azizul Huq, who migrated to
East Pakistan in 1954 and whose stories engage the duality of identity as
Bengali Muslim and middle class.
The fifth and final section, “Partitions Within,” focuses on the impact
of Partition in regional areas seldom discussed within Partition studies.
Jeremy Rinker studies the legacy of authoritarian colonialism and Parti-
tion in contemporary Banaras and its complex social dynamics. He exam-
ines the role of custodial torture in prisons and how it marginalizes com-
xxviii Amritjit Singh, Nalini Iyer, and Rahul K. Gairola

munities and reconstructs inequalities in the city. Ultimately, Rinker pro-

poses that the work of reducing communal antagonism must unbuckle
important identity paradoxes embedded in the intertwined caste and re-
ligious lives in modern Banaras. The two essays by Nazia Akhtar and
Nalini Iyer deconstruct the idea that Partition did not have an impact on
Southern India. Akhtar examines the experience of Nizam’s Hyderabad
where, in the 1940s, the Muslim elite made up 90 percent of the officials
and where the Razakars, a paramilitary organization, forced the migra-
tion of thousands of Hindus in 1946. Through an analysis of a Telugu
short story “Durga” in Kishorilal Vyas Neelkanth’s Razakar, Akhtar dem-
onstrates how the Hindutva nationalists—the Hindu right wing—repre-
sent the history of sexual violence perpetrated by the Razakars to justify
present-day Hindutva violence against Muslims. Iyer’s essay examines
how literary works by R. K. Narayan, Lalithambika Antherjanam, and
Balachandra Rajan represent Partition experiences of those in Southern
India who experienced Partition indirectly and witnessed the events at a
distance. She argues that these authors imagine a secular nation as they
are engaged in accounting for regional differences and expressing anxie-
ty about the loss of the secular ideal through the communal violence of
Partition.

In conclusion, we hope that the essays in Revisiting India’s Partition will

shed new light on how British India’s 1947 Partition and its sectarian
consequences have had an enduring impact on the peoples of India, Paki-
stan, and Bangladesh and even allow new readings of the many literary
texts and films widely associated with the subject. The arbitrariness of the
border, coupled with the ambivalence of the people divided by it, has led
to a legacy of violence that has significant diasporic and postcolonial
consequences. By teasing out the implications of ethnic difference and
cross-border nationalism, the nineteen essays in this volume illuminate
the many ways in which the Partition is not a static event of the past, but
an evolving moment in history with a resounding impact on all of con-
temporary South Asia and its inhabitants. With special attention to voices
that have been historically silenced—the voices of women, ethno-relig-
ious minorities, and other marginalized populations—we seek through
this volume to understand the past, hoping to signal a new way forward.

NOTES

1. Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines (New Delhi: Ravi Dayal, 1988), 151.
2. Ibid., 152.
3. At the 1930 Muslim League conference, well-known poet Muhammad Iqbal
(1877–1938) first introduced the idea of a separate state for Muslims. Taking his cue
from the 1905 Partition of Bengal, he indicated that such a state would comprise
majority-Muslim areas, to be severed from Hindu-majority areas. In 1933, Chaudhry
 Introduction xxix

Rahmet Ali in “Now or Never: Are We to Live or Perish Forever?” suggested that a
state called “Pakistan” could be formed from Punjab, Afghanistan, Kashmir, Sind, and
Baluchistan. The acronym, Pakistan, means the “land of the pure.” This idea gradually
developed into the “two-nation” thesis. Later, when Rahmet Ali was asked about
Bengal, he suggested that the Bengali Muslims should form their own state that could
be called “Bangistan” ([Link]
_Bengal_ (1947; Accessed October 26, 2015). In a letter sent to Jinnah on June 21, 1937,
Iqbal articulated his vision of Muslim autonomy: “A separate federation of Muslim
Provinces . . . is the only course by which we can secure a peaceful India and save
Muslims from the domination of Non-Muslims. Why should not the Muslims of
North-West India and Bengal be considered as nations entitled to self-determination
just as other nations in India and outside India are?” In an earlier letter of March 29,
1937, Iqbal had clarified his concern for Indian Muslims in the broader context of the
Ummah, the global Muslim community: “While we are ready to cooperate with other
progressive parties in the country, we must not ignore the fact that the whole future
context of Islam as a moral and political force rests very largely on a complete organ-
ization of Indian Muslims” ([Link]
[Link]. Accessed, October 26, 2015). Iqbal, less than a year before his own death,
saw Jinnah as the right leader to enunciate and protect the rights of the Indian Mus-
lims in a pan-Islamic context. In the late 1970s, the progressive pan-Islamic vision
shared by Iqbal and Jinnah would get reduced to a monolithic mold of strict orthodox
Islamization or “Wahhabism.”
At the same time, the evolution of the “two-nation” theory in colonial India was
not confined to Muslim thinkers. In 1923, V. D. Savarkar, as much a non-believer as
Jinnah, had espoused his own version of the “two-nation theory” in his essay “Hin-
dutva”: “We Hindus are bound together not only by the love we bear to a common
fatherland and by the blood that courses through our veins . . . but also by the tie of the
common homage we pay to our great civilization—our Hindu culture . . . we are one
because we are a nation, a race and own a common Sanskriti (civilization).” In 1937, in
his presidential address at the open session of the Hindu Mahasabha in Ahmedabad,
Savarkar declared: “India cannot be assumed today to be a unitarian and homogene-
ous nation, but on the contrary there are two nations in the main—the Hindus and the
Muslims.” However, when Gandhi met with Jinnah in September 1944 to reconsider
Rajagopalachari’s proposal conceding the demand for Pakistan, Savarkar expressed
his reaction quite furiously: “The Indian provinces were not the private properties of
Gandhiji and Rajaji so that they could make a gift of them to any one they liked.” Cited
in Maloy Krishna Dhar, Battleground India: Prognosis of Hindu-Muslim Exclusivism (New
Delhi: Vitasta, 2012), 272. Empathizing with the alienation that Muslims, like Dalits,
would experience in a Hindu majority India, the Dalit leader B. R. Ambedkar had also
supported the case for a separate Muslim homeland in his monograph Pakistan or the
Partition of India (1940). Here is a snapshot of his thinking from the introduction to his
book: “It is beyond question that Pakistan is a scheme which will have to be taken into
account. The Muslims will insist upon the scheme being considered. The British will
insist upon some kind of settlement being reached between the Hindus and the Mus-
lims before they consent to any devolution of political power. There is no use blaming
the British for insisting upon such a settlement as a condition precedent to the transfer
of power. The British cannot consent to settle power upon an aggressive Hindu major-
ity and make it its heir, leaving it to deal with the minorities at its sweet pleasure. That
would not be ending imperialism. It would be creating another imperialism. The
Hindus, therefore, cannot avoid coming to grips with Pakistan, much as they would
like to do. . . . Coercion, as an alternative to Pakistan, is therefore unthinkable. Again,
the Muslims cannot be deprived of the benefit of the principle of self-determination
[that the Hindu Nationalists rely on in asking the British to leave India (http://
[Link]/itc/mealac/pritchett/00ambedkar/ambedkar_partition/. Accessed
January 8, 2016).
4. Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines (New Delhi: Ravi Dayal, 1988), 228.
xxx Amritjit Singh, Nalini Iyer, and Rahul K. Gairola

5. Egregious delays in resolving outstanding border disputes are best exemplified

by the July 2015 agreement signed between India and Bangladesh. India and Bangla-
desh Land Boundary Agreement, [Link]
24529_LBA_MEA_Booklet_final.pdf. Accessed, October 25, 2015.
6. W. H. Auden, “Partition,” [Link] Ac-
cessed, October 27, 2015.
7. Christopher Hitchens, “The Perils of Partition,” The Atlantic, March 2003, http://
[Link]/magazine/archive/2003/03/the-perils-of-partition/302686/. Ac-
cessed October 25, 2015.
8. Saros Cowasjee, “Introduction,” Orphans of the Storm: Short Stories on the Partition
of India, Eds. Saros Cowasjee and Kartar Singh Duggal (New Delhi: UBS Publishers,
1995), xi–xii.
9. Ibid.
10. William Dalrymple, “The Great Divide: The Legacy of Indian Partition,” http://
[Link]/magazine/2015/06/29/the-great-divide-books-dalrymple (Ac-
cessed November 5, 2015).
11. Nisid Hajari, Midnight’s Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India’s Partition (New York:
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2015). Offering theories about how and why the British
chose to partition India in 1947 has become a small-scale industry. Two other recent
examples are Narendra Singh Sarila, The Shadow of the Great Game: The Untold Story of
India’s Partition (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2009) and Venkat Dhulipala, Creating a
New Medina: State Power, Islam, and the Quest for Pakistan in Late Colonial North India
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
12. For the full text of Nehru’s speech, see [Link]
english/nael/20century/topic_1/[Link]. Accessed, December 17, 2015.
13. After Midnight: Indian Modernism to Contemporary India, 1947/1997, Art Exhibit
Program. Queens Museum, New York City, March 2015.
14. [Link]
_final.pdf.
15. William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun Act I, Scene 3, 1951 (New York: Knopf
Doubleday, 2011), 73.
16. Ayesha Jalal, The Pity of Partition: Manto’s Life, Times, and Work across the India-
Pakistan Divide (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 1.
17. Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern
South Asia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 2. Further readings on Parti-
tion history include Mushirul Hasan, Ed., India’s Partition: Process, Strategy, and Mobil-
ization, (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), Yasmin Khan’s The Great Partition:
The Making of India and Pakistan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), and Gya-
nendra Pandey, Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism, and History in India (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
18. Rita Kothari, “From Conclusions to Beginnings: My Journey with ‘Partition,’”
Partition: The Long Shadow, ed. Urvashi Butalia (New Delhi: Zubaan, 2015), 45.
19. Siddiq Wahid, “Converging Histories and Societal Change: The Case of La-
dakh,” Partition: The Long Shadow, ed. Urvashi Butalia (New Delhi: Zubaan, 2015),
1–29.
20. For a discussion of border issues in the Northeast, please see Gyanesh Kudaisya
and Tai Ton Tang, The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia (New York: Routledge, 2000).
21. Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (Dur-
ham: Duke University Press, 2000), 6. For a critical review of Butalia’s work, please see
Anindya Bhattacharya, “Significant Moves: Urvashi Butalia’s Contribution to the
Women’s Movement in India,” The Gendered India: Feminism and the Indian Gender
Reality, ed. Arnab Bhattacharya (Kolkata: Books Way, 2012), 141–57. Similar to Butal-
ia’s gathering of oral histories is the more recent work by Devika Chawla who has
gathered cross-generational oral histories from ten Hindu and Sikh families living in
Delhi. See Devika Chawla, Home, Uprooted: Oral Histories of India’s Partition (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2014).
 Introduction xxxi

22. There is considerable murkiness about the tragic events in the Punjab from the
late 1970s to the 1990s—another example of the unresolved Long Partition. One of us
(Amritjit Singh) has researched the issue extensively to formulate a balanced narrative
in this long endnote. In the 1970s, the Akalis, the Sikh political party in the Punjab,
presented a memorandum of demands to PM Indira Gandhi for resolution. These
issues were for the most part enshrined in the 1973 Anandpur Sahib Resolution (http://
[Link]/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195673098.003.0020 (Accessed De-
cember 17, 2015). While the Resolution did not include a demand for a separate Sikh
nation, Mrs. Gandhi touted its focus on enhanced state rights (a concern that was also
being voiced in West Bengal and Tamil Nadu) as a step toward secession. She did not
respond to issues and demands raised by Akali leadership in good faith or in a timely
fashion, instead letting the situation fester well into the early 1980s. In 1982, Congress
leader Swaran Singh negotiated an agreement on behalf of the central government
with the Akalis on the distribution of water and key issues from the Anandpur Sahib
Resolution, but Mrs. Gandhi quickly backed out without any explanation. Around
1977, when the Akali-Janata coalition came to power in the Punjab after the defeat of
Congress Party in assembly elections, Sant Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, a charismatic
religious leader, had emerged on the Punjab scene. By 1978, both the Akalis and the
Congress had begun to use the Sant to their own ends in their ongoing tussle over
electoral politics and related matters. Within a few years, the Sant would become the
Frankenstein’s monster for both sides. The Akalis allowed the Sant and his armed
followers to move into the Golden Temple complex, from where he apparently di-
rected the killings of dissenting Sikhs and Hindus (55 percent of his victims were
Sikhs). State and central authorities did little to stem the growing violence in the state
or to flush the Sant and his cohorts out of the Golden Temple. By 1984, the situation
became too egregious to ignore and, in June 1984, Mrs. Gandhi ordered the storming
of the Temple in a military-style attack named Bluestar Operation, in which thousands
of innocent pilgrims apparently died along with the militants. On October 31, 1984,
Mrs. Gandhi’s Sikh bodyguards assassinated her in retribution for her desecration of
their most sacred house of worship. What followed in Delhi and elsewhere on the first
three days of November 1984 was a vicious pogrom that ignited painful memories of
the 1947 horrors. Although many Congress politicians were directly implicated in the
bloodshed, none of them have been brought to justice to this day. In the Punjab, young
Sikh militants began openly to espouse a separate Sikh state, “Khalistan.” Many in the
large Sikh diaspora in Canada were incensed by the deteriorating political situation in
the Punjab, and some allegedly supported the Khalistan movement by supplying
money and arms to separatist groups in India. In 1985, a couple of Sikh extremists
allegedly bombed an Air India flight with 187 passengers, largely Indo-Canadians
bound for India from Toronto. This tragedy transformed inter-ethnic relationships
within the South Asian Canadian community along religious lines as had happened
during the days and months leading up to the 1947 Partition. Meanwhile, the state of
Punjab experienced a reign of terror at the hands of two major adversaries—the Sikh
separatists and Indian security forces (including the corrupt and cunning Punjab Po-
lice) whose targets included not just Sikh separatists but also thousands of innocent
young Sikhs who were framed as militants or harassed on suspicions of sympathy or
abetment. Gulzar’s film Machis (Matchsticks, 1996) is one rendition of that trajectory.
Fortuitously, Punjab did not witness orchestrated mob violence between Sikhs and
Hindus at any time during the 1980s and 1990s, although there were abundant misper-
ceptions between the two communities, both of whom suffered the turmoil and vio-
lence over many years. This brief narrative of the tragic events in the Punjab is based
on many sources, especially: Khushwant Singh, A History of the Sikhs: Volume 2:
1839–2004, Revised Edition (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005); Gita Mehta,
Snakes and Ladders: Glimpses of Modern India (New York: Anchor, 1998); Mark Tully and
Satish Jacob, Amritsar: Mrs. Gandhi’s Last Battle (New Delhi: Penguin, 1985); and Kris-
tin Bakke, Decentralization and Intrastate Struggles: Chechnya, Punjab, and Québec (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
xxxii Amritjit Singh, Nalini Iyer, and Rahul K. Gairola

23. Tehmina Qureshi, “The year was 1971, but it felt like 1947, says Intizar Hus-
sain.” The News (Karachi), February 8, 2014, [Link]
News-4-231111-The-year-was-1971-but-it-felt-like-1947-says-Intizar-Hussain (Ac-
cessed December 23, 2015).
24. Alok Bhalla, “Partition, Exile and Memories of a Lost Home,” in Intizar Husain,
A Chronicle of the Peacocks (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002), 234.
25. Ibid., 248.
26. Cited in Thomas L. Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Centu-
ry, Third Edition ( New York: Picador, 2007), 457.
27. Anita Rau Badami, Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? (New Delhi: Penguin Vi-
king, 2007).
28. Ananya Jahanara Kabir, Partition’s Post-Amnesias: 1947, 1971 and Modern South
Asia (New Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2013). See also, “Ananya Jahanara Kabir: In
Conversation with Prathibha Umashankar,” Muse India, 59 (January–February 2015).
Accessed November 14, 2016: [Link]
id=59andid=5472.
29. M. G. Vassanji, A Place Within: Rediscovering India (Toronto: Doubleday, 2008),
236.
30. For other discussions of Kashmir and Partition, see Suvir Kaul, “Indian Empire
(and the case of Kashmir), Economic and Political Weekly, 46, no. 13 (2011): 66–75; Nyla
Ali Khan, Islam, Women, and Violence in Kashmir: Between India and Pakistan (London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Nitasha Kaul, “Kashmir: A Place of Blood and Memory,”
[Link] 31 (2010).
31. For a detailed account of events that led up to the formation of Bangladesh, see
Srinath Raghavan, 1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh (Ranikhet: Perma-
nent Black, 2013).
32. “It is a mistake to equate the demand for Pakistan with the Partition of India,”
Interview with Ayesha Jalal by Shoma Chaudhury, South Asia Citizens Web, September
11, 2009, [Link] (Accessed October 14, 2015).
33. Ibid. While Gandhi stayed above the somewhat impatient power dynamic that
defined the communications among Jinnah, Nehru, and Sardar Patel, many Muslims
(and some Sikhs) felt they could not fully trust Gandhi, viewing him as a wily Hindu
politician despite his refrain on “Ramrajya,” signaling mutual respect for all religions.
On the other hand, Hindu nationalists thought of Gandhi as much too “pro-Muslim.”
Nathuram Godse, Gandhi’s assassin, remained unrepentant during his trial and re-
garded Gandhi’s continuous “appeasement” of Jinnah as a huge giveaway of Hindu
interests in Gandhi’s delusional ambition to be recognized as the moral leader of both
Hindus and Muslims before and after the Partition. See, Nathuram Godse and Gopal
Godse, Why I Assassinated Gandhi, Revised Edition (New Delhi: Farsight Publishers,
2015), 58, 71, 98.
34. On Saravkar, please see endnote 3. This section is based on several sources
including the following: Koenraad Elst, Decolonizing the Hindu Mind: Ideological Devel-
opment of Hindu Revivalism (New Delhi: Rupa, 2011); Maloy Krishna Dhar, Battleground
India: Prognosis of Hindu-Muslim Exclusiveness (New Delhi: Vitasta, 2012); V. D. Saravk-
ar, Essentials of Hindutva: [Link]
tials_of_hindutva.[Link] (Accessed January 20, 2016); Ramachandra Guha, “The
Guru of Hate” (on Saravkar). The Hindu, November 26, 2006; [Link]
[Link]/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-sundaymagazine/[Link] (Accessed
January 5, 2016); Amartya Sen, The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History,
Culture and Identity (London: Penguin, 2005).
35. Kavita Daiya, Violent Belongings: Partition, Gender, and National Culture in Postco-
lonial India (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008), 5.
36. Urvashi Butalia, “Community, State and Gender: On Women’s Agency in Parti-
tion,” Economic and Political Weekly, 28, 17 (1993): 12–21, 24.
37. Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries: How Women Experienced
the Partition of India (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998).
 Introduction xxxiii

38. Vishwajyoti Ghosh, ed., This Side, That Side: Restorying Partition (New Delhi:
Yoda Press, 2013). Asked about the meaning of “Restorying” in the title of his edited
book, Ghosh stated the following in an interview: “One thing we felt from the begin-
ning is that we should do away with these myths that Partition is a 1947 thing. Parti-
tion is not only about the exodus, but about the little Partitions that we carry in our
heads. . . . So what has happened is that memories have also gotten partitioned and
stuck on the timeline. . . . We all know what happened. It’s also to see how we
reprocess all of that, and how subsequent generations negotiate around that.” Sonia
Paul, “A Conversation With: Graphic Novelist Vishwajyoti Ghosh,” India Ink (January
21, 2014), [Link]
elist-vishwajyoti-ghosh/?_r=0 (Accessed December 17, 2015).

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Auden, W. H. “Partition.” [Link] Accessed
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Badami, Anita Rau. Can You Hear the Nightbird Call? New Delhi: Penguin Viking, 2007.
Bakke, Kristin. Decentralization and Intrastate Struggles: Chechnya, Punjab, and Québec.
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Bhattacharya, Anindya. “Significant Moves: Urvashi Butalia’s Contribution to the
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Butalia, Urvashi. “Community, State and Gender: On Women’s Agency in Partition.”
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Butalia, Urvashi. The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India. Durham:
Duke University Press, 2000.
Chawla, Devika. Home, Uprooted: Oral Histories of India’s Partition. New York: Fordham
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Chaudhury, Shoma. “It is a mistake to equate the demand for Pakistan with the Parti-
tion of India,” Interview with Ayesha Jalal by Shoma Chaudhury, South Asia Citi-
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Cowasjee, Saros. “Introduction,” Orphans of the Storm: Short Stories on the Partition,
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Dhar, Maloy Krishna. Battleground India: Prognosis of Hindu-Muslim Exclusivism. New
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Dhulipala, Venkat. Creating a New Medina: State Power, Islam, and the Quest for Pakistan
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Faulkner, William. Requiem for a Nun. 1951. New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2011.
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Edition. New York: Picador, 2007.
Ghosh, Amitav. The Shadow Lines. New Delhi: Ravi Dayal, 1988.
Ghosh, Viswajyoti, ed. This Side, That Side: Restorying Partition. New Delhi: Yoda Press,
2013.
Godse, Nathuram, and Gopal Godse. Why I Assassinated Gandhi. Revised Edition. New
Delhi: Farsight Publishers, 2015.
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Asia. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.
 Part I

Approaches to Partition
 ONE
Specters of Democracy/
The Gender of Specters
Cultural Memory and the Indian Partition

Radhika Mohanram

If the past can be brought back to life through the act of remembering,
can it also be completely obliterated? What happens to memories within
a new beginning, a radical inauguration, or the birth of a new future?
Paul Connerton, states that “[a]ll beginnings contain an element of recol-
lection,” thus suggesting that the past cannot be excised completely as
even a wholly new start partakes in the habits and loyalties of the dis-
carded past. 1 For Marc Augé who famously states, “Remembering or
forgetting is doing gardener’s work, selecting, pruning,” memory and
forgetting are in constant negotiation in the construction of the past. 2
This essay focuses on how memory and forgetting work in tandem in
national politics. It unpicks how cultural memory shapes the forms of
citizenship and democracy in India and how the 1947 partition, though
not always factored in, is significant to their narration. Crucially, it also
examines how critical theory, an underutilized tool in topics that sur-
round traumatic national history, can open up interpretations of memory
and history so that India’s official invocation of the past can be perceived
to be largely an invited one, a domestication of difference that serves
present-day politics, even though the latter itself has been shaped, in a
circularity, by this very domestication. If historic beginnings are predicat-
ed on a historic rupture for both India and Pakistan, it is British colonial-
ism that is perceived to be a rupture—but with a difference. For Pakistan,
British colonialism enabled the eventual new beginning of the land of the
3
4 Specters of Democracy/The Gender of Specters

pure; 3 for India, independence from British colonialism meant the end of
a foreign disruption and the restoration of a fictional and imaginary time-
line of the past. Thus the common past and history and the disruption
that they shared when they were one have been relegated by both nations
to a prescriptive forgetting, 4 a particularly politicized selective memory
in the present.
The 1947 partition of the subcontinent does not feature to a great
extent in postcolonial narratives of India as is evident in the lack of its
memorialization either through museums or during independence day
celebrations, the topic being confined to studies made by a few scholars. 5
In contemporary India, the new projects of postmodernity and economic
liberalization with their built-in compulsory obsolescence of the past
have demanded a break from the historical memory of the 1947 partition
and India’s long travel down the road of Nehruvian socialism. Within the
nation’s feeble collective memory of 1947, of India’s “tryst with destiny,” 6
narratives of the partition have been mostly relegated to personal or local
histories indicating an asymmetry of memories across the national geog-
raphy. In short, the Punjab, Bengal, and Kashmir have different land-
scapes of partition memory and refer to a different collective memory in
Pakistan than the one that the rest of India is made to remember.
But forgetting, too, is replete with memory and this is the focus of my
essay, which is divided into three sections. In the first section I explore
cultural and collective memory’s relationship to the construction of na-
tional identities. Scholarship on the memories of the 1947 partition tends
to focus on the individual and develops on the assumption of the recu-
peration of repressed voices and historical memory as a form of resis-
tance to grand, totalizing, national narratives. However, if we intersect
collective memory with that of traumatic memory—as was the 1947 parti-
tion to the fifteen million refugees from both sides of the border who all
suffered a loss monetarily and emotionally—we are able to draw on
psychoanalytic contexts for our analysis, to track traumatic displace-
ments and repetitive compulsions. This line of argument reveals that
trauma can be experienced not just by individuals but by entire nations. In
the second section I examine how the very notion of a democratic govern-
ment and citizenship in India are marked by the repressed or unacknowl-
edged trauma of the 1947 partition. I particularly want to trace the meta-
morphosis of threatening and destabilizing memories, investigating how
these change shape, fragment, and remanifest themselves in disguise.
Traumatic memories being painful are also bodily memories and, as
such, bodies become important sites of memory in the analysis of Indian
citizenship. The final sections, therefore, inspect bodily memory and, in
particular, the metonymic significance of women’s bodies as signifiers of
1947 partition memories. In these, I want especially to read partition trau-
ma through Jacques Derrida’s notion of the ghost and of hauntology as
conceptualized in Specters of Marx. The significance of this chapter lies in
 Radhika Mohanram 5

my intersection of affect with critical theory, exploring trauma through

Derrida rather than trauma and repetition, a framework that gained in
popularity with Holocaust scholars. The use of abstract poststructuralist
thought might seem to be problematic for some partition scholars as the
human costs and the horrific nature of this event can often be quantified
only in materialist terms, with facts, figures, names, losses, and recuper-
ated voices, as doing anything less would seem to be trivialising this
traumatic event. However, notwithstanding the philosophical abstrac-
tions of poststructuralist thought, we would do well to remember Derri-
da’s injunction that his deconstructive framework is also an intervention
and a politicizing of that which is often normalized and therefore invis-
ible. In reading the issue of woman as Indian citizen I want to move
beyond the analysis of women’s losses in 1947 on both sides of the border
and examine questions such as: What does the ghost metaphor reveal
about the construction of gender in India? And how does the examina-
tion of gender refer back to the 1947 partition? My focus on gender is to
reveal how their treatment in the hands of history makes them a meta-
phor for all victims of the Indian partition.
Much of Derrida’s work on deconstruction is built around the notions
of memory, forgetting, recalling, losing, and mourning, embedded not
only in his arguments on the function of language in Of Grammatology but
also in the very idea of the trace, which is a memory of an absence, and in
The Work of Mourning, The Specters of Marx, and his 1984 lectures on Me-
moires: For Paul de Man. For Derrida, there is an intricate relationship
between mourning and memory in that mourning is a result of memory
and the act and process of mourning, in a loop and in turn, evokes memo-
ry. In his work, memory is not a simple reproduction or repetition, but an
inheritance. As Gerard Richter points out, “Derrida’s writing works to
define and perpetually to redefine the meaning of inheriting without
following, the meaning of acceptance without repeating . . . and the
meaning of setting to work an idea while taking it to a different direc-
tion.” 7 Thus, the presence of memories which refer to a trace are marked
by a différance. In this essay, I particularly use his work Specters of Marx
because I think his idea of the ghost that haunts the dense, material, solid
reality of the present is so rich and helps to tease out the relationship not
only between the past, present, and the future but also the relationship
between the 1947 partition and the contemporary militarization of Kash-
mir and the constant muted threat of nuclear war in South Asia. As
Frederic Jameson comments on Derrida’s spectrality, “[they are] like the
vibrations of a heat wave through which the massiveness of the object
world—indeed of matter itself—now shimmers like a mirage.” 8 In the
first section of Specters of Marx, Derrida invokes the ghost of Hamlet’s
father, “The time is out of joint,” and it is this that I want to explore—how
does the ghost of the Indian partition haunt the concepts of democracy in
the nation-state?
6 Specters of Democracy/The Gender of Specters

NATION AND CULTURAL MEMORY

It is important to consider the way cultural memory functions alongside

national injunctions in the Indian context. 9 August 15, Indian indepen-
dence day, is celebrated every year in New Delhi, as well as other state
capitals, with great shows of military and police strength which serve to
keep alive memories of the moment of maturation of the Indian polity, its
current sustainability, as well as relegating British colonialism to a past
moment in the nation’s history. Forgotten in these celebrations is the fact
that Indian independence is forever linked with the Indian partition as
both were brought into being simultaneously. Yet the Indian partition
with its shocking statistics of twelve to fifteen million refugees in the
transaction of population, two million deaths in the ensuing violence,
75,000 women abducted and raped, 50,000 children abandoned or or-
phaned, is not part of these national commemorations. How does one
event get remembered and celebrated and the other forgotten? Indeed, in
India today, almost seven decades later, some 1947 partition refugees still
lack resolution for their losses and continue to appeal for justice to the
Department of Relief and Rehabilitation in New Delhi. 10
In one of the earliest works on memory studies, Maurice Halbwachs
suggests that time and space are imposed upon people thus imparting a
sense of reality and an anchor for our memories. 11 We can see that in the
forgetting of partition trauma India colonizes a sense of time by correlat-
ing only certain events with important dates, a move by which the trau-
ma can be ignored. In “What Is a Nation” Ernest Renan posits that forget-
ting as much as remembering should play a large part in issues of nation-
al cohesion. Renan suggests that remembering the past requires selective
memory as “unity [in a nation] is always brutally established” and it
would be disruptive to a sense of shared identity to keep all memories of
the past alive. Renan distinguishes between the memories of commu-
nities and that of cities by suggesting that individual communities within
cities, for instance, often have memories that do not coincide or intersect
with each other but the essence of a nation is evident in the fact that
“individual members have a great deal in common and also that they
have forgotten many things.” 12 Indeed, the nation is a great mnemonic
community “for its continuity relies on the vision of a suitable past and a
believable future.” 13 Nations, then, are communities of memories whose
identity resides in having traits of ethnicity, religion, culture, and experi-
ences in common. Nationalist movements are enjoined with constructing
shared memories, for it is only through these that successive generations
can establish shared identities, destinies, and a sense of continuity. This
constructed memory or collective amnesia of details not only ensures the
forgetting of disturbing elements of the past but also that of the present—
only by forgetting the partition can the Kashmir problem be reframed as
Pakistan clamoring for our territories. In fact, the valorization of selected
 Radhika Mohanram 7

memories is a form of forced forgetting imposed by the nation and car-

ried to extremes in repressive regimes such as during the Stalinist era of
the USSR or Nazi Germany or the Cultural Revolution in China. In these
situations, the very act of remembering details of the past becomes a form
of critiquing and questioning the truth expounded by the regime in pow-
er. In the striking opening of Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and
Forgetting, this theme of questioning the nation and its relationship to
memory and forgetting is underscored. The text starts with an iconic 1948
photograph of the communist leader Gottwald taken in Prague in which
he is flanked by his comrade Clementis. Four years later when Clementis
is hanged for treason, the photograph is recirculated with a blank wall
where the figure of Clementis had stood. The very act of narrating this
story here points to the questioning of official history. Indeed, in their
promotion of a coherent and unified identity, the nation and nationalism
not only protect memories of the past but memory itself is perceived to be a
political instrument. The political nature of memories is linked to what
Stanley Cohen refers to as open secrets or a “social amnesia,” the latter
term being defined as a mode of forgetting by which a whole society
separates itself from its discreditable past record. This might happen at
an organized, official, and conscious level—the deliberate cover-up or the
rewriting of history—or through the type of cultural slippage that occurs
when information disappears. 14
But the nation’s mediation of collective memory is also challenged by
family memory. The family, along with ethnic groups, is the other mne-
monic community that our memories are shaped by as it is their social
contextualization and their embeddedness that make memories vivid
and resonate with meaning and significance. These contexts are often
supplied by the various communities or groups in which we have mem-
bership. Families, in particular, affect the depth of our memory, regulat-
ing how far back in the past we can remember and what we need to
forget. Furthermore, as memories are linked to landscapes, monuments,
and places, family stories of lost homes often create a longing and a
familiarity in those who might never have seen these very sites of memo-
ry. In partition narratives, there is often a sense of coming home in post-
independence-born Indians when they visit Pakistani cities for the first
time. 15 Notwithstanding national ideologies of perceiving Pakistan as an
enemy state and supported by a state-sanctioned selective memory, these
Indians often find themselves having more in common and a sense of
community with their Pakistani counterparts. In this, the sense of “com-
munity” invoked by the two different and new nation-states is super-
seded by the memory of an alternative, pre-Partition community, marked
politically and strongly by the local.
8 Specters of Democracy/The Gender of Specters

DEMOCRATIC MEMORY

It is important to explore the relationship between collective memory,

democracy/citizenship, and the Indian partition because the events of
1947 reformulated not only notions of citizenship and belonging but also
those of difference and otherness. Indeed, undemocratic colonial rule
under the British followed by the massacres of the partition and an artifi-
cial division of population and the destruction of communities have
shaped a melancholic form of democracy in India. Notwithstanding the
political nature of partitions and the function of a democracy, I want to
track how these terms are imbricated within aspects of cultural memory.
Within the context of memory studies, remembering and forgetting are
closely linked to the very origin of democracy in that in 403 BC, after the
oligarchic coup against the Thirty Tyrants and civil war in Athens, Athe-
nian citizens publicly swore that they would not recall the misfortunes in
order to reconcile and live together as a community. Recalling the past—
especially past injustices—had to be a forbidden activity if Athenian de-
mocracy was to survive and become politically stable. 16 This selective
operation of memory and amnesia has also been a fundamental principle
in discourses that hold the nation together so much so that official narra-
tions of history of a nation can often be perceived as not entirely having
truth-claims. Within democracies, the question that lingers is who gets to
decide what must be forgotten and what remembered. Indeed, it is this
selective process in the constructions of democracy and collective memo-
ry that Theodor Adorno argues against in the context of the holocaust. He
states:
“Coming to terms with the past” does not imply a serious working
through of the past, the breaking of its spell through an act of clear
consciousness. It suggests, rather, wishing to turn the page and, if pos-
sible, wiping it from memory. The attitude that it would be proper for
everything to be forgiven and forgotten by those who were wronged is
expressed by the party that committed the injustice. 17
This destruction of memory demanded by history for the successful func-
tioning of democracies is located within selective understandings of guilt
and psychiatry. Because within psychiatry, feelings of guilt are located in
the psychological makeups of individuals, the past is deemed to be part
of guilty imaginations and “inadequate to reality.” 18 Adorno suggests
that “a real and terrible past is rendered harmless by being transformed
this way—into a mere figment of the imagination of those who are af-
fected by it.” 19
In late twentieth century the relationship between cultural memory
and democracy became particularly visible within issues of justice, for
instance, in the Tribunal on Genocidal Civil War in Rwanda, the Truth
and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, or the cases that come
 Radhika Mohanram 9

up before the International Criminal Court. Newly democratized post-

communist societies have valorized this relationship with policies that
screen the pasts of candidates, exclude former Communist Party officials
from high public positions, or give restitution for property that had been
seized under the previous regime. Thus, two types of collective memory
have to be negotiated for the proper functioning of a democracy: a na-
tionally orchestrated memory that can bring about cohesiveness to a soci-
ety and one that is open-ended, non-fixed, and non-politicized that can
critique and question the former.
How has the Indian partition of 1947 influenced the shape of demo-
cratic forms in India? If democracy shapes and affects the public sphere,
can the reverse also be true—can the public sphere also shape democra-
cy? Partha Chatterjee’s work The Nation and Its Fragments hints at exactly
such a notion when he argues for the particularity of anti-colonial nation-
alism in colonized countries. 20 If nationalism is considered to be a prod-
uct of European political and cultural history, organic to European na-
tions, Chatterjee asks how could we conceptualize nationalism in non-
European nations? Would it be a derivative discourse implying that even
forms of national identity have trickled down from Europe? He suggests
that one of the strategies adopted by the independence movement in
India was to redefine nationalism by making it an anticolonial struggle.
This was achieved by dividing social institutions and practices into two
domains—the material and the spiritual. The material world encom-
passed economy, statescraft, and science and technology, where the West
was deemed to be superior. The spiritual domain remained essentially
indigenous and it was from this domain, Chatterjee affirms, that the crea-
tive spirit of Indian nationalism emerged. If the colonial rule of India was
justified by its lack of modernity and democratic forms, the Indian inde-
pendence movement had to remake democratic forms to suit its specific
needs so that it became purely an Indian modernity. By redefining the
private sphere it redefined the notion of the national itself.
I want to follow Chatterjee’s method of analysis to see how the 1947
Indian partition reshaped forms of democracy in India. Three central
events coincided in South Asia in 1947—independence, partition, and the
formation of two democratic states—thus suggesting a close imbrication
between all three events. That is to say, the material conditions that had
caused one event had contributed to the shaping of the other two as well.
In fact, the concept of citizenship prevalent in India is closely linked to
the partition. In December 1946 the issue of what constituted a citizen
was first debated before the question of partition had been settled. 21 The
principle of jus solis was first forwarded as the basis of Indian citizen-
ship—if you were born in India, then you had the right to citizenship. But
as events unfolded in the nine months to independence, followed by the
effects of the partition, this principle transmuted into different shapes in
India. Joya Chatterjee points out that as the idea of partition solidified in
10 Specters of Democracy/The Gender of Specters

both India and Pakistan, a territorial definition of citizenship emerged—

whosoever domiciled in India or Pakistan was considered to be a citizen
of that country. Partition violence and the increasing flood of refugees
shifted the comprehension of citizenship to one predicated, though unac-
knowledged, on religious affiliation. For instance, in the ongoing violence
and continued chaos the two new sovereign nations decided that minor-
ity refugees could not be protected by the armed forces. Hindu and Sikh
refugees trapped in Pakistan and Muslim refugees in India could be pro-
tected only by the armed forces from the dominion across the border.
Joya Chatterjee also suggests that the Evacuee Property Acts which gave
the government in both India and Pakistan the right to distribute unoccu-
pied homes to refugees, the establishment of passports, and the Dis-
placed Person’s Compensation Act all changed the tenor of citizenship. 22
From jus solis, it transformed to something that was based on religious
affiliation, and minorities in particular were vastly affected by their status
as it created a sense of a minority citizen who was unequal in rights to the
citizen of the dominant community. Pakistan’s definition of itself as an
Islamic country determined its minorities, but notwithstanding profes-
sions of being secular, Indian state actions implied that its Muslim citi-
zens were less than equal. Even more than Hindus or Sikhs, Indian Mus-
lims who visited Pakistan after 1947 were put in a precarious position as
it cast doubt on their commitment to their Indian citizenship.

SPECTERS OF DEMOCRACY

What, then, is the relationship between the past and the present or that
between the 1947 partition and the contemporary nation-state (India)?
The excavation of this past is to highlight not only that which has been
conveniently forgotten but also to ask what the implications of the parti-
tion are, not to 1947, but to the present. How does the history of 1947
constrain or occupy the present? How does it contour contemporary po-
litical or cultural life? If the past evoked by the nation-state is an invited
one that shows its control over memories, are there still ghosts of the past
that escape their domestication by the future? And what sort of ethical
relationship does the past and present hold to the future? In her examina-
tion of visual arts and writing saturated by the experience of the Holo-
caust in The Generation of Postmemory, Marianne Hirsch indicates trauma’s
lasting hold on subsequent generations. She suggests that her term “post-
memory” encapsulates
[t]he relationship that ‘the generation after’ bears to the personal, col-
lective, and cultural trauma of those who came before—to experiences
they “remember” only by the means of stories, images, and behaviours
among which they grew up. But these experiences were transmitted to
them so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in
 Radhika Mohanram 11

their own right. . . . To grow up with overwhelming inherited memo-

ries, to be dominated by narratives that preceded one’s birth or one’s
consciousness, is to risk having one’s own life stories displaced, even
evacuated, by our ancestors. 23
Hirsch’s provocative and useful term suggests a transmission of memo-
ries through the generations such that even the present is shaped and
marked quite strongly by memories of the past. Yet the question remains
of how these memories can be transmitted if there is no attempt, as in
India and Pakistan (and also Bangladesh), to preserve them. In the battle
for supremacy between sustaining memories of independence or parti-
tion, it is the former term that is venerated while the latter term is almost
absent in considerations of contemporary life, mediated as it is by the
nation-states’ sense of history.
In Partition’s Post-Amnesias, Ananya Kabir correctly points out that
Hirsch’s term “post-memory” constitutes “a memory of a memory” that
is more appropriately used for Holocaust survivors’ narratives. Since the
partition emerged from a different history than the Holocaust, Kabir
proffers a term that she considers to be more nuanced and pertinent to
South Asian history—“post-amnesia”—that tracks the forms of contem-
porary recuperation of memory and links to the past after the nationally
and psychologically enforced amnesia of 1947 (and the 1971 formation of
Bangladesh). Kabir suggests that “post-amnesia imagines the layering of
national belonging, inevitable in the modern world, with affiliations de-
riving from pre-modern economic and cultural histories” in South Asia. 24
Thus the recuperation of these memories skews notions of linear tempo-
rality and history in that if memory is a trace, then it rarely recuperates
history completely but rather constitutes a creative reiteration of a trace.
It is this skewing of linear history and temporality that is also central
to Derrida’s notion of hauntology and that allows for disturbing ques-
tions to be asked of an assessment of the 1947 partition and permits new
ways of thinking about gendered citizenship. It asks primarily what a
society does with history, especially with the ghosts of the past. Unlike
Kabir’s notion of post-amnesia, which is a resurrection of the past in the
present that follows different temporalities of modernity and the pre-
modern, Derrida’s ghosts are the traces of those who have not been al-
lowed to leave a trace. Hauntology—a play upon ontology—refers to the
past which is not, yet which is simultaneously present. While the psycho-
analytic frame focusses on repression and mourning, Derrida explores
the relationship between the past, present and future through the ghost
as this figure destabilizes linear concepts of time so that even the present
is not static or singular. The present is psychically interrupted by the past
and even the future. Through this rupture of the present, the routine, and
the everyday, ghosts gesture toward unresolved history and pasts that
are impossible to forget. Derrida suggests that specters reverse the under-
12 Specters of Democracy/The Gender of Specters

standing of history as origin and the present as being a teleological out-

come of the past. Derrida’s specters, as Wendy Brown points out, politi-
cally activate “the spirits of the past and the future, the bearable and
unbearable memories of the past and the weight of obligation toward the
unborn.” 25 This essay seeks to investigate how Derrida’s ghost and its
insubstantial presence might be useful to a reading of Indian democracy
in the aftermath of the 1947 partition.
The shifting principle of citizenship or the contestation between secu-
larity and Hindu faith that was initiated during the partition in India
erased memories of a coherent racial, cultural, and national Indian iden-
tity that had been the primary strategy for the success of the Indian
independence movement. This tension reverberates to the present day.
There is also an ideological disconnection between the history of partition
and contemporary cultural politics in India in that the violence and mas-
sacres of 1947 are somehow located within a pre-historical period and,
therefore, not perceived as being in a continuity with the present. Such a
disconnection is made possible by the relative paucity of information of
archived material of the event and any focus on the sense of loss, chaos
and massacre is generally limited to regional languages—principally
Punjabi, Bengali, and Hindi/Urdu. This results in localizing what was a
nationally catastrophic event. As Faisal Devji has pointed out,
Insofar as partition is problematized at all, it is done so as a “horror”
which cannot be grasped by a narrative, or as “a mindless cycle of
violence.” And this simply removes the event from normality and his-
tory both by withholding rational agency from its participants, and by
separating it from one’s own narrative reason. It is the nation’s dis-
claiming of responsibility for its own actions—its dehistoricization of
the event into something uniquely elemental. 26
Partition violence is rerouted in India nowadays by a reconceptualization
of it as communal violence or as “the Kashmir problem” or in the nuclear
arms race in South Asia. Communalism was a term used by the colonial
British which posited primordial hatred between Hindus and Muslims
and therefore justified colonial rule as neutral and fair governance. The
circulation of this term in contemporary India and the repeated commu-
nal violence between Hindus and Muslims (or even between Hindus and
Sikhs) since independence in India suggests the failure of nationalism.
This is especially evident in the rise in popularity of political parties such
as Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People’s Party), the Rashtriya Swayam
Sevak Sangh (National Volunteer Service Society), and Vishwa Hindu
Parishad (World Hindu Congress).
The ghosts of partition and the meaning of citizenship have become
particularly visible now with the election of Narendra Modi as the fif-
teenth Prime Minister of India. Modi who had been the Chief Minister of
the state of Gujarat between 2001 and 2014 is a member of both the BJP
 Radhika Mohanram 13

and the RSS and oversaw Gujarat during the violence of 2002 in which
over 2,000 Muslims and over 250 Hindus were killed in communal vio-
lence. Though the intercommunal violence had been committed during
his watch as Chief Minister, he had not suppressed it, especially the
massacre of Muslims, and has often been accused of overseeing state
complicity. In 2012 Modi was cleared of state complicity by a Special
Investigative Team of the Supreme Court of India notwithstanding testi-
mony to the contrary by NGOs and, in the general elections of 2014, led
the BJP to a landslide victory on a ticket of economic progress for India.
The presence of Muslims in India and the partition as the underside to
independence reveals a sense of the failure of nationalism, of a nation
“unachieved” in the words of Devji. 27 It functions as a failure in two
ways: First, if Indian nationalism is based on a European ideal of liberal
democracy, its failure to give equal status to all citizens and the pogroms
against Muslims suggest that it does not partake of the Enlightenment
teleology of progress. Second, rather than the metonymic association of
the Indian Muslim with the Pakistani Muslim and thus a threatening
figure, it suggests a weakness of the secular-nationalist agenda which is
the primary representation of India as a democratic state. It implies that a
homogeneous Indian nationalism is a myth. In fact, one could say that the
anxiety that the Indian Muslim evokes within the nation-state is an anxie-
ty over the dis-unified nature of the state with the demand for secession
in Kashmir, Assam, and Punjab, the Muslim a signifier of the nation-state
coming apart. 28
The Indian Muslim, then, is an uncomfortable reminder of an India
wanting to forget the past of partition. One can say that, in fact, cultural
memory in India focuses on the norm, the status quo. This is where
Derrida’s notion of hauntology offers a fresh insight on how to negotiate
with the past. Derrida’s nuanced suggestion that the ghosts of the dead
haunt the living and affect and shape it and, through their absent pres-
ence, undo the line between life and death gestures to a thought process
which discards the opposition between the past and the present, and the
real and the fictive and questions inconsistencies and delusions. For Der-
rida, the presence of ghosts is linked to the issue of justice. He states:
No justice . . . seems possible or thinkable without the principle of some
responsibility, beyond all living present, within that which disjoins the
living present, before the ghosts of those who were not yet born or who
are already dead, be they victims of war, political or other kinds of
violence, nationalist, racist, colonialist, sexist, or other kinds of extermi-
nations, victims of the oppressions of the capitalist imperialism or any
of the forms of totalitarianism. 29
Thus justice is a demand not only of the forgotten past but also of the
future that is to come, the ghosts of which also live in the present. Iden-
tity as we know it is shaped by social and group demands and con-
14 Specters of Democracy/The Gender of Specters

straints, but for Derrida the future also has a say in the formation of
identity. The present is responsible to the future and the ghosts of the
future inhabit the present as much as those of the past. The investment in
remembering the partition, then, is an investment in “communal” harmo-
ny in India.

THE GENDER OF GHOSTS

In my attempt to rescript the hermeneutical trace between the 1947 parti-

tion and India’s present within the scope of democracy, I want to exam-
ine briefly how the partition has affected representations of gender. In-
deed, there were implications for the postcolonial construction of Indian
gendered identity in that the Indian constitution written and adopted
after independence promised all citizens, male and female, justice, equal-
ity, and liberty by creating an ungendered version of a citizen. It is a
commonplace to state that the privileged citizen of postcolonial India has
been the urban, well-off, English-speaking male. In “Woman in Differ-
ence: Mahasweta Devi’s Douloti the Bountiful,” Gayatri Spivak suggests
that the Adivasi (Aboriginal) Indian woman is left behind as a residue in
assessments of Indian citizenship as she doesn’t embody the idealized
construction of this figure. But what is the status of the postcolonial In-
dian woman? Is it equivalent to that of her male counterpart? What does
Derrida’s ghost that is linked to justice and the future (as much as to the
past) have to do with the women of the Indian partition? Is the treatment
of the Indian woman refugee who survived the partition linked to con-
temporary Indian women? What would the ghosts of the Indian partition
say about the construction of gender in India?
The suffering of women refugees during the 1947 partition has been
the focus of research only in the past twenty years. 30 The horrific statistics
that surround women refugees—between 75,000–100,000 Hindu, Mus-
lim, and Sikh women who were abducted by men of the other commu-
nities, subjected to multiple rapes, mutilations, and, for some, forced
marriages and conversions—is matched by the treatment of the abducted
women in the hands of the nation-state. In the Constituent Assembly in
1949 it was recorded that of the 50,000 Muslim women abducted in India,
8,000 of them were recovered, and of the 33,000 Hindu and Sikh women
abducted, 12,000 were recovered. 31 The Ministry of Relief and Rehabilita-
tion in the newly formed states ensured that these women were returned
to their respective countries, even the ones who had come to terms with
their abductors and started a family with them. Yet, these women’s
lives—the ones who were abducted, the ones who died, the ones who
were never recovered—were not even deemed worthy of being recorded
or their memory being kept alive. In most of the instances of the recov-
ered women, their voices, their preferences, and their wishes were not
 Radhika Mohanram 15

heard and they lacked agency; they were subject to the whims of the men
and the state which were structurally at an equivalence with each other.
Urvashi Butalia points out that she had come across a ledger in a second-
hand bookstore which consisted of 1,414 pages with a list of 21,809 names
of abducted women and children compiled by the Commissioner of Am-
bala and Jalandhar districts. The discarding of this ledger, a refusal to
archive it, shows the lack of value that the new nation-state placed upon
its women citizens. 32 She also adds that ashrams (monasteries) were set
up for abducted women who were recovered and discarded by their
families as they were considered to be “polluted” and that these ashrams
continued to house these women unclaimed and with nowhere to go as
late as 1997, fifty years after independence and partition. 33 For Veena
Das, “the circulation of the figure of the abducted woman, with its asso-
ciated imagery of social disorder as sexual disorder, created the condi-
tions of possibility in which the state could be instituted as essentially a
social contract between men charged with keeping male violence against
women in abeyance.” 34 The privileging of male citizens and women be-
ing denied justice, despite equality and liberty being promised by the
Constitution, also points to the limits within which women are placed in
the formation of the nation-state.
These limits, post-partition, in the subcontinent are highlighted in a
recent Pakistani film that deals with the aftermath of 1947 partition. I
have selected to exemplify my point on the Indian state with a Pakistani
film because of the scarcity of recent examples in India which deal with
Hindu or Sikh women affected by the partition. Sabiha Sumar’s 2003
Punjabi film Khamosh Pani [Silent Waters] deals with an abducted woman,
Ayesha, who lives in a small village in Punjab along with her son, Salim.
Set in 1979 when Pakistan was on the road to further Islamization during
President Zia-ul-Huq’s tenure, the film includes flashbacks of Sikh wom-
en being coerced by their menfolk to commit suicide during partition by
jumping into a well to protect their family, especially male, honor. We
find out that Ayesha had been Veeru, a Sikh, before 1947 and was an
abducted woman who had eventually converted and married her abduc-
tor, Salim’s father, and that her Sikh origins had been kept a secret from
her increasingly radicalized son. Eventually, in the face of her son’s de-
mand that she prove her commitment to Islam by publicly declaring it,
and following her realization that, notwithstanding her current life as a
Muslim woman, she could never escape her Sikh origins in the eyes of the
village, she commits suicide in the very well she had refused to enter in
1947. Ayesha functions as a ghost, the undead, between 1947 and 1979,
and as such signals the unresolved matters of the partition which haunt
the postcolonial state. The suppression of memory proves impossible as
Ayesha’s spectral presence shows the political irresolution of the legacy
of violence and the unfinished business of the past that has been left as an
inheritance to the present. What is inherited in this case is not only the
16 Specters of Democracy/The Gender of Specters

demand put on the young Veeru in the past to commit suicide so that the
male family members’ sense of honor remains unblemished but also the
specter of what could have been and what is yet to be achieved and to
materialize. Salim, the village, the sense of Islam represented in the mo-
vie could have all accepted the history and life of Veeru/Ayesha and
given her voice and agency.

CONCLUSION

This essay has argued that it is important to take note of the 1947 parti-
tion in considerations of Indian democracy, citizenship, “home,” and
contemporary life. In its focus on the overthrow of British colonialism
and postcolonial life, I have proposed, there has been an occlusion of this
catastrophic event which occurred simultaneously to independence and
which has underpinned governance, defense policies, multicultural life
and the status of the minority, and a sense of community and safety in
contemporary India. I have suggested that reading the partition and the
modern Indian state through the lens of Derrida’s Specters of Marx allows
for the ghostly rescripting of that which the history of the powerful
leaves behind as detritus. By engaging with Derrida’s work I have shown
that “abstract” critical theory can nuance and add meaning to histories of
trauma which are generally analyzed in a realist mode.
In his well-known article “The End of History,” Francis Fukuyama
posits that the wholesale adoption of Western liberalism has led to the
“end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of
Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” 35
For Fukuyama, like for Marx, the end of history signals the achievement
of an ideological utopia—in this case the triumph of liberal democracy
over other ideologies. He suggests that in the “post-historical period
there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of
the museum of human history,” 36 thus suggesting the beginnings of a
democratic present that leads to a permanently democratic future. What
will be the status of cultural memories of the Indian partition in Fukuya-
ma’s globalized future? Could there be a future for a collective memory
framework by which to remember the partition within a globalized
present informed by liberal democracy and the liberalization of the mar-
ket? What happens to all the idealism and the willingness to sacrifice
lives for one’s cause that the independence and partition was about?
Where do they go?
With their ability to destabilize linear conceptions of time so that the
present cannot be perceived as static, Derrida’s specters signal and high-
light that which is forgotten in the rerouting of national narratives, and
“anachrony [rather than synchrony] becomes the law.” 37 This anachro-
nous presence of ghosts disrupts the perceptions of the smooth linearity
 Radhika Mohanram 17

of time, of the past followed by the present and the future, their very
presence giving a disembodied voice and a form of presence to those who
are politically voiceless. Indeed, the ghosts of the Indian partition, the
politically voiceless, those erased from nationalist history, and the inter-
communal violence are linked to broader memories of being part of the
same community in the past and of having had a shared history. The
rupture and the aftermath cannot be contained by dealing with the parti-
tion in isolation. One could say that intercommunal relations in India is
heir to, in Derrida’s words, “a bottomless wound, an irreparable trage-
dy.” 38 It is the ghosts of partition that remind us of the gap between the
promise of the future and the practices of contemporary Indian democra-
cy. If national history shows the power the living have over the dead, the
ghosts of the partition dead show the power the dead have over the
living and the unfinished work of democracy that has been left to the
present as an inheritance. Transmuting or misnaming partition violence
as communal violence and electing Modi as PM just reveals what is yet to
materialize, what failed to materialize. Just as the partition revealed an
India “unachieved,” the ghosts of partition and the location of the minor-
ity reveal a democracy that is unfinished.
Derrida’s work is relevant to analyze the significance of the 1947 parti-
tion precisely because it partakes of the memory framework as well as
raises issues of justice and ethics to it. If justice and equality in democracy
is rights-based or ordained by law, Derrida’s ghosts break with these
notions and posit a responsibility that the present has to connect the past
with the future. Derrida’s ghosts insist that justice and democracy are
always yet to come, always works in process, and not only refer to a past
but also to pasts foreclosed by loss. Yet their very immaterial presence chal-
lenges both power and history and the power that history has to the
present. Derrida’s suggestive work, then, is valuable to trace not the rup-
ture but the continuum between the past and present day—the time out
of joint—in India.

NOTES

1. Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1989), 6.
2. Marc Augé, Oblivion, trans. Marjolijn de Jager (Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press, 2004), 17.
3. I refer to the meaning of the word/name Pakistan—the land of the pure.
4. See the chapter on “Seven Types of Forgetting” in Paul Connerton’s How Moder-
nity Forgets (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
5. Considering the cataclysmic nature of this event, not many scholars have given
it proper attention. Among the most significant works are: Gyanendra Pandey’s Re-
membering Partition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Kavita Daiya Vio-
lent Belongings (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008); Urvashi Butalia, The
Other Side of Silence (London: Hurst and Company, 2000); Joya Chatterji, The Spoils of
Partition 1947–1967 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Jill Didur, Unset-
18 Specters of Democracy/The Gender of Specters

tling Partition: Literature, Gender, Memory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006);
Ayesha Jalal The Pity of Partition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013); and
Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, South Asia, History, Culture, Political Economy, 2nd Edi-
tion (New York: Routledge, 2004).
6. I refer to Jawaharlal Nehru’s well-known speech on Independence Day 1947.
7. Gerard Richter, “Acts of Memory and Mourning: Derrida and the Fictions of
Anteriority” in Memory, Histories, Theories, Debates, ed. Susannah Radstone and Bill
Schwarz. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 152.
8. Frederic Jameson, “Marx’s Purloined Letter,” in Ghostly Demarcations: A Sympo-
sium on Jacques Derrida, ed. Michael Sprinker (London: Verso, 1999), 38.
9. I focus on the Indian context particularly as I have never been to Pakistan like
most Indians of my generation. I have no family across the border. It has only been in
recent years that Indian and Pakistani civilians have been able to visit each other’s
countries.
10. See, for instance, Ravinder Kaur’s “Distinctive Citizenship: Refugees, Subjects
and Post-colonial State in India’s Partition,” in Cultural and Social History 6.4 (2009):
429–46. In this work and in Since 1947: Partition Narratives among Punjabi Migrants in
Delhi (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007), she discusses the ongoing, unfin-
ished stories of the Indian partition.
11. See Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1992), 53.
12. Ernest Renan, “What Is a Nation?” Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha.
(London: Routledge, 1990), 8–22.
13. See Barbara Misztal, Theories of Social Remembering (Maidenhead: Open Univer-
sity Press, 2003), 17.
14. See Stanley Cohen, “State Crimes and Previous Regimes: Knowledge, Account-
ability and the Policing of the Past,” Law and Social Inquiry 20.1 (1995): 7–50.
15. See for instance Butalia, The Other Side of Silence.
16. See Barbara Misztal, “Memory and Democracy,” American Behavioural Scientist
48.10 (2005): 1324–25.
17. See Theodor Adorno, “What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean?”
Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspective, ed. Geoffrey H. Hartman (Bloomington: Indi-
ana University Press, 1986), 115.
18. Ibid., 117.
19. Ibid., 117.
20. See Partha Chatterjee, Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories.
21. See Joya Chatterjee, “South Asian Histories of Citizenship: 1946–1970,” Histori-
cal Journal, 55. 4 (2012): 1052–53.
22. Ibid., 1060.
23. Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after
the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 9.
24. See Ananya Jahanara Kabir, Partition’s Post-Amnesias: 1947, 1971 and Modern
South Asia (New Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2013), 26.
25. Wendy Brown, Politics Out of History (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2001), 150.
26. See Faisal Fatehali Devji, “Hindu/Muslim/Indian,” Public Culture 5, 1, (1992):
16–17.
27. Ibid., 1.
28. Ibid., 1–2.
29. See “Exordium,” in Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the
Work of Mourning and the New International (New York and London: Routledge, 1994),
xviii.
30. See Kamla Bhasin and Ritu Menon’s Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s
Partition (New Delhi: Kali for Women Press, 1998) and Urvashi Butalia for some of the
earliest analyses of women’s lives in the partition. That they have been published only
fifty years after the partition suggests the muting of women’s voices in the recording
of history of this event.
 Radhika Mohanram 19

31. See Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 2007).
32. See Butalia, The Other Side of Silence, 107.
33. Ibid., 129–30.
34. Das, Life and Words, emphasis in the original; 21.
35. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History,” National Interest (Summer 1989): 1.
36. Ibid., 17–18.
37. Derrida, Specters of Marx, 7
38. Ibid., 21.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adorno, Theodor. “What Does Coming to Terms with the Past Mean?” Bitburg in
Moral and Political Perspective, ed. Geoffrey H. Hartman. Bloomington: Indiana Uni-
versity Press, 1986: 114–29.
Augé, Marc. Oblivion. Trans. Marjolijn de Jager. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2004.
Bhasin, Kamla, and Ritu Menon. Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition.
New Delhi: Kali for Women Press, 1998.
Bose, Sugata, and Ayesha Jalal. South Asia, History, Culture, Political Economy, 2nd
Edition. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Brown, Wendy. Politics Out of History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001.
Butalia Urvashi. The Other Side of Silence. London: Hurst and Company, 2000.
Chatterjee, Partha. Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. Prince-
ton: Princeton University Press, 1993.
Chatterji, Joya. “South Asian Histories of Citizenship: 1946–1970.” Historical Journal,
55, 4 (2012): 1052–53.
———. The Spoils of Partition 1947–1967. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2007.
Cohen, Stanley. “State Crimes and Previous Regimes: Knowledge, Accountability and
the Policing of the Past.” Law and Social Inquiry 20, 1 (1995): 7–50.
Connerton, Paul. How Societies Remember. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1989.
———. How Modernity Forgets. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Daiya, Kavita. Violent Belongings. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008.
Das, Veena. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. Berkeley: Univer-
sity of California Press, 2007.
Derrida, Jacques. Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the
New International. New York and London: Routledge, 1994.
Devji, Faisal Fatehali. “Hindu/Muslim/Indian.” Public Culture 5, 1, (1992): 1–18.
Didur, Jill. Unsettling Partition: Literature, Gender, Memory. Toronto: University of To-
ronto Press, 2006.
Fukuyama, Francis. “The End of History.” National Interest (Summer 1989): 1–18.
Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1992.
Hirsch, Marianne. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the
Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.
Jalal, Ayesha. The Pity of Partition. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.
Jameson, Frederic. “Marx’s Purloined Letter.” In Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on
Jacques Derrida, ed. Michael Sprinker. London: Verso, 1999: 26–67.
Kabir, Ananya Jahanara. Partition’s Post-Amnesias: 1947, 1971 and Modern South Asia.
New Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2013.
Kaur, Ravinder. “Distinctive Citizenship: Refugees, Subjects and Post-colonial State in
India’s Partition.” In Cultural and Social History, 6, 4 (2009): 429–46.
20 Specters of Democracy/The Gender of Specters

———. Since 1947: Partition Narratives among Punjabi Migrants in Delhi. New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 2007.
Misztal, Barbara. Theories of Social Remembering. Maidenhead: Open University Press,
2003.
———. “Memory and Democracy.” American Behavioural Scientist 48, 10 (2005):
1320–38.
Pandey, Gyanendra. Remembering Partition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001.
Renan, Ernest. “What Is a Nation?” In Nation and Narration, ed. Homi K. Bhabha.
London: Routledge, 1990: 8–22.
Richter, Gerard. “Acts of Memory and Mourning: Derrida and the fictions of Anterior-
ity.” In Memory, Histories, Theories, Debates, ed. Susannah Radstone and Bill
Schwarz. New York: Fordham University Press, 2010: 150–60.
 TWO
Lost Homes, Shifting Borders, and the
Search for Belonging
Jasbir Jain

The Partition of India dislocated millions of people on both sides of the

border, a dislocation much more than just a physical one. It created a
feeling of helplessness and desolation and challenged the definitions of
nation and homeland. Memories and histories of the past continue to
haunt the children and grandchildren of those who experienced disloca-
tion and violence during the Partition, and the social fabrics of the two
(now three) countries have been deeply affected. Partition is an experi-
enced reality, a history which in itself is an incomplete process through
its continued resurfacings in our present. For many of us, who did not
live through it ourselves, it becomes an exploration of the suppressed
texts of memory. The past in itself is neither “real” nor stable; it finds a
tentative reality through recollections and memories.
This essay seeks to work with home and homelessness in the context
of cultural memories. It also seeks to widen the meaning of the word
refugee to take it beyond mere political immediacy and relate it to the
existential sense of belonging, estrangement, and exile as these terms
come to express the psychological states of the dislocated and to stretch it
to include the word muhajir. Derived from the word hijrat, muhajir carries
a reference to the Prophet’s exodus and signifies the idea of a religious
mission. The Muslim migrants from those parts of India lying outside the
newly formed boundaries of Pakistan, especially from Uttar Pradesh and
Bihar, are referred to as muhajirs. There are other economic and political
power equations that also come into play, but the fact remains that they
are still considered as outsiders. In the case of Partition-related migra-

21
22 Lost Homes, Shifting Borders, and the Search for Belonging

tions, not only are homelands left behind but community affiliations are
also displaced. No one was able to carry the cultural artifacts with them.
Another complex aspect of these cross-border migrations is the constant
negotiation which the self is called upon to make with both belonging
and estrangement.
What is a home? Land, territory, neighborhood, the environs, commu-
nity, citizenship, a dwelling, or a national unit? Bachelard has comment-
ed on the integrating function and the psychological impact of the physi-
cal home, 1 and Avtar Brah wonders whether it is a mythic place and thus
one of no return. 2 Does home denote possession or a sense of being-at-
home and does dispossession disconnect a person from all social affilia-
tions? In India’s culture, the renouncer, the ascetic, and the fakir live
through non-possession and yet have a social significance and claim the
householder’s hospitality. 3 The self was not annihilated. Derrida extends
the notion of hospitality as an offering of refuge to a stranger uncondi-
tionally. 4 But that doesn’t happen and the temporary ‘homecoming’ nev-
er takes place. Both the Indian and Abrahamic traditions collapse when
the fact of homelessness is thrust upon contemporary society. There can
be no return to the purist condition, for the return is not to an existing
home where one can belong. As Brah points out, “If the circumstances of
leaving are important, so, too, are those of arrival and settling down.” 5
Homecoming is associated with earlier memories of the lived space and
brings with it warmth and restoration and has its own pleasures, the kind
that Hölderlin in his 1802 poem “Homecoming” and Wordsworth in
“Tintern Abbey” experience. The return home brings about a conjunction
between self and environment and builds a bridge across time. It, as
Heidegger has observed, literally holds the being. 6 But a violent, trau-
matic exodus brings about a total uprooting in which the very sense of
being is annihilated. The process of rehabilitation remains limited to the
material concerns. Later in the essay I seek to problematize the various
footholds for the act of belonging. An act of hospitality across differences
facilitates and sets in motion the process of belonging.
It is in the above context that Bishen Singh’s preference to die on the
barbed wire fencing marking the border between India and Pakistan
rather than submit to a forced deportation from the land of his birth in
Manto’s short story “Toba Tek Singhs,” 7 makes sense. A profound and
painful comment on the Partition, the story captures the anguish of being
exiled as also the difficulty of accepting the finality of “no return.” Even a
supposedly insane man resists it. The story is also a comment on the
unbridgeable gap between the abstract notion of nation, a formation of
people, and the actuality of peopling it by shifts of populations. At the
same time it exposes the futility of this division; if people have got along
so far, where is the logic in disrupting them? There is an incident in the
story, the visit of a friendly Muslim neighbor who brings news to Bishen
Singh of his family’s departure and the cattle they have left behind. The
 Jasbir Jain 23

episode demonstrates that human relationships can survive even in a

time of conflict. The nation imagined or real and its geographical counter-
part have no meaning for Bishen Singh. Toba Tek Singh happens to be a
little hamlet where Bishen Singh has lived all his life before being shifted
to the asylum fifteen years ago. One wonders why Manto zeroes in on a
lunatic asylum and its inmates to expose the insanity of the seemingly
sensible political decisions. Through its irony, the narrative also com-
ments on power—political power, police power, and power of the regula-
tions—impersonally acted upon, deprive the individual of both choice
and agency. There is a questioning of the artificial division governed by
political considerations, encroaching on personal space. In the process
families, properties, and relationships are all affected. Again, the deporta-
tion will only sink them further into anonymity and cut off their moor-
ings from all that is familiar. Bishen Singh’s very sense of being in the
Heideggerian sense of the word collapses at the possibility, just as his
swollen legs do at the border. There is an insistent refusal to surrender to
the political will. The question he asks repeatedly is about the location of
this space labeled Pakistan. Bishen Singh is known as one who continu-
ously keeps standing on one leg with the result that his legs are swollen.
His upright vertical position signifies a variety of things: the strength of a
lone pillar, uprightness of thought and approach, as well as a separation
from the other two-legged animals of the world. One can only speculate
as to Manto’s reasons for locating him in this eccentricity, but it definitely
is an action which resists the environment and opts out of doing as others
do. There are several others in the asylum who like him are resistant to
dislocation. 8 Even though disconnected to the world outside, they are
reluctant to leave, bewildered as to how spaces, towns, and villages can
be allotted and distributed at will and fear that it may become a recurrent
exercise. 9 Finally, Bishen Singh collapses on the barbed wire, willing him-
self to this crucifixion rather than cross the border. 10
Reflecting Manto’s own anguish about the Partition through its
layered irony, “Toba Tek Singh” is scathing in its criticism of the madness
of the times and an unforgettable exposition of home and homelessness.
Manto’s own birthplace lay in East Punjab and his adult life was
grounded in Bombay. In “To My Readers,” a piece he wrote in October
1951, he shares his grief with us, “My heart is steeped in sorrow today. A
strange melancholy has descended on me. Four and a half years ago,
when I said goodbye to my second home Bombay, I felt the same way . . .
that piece of land had offered shelter to a family reject. . . .” He goes on to
add, “I rebelled against the great upheaval that the Partition of the coun-
try caused. I still feel the same way.” 11 The decision to come to Pakistan
was an ‘idea lane’ because of the fear that the future was already blot-
ted. 12 In “Letters to Uncle Sam,” written between 1951 and 1954, Manto
expressed his feelings of abandonment and betrayal. In the very first
letter, he recalls his village in India, “My mother is buried there. My
24 Lost Homes, Shifting Borders, and the Search for Belonging

father is buried there. My first born is also resting in that bit of earth.” 13
In these letters he comments on political alliances, art, America’s own
injustices and discriminations, and pursuit of military control over the
subcontinent, reinforcing the wedge that Britain had first driven in
through its divide and rule policies and eventually the Partition of the
subcontinent. He reflects too on the social and political conditions, the
incomplete freedom offered to the Indians is compared to birds whose
wings have been clipped. 14 “Toba Tek Singh” questions the re-formation
of nationhood. It is not for nothing that the soil of our country, our native
place holds an emotional meaning for many of us. This echoes the power
of desh (often the village left behind) in the oral narratives of migrants in
both Eastern and Western sections of Partition.
In Tahira Iqbal’s story “Deshon Mein,” 15 an old woman who had mi-
grated to Pakistan remembers the smell of the soil and the taste of the
radishes grown back in her home in India at the foothills of the Himalay-
as in Punjab. And even if it is an infertile land, the émigré turns back to it
in memory. Sumathi Ramaswamy in her essay “Thinking Territory,”
draws our attention to explorations of cultural memory associated with
particular places and referring to them as place-worlds, observes that
“territory is not simply a pre-determined area within which certain phys-
ical actions are performed . . . rather, it is a complex outcome of discur-
sive meditations and everyday mediations, and a structure of sentiment
produced through imagination, memorialisation, recollection and visual-
isation.” 16
As Intizar Husain’s story “The Unwritten Epic” 17 testifies, place-
worlds and nations may run counter to each other, tearing the individual
into two, leaving no choice but to die. The recurrent theme of most Parti-
tion narratives is the transference of self, of locale or monument, in actu-
ality of history and familiarity: can the Taj Mahal be carried over from its
current location and be relocated? 18 What is rationally argued at the po-
litical level makes little sense at the personal and emotional levels. Pich-
wa in Intizar Husain’s “An Unwritten Epic” hoists up a Pakistani flag
when its birth is announced but has soon to pull it down as it is a foreign
flag. He is further bewildered by the quiet migration of many of his
neighbors and feels compelled to follow. But in Pakistan he is labeled a
muhajir, an outsider, and tolerated on the fringe. The return to India is
inevitable just as his death is. Soon after his return, one morning the body
of the failed hero is found hanging on the branch of a tree. 19 The epic
remains unwritten. The logic in Pichwas’s reasoning outstrips the politi-
cal action. Like Bishen Singh in “Toba Tek Singh,” migration is a tearing
away, and neither Bishen Singh nor Pichwa is able to make the crossing.
The very idea of the dismantling of a known home is traumatic and fatal.
Together the two narratives, focusing on space, attempt a definition of
nationhood and work with emotional loss. “An Unwritten Epic” despite
its mock heroic tone unfolds into a tragedy, transcending the narrative
 Jasbir Jain 25

structure to inhabit our inner beings and our consciences. What price
rationality and what price new-found freedom?
Houses, like environments and surroundings, also hold a sense of
belonging and define a relationship between the self and the past. Hei-
degger in his essay “Building Dwelling Thinking” points out that men
dwell in buildings and treat them both as ends and means. There is a
difference between inhabiting and dwelling. The latter includes the
whole of our being encompassing our activities and the changes in our
growth, the way we are on earth. The three processes of building, dwell-
ing, and thinking are interlinked. 20 The absence of any one of them sub-
tracts from the act of living and the meaning of existence. Does the transi-
tion of dwelling from a noun to a verb reflect the memories and histories
which the place holds? Again, thinking can never be governed by linear-
ity. It moves in multiple directions. When dislocated, what is it that we
manage to salvage from the past and carry with us? The very centrality of
space in writings of dislocation supports the connection of the outer
space to the inner self, though each writer approaches it differently. Inti-
zar Husain’s novel Basti goes even further and takes up two dislocations:
the Partition of India and the Partition of Pakistan. The second Partition
placed Bangladesh in the same relation to Pakistan as Pakistan had stood
in relation to India in 1947. As the historian Mushirul Hasan has ob-
served: “Perhaps Partition does not convey the same meanings in Lahore
and Islamabad as it does to people living in Delhi, Lucknow, Calcutta or
Dhaka. It is not bemoaned, for understandable reasons, as an epic trage-
dy but celebrated as a spectacular triumph of Islamic nationalism.” 21 The
birth of Bangladesh dismantled this very idea of Islamic nationalism, and
Pakistan was compelled to think of its prisoners of war and the life of the
nation after the division. Sara Suleri in Meatless Days: A Memoir writes
about her sister’s husband, Zaved, who was taken a prisoner in the ‘71
war, and when he finally returned, it was to a world “that did not really
want to hear the kind of stories they had to tell.” Suleri recounts how she
had felt that his mind was overwhelmed with the incongruity of violence
and the perpetual nightmare that had begun to inhabit his mind. The
question that worried her was, “How will Ifat do it, make Javed’s mind a
human home and take these stories away from his head?” 22
Husain’s Basti reflects his own reasons for migration: a hijrat under-
taken on the lines of the Prophet’s journey. But the novel also questions
the validity of this hijrat working with two time frames and part fantasy,
part history and part personal memories; it creates a ghost town un-
named right till the end. The narrative begins at mid-point and the past
flows in through memories and letters. In this hazy combination of politi-
cal history and personal memory, it recreates the desolation and the tem-
porariness of the past. Zakir is a teacher of history, an occupation he finds
boring, caught as he is in the turbulence of new histories taking birth as
ideological warfare, civil strife, and finally dislocation disrupt their lives.
26 Lost Homes, Shifting Borders, and the Search for Belonging

His father’s generation veil all their anxieties behind their faith in relig-
ion. They communicate through riddles:
“Maulana, when will Doomsday come?”
“When the mosquito dies and the cow is without fear.”
“When will the mosquito die, and when will the cow be free of fear?
“When the sun rises in the west.” 23
And thus the question-answer session goes on to be completed much
later in the narrative through the parables from Buddha’s discourses,
stories from the Bible, Muslim folk tradition, and references to the Koran.
When Buddha fell silent, the shoelaces, if they spoke, would be conspicu-
ous; when Husain and his brothers are martyred, the shoelaces speak.
Death follows death. The “crooked cannot be made straight.” 24 Thus the
initial question-answer session marks the need for the world to set itself
straight. A recurrent theme through all history is: Why does brother kill
brother; why did Cain kill Abel?
Where is the basti? Where does one dwell? Memories travel, but can
cities and collectivities travel? And what about graves? One Hakimji had
refused to migrate, because of the shade of the trees in the graveyard. His
query was, “How could my grave have such a shade in Pakistan?” Many
an elderly person stayed back in India, held back by the thought of his
grave. Zakir’s friend Surendar, comments on this: “Yar, you Muslims are
wonderful! You’re always looking toward the deserts of Arabia, but for
your graves you prefer the shade of India.” 25 And those who have mi-
grated, and have lost their houses still hold on to their keys and keep
them rust-free. Zakir’s mother asks her husband for the keys—not the
property but the keys—but he gives them to her only on his deathbed
which she later passes on to her son. 26 They are symbolic of an identity, a
past and a history. These migrants are engaged in salvaging memories of
a once-lived past. Zakir’s friend Afzal recalls his grandmother, who kept
on saying till her death, “My child, the flood must have gone down, let’s
go home.” 27 But as the floods have now risen on this side, there is no
going back, the basti is inhabited by perpetual nomads. Repeatedly, in
different ways, the question is asked, “How does one belong?” Even a
public place like a hotel is desolate and melancholy. Shiraz is almost
abandoned. The emptiness around them merely echoes what they feel
and experience: estranged, rootless, held by an inheritance which binds
them to a past no longer within their reach or accessible.
In contrast to the almost dead city that Intizar Husain presents is
Sorayya Khan’s novel Five Queen’s Road 28 where Dina Lal, a Hindu,
chooses to stay on in Pakistan much against his sons’ and wife’s wishes.
Dina Lal’s property is a recently purchased one; he has bought it from a
British officer who was to leave for England in 1947. When the riots take
place and his sons decide to migrate to India, he refuses to accompany
them. His wife, Janoo, the hapless woman, bemoans this division of her
 Jasbir Jain 27

family and is later abducted, leaving Dina Lal to himself. He sets about
populating his house and his front lawns in different ways. He invites a
colleague to occupy the front portion of his house as a tenant. Later, a car
mechanic’s shop is set up on his front lawns and a kind of slum colony
springs up. Dina Lal converts to Islam and takes the name D. L. Ahmed.
His behavior is difficult to explain in terms of rational argument. He
needs space, but then sets about shrinking it by crowding it and later
cushions his walls to keep the noise from the mechanic’s workshop out.
His food comes from Amir Shah’s house. Yunus, the sweeper and the
odd-job man, does the cooking. The inner partitions in Five Queen’s Road
keep on shifting depending on circumstances. A huge billiard table with
which he associates the memories of his sons pushes all else to the cor-
ners. The friendship with Amir Shah is built on a series of arguments and
quarrels, and finally when Dina Lal dies, Amir Shah discovers that all the
electricity and water bills, an amount far in excess of the rent he had been
paying, have all been paid by Dina Lal. Friend or enemy, refugee or
outcast, or none of these but a generous, lonely man who holds on to his
roots while accepting all other kinds of changes—in religion, name, caste,
and relationships. Why? Is it because it is difficult to leave the place
where one has grown up and where childhood memories are stored? Or
is it a total refusal to accept the borders drawn as a dividing line? It is not
children, nor family inheritance, nor property, nor graves in this instance
but his adherence to his own past, which holds him back. There is no
future and the present he has constructed is one which contracts and
expands simultaneously. The colony with which he inhabits his environs
is loud, noisy, and an agglomeration of odds and ends.
The partitions in the house are also borders; Amir Shah when he sits
in the garden of an evening is “careful to set his folding chair on his side
of back lawn’s imaginary border.” 29 He follows this pattern of life even
when Dina Lal is dead. Despite the barriers and divisions, Dina Lal con-
nects people with people, memories with other memories, and cultures
with other cultures. The jewelery of his wife has supported them and his
private collection of newspapers holds an archive. But now there is no
jewelery left and, after his death, the newspapers make a huge bonfire on
the front lawns and finally even Amir Shah and his family move away
from Five Queen’s Road to a smaller box-like house while missing out on
both the magnificence and the crowding of the house on Queen’s Road.
Amir Shah belongs, but Dina Lal is constantly in search of a human
community and hence the world he surrounds himself with where the
past of his memories is held in place by the archives he builds in his
house through the neat stack of newspapers and the connections with the
noise of the reality around him. Fully aware that he has no future, no
family heirs, no ties that he can hold on to, he still chooses to live there
and later die there to be mourned briefly by Amir Shah’s family. Its
collection of people represents a cross-section of society.
28 Lost Homes, Shifting Borders, and the Search for Belonging

The Partition gave birth to a “heart-in-pieces” generation. 30 Attia Ho-

sain, the writer on whose work Hasan was commenting when he de-
scribed their generation as such, had described her generation in a similar
matter herself years after the Partition. 31 She wrote a piece for Voices of the
Crossing reflecting upon the choices she had made in 1947. As millions of
people suffered loss and large numbers changed sides, she and her hus-
band happened to be in England. They chose to stay there and hold on to
their British passports. They were in a way torn between the two coun-
tries with the family also divided along political lines. One of her broth-
ers chose to go to Pakistan. And hence this self-imposed exile began. 32
Did she ever belong to England? No. In an interview with Lakshmi
Holmström, she admitted, “Apart from anything else I haven’t belonged
to it (English society) because I have not been totally part of any fami-
ly.” 33 This was the way she accounted for her long silence after her novel
Sunlight on a Broken Column. There was a failure of imagination and an
inability to enter a self except her own. In another piece that Attia Hosain
wrote in 1988, “Second Thoughts: Light in Divided Worlds,” 34 occa-
sioned by the reincarnation of Phoenix Fled and Sunlight on a Broken Col-
umn, she rendered an account of her sense of exile and its harsh reality.
She constantly lamented the absence of a family, and though she has left
behind a stack of written work, only a couple of short pieces were pub-
lished during her lifetime, besides the collection of short stories and the
sole novel, which is semi-autobiographical.
Sunlight on a Broken Column is a narrative of division and focuses on
the yesterdays, todays, and tomorrows that merge into each other. It is
also a critique of religious nationalism, but what is of importance for my
present concern is Laila’s (the protagonist’s) visit to the ancestral house
which is to be divided as the house is now declared evacuee property.
This last visit for a final farewell is crowded with memories. The spatial
images of the house dominate and are overlaid by earlier arrangements
and relationships; the double timescape results in a double-layered map
of the house. The absent members are present in their ghostly selves and
the material and the personal imaginations fuse. Fairly early in the novel,
Laila expresses the view that the house was more than a pride of posses-
sion, it was “the fulfilment of a deep need to belong, it was a feeling of
completeness, of a continuity between now and before and after.” 35 Now
visiting it after fourteen years, belonging and non-belonging confront
each other. The house has been through separation, sorrow, and division.
It seems empty as no domestic activity is humming around. It indicates
the dispersal and the fragmentation of the family. In short, the house is
now rejecting its erstwhile owners, leaving them literally unhoused. And
even as the sunlight pours in when she opens a window, she, unable to
move out of the past, shivers in the sun, “There were ghosts that could
not be laid by the passing of years.” 36 The unkempt gardens announced
and identified with her own sense of loss, of being in a wilderness, which
 Jasbir Jain 29

in later years, was to inhabit Attia Hosain herself, silencing and isolating
her and pushing her into a withdrawal, resulting in a total disconnect
from the outer world. The haunting presence of nothingness is somewhat
in the manner of Zakir’s sense of loss in Intizar Husain’s Basti where the
ghostly town is an external symbol of inner emptiness. In this connection
Attia Hosain’s last published work which appeared in Wasafiri, is a sig-
nificant piece, the poem of a lost soul. Titled “Journey to No End,” it
works through the consciousness of the narrator and is loaded with im-
ages of closure, coldness, and loneliness, “imprisoning buildings, dark-
ness absorbed”; “incisive cold entering each pore and probing inwards.”
There is no laughter, no open space, no trees, one is “just a tenant,” a
temporary occupant: “Yet always I am going back through years of
space; and there is no way of stopping this scattering of myself for I have
no guard against the sly abductors concealed and springing out from
every vulnerable perceptive sense.” There is a recurrent desire to be lost
in a crowd, to be among strangers, to feel the silence of alien speech. The
narrator asks, “Went home? I have never left it though I am not there. But
I have no home. I have to repeat the thought to myself to believe in it,
because it is incredible.” 37
Does a human being always dwell in an incomplete unfinished home,
or is it a temporary condition that can be healed? Or is it the political
upheaval that ruptures connections? Does one have to belong to a catego-
ry such as race, religion, region or does there exist the possibility of living
in relationships outside these categories? Political divisions search for a
redefinition of the term “nation,” in order to construct a sense of belong-
ingness, of being “at-home.” Perhaps, loneliness is a permanent condition
of modernity, but then we need to distinguish between the existential
sense of loneliness and the one related to exclusion, memory, and history.
Exile literally entered Attia’s being. Many others feel similarly estranged
on account of divided families and being labeled as muhajirs, immigrants,
hence outsiders. With political developments rendering movement
across borders difficult and rehabilitation laws applicable to evacuee
properties, the division of families has also left a heartache which inhab-
its the mind and the soul. 38
The Urdu poet and writer Munawwar Rana, a post-partition Indian,
also feels this pain. I draw attention to the introductory essay to his long
poem Muhajirnama. Titled “Hum khud udharne lagte hain, turpai ki tarah,”
(We ourselves come undone like the seams), he begins with an account of
the uncomfortable feeling that invades him as he awaits the announce-
ment of his turn in a mushaira in Pakistan, because the poetry of others
constantly works with images of Partition. The essay serves as an intro-
duction to his long poem, Muhajirnama. 39 The lost possessions of the
muhajirs include memories, graves, homes, neighborhoods, and unfin-
ished tasks. In Muhajirnama Rana writes, “Yahan aate huye sab keemti sa-
maan le aaye/Magar Iqbal ka likha tarana chod aaye hain” 40 (On the way here
30 Lost Homes, Shifting Borders, and the Search for Belonging

we carried all that was valuable/but left behind the lyric that Iqbal wrote).
The reference is to the lyric “Saare Jahan se accha Hindustan hamara” (Our
country is the best in the world), a poem which was considered at one
time as a possible choice for the national anthem and speaks of unity and
belonging. Partition has ruptured this feeling of oneness. Rana feels that
these immigrants will be referred to as muhajirs till the end of the world
because they have abandoned so many, “kisi ka saath chuta hai, kisi ko chod
aaye hain,” we have parted from some and left behind others. 41
In the introductory essay to Muhajirnama, “Hum khud udharne lagte
hain,” he moves beyond its initial reference and asks that if Partition was
the solution to religious conflicts, why are Muslim of various regions and
denominations within Pakistan caught up in conflictual situations and
Muslims divided among themselves in other countries? Extending this
argument to other Islamic nations, he lists the numerous conflicts which
entangle them. Israel would never have been able to encroach on Pales-
tine, Afghanistan would not have become a battlefield for Russia and the
US to fight their wars and the race for armaments would not have been so
competitive. 42 The division of the country has rendered us vulnerable as
a nation to the power politics of the major international players. The gaze
backwards is now part of our present reality as longing, nostalgia, and
regret play with one another at the Wagah border camouflaged by jingo
patriotism.
Is there no homecoming? Is there no way of belonging? Is the outsider
eternally doomed to this sense of homelessness? Perhaps not. The only
way borders can be crossed is by going across, by allowing culture a
priority over violence. Asghar Wajahat’s play Jis Lahore Nahin Dekhiya O
Jamiya hi Nahin 43 explores this possibility. Wajahat, like Rana, is an Indian
and teaches Hindi at Jamia Millia Islamia. Born in 1946 he has no lived
experience of the Partition but his writerly imagination has gone over to a
Punjabi woman’s situation who is living alone in her huge house, uncer-
tain whether her son and his family have survived the exodus or have
perished. Declared evacuee property, a Muslim family from Lucknow is
allotted the house, which they believe to be unoccupied. But soon they
realize that there is another occupant—a ghost, a woman, or who? The
son of the family wants to eliminate her as she refuses to go. It is immate-
rial whether she lives in India or Pakistan; she refuses to be unhoused,
kinless as she is at the moment. But through her willingness to accommo-
date, she acquires a family. The man addresses her as phuphi, paternal
aunt, and the children as grandmother. Her being at home amid her
surroundings is of great help to the newcomers as well as their kin. There
are two occasions which capture this spirit of belonging. On one occasion
the woman expresses a desire to leave for India, but the family refuses to
let her go into an unknown and uncertain future, an exile as it were; 44 the
second occasion is when she dies—should she be cremated according to
Hindu customs or buried according to the Muslim rites? The Maulana
 Jasbir Jain 31

advises them to be true to her religion and the men then start trying to
put together whatever they have observed of Hindu rites. 45 These two
moments capture the meaning of the title “He who has not seen Lahore,
is not yet born,” the allusion being to the culture of Lahore which em-
braces the other, offers hospitality, unconditionally.
But these moments in themselves point to individual reciprocal good-
ness and are not enough to bring about a large-scale shift in the exiles’
non-belonging. Yet, Wajahat shows a way, which if adopted can change
our present. The Pehlawan, full of hatred, takes it out on the Maulana
which brings the reader/viewer down to the ghastly reality of our exis-
tence. To repeat Heidegger’s question: “What is it to dwell?” 46 One finds
no satisfactory answer. Do we dwell in houses, in memories, in history or
in art? How do we sustain ourselves and cope with a sense of exile—
through language or through silence? The search for home is an ever-
continuing search for belonging, for a placement in the new social forma-
tion which perhaps every individual has to engage in at an individual
level. The political realities work through multiple discourses and one of
them is power. Any aspiration to power comes up against histories of the
past, of immigration, of nationalism and against minority-majority dis-
courses. Munawwar Rana is not far wrong when he traces the conflicts in
Muslim countries to the rupture that the Partition of India. The individu-
al has to work out his own salvation through a conscious act of belonging
and perhaps survive on substitutes as Dina Lal does in Five Queen’s Road,
or in nostalgia and regret as in Muhajirnama, where Rana goes so far as to
say, “Yeh hijrat to nahin thi buzdilli shayad hamari thi/ ki hum bistar pe ek
hadiyon ka dancha chod aaye hain,” 47 (This was not hijrat but perhaps our
cowardice/ we left behind a skeleton on the bed).
Migration, in itself, is a disintegrating fact and partition migrations
even more so. The task of integrating involves both the outside and the
inside worlds. It is difficult to arrive at a satisfactory equation between
political and personal space. It is even more difficult when cultural
spaces and languages overflow. One finds sameness everywhere. They
are just like us; then, why are we separate? One can only work out solu-
tions at an individual level and home, in the final instance is a memory
home.

NOTES

1. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, translated by Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon
Press, 1969), 6–7.
2. Avtar Brah, Cartographies of the Diaspora (London: Routledge, 1996), 192.
3. Romila Thapar, in her study of the Buddhist tradition and of renunciation as a
counterculture has underlined the moral and emotional base of both as they work
through compassion and concern for others and resist ideological pressures. The act of
dispossession does not annihilate the self or disrupt the renouncer’s relationship with
society. See Romila Thapar, “The Householder and the Renouncer in the Brahmanical
32 Lost Homes, Shifting Borders, and the Search for Belonging

and Buddhist Traditions,” Cultural Pasts: Essays in Early Indian History (New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 2000), 914–45.
4. Jacques Derrida, “Hospitality,” in Jacques Derrida: Basic Writings, ed. Barry
Stocker (London: Routledge, 2007), 237–64. Derrida refers to the politics of the late
nineties, especially in France, and refers to the “cities of refuge” and debates the
possible hospitality one can extend to a refugee. This essay should be read along with
Derrida’s essays, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, translated by Mark Dooley and
Michael Hughes (London: Routledge, 2012). Offering hospitality to the outsider re-
quires first of all the attitude of trust; it demands reciprocity and is, at present, condi-
tional.
5. Avtar Brah, Cartographies of the Diaspora (London: Routledge, 1996), 182.
6. Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” Basic Writings, ed. David Far-
rell Krell (London: Routledge, 1978; Indian Reprint 2012), 243–55.
7. Saadat Hasan Manto, “Toba Tek Singh,” in Bitter Fruit: The Very Best of Saadat
Hasan Manto, edited and translated by Khalid Hasan (New Delhi: Penguin, 2008),
9–15.
8. Ibid., 10–11.
9. Ibid., 11–12.
10. Ibid.,15.
11. Saadat Hasan Manto, “To My Readers,” Bitter Fruit: The Very Best of Saadat Hasan
Manto, edited and translated by Khalid Hasan (New Delhi: Penguin, 2008), 655–56.
12. Saadat Hasan Manto, “Ashok Kumar: The Evergreen Hero,” Bitter Fruit: The
Very Best Saadat Hasan Manto, edited and translated by Khalid Hasan (New Delhi:
Penguin, 2008), 460.
13. Saadat Hasan Manto, “Letters to Uncle Sam: Letter I,” Bitter Fruit: The Very Best
of Saadat Hasan Manto, edited and translated by Khalid Hasan (New Delhi: Penguin,
2008), 610–52.
14. Tahira Iqbal, “Deshon Mein” in Rekhat (Islamabad: Dost Publications, 2003),
42–51.
15. Sumathi Ramaswamy “Thinking Territory: Some Reflections,” Foreword to
Thinking Territory: Some Reflection, eds. B. P. Giri and Prafulla Kar (Delhi: Pencraft
International, 2009), 11.
16. Intizar Husain, “The Unwritten Epic,” translated by Leslie E. Fleming and Umar
Menon, Stories About the Partition of India, 3 volumes, ed. Alok Bhalla (New Delhi:
Harper Collins, 1994), 635–57.
17. Mohan Kalpana, “Traitor to the Tajmahal” in Reading Partition/Living Partition,
ed. Jasbir Jain (Jaipur: Rawat Publications, 2007), 35–39.
18. Martin Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking,” Basic Writings, ed. David Far-
rell Krell (London: Routledge, 1978, Indian Reprint 2012), 243–44.
19. Intizar Husain, Basti, Translated Frances W. Pritchett (New Delhi: Harper Col-
lins, 2000).
20. Mushirul Hasan, “Memories of a Fragmented Nation: Rewriting the Histories of
India’s Partition,” Economic and Political Weekly, October 10, 1998, 2663.
21. Sara Suleri, Meatless Days: A Memoir (London: Flamingo, 1991), 144.
22. Ibid.
23. Intizar Husain Basti, translated Frances W. Pritchett (New Delhi: Haper Collins,
2000), 7.
24. Ibid., 256–57.
25. Ibid., 139.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid., 231.
28. Sorayya Khan, Five Queen’s Road (New Delhi: Penguin, 2009).
29. Ibid., 201.
30. Mushirul Hasan, “Heart-in-Pieces Generation,” Financial Express, 21 Feb. 1998.
www:/[Link]/del/ / le /daily (accessed 28 October 2014.)
31. Suman Bhuchar, “Attia Husain 1913-1998,” Wasafiri, 13, 27 (1998), 43–44.
 Jasbir Jain 33

32. Attia Hosain, Voices of the Crossing, Serpent’s Tail, 1998. Transcript of the audio
version of the paper written for this volume was made available to me by Attia’s
daughter, Shama Habibullah, hence page references and other details are missing.
Voices of the Crossing was BBC Third Programme. Attia worked for some time in the
BBC for the Third Programme, Eastern Service and Home Service and there was a
controversy about a non-Pakistani running a program in Urdu. A part of the recording
is included in the Memorial Meeting video. My access has been through Shama Habi-
bullah, hence no print references.
33. Attia Hosain, Interview with Lakshmi Holmström, “Sunlight and Shadow,” In-
dian Book Review, September, 1992. Holmström has another piece on her “Cerebrations:
Attia Hosain, Her Life and Her Work,” Indian Book Review, 16 February–15 March,
1999.
34. Attia Hosain, “Second Thoughts: Light in Divided Worlds,” The Independent,
Thursday, 18 August, 1988.
35. Attia Hosain, Sunlight on a Broken Column (New Delhi: Arnold Heinemann,
1979).
36. Ibid., 88.
37. Ibid., 310.
38. The word muhajir is derived from the Prophet’s hijrat and is generally applied to
immigrants. In Pakistan the reference is to Muslim immigrants who have migrated
from the areas allocated to India, more specifically Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. The poet
Nida Fazli has two autobiographies: Deewaron Ke Beech (New Delhi: Vani Prakashan,
2001), and Deewaron Ke Bahar (New Delhi: Vani Prakashan, 2005), which narrate his
family’s story at the time of Partition. Again Mushirul Hasan’s edited two-volume
India Partitioned: The Other Face of Freedom (New Delhi: Roli Books, 1995, 1997) has an
extract from the poet, Josh Malihabadi, from his autobiography, Yaadon ki Baraat, titled
‘‘My Ordeal as a Citizen of Pakistan” (196–206). This extract has been translated by
Mushirul Hasan. Josh writes about the difficulty of the decision to migrate. While the
then Prime Minister Nehru wanted him to stay or divide his time between the two
countries, his friends in Pakistan advised him to migrate fearing a dark future after
Nehru. The migration was much against his emotional self (200–201). His welcome in
Pakistan was marked by hostility, ‘‘Jis jagah hum ne banaya ghar sadak pe aa gaya” ( the
place where I built a house, turned into a road). It comments on his sense of homeless-
ness and non-belonging. “To be on the road” is a way of expressing homelessness.
39. Munawwar Rana, “Hum khud udharne lagte hain,” introduction to Muhajirnama.
(New Delhi: Vani Prakashan, 2011), 9–29.
40. Munawwar Rana, Muhajirnama (New Delhi: Vani Prakashan, 2011). 47
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid.
43. Asghar Wajahat, Jis Lahore Nahin Dekhiya O Jamikya Hi Nahin (New Delhi: Vani
Prakashan, 2001).
44. Ibid., 51–52.
45. Ibid., 76–78.
46. Heidegger, 243.
47. Muhajirnama, 35.

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don: Routledge, 2007. 237–64.
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———. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. Translated by Mark Dooley and Michael

Hughes. London: Routledge, 2012.
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———. Deewaron ke Bahar. New Delhi: Vani Prakashan, 2005.
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———. “Memories of a Fragmented Nation: Rewriting the Histories of India’s Parti-
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———. India Partititioned: The Other Face of Freedom. 2 Volumes New Delhi: Roli Books,
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Heidegger, Martin. “Building Dwelling Thinking,” Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell
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Holmström, Lakshmi. “Review: Sunlight on Broken Column,” Indian Book Review 1992:
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———. “Journey to No End,” Wasafiri, 26 (1997): 64.
———. Sunlight on a Broken Column. New Delhi: Arnold Heineman, 1979.
———. Voices of the Crossing Serpents Tail, 1998. A transcript of the audio in Private
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Husain, Intizar. “The Unwritten Epic.” Translated by Leslie E. Fleming and Umar
Menon, Stories About the Partition of India. Ed. Alok Bhalla. New Delhi: Harper
Collins, 1994. 635–57.
———. Basti. Translated by Frances W. Pritchett. New Delhi: Harper Collins, 2000.
Iqbal, Tahira. “Deshon Mein” in Rekhat. Islamabad: Dost Publications, 2003, 42–51.
Kalpana, Mohan. “Traitor to the Tajmahal” in Reading Partition/Living Partition. Ed.
Jasbir Jain. Jaipur: Rawat Publications, 2007. 35–39.
Khan, Sorayya. Five Queen’s Road. New Delhi: Penguin, 2009.
Malihabadi, Josh. “My Ordeal as a Citizen of Pakistan,” extract from the writer’s
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———. “Letters to Uncle Sam: Letter I,” Bitter Fruit. 610–52.
———.”To My Readers,” Bitter Fruit. New Delhi: Penguin, 655–61.
———. “Toba Tek Singh,” Bitter Fruit: The Very Best of Saadat Hasan Manto, edited and
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Rana, Munawwar. “Hum khud udharne lagte hain turpeyi ki tarah,” Introduction to Mu-
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———. Muhajirnama. New Delhi: Vani Prakashan, 2011.
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 THREE
A Will to Say or Unsay
Female Silences and Discursive Interventions in
Partition Narratives

Parvinder Mehta

The issue of deliberate silence, especially in traumatic history-laden nar-

ratives, revolving around nationalism and superseding the personal and
private tragedies in favor of building a collective consciousness, becomes
a metaphoric apparatus of repression, even strategic dominance in some
cases. The tug-of-war between “silence” and “narration” of traumatic
events—a predominant engagement in many history-inspired literary
narratives—reveals a dichotomous struggle between repressive para-
digms of fragmented history and the confessional urges to express and
articulate that which has not been narrated yet. Silence becomes a non-
narrated discourse which seeks articulation and demands inquiry into its
own subject formation. Mute experiences of traumatic incidents, especial-
ly those acts committed with atrocity, when represented in creative ex-
pressions, offer a discursive framework underscoring the limitations of
the mainstream history as well as interrogating, even challenging them
on the one hand, and creating possibilities for alternative narrative
spaces, albeit marked by belatedness. Thus, for example, in the Indian
historical context, a plethora of narratives about the 1947 Partition of
British India have traced the official discourse/history that celebrates
nationalistic imperatives and endorses the courage of the freedom fight-
ers and national leaders. Although many narratives about the partition
have highlighted the Partition violence, including mass killings, rape of
women on both sides of the border, as well as homelessness and abduc-

35
36 Parvinder Mehta

tion leading to a catastrophic loss in India’s recorded history, there is a

remarkable tension between silence and discourse. Thus while the pre-
dominantly celebratory, nationalistic aspect of India’s awakening at the
dawn of its independence from the British rule is resplendently eulogized
through narratives of patriotic history, glimmering with tales of bravery,
there is also another emerging trend of narratives that has evolved from
discourses on loss and nostalgia. In recent decades, narratives revealing
shame and sexual violence that were intrinsically ignored or passingly
referred to in mainstream history have emerged to underscore aberra-
tions and an alternative history of Partition.
History, especially in the context of Indian independence and Parti-
tion, reveals a strange bifurcation between the official history endorsing
the Nehruvian/Gandhian vision of nation-formation, and the countless
individual stories of victimhood, and trauma encoded within enforced
silences. Historians such as Gyanendra Pandey, and many others, have
written about historiographic interventions needed to understand the
gaps and silences about the unspoken subject positions that struggle
against a shallow homogenization of historical analysis. In “In Defense of
a Fragment,” Pandey establishes that the history of sectarian violence in
modern India is written as an “aberration” and as an absence as “violence
is seen as something removed from the general run of Indian history: a
distorted form, an exceptional moment, not the “real” history of India at
all.” 1 Such a disjuncture between different versions of history—one that
endorses ultra-nationalism and the other history on the margins that is
only partly channeled through inadequate examination and/or represen-
tation—reveals a willful indifference and even contributes to a collective
amnesia. “[Violence’s] contours and character are simply assumed: its
forms need no investigation.” 2 The history of partition linked with the
mainstream, inflated rhetoric of nationalism, that ignores the agonies suf-
fered by minorities, is limited and unacceptable: “because it tends to be
reductionist and not only because it continues to ply a tired nationalist
rhetoric. It is unacceptable also because, willy-nilly, it essentializes “com-
munalism” and the “communal riot,” making these out to be transparent
and immutable entities around which only the context changes.” 3 Pan-
dey urges historians to do away with a sanitized history; the scars of
history must be examined deeply to reveal “the totalizing standpoint of a
seamless nationalism that many of us appear to have accepted.” 4 His call
for doing away with an inadequate, aberrant history of Partition and
instead recuperate from its amnesiac lethargy and question its hegemonic
parameters has indeed led to many critical works that followed on the
inadequacy of mainstream history. His sense of urgency has been ac-
knowledged in many scholarly books that have come out since 2000. As
Urvashi Butalia investigates, “Why had the history of Partition been so
incomplete, so silent on the experiences of the thousands of people it
affected? Was this just historigraphical neglect or something deeper: a
 Female Silences and Discursive Interventions in Partition Narratives 37

fear, on the part of some historians, of reopening a trauma so profound,

so riven with both pain and guilt, that they were reluctant to approach
it?” 5 Butalia also draws attention towards “the patriarchal underpinnings
of history as a discipline” and challenges the feminists to retrieve female
agency in a predominantly male-centered discourse. 6
Many writers have traced unheard, unspoken limns of empowering
moments in adversity, so to speak, and have reflected on the inane hu-
manity as well as inhumanity of Partition. 7 Despite such a plethora of
narratives, there are critical imperatives defined within nationalistic/mas-
culinist frameworks that attempt to revoke the trauma of violent viola-
tions especially with female victims through repressive silences and non-
representations. By relegating experiences of female victims of Partition
in terms of unspoken, shame-induced moments of violation, a non-repre-
sented discourse does not merely ontologically negate the experiences of
female victims and survivors, but is also rendered a collateral necessity
that must be forgotten. Such histories, curbed through the rubric of
shame and trauma, remain embedded and unresolved because the si-
lence surrounding these histories becomes a male-sanctioned attestation,
an iconography of selectively chosen moments of valorization and limit-
ed remembrance. The wide disjuncture between the State-endorsed, text-
book history and its step-sibling, revealed through individual personal
histories that are either framed within the specialized modes of academic
dissemination by social scientists or creative writers or filmmakers, must
be and has been critically acknowledged by scholars in recent decades.
My central argument in this article relates to the representations of
such an unspoken discourse through female silence and opacity that be-
comes imperative, even instrumental in suggesting a closeted, totalizing
notion of history in them. Sometimes, such representations reveal a bifur-
catory politics: they valorize masculinist ideals of martyrdom and cou-
rage while relegating shameful incidents of female violations and victim-
hood to discursive frameworks of amnesiac, forgetful narrations. Refer-
ring to selected works such as Rajinder Singh Bedi’s short story “Lajwan-
ti,” Shauna Singh Baldwin’s What the Body Remembers, and Sabiha Su-
mar’s Silent Waters (Khamosh Pani), this chapter underscores the discur-
sive implications of this metaphoric female silence or inchoate narrations
and highlights the legitimate, feminist questions that these writers high-
light. In most partition narratives, a ubiquitous sense of urgency is
blocked by notions of shame, willful forgetting, and erasures. The hidden
voices that emerge may be framed by their silence or even whispering
vocality rather than an assertive intervention, a transgressive take on
mainstream history. In registering the discursive framing around silence,
I also want to explore viable theoretical standpoints to understand the
private, unspoken discourse around Partition and the complicit politics
of representation, especially of the female voice or lack thereof, which
affirms a particular kind of totalitarian history in collective memory. For
38 Parvinder Mehta

example, in her oft-cited essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Gayatri Chak-
ravorty Spivak offers an interventionist claim that the subaltern, always
placed in a subordinate position, cannot speak in a hegemonic frame-
work and is already effaced by gender politics. 8 Silence, merely seen as
an absence, frames the non-utterance as a quiet act of choosing not to
speak or narrate—a repressive act of curbing secrets and/or traumas.
However, silence can also be seen as a presence, as a yet-unuttered dis-
course that has been denied or delayed narrative space within available
paradigms. Even when attempts of articulation are made, they are either
consigned to secret, private spaces or usurped over dominant narrativity
that can then choose to interpret it strategically. Likewise, choosing to be
silent endorses a willful relinquishing, a surrender of articulation. Yet not
being allowed to speak from a particularly subjective vantage point be-
comes a censorial, oppressive act of regulation, a disciplinary decree that
must negate any affirmation through totalitarian control. Silence can thus
operate through strategies that must be acknowledged. As Foucault ex-
plains (albeit in the context of seventeenth-century repression of sexual-
ity), silence as the discretion between different speakers is less a limit
than “an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and
in relation to them within over-all strategies.” 9 Instead of focusing on
binary divisions between what is said or not, Foucault insists, “we must
try to determine the different ways of not saying such things, how those
who can and those who cannot speak of them are distributed, which type of
discourse is authorized, or which form of discretion is required in either case”
(emphasis added). The forbidden, unuttered silence thus operates not
necessarily through the limits of discourse—that which is narrated and
related—but even constituted through it. 10 Another valuable, theoretical
concept about silences can be drawn from what Barrett Watten describes
as a “non-narratives” in The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to
Cultural Poetics: “Nonnarratives are forms of discursive presentation
where both linear and contextual syntax exist but where univocal motiva-
tion, retrospective closure, and transcendental perspective are suspended, de-
ferred or do not exist” 11 (emphasis added). Through “non-narratives,” as I
will show later, silences can be attributed with an alternative to its teleo-
logical understanding by way of a creative history that not only inter-
venes, but also suspends or displaces given interpretation of totality,
thereby revealing hidden structures of passive complicity.

A CARTOGRAPHY OF SILENCE ON THE MARGINS OF HISTORY

The issue of silence in relation to voice has been a predominant concern

with feminist thinkers, scholars, poets, and activists. Thus Adrienne Rich,
Tillie Olsen, Audre Lorde, Cherrie Moraga, Gloria Anzaldua, bell hooks,
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and several others, have addressed the bi-
 Female Silences and Discursive Interventions in Partition Narratives 39

naries of silence and voice, powerlessness and agency amid dichotomies

created within discursive formations of gender. The deployment of fe-
male silence amid masculinist, patriarchal narratives and utterances be-
comes a strategic intervention. Many feminist writers have underscored
the ethical imperatives of understanding the oppressive or liberating si-
lence (depending upon the context), overcoming it and even interpreting
and/or translating the encoded resistance as counter-hegemonic to lacka-
daisical or patriarchal voices. Adrienne Rich writes on silence in her
poem “Cartographies of Silence”—silence can be a plan, a presence and
should not be confused with any kind of absence. 12 Likewise, Trinh T.
Min-ha underscores the use of silence as a subversive intervention and its
multifarious aspects:
Like the veiling of women . . . , silence can only be subversive when it
frees itself from the male-defined context of absence, lack, and fear as
feminine territories. On the one hand, we face the danger of inscribing
femininity as absence, as lack and blank in rejecting the importance of
the act of enunciation. On the other hand, we understand the necessity
to place women on the side of negativity and to work in undertones,
for example, in our attempts at undermining patriarchal systems of
values. Silence is so commonly set in opposition with speech. Silence as
a will not to say or a will to unsay and as a language of its own has
barely been explored. 13
I am interested in exploring this idea of silence as its own language
and as “a will to say or a will to unsay” that inscribes female silence
through absence, non-utterance, or enforced silence. When voiced, the
fictionalized incidents of rape, murder, and suicides of countless women
are revealed through the male prerogative and a masculinist language.
Notably, the female silence about the traumatic encounters or memories
depicts the female victims and survivors on the margins of otherness.
Despite diverse authorial interventions, the female voice or silence is
relegated to the condition of impossibility: an aporetic conundrum of
irresolute struggle. As Ramu Nagappan maintains: “To confront social
suffering is to struggle with silence: both to respect the silence of survi-
vors who cannot speak and to break the political silences that veil social
calamity. The silence of survivors, that chilling aporia, points again and
again to the desecratory potential of narrative.” 14 Nagappan also main-
tains that despite the guiding humanism and/or moral outrage that may
be the intentional motives, many a times, controversial or shocking ac-
counts can cause narrative ambivalence through critical and pedagogical
jostling of diverse isms.
Examining the representations of history and social sufferings, coded
within the rubrics of shame, dishonor, trauma, and acceptance, brings
forth key ethical and moral arguments (if any) raised by the writers of
partition narratives where unheard silence is a metaphoric presence.
40 Parvinder Mehta

When writers represent the violence, more so, through their representa-
tion of silently passive female victims, what function does the silence offer
for the readers of these narratives? Is silence only a punishment, a cover-
up, a shame-coping mechanism, or can it also reveal the dysfunctional
deficiency of language? Likewise, the employed language and its opera-
tion on the narrative requires a critical examination: the implications of a
narrative that attempts to create or destroy historical nostalgia by fram-
ing it with suffering could be a repetitive, mimetic act of performance.
Being silent does not necessarily mean being powerless, and likewise,
being vocal does not simply imply articulation of power.
The ethics of portraying female victims and survivors predominantly
through a spectacle of their silent otherness and mute narratives must be
examined. Implicated in an inaudible address, are such women charac-
ters, in most cases, maybe essentially placed only as arbitrary descen-
dants of inherited shame and loss? For instance, portraying female vic-
tims within a nationalist framework, especially in colonial setting as vic-
tims of history and/or postcolonial rebels, does bring the risk of commod-
ifying their marginality/shame. A cross-comparative examination of how
women writers have represented the trauma of partition and its historical
implications in contrast to multiple narratives written by male writers
also reveals an interesting dynamic that mostly attributes to male victims
of Partition a more provocative sense of mimetic sympathy compared to
female victims struggling against the trauma and shame. 15 Take for in-
stance, Rajinder Singh Bedi’s acclaimed Urdu story “Lajwanti” that de-
picts the recovery efforts of abducted women during Partition. The pro-
tagonist, Sunderlal, yearns for his own missing wife Lajwanti/Lajo,
whose name invokes the sensitive “touch-me-not” plant that withers at
human touch. The story begins with reference to the Punjabi folk song
admonishing against touching lajwanti “for she will curl up and die.” 16
Each morning, Sunderlal, as the secretary of the newly formed rehabilita-
tion committee for abducted women, along with his supporters, would
chant the song and end up choked with tears and follow in silence. The
plant’s sensitivity is related to the fragility of human beings: “the mere
shadow of a hand could make them tremble and wither.” 17 Sunderlal
recalls his abusive behavior towards his wife, Lajo, and yearns for her.
“How frequently had he thrashed her because he didn’t like the way she
sat or looked, or the way she served his food!” His reminiscences of
Lajo’s personhood “with the mercurial grace of a drop of dew on a large
leaf” highlights his casual stance on his physical abuse of his wife, almost
as if she expected it and had accepted it as a part of her life. 18 Lajo’s
passive reticence about the abuse is responded to only through a non-
serious statement that if he beats her again, then she will not speak to
him. Domestic abuse of wives is referred to as a norm in patriarchal
culture. Even as Bedi reveals Sunderlal’s progressive views on accepting
and honoring the innocent, abducted women, he also underscores Sun-
 Female Silences and Discursive Interventions in Partition Narratives 41

derlal’s restrictive views and inability to handle any traumatic experi-

ences.
The emphasis on the frailty of women as leaves of lajwanti can be seen
as Bedi’s commentary on Sunderlal’s own sense of insecurity and fragil-
ity in dealing with the bitter truth. The way his sermonic pleas are ig-
nored or dismissed by people also indicates a sense of apathy towards
words and ideals: “one repeats them like a futile argument, collides with
them, hums them as one goes about the tasks of the day.” 19 The denial
and rejection of some of the returned women by their relatives also reflect
on their cruel expectation of death instead of rehabilitation. Bedi’s story
does not only depict the cruelty of dismissive emotions shown through
the condescending remarks or passive dejection but also demonstrates an
innate sense of weakness, an essential crisis of communication especially
for progressive citizens like Sunderlal. In an attempt to encourage people
to rethink their insular, dismissive attritions about the survivors of parti-
tion violence, his efforts to intervene and offer correctives to his friend,
Kalka Prashad’s failing rhetoric drawn on religious scriptures, would
always bring him to face his own expressive inabilities: “His voice would
choke. Tears would begin to flow down his face, and overcome with
emotion, he would be forced to sit down.” 20
During a conversation between Sunderlal and Narain Bawa, Bedi
skillfully brings the Hindu mythological reference of the Hindu God,
Ram, who had evicted his wife, Sita, because she had lived with her
abductor, Ravana. By alluding to the Hindu mythology, Bedi juxtaposes
these responses in a post-partition context and reveals the rigid expecta-
tions in patriarchal thought and how their validation, even sought via
mythological references, remains framed by silence. Through irony, Bedi
allows the two discourses—religious and socio-political—to coalesce on
how silence can be used as a repressive tool for argument. Thus when
Sunderlal’s voice is initially unheard by others, he suggests that in “Ram
Rajya,” a washerman could express his thoughts unlike now when he is
not allowed to speak. Sunderlal emotionally exhorts his audience: “Did
Sita commit any sin? Wasn’t she, like our mothers and sisters today, a
victim of a violence and deceit?” 21 Although seemingly portraying Sun-
derlal as a fearless, progressive man with liberal views, the narrative
shifts to reveal his limitations eventually. In a strange ironical twist, Laj-
wanti has been recovered. At the Wagah border, Lajo is perhaps one of
the few younger women that has been exchanged as part of the mutual
deal. As the people stare at her, she “stood there trying to hide her tattoo
marks from the curious gaze of people.” 22 Sunderlal’s initial response to
this news is represented with a vacancy of thought and action. When
assured by the description of Lajo’s tattoos that indeed his wife has been
recovered, Sunderlal nostalgically remembers her tattoos:
42 Parvinder Mehta

They were like the soft green spots on a lajwanti plant that disappear
when its leaves curl up. Whenever he tried to touch them with his
fingers, Lajwanti would curl up with shyness . . . as if they were some
secret and hidden treasure, which could be despoiled by a predator
and a thief. 23
Initially, Sunderlal is relieved: “he enshrined Lajo like a golden idol in the
temple of his heart and guarded her like a jealous devotee.” 24 However,
when Lajo attempts sharing her sorrow with him, he urges her to not go
there. “Let’s forget the past; you didn’t do anything sinful, did you? Our
society is guilty because it refuses to honour women like you as goddess-
es. It ought to be ashamed of itself. You shouldn’t feel dishonored.” 25 By
imposing silence on Lajwanti, Bedi shows the irony of her recovery. Al-
though the story shows his sympathies, her suffering is never heard and
she is marginalized through enforced muteness. “She had returned
home, but she had lost everything. . . . Sunderlal had neither the eyes to
see her tears nor the ears to hear her sobs.” 26 Idolizing Lajo as a Devi, a
goddess, and never touching her, Sunderlal deprives her of any vestigial
individuality, yet gains sympathy and respect from others. Lajo’s re-cov-
ering is not merely incidental, but also symbolically constitutive of cover-
ing shame.
Another text that visually depicts a silent victim of Partition finally
speaking out is Sabiha Sumar’s highly acclaimed Pakistani film Khamosh
Pani: Silent Waters. 27 Initially, it was supposed to be a documentary
showing a story about Partition violence against women, but then Sumar
changed it into a feature film production as “it would mean scratching
people’s wounds.” 28 In showing a film dealing with Partition, and con-
temporary Pakistan, Sumar depicts violence as a continuing process and
how “politicization of religion” had affected women. The protagonist is
Ayesha (Kirron Kher), a widow with a teenaged son, Saleem, living in the
village Charkhi in Pakistan. The film’s narrative begins in 1979, and Aye-
sha is respected by all. She manages her livelihood by her late husband’s
pension and by teaching Quran lessons to young village girls. We learn
how Ayesha never went near the village well and had other girls draw
water for her from the well. Her haunting memories around the well are
revealed partially like pieces of a puzzle. When asked by her friend if she
misses her husband, Ayesha replies, “Life catches up with you, what you
don’t have . . . you have to let it be.” Strategically set during the rule of
military ruler Gen. Zia-ul-Haq, the film shows the gradual enforcement
of Islamic law in Pakistan. We see how Ayesha’s son Saleem, under the
influence of Islamist fundamentalists, gets estranged from his love-inter-
est Zubeida and becomes more aggressive. Saleem, a flute-playing music-
lover fascinated by Zubeida’s charm, pursues her romantically but is
transformed by his indoctrination through radical Islamic thought.
 Female Silences and Discursive Interventions in Partition Narratives 43

Later, we find that a group of Sikh pilgrims are visiting Pakistani

Punjab to visit holy shrines. A Sikh man, Jaswant Singh, inquires the
villagers about his sister, Veero, who had remained in Pakistan after
Partition. When the pilgrims visit the Panja Sahib Gurdwara, Ayesha
sends sweets for them. However, Saleem gets angry upon finding about
such interaction with “non-believers.” The film shows moments of
stereotypical humor towards the Sikh pilgrims, the respect and affection
shown by the village barber and other villagers, and also sensitively de-
picts the scene where Sikh men, inside the Gurdwara, are combing their
unshorn hair. When they talk about the women who were left behind,
one of them vehemently refutes it, saying that all twenty-two women
were killed for honor, “so the Muslims couldn’t touch them.” At that
point Jaswant thinks about the possibility that some women might have
survived the horror of partition. However, he is strongly rebuked to si-
lence as it is a dangerous premise to even think about. Jaswant Singh,
relentlessly, wants to search for his lost sister, Veero. Initially, when he
inquires about her, he is unable to get much information until Amin, a
Pakistani policeman, visits Jaswant at night stealthily and tells him that
“she is the one that does not go to the well.” Earlier, Amin shares with his
wife that he knows “their pain” as he too is grieving for the loss of his
sister Mina.
Ayesha is indeed Veero, who had been raped by Muslims during the
Partition violence and then later had married one of her rapists, after
converting to Islam. When Ayesha’s past as a Sikh girl collides with her
present as Muslim mother of a young radicalized Muslim man, she is at a
critical threshold, reminded of her history of trauma and violence. In an
evocative scene, Jaswant meets Ayesha for the first time and is convinced
that she is indeed Veero; Saleem enters the house and is upset and ques-
tions Ayesha about the truth. All the pieces of her haunting past come
together as the sepia-toned memories collate her past, question her
present, and portend an uncertain future. Saleem, now a radical Muslim,
is visibly displeased upon finding about his mother’s Sikh identity, a
non-Muslim, kafir. This creates a segregationist politics as her friends
start avoiding her. Saleem insists Ayesha’s “unconditional commitment”
towards Islam and demands her public self-acknowledgment as a Mus-
lim.
Ayesha’s silences as Veero and her traumatic past, when in a moment
of impending crisis, her family tries to preserve the family honor through
willful annihilation, require a critical understanding. The women in the
family are jumping into the well, as men, fearful of impending danger
including potential rape, are urging them to end their lives. Young Veero,
hesitant, refuses to jump into the well and runs away from her family, as
young Jaswant attempts to call her. Veero’s refusal to take her own life
has been interpreted by some critics as a feeble attempt to refute the
patriarchal imposition of masculine ideals. Even Ayesha retorts when
44 Parvinder Mehta

Jaswant urges her to return with him to meet their dying father. “But he
wanted to kill me for his peace . . . seeing me alive and Muslim . . . how
will he go to Sikh heaven.” Such portrayal of Veero’s anger, and its inter-
pretation however, becomes problematic, even complicated in the film.
As a young girl, her inability take the consensual, suicidal step, unlike her
mother and sister, and in her naiveté her futile escape lead to fateful
consequences. She can’t save herself from Muslim rapists and suffers
victimhood, even though it leads to her subsequent conversion to Islam
and marriage to one of the rapists.
In her analysis on Silent Waters, Kavita Daiya maintains: “Ayesha’s
voice articulates the feminist critique of the rhetorics of honour invoked
by men to sanction their dehumanizing violence against women.” 29 Thus
Ayesha’s passivity and lack of viable agency is seen in terms of a subal-
ternity. Daiya asserts, “[in] both contexts, through the use of religions, the
female citizen subject is increasingly rendered subaltern as object, prop-
erty and undesired citizen” and Saleem’s transformed radicalization is
seen as “emerging through the estranging and demonizing of female
subjectivity as Hindu and modern.” 30 Such an interpretation echoes the
Spivakian inability of the subaltern to speak. 31 However, I want to ex-
plore another evaluation of Ayesha’s final act where she jumps into the
well towards the end of the film, without any witnesses, and any immi-
nent danger that propels her to take the drastic step that she avoided as a
young girl in Partition. An unexplored facet of Ayesha’s past identity is
the fact that she was a Sikh girl (not “Hindu and modern” per Daiya’s
view). While it is easy to interpret that her refusal to jump into the well
maybe a neo-feminist refusal to follow patriarchal expectations, we must
also see the nuances of that sepia-toned memory in the film. Young Veero
sees her mother and sister jump into the well, while the worried men
warn about the potential danger from Muslim rioters. The women who
jumped into the well may have taken that drastic step in the Sikh spirit of
shaheedi, to follow martyrdom instead of being forced to convert to Islam.
In Sikh history, the struggle against the Mughal rule’s dictates to accept
Islam or face death, and the shaheedi of the Sikh Gurus as Guru Arjan Dev
and Guru Tegh Bahadur and many other Sikh followers are seen by Sikhs
as exemplary cases of self-affirming heroism. In the film, the women are
jumping amid recitation of the Japji Sahib, the Sikh meditational prayer on
the mystery of God and the Universe; their final act then becomes a
similar act of self-affirmation that defies any possibility of conversion to
Islam. As Suvir Kaul explains, the seemingly senseless deaths are recu-
perated by the vocabulary of martyrdom. “In this vision, the nation, or
quam (community) demands its shaheeds, and is strengthened by
them.” 32 It is notable to see that before Ayesha takes the final drastic step,
even though she offers her prayers as a Muslim woman, she also wears
the necklace (containing her picture as young Veero) that Jaswant gives
to her to remind her of her past identity. In jumping into the well, Ayesha
 Female Silences and Discursive Interventions in Partition Narratives 45

is reclaiming her past identity as Sikh Veero and finally giving her belat-
ed shaheedi in the Sikh spirit. Later, Zubeida questions the meaning of
Ayesha’s drastic step: “So this is how Veero went away, and Ayesha
stayed behind. . . . Or do we really know who left and who stayed?” 33
Despite her conversion to Islam, Ayesha had not fully discarded her past
identity as a Sikh.
After her death, Saleem opens her trunk to find Sikh prayer books,
(Sukhmani Sahib and Japji Sahib) and pictures of the Sikh guru Guru Na-
nak Dev ji. Ayesha is given a burial; her belongings (including the Sikh
prayer books) in the trunk, are dispersed in the river, almost as if per-
forming last rites in the Sikh tradition wherein the cremated remains are
dispersed in a river. Saleem hands over Ayesha’s necklace to Zubeida
and it is Zubeida who is shown remembering Ayesha, and not her son
Saleem. The film ends with the urban setting in Rawalpindi, 2002, as it is
announced on radio: “Pakistan won’t be a haven for Islamic extremists.”
Zubeida’s voice-over acknowledges remembering Ayesha: “Sometimes I
dream of her. I preserve each dream and try not to let it go.” The film’s
final question as to why Pakistan was created is answered by Saleem’s
incomplete utterance as an older, Muslim minister saying, “Pakistan was
made for Islam.” Ayesha’s silence, although seemingly curbed forever
within the male discourse, through her final symbolic act of annihilation,
is also carried on through Zubeida’s personal remembrances.
Another representation of the trauma of Partition is offered by Shauna
Singh Baldwin in her debut novel, What the Body Remembers. Baldwin
narrates the story set in 1937 at Rawalpindi, pre-independent India,
about sixteen-year-old Roop, in a bigamous marriage with a Sikh man,
Sardarji, who is twenty five years older than her. The first half of book
shows the antagonism between Roop and Satya (Truth) vying for power
implicatit in being Sardarji’s wife. The interesting plot incidents, some-
times too predictable, even incredible, carve female sensibilities marked
by patriarchal assumptions, symbolic roles and seemingly feminist ef-
forts. Satya, the uneducated, older wife of Sardarji, belongs to an upper
class and although barren, having failed to produce children, she is also
the manager of Sardarji’s assets. Roop, initially a naïve, child-like, semi-
educated, village wife, gives Sardarji three children for his progeny. Their
narratives, about what their bodies remember and their experiences,
bring out Baldwin’s commentary about the partition from a thoughtful,
Sikh perspective.
The novel’s most horrific experience, also the most relevant section for
this discussion, shows us the traumatic violence and its effects through
the narration of the killing and eventual dismemberment of Kusum (the
wife of Roop’s brother, Jeevan). Kusum’s killing is drawn from a real
incident narrated in Urvashi Butalia’s book The Other Side of Silence where
a father killed his daughter-in-law to save her honor from potential Mus-
lim rapists. Earlier, Baldwin shows how Roop saves Jorimon, her Muslim
46 Parvinder Mehta

maid and herself from potential danger from a group of Muslim soldiers.
Through strategic silence and aggressive vocality, Roop prevents Jori-
mon’s potential rape. Roop ultimately meets her brother Jeevan and finds
out about Kusum’s killing supposedly by Muslim rioters. “This body was
sliced into six parts, then arranged to look as if she were whole again.” 34
Kusum’s breasts had been chopped off and her womb was ripped out
too. Jeevan’s narrative underscores the message and interpretation of her
bodily violation as “a war against [their] quom.” 35 The narrative about
Kusum’s mutilation seems suspect to inquisitive Roop, who is not a pas-
sive listener of narratives and questions its viability. “Questions jumped
like trapped fish in the loose mesh of her mind.” 36 Jeevan’s narrative is
implied through a focus on interpreting the iconographic implications of
Kusum’s bodily violation. It is a tangential narrative that sees “Kusum
only from the corners of his eyes” 37 and one that Jeevan feels should not be
shared with others: “It must be ignored, so that no Sikh man shows weak-
ness or fear.” 38 Roop’s counternarrative is her interrogative aside—an
interior monologue that, although silent and unheard, contests the very
narrative until she finds other plausible meanings. Later Roop learns how
her father, Papaji, had killed Kusum by one stroke of his kirpan, his cere-
monial sword, an article of faith and how Kusum had willingly offered
herself to be killed instead of being violated by Muslims. Even though the
traumatic experience of Kusum’s dismemberment becomes a homosocial
discourse, a narrative told separately by Jeevan and Papaji, Roop is given
the prerogative of remembering: “Roop will remember Kusum’s body,
re-membered.” 39 The lack of omniscience around Kusum’s death might
seem to relegate Roop’s horror and, by extension, the readers’ horror, to
margins of unreliable fragments of history, narrated by the male preserv-
ers of female honor. Roop becomes the ultimate reader of the narrative of
Kusum’s mutilation and provides her own “non-narrative” (as defined
by Barrett Watten). She assumes the critical role of a translator, which in
Judith Butler’s terms, is “to bring into relief the nonconvergence of dis-
courses so that one might know through the very ruptures of narrativity
the founding violences of the episteme.” 40

TRANSLATING SILENCES OF LAJO, VEERO, AND KUSUM:

RUPTURES OF NARRATIVITY AND NON-NARRATIVES

A crucial question worth investigation is: when writers challenge the

official, documented narratives of nationalist versions of partition histo-
ry, to produce alternative, personal histories that might even negate the
nationalist discourse, do such interventions enable a more mimetic, em-
pathic understanding of history or trauma, or do they merely show
glimpses of fragments of history trying to emerge within the interstices of
a silent, passive rhetoric? How do we then formulate the silences repre-
 Female Silences and Discursive Interventions in Partition Narratives 47

sented through the female subjects vis-à-vis the male narrators studied in
this chapter? Can the unheard stories and silences about the traumatic
incidents of Lajo in “Lajwanti,” Ayesha/Veero in Silent Waters, and Ku-
sum in What the Body Remembers be reframed to signify more than a lack,
an inability, or an absence and rather seen as a mode of cognitive affirma-
tion? Ultimately, the implied legacy of received narration of Lajo, Veero,
and Kusum’s silent trauma can be contrasted to see how their subjectiv-
ities are engendered and received in the process. Interestingly, the cultu-
ral translation of the traumatic female silence in these stories engenders
different responses by the male characters. In “Lajwanti,” Lajo’s narrative
is never heard or even imagined by her husband, who actually denies her
any tangible subjectivity, making “her feel as if she was precious and
fragile like glass, that she would shatter at the slightest touch . . . she
would never be Lajo again.” 41 Lajo’s silence is never even translated; its
interpretation is not possible as it becomes a paraphernalia of absence, an
annihilatory assumption, and a logo-centric, nihilistic act of finality pre-
scribed by male hegemonic monopolization. Sunderlal’s reinscription of
Lajo as Devi is an example of subalternizing her silence, in terms of what
Spivak calls “the effaced itinerary of the subaltern subject,” 42 and hence
Lajo remains doubly effaced as one without history and a voice. As a
subaltern, Lajo cannot speak, because her narrative is illegible and inac-
cessible. There is no interpreter or translator available to legitimize her
experience and agency, as there is no linguistic original accessible. Sun-
derlal’s mimetic replication of Lajo’s silence through his own imposed
silence in the end merely frames it and controls its meaning via male
privilege of interpretation.
In Silent Waters, Veero’s trauma and silence is only an absence that is
never uttered yet is gradually visualized through the sepia-toned inter-
ruptions as the spectator is stealthily included in Veero’s narrative. Her
thoughts on her past experiences, as she is shown sitting by the window
many times, are never a part of the film’s narrative and we are oblivious
to her voice. Likewise, we never learn about her perspectives on why she
commits the final act of jumping into the well. Her own discourse is never
accessible, rather, it is extrapolated in retrospect through Zubeida’s inter-
nal thoughts presented as a voice-over narration in the end. Veero’s nar-
rative is then inherited by Zubeida, who symbolically inherits Veero’s
necklace, and not Saleem, her son, who simply ignores Veero’s past. Vee-
ro is not a subaltern, doubly effaced, in Spivakian terms; however, her
history and her voice remains framed in Zubeida’s private memories.
Veero’s story reminds us of Foucaldian paradigms whereby we can see
how the notion of trauma is circulated through discursive formations and
strategic deployment of silence: “how those who can and those who can-
not speak of them are distributed, which type of discourse is authorized,
or which form of discretion is required in either case.” 43 Female silence in
48 Parvinder Mehta

this film, is intrinsically related to trauma which is thus relegated to

oblivion and inaccessibility in public memory.
In What the Body Remembers, the silence around Kusum’s traumatic
experience, although initially inaccessible and trapped within male
voices of interpretation, is reflectively translated through Roop who,
while she listens to Jeevan and Papaji’s narratives about Kusum’s tragic
end, simultaneously questions them. As mentioned earlier, Roop be-
comes a translator who underscores the “ruptures of narrativity” and the
implications of male violence in Jeevan and Papaji’s versions. When Jee-
van first tells Roop about his wife’s dismemberment, he also imagines the
motive of killing a young woman: “without first raping—a waste, sure-
ly.” 44 He also speculates and interprets Kusum’s response to the violence:
“She looked accepting. . . . How can she actually desire it, move to her
captor with a smile on her lips?” Like Sunderlal in “Lajwanti,” Jeevan
initially feels that the symbolic implications of Kusum’s dismemberment
“must be ignored, so that no Sikh man shows weakness or fear.” 45 The
burning of the ancestral house, Pari Darwaza, is also a matter of “shame”
and Jeevan cannot trust anyone except the Sikhs. 46 Likewise, Papaji’s
narrative of how Kusum, his daughter-in-law, was his responsibility and
duty to protect, and how he killed her with one stroke of his kirpan, is a
matter of izzat (honor), and yet Roop evaluates the stories of loss and
death of Kusum, and possible deaths of Gujri and Revati Bhua. We are
also told of Sardarji’s possible traumatic experience which is never
shared and remains relegated to the world of silent secrecy.
The demarcated difference towards personal trauma is thus discern-
ible in how male characters subsume and relegate it towards silence,
whereas Roop, a female respondent to these narratives, translates and
even assumes the responsibility of not relegating this personal trauma (of
Kusum’s dismemberment) to unheard silence or through a predominant-
ly male rhetoric of honor and/or shame. As a translator of traumatic
experiences, while revealing the Butlerian “ruptures of narrativity” in the
male discourse on Partition experiences, Roop’s thought-provoking in-
vestigations conceptually underscore Barrett Watten’s definition of “non-
narratives” that may range from simple to complex forms of articulation,
“but their distinguishing feature is an affective/cognitive unity of tempo-
ral sequence in their presentation by means of punctual, accretive, asso-
ciational, or circular forms, whose formal organization and affective force
would be lost if subsumed within an overarching narrative.” 47 Analyzing
the closeted narratives of Kusum’s killing for instance, Roop’s translated
meanings of the violence narrative, enables a non-narrative articulation
of female silence leading to counter-patriarchal implications: “In their
affective immediacy and associational complexity, nonnarratives engage,
rescript, and displace narratives, but they are not reducible to merely
deformed or negative species of narrative and thus are not fully narrat-
able as such.” 48 Grounded on narratives uttered by Papaji and Jeevan,
 Female Silences and Discursive Interventions in Partition Narratives 49

Roop’s non-narrative confronts the inexactitude of a particular totalitar-

ian history by way of incidental references.
Ultimately, then, the very process of reading narratives on Partition,
especially where female experiences are represented within silence, de-
mands a critical understanding of discursive strategies employed for
their affective immediacy and cognitive affirmation rather than a myopic
examination for historical appropriation and/or representational prac-
tices. The enforced silences of women in such narratives, especially those
written by women writers, attempt to decode the inaccessible stories to
reveal patriarchal assumptions and question the nationalist-statist frame-
work that denies female agency and address. At the same time, I have
underscored how these narratives also seem to foreground the urgency
of un-silencing female agency. The female subject may be rendered subal-
tern as an unheard woman, framed within private, discursive spaces and
may (sometimes) even transcend narrative limitations imposed through a
consciously engendered response. Regardless, the politics of privilege
and the privileging of the (female) body as a communal marker for hon-
or/shame can produce violence of epistemic regimes.

NOTES

1. Gyanendra Pandey, “In Defense of the Fragment: Writing about Hindu-Muslim

Riots in India Today,” A Subaltern Studies Reader, 1986–1995, ed. Ranajit Guha (Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 1.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid., 18.
4. Ibid., 33.
5. Urvashi Butalia, “Community, State, and Gender: Some Reflections on the Parti-
tion of India,” Women and the Politics of Violence, ed. Taisha Abraham (New Delhi: Har-
Anand Publications, 2002), 127.
6. Ibid., 128.
7. Thus writers like Saadat Hasan Manto, Bapsi Sidhwa, and Khushwant Singh
along with other writers have referred to the amnesiac histories around Partition.
Several Bollywood films, likewise, have portrayed the Partition violence. Scholarly
books such as Gyanendra Pandey’s Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and
History in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), and others have high-
lighted alternate histories surrounding Partition. Likewise, critical anthologies have
endorsed literary and visual representations via critical examination of fictionalized
personal memories.
8. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the
Interpretation of Culture, ed. C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (Basingstroke: Macmillan
Education, 1988), 271–313.
9. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley,
Vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1980), 27.
10. Foucault states that his aim is “to examine the case of a society . . . which speaks
verbosely of its own silence, takes great pains to relate in detail the things it does not
say, denounces the powers it exercises, and promises to liberate itself from the very
laws that have made it function.” The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert
Hurley, Vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1980), 8.
50 Parvinder Mehta

11. Barrett Watten, The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics,
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003), 200.
12. Adrienne Rich, “Cartographies of Silence,” in The Fact of a Doorframe: Selected
Poems, 1950–2001 (New York: W. W. Norton and Company), 139–40.
13. Trinh T. Min-ha, “Not You/Like You: Postcolonial Women and the Interlocking
Questions of Identity and Difference,” Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolo-
nial Perspectives, ed. Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 416.
14. Ramu Nagappan, Speaking Havoc: Social Suffering and South Asian Narratives
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005), 14.
15. Obviously, this cannot be taken as an essential predicament, but more as an
observation relevant to the specific texts examined in this chapter.
16. Rajinder Singh Bedi, “Lajwanti,” Manoa 19, 1 (2007): 21.
17. Ibid., 22.
18. Ibid., 22.
19. Ibid., 23.
20. Ibid., 24.
21. Ibid., 25.
22. Ibid., 29.
23. Ibid., 28.
24. Ibid., 30–31.
25. Ibid., 31.
26. Ibid., 32.
27. Silent Waters: Khamosh Pani, DVD, Sabiha Sumar (dir.) 8th October, 2004, (Vidhi
Films et al.), September 20, 2005.
28. Nermeen Shaikh, “Interview with Sabiha Sumar,” Asia Society (New York, 2005)
[Link]
29. Kavita Daiya, “Visual Culture and Violence: Inventing Intimacy and Citizenship
in Recent South Asian Cinema,” South Asian Transnationalisms: Cultural Exchange in the
Twentieth Century, ed. Babli Sinha (New York: Routledge, 2012), 143.
30. Ibid., 143.
31. Daiya maintains, “The film thus creates a visual narrative space for the female
subject to represent her pain and to critique her abjection by the violence of patriarchal
ethnicities which she equates structurally with that of masculine fundamentalism.”
Ibid., 145. Identifying Veero’s past as a “patriarchal ethnicity” serves to present her as
an un-understandable otherness and limits ethical perceptions about her dilemmas
and their resolution in the end.
32. Suvir Kaul, “Introduction,” The Partition of Memory: The Afterlife of the Division of
India (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001), 7.
33. Silent Waters: Khamosh Pani, DVD, Sabiha Sumar (dir.) 8th October, 2004 (Vidhi
Films et al.), September 20, 2005.
34. Shauna Singh Baldwin, What the Body Remembers (New York: Random House,
1999), 446.
35. Ibid., 447.
36. Ibid., 447.
37. Ibid., 447, emphasis original.
38. Ibid., 448, emphasis mine.
39. Ibid., 451.
40. Judith Butler,”Restaging the Universal,” Contingency, Hegemony, Universality:
Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, ed. Ernesto Laclau, Judith Butler, Slavoj Žižek (New
York: Verso, 2000), 37.
41. Rajinder Singh Bedi, “Lajwanti,” Manoa 19, 1 (2007): 32.
42. Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of
Culture, ed. C. Nelson and L. Grossberg (Basingstroke: Macmillan Education, 1988),
287.
 Female Silences and Discursive Interventions in Partition Narratives 51

43. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley
(Vol. 1. New York: Vintage, 1980), 27.
44. Shauna Singh Baldwin, What the Body Remembers (New York: Random House,
1999), 447.
45. Ibid. 448.
46. Ibid., 451.
47. Barrett Watten, The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003), 201.
48. Ibid.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Baldwin, Shauna Singh. What the Body Remembers. New York: Random House, 1999.
Bedi, Rajinder Singh. “Lajwanti.” Manoa 19.1 (2007): 21–32.
Butalia, Urvashi. “Community, State, and Gender: Some Reflections on the Partition of
India.” Women and the Politics of Violence, ed. Taisha Abraham. New Delhi: Har-
Anand Publications, 2002.
Butler, Judith. “Restaging the Universal.” Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contem-
porary Dialogues on the Left, ed. Ernesto Laclau, Judith Butler, Slavoj Žižek. New
York: Verso, 2000.
Daiya, Kavita. “Visual Culture and Violence: Inventing Intimacy and Citizenship in
Recent South Asian Cinema.” South Asian Transnationalisms: Cultural Exchange in the
Twentieth Century, ed. Babli Sinha. New York: Routledge, 2012. 133–48.
Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. Vol. 1.
New York: Vintage, 1980.
Kaul, Suvir. “Introduction.” The Partition of Memory: The Afterlife of the Division of India.
Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001. 1–29.
Minh-ha, Trinh T. “Not You/Like You: Postcolonial Women and the Interlocking
Questions of Identity and Difference.” In Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and
Postcolonial Perspectives, edited by Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. 415–19.
Nagappan, Ramu. Speaking Havoc: Social Suffering and South Asian Narratives. Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 2005.
Pandey, Gyanendra. “In Defense of the Fragment: Writing about Hindu-Muslim Riots
in India Today.” A Subaltern Studies Reader, 1986–1995, ed. Ranajit Guha. Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997. 1–33.
———. Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Rich, Adrienne. “Cartographies of Silence.” In The Fact of a Doorframe: Selected Poems
1950-2001. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2002. 139–40.
Shaikh, Nermeen. “Interview with Sabiha Sumar.” New York, 2005. Asia Society.
[Link] (Accessed July 10, 2015)
Spivak, Gayatri. “Can the Subaltern Speak?”In Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture,
ed. C. Nelson and L. Grossberg. Basingstroke: Macmillan Education, 1988. 271–313
Silent Waters (Khamosh Pani). Dir. Sumar, Sabiha Vidhi Films et al. 2003.
Wagner, Roi. “Silence as Resistance before the Subject, or Could the Subaltern Remain
Silent?” Theory, Culture and Society 29, 6 (2012): 99–124.
Watten, Barrett. The Constructivist Moment: From Material Text to Cultural Poetics. Mid-
dletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003.
 FOUR
Migrations in Absentia
Multinational Digital Advertising and
Manipulation of Partition Trauma

Rahul K. Gairola

I open this essay with the observation that the current historical moment
of Islamaphobia, state-sanctioned genocide, and perpetual war across the
globe behooves new genealogies for historically rethinking the tragic Par-
tition of “British India” as its seventieth anniversary approaches. Two
critical lenses empower us to formulate and engage in one such genealo-
gy. The first is the much-needed turn to the postcolonial digital human-
ities (#DHpoco), a call-to-arms issued by Roopika Risam and Adeline
Koh, 1 and ongoing work in South Asian Digital Humanities by Sukanta
Chaudhuri, Radhika Gajjala, Padmini Ray Murray, and many others.
This important work recognizes that engaging with digital humanities
enhances our understanding of the imperial dynamics subtending coloni-
alism, partition, and imperialism—even when the subjects and objects of
critique themselves are digital texts. I contextualize my interests in
#DHpoco critique of transnational capitalism through Partition’s eco-
nomic afterlife in what Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar has termed
“the Long Partition.” 2 This second critical lens allows us to evaluate Par-
tition’s economic afterlife in the twenty-first century as part of an ongo-
ing history of South Asia that continues to shape the arms and space race
between Pakistan and India as the latter has become the first nation on
earth to successfully launch a satellite into Mars’s orbit on its first at-
tempt.

53
54 Rahul K. Gairola

A crucial vector of “the Long Partition” that Zaminder explores in her

book-length study tracks the biases invested in the economic flows from
Muslims in India to the newlyformed country of Pakistan. Zaminder de-
tails that “financially crippling Muslims living in India with evacuee
property laws was seen as having a positive effect in actually undermin-
ing the Pakistani state.” 3 Such policies in independent India and similar
ones targeting Hindu and Sikh evacuees from Pakistan ensured that the
assets of both communal groups would continue to shape each nation’s
material possibilities for decades. Yet this impulse to capitalize on the
misery wrought by Partition is by no means a dusty remnant of the past,
or one limited to the geographical borders of South Asia. If we extend
transnational capitalism’s agenda to capture new markets with respect to
the Long Partition, we can deploy postcolonial digital critique to analyze
the ramifications of such concerns through an elusive yet powerful twen-
ty-first-century medium—digital media marketing. Curiously yet per-
haps predictably, digital advertising of Western brands has sought to tap
the trauma and nostalgia of forced communal migration that marks hu-
man displacement in the Long Partition of South Asia. With 45 percent of
the world’s Internet users now located in the Asia-Pacific region, up from
30 percent in 2002, it is evident that a massive global shift in media,
technology, culture, communications, etc., is occurring between Asia and
the rest of the world.
This dramatic rise in Internet users also reflects the rise of population
numbers in both India and Pakistan, as well as the neoliberalization of
their markets. The whopping 1.32 billion persons in India and 191 million
in Pakistan represent untapped markets whose inhabitants are assailed
by the sophisticated technologies of postcolonial advertising, branding,
and imaginings of affiliation with the West as an effect of South Asia’s
colonial past. In Cyberculture and the Subaltern, Radhika Gajjala elegantly
writes:
Technocultural agency is produced in the interplay of layered literacies
and nuanced identities as the user at the interface is forced into renego-
tiating his/her ability to act and define herself/himself at the online/
offline and global/local interface. . . . It reveals how we are clearly
situated within unequal power relations manifested within the current
continuum of local-global-local through hierarchies of literacies and
connectivity. 4
Gajjala’s observation in the context of the Long Partition is indeed
fraught with new historical and cultural stakes with the hegemony of
digital advertising and the proliferation of handheld devices through
which marketing is efficiently disseminated. Indeed, the “unequal power
relations” fraught throughout imbalances of access to technology around
the world are too often masked by flaccid neoliberal exclamations that
technology can extinguish global poverty. While the digital public sphere
 Migrations in Absentia 55

enables and allows new technological subjects to exist that may indeed
challenge conventional hegemonies of colonialism, it also gives birth to
new avenues for the afterlife of neoliberal capitalist discourses spear-
headed by corporate interests which emerge from former modes of domi-
nation. In addition, in the frame of “the Long Partition,” technocultural
agency places subjects in displacement. This essay examines two adver-
tisements by American multinational corporations Coca-Cola and Google
which target upper-middle class Indians and Pakistanis, many of whose
families carry traces of the Long Partition.
The public relations firms representing these corporations disseminat-
ed these advertisements on YouTube, Facebook, and throughout the
Internet, and thus the world, where they could be viewed on diverse
portable devices. Despite the fact that the Pakistan Telecommunications
Authority blocked access to YouTube from within Pakistan in September
2012, a number of programs, like Dailymotion, Vimeo, HideMyAss, and
UltraSurf, enabled users to evade censorship and access digital media.
Both advertisements attempt to capitalize on the trauma of Partition by
celebrating a neoliberal millennium in which the products facilitate har-
mony between India and Pakistan, Hindus and Muslims, Indians and
Pakistanis, men and women, and the rich and the poor. While the Coca-
Cola advertisement suggests that old animosity and new friends can be
made in India and Pakistan with the marvelous opening of a soda can,
the Google ad suggests that Android phones and other Google handheld
devices can bring together long-lost patriarchs across the divided subcon-
tinent. In other words, these digital advertisements strategically market
their wares, brand, and image through new technologies of imperialism
that exuberantly promise transcendence of historical, ideological, and
geographical divides by drinking Coca-Cola, using Google, and subscrib-
ing to the ideologies and feelings that pervade neocolonial circuits of
transnational capitalism that are widely digitally disseminated.
Before comparatively critiquing these digital advertisements, we must
identify from the outset precisely what they are selling. Unsurprisingly,
they are peddling what many commodities promise and most people
want from life: happiness. Sara Ahmed’s work on happiness unearths its
constructed, racialized nature, on the one hand, while offering us critical
insight on the investiture of affect in objects, on the other. In a particular-
ly compelling passage from The Promise of Happiness, Ahmed writes:
Happiness might play a crucial role in shaping our near sphere, the
world that takes shape, the world that takes shape around us, as a
world of familiar things. Objects that give us pleasure take up resi-
dence within our bodily horizon. We come to have our likes, which
might even establish what we are like [original emphasis]. . . . Incorpora-
tion may be conditional on liking what we encounter. Those things we
do not like we move away from. Awayness might help establish the
edges of our horizon; in rejecting the proximity of certain objects, we
56 Rahul K. Gairola

define the places that we know we do not wish to go, the things we do
not wish to have, touch, taste, hear, feel, see, those things we do not
want to keep within reach. 5
Ahmed’s critical reading of happiness compels us to question happiness
as a motivated social construction in the frame of digital advertising. Yet
we should here note that the soda commercial goes beyond the “bodily
horizon” and external spaces of the “near sphere.” Indeed, it goes beyond
the pleasurable commodities and fetishes placed in proximity to our bod-
ily corpuses. The promise of happiness lies precisely in the human con-
sumption, literally visceral ingestion, of joy. Along this logic, the adver-
tisement suggests that the by-product of soda is euphoric urine that can
erase historical, geographical, and religious difference and thus act as an
amnesiac enema. In contrast to excrement, the abject of the internal
bloodstream of the Indian and Pakistani body, this is healing elixer. As
Giorgio Agamben has observed in a different context, happiness is the
by-product of an experience of that which never happened because it
only exist as “happiness” because it was a state of being that was not
previously felt. 6
The history of the Coca-Cola Company in South Asia offers us histori-
cal context for my critique. The company re-entered the Indian market in
1993 after a self-imposed sixteen-year exile due to market constraints. As
Amanda Ciafone notes, “The Coca Cola Company had long been eager to
return to India, one of the largest markets of the ‘sweat belt,’ as company
executives called the hot, developing countries of the Global South with
large Muslim and/or Hindu populations that looked down on alcohol
consumption and thus held vast potential profits for the soft drink indus-
try.” 7 The commercial attempts to reconcile the gulf of time and space
between Lahore and Delhi by portraying the “bodily horizon” as a
shared experience at the local level of an historical event. The advertise-
ment is the result of Coca-Cola’s Small World Machines public relations
campaign in South Asia led by the Leo Burnett Chicago and Sydney
Agency. It begins with: “A moment of happiness has the power to bring
the world closer together.” It subsequently cuts to a sunrise in New Del-
hi, crosscut by sunrise over the Badshahi Mosque in Lahore, Pakistan,
thus linking both cities in the same visual chronology and consequently
suggesting that there is a sameness permeating both spaces. And what
exactly bonds together the people of these cities, located 426 kilometers
across the gulf of the Long Partition? Why a Coke-dispensing machine, of
course!
Featuring life-size touch screen interfaces and webcams on either
vending machine in each respective city, Coca-Cola patrons can trace
palms, peace signs, and smiley faces together with residents in the other
city, after which the vending machines dispense a can of soda. Stylized,
neon instructions beckon folks on both sides of the border to “Make a
 Migrations in Absentia 57

friend in Pakistan/India to share a Coca Cola,” “Join hands,” wave, and/

or trace peace signs together in a real-time experience that is digitally
facilitated, ironically, by a mechanism that is anything but human, indig-
enous, or altruistic, despite its ability to infuse humans with the senses of
touch, sight, and taste. Coca-Cola’s feel good messages have often been
promoted by famous Bollywood stars like Hrithik Roshan and Aishwar-
ya Rai, yet it seems the corporation identified the pitfalls of marketing
through Hindi film stars at the same time it realized that the digital
medium was the best way to capture a wider market in India. Scholars in
South Asia have taken note of the shift from mass appeal to an appeal to
affect. According to Seema Gupta, K. Naganand, and Avneesh Singh
Narang, “With the current campaign of Open Happiness, Coca-Cola
seems to have achieved both an emotional as well as a mass appeal [sic].”
There is a very natural connect with the target segment, that of celebrat-
ing every day, and sharing small moments of joy with our loved ones,
irrespective of any barriers. 8
Thus the troubling logic of the advertisement comes into sharper fo-
cus: the barriers removed between people are merely barriers removed
between markets, and Indians and Pakistanis are motivated to do so
under the ruse of communal harmony now a quick fix for the pain of the
past. Like the sugar high rendered by the can of soda, the moment of
happiness is also fleeting. “I’d like to buy the world a Coke, and keep it
company,” indeed. 9 Yet at the same time the corporation touts this effer-
vescent message, it presents the opposite. Taking a closer look at the
advertisement’s rhetoric, we see the fissures inherent in the promise of
happiness “to bring the world together” by making a “friend in Pakistan/
India.” That is not to say that there is no relation between objects and
affect, however. Ahmed writes,
It is possible that the evocation of an object can be pleasurable even if
we have not yet experienced an object as pleasing: this is the power
after all of the human imagination as well as the social world to bestow
things that have yet to be encountered with an affective life. Things
might have an affective life as a result of being given or bestowed with
affect, as gifts that may have been forgotten. . . . We can also anticipate
that an object will cause happiness in advance of its arrival; the object
enters our near sphere with a positive affective value already in
place. 10
In other words, in the context of the advertisement and the “happiness”
that the product promises, is a condition of the interaction instead of a
result of it. Unhappiness is predicated as the affect, while happiness is
cast as the effect of purchasing Coca-Cola. Indeed, the first forty seconds
of the three-minute commercial works hard to broadcast a dire, negative
tone to the relationship between the nuclear-armed neighbors through its
script, images, music, and technique.
58 Rahul K. Gairola

The camera skillfully juxtaposes the images and the words: while soft
lighting illuminates a variety of subjects’ faces in tightly framed close
shots, their testimonials contain the utmost negative language. A brief
inventory of the words and language used before the peppy introduction
of Coca-Cola to the brown masses includes: “The relationship between
India and Pakistan is one that has seen a lot of loss”; “It’s [the relation-
ship] stressful, it’s tense—it seems it’s not improving and it’s getting
worse”; “It’s only been 60 years that we have been apart—before that we
were living harmoniously together”; “I think all the strife would go away
if you took away all the barbed wire between the two countries” (cross-
cut with close shots of barbed wire and fences); “It saddens me that we
have this neighbor that we can’t even visit”; “That’s the bad guy, but
when they actually meet them, ‘You know, you’re just like me’”; and
“They’re near us but we have no access to them and it’s sad, because
together I think we would do wonders.” Thus, the advertisement intro-
duces these two nations as rife with loss, stress, tension, (di)vision, sad-
ness, misrecognition, and lack of access. As such it delineates the condi-
tions for which the subjects portrayed in the commercial and viewers
themselves will experience “a moment of happiness,” be it pleasure from
consuming Coke or pleasure from consuming images of Coke facilitating
playful interactions between India and Pakistan.
This brand of capitalist manipulation has long been critiqued by
scholars working in the field of cultural studies. In perhaps one of the
most important, seminal works in the field, Stuart Hall writes, “The do-
mains of ‘preferred meanings’ have the whole social order embedded in
them as a set of meanings, practices and beliefs: the everyday knowledge
of social structures, of ‘how things work for all practical purposes in this
culture’, the rank order of power and interest and the structure of legiti-
mations, limits and sanctions.” 11 When we apply the notion of “preferred
meanings” to the target demography and digital medium of this Coke ad,
we can see clearly that the corporation is coercing viewers to accept that
the “social order” and “everyday knowledge” of cross-border hatred is
the way of the world. If there is a doubt of this corporate advertising
agenda, we should critically note how varied the overall tone and repre-
sentation of subjects on either side of the border are after the establishing
shots of the neighboring nations. The screen prominently features the
words “A moment of happiness has the power to bring the world closer
together” against a soundtrack of music that begins with cheerful whis-
tling as the “Open Happiness” machines are installed in their respective,
bourgeois spaces. The music crescendos to an operatic crooning against
an upbeat string section featuring a split screen in which Indians and
Pakistanis, divided by the material border but brought together by the
digital interface, “join hands” and become instant friends.
This instant friendship, like the effervescent pop when we open a can
of Coke, is underscored by the attendant testimonials which are designed
 Migrations in Absentia 59

to stand out in stark contrast to the dire messages in the first forty sec-
onds of the advertisement. Choice exclamations include: “We are creating
an environment where young people can exchange ideas, thoughts, ges-
tures, and take away that communication gap that exists”; “If I have any
opportunity to go to India, I will surely go there”; “The whole idea of
actually touching hands, it’s like communicating with each other without
words—and that action speaks louder than anything else”; “This is what
we are supposed to do, right? We are going to take minor steps so that we
are going to solve bigger issues [sic]”; “It is more about, you know, how
similar we are as opposed to how different we are”; and “Togetherness,
humanity—this is what we want, more and more exchange.” The denota-
tive meaning here is very clear in juxtaposition to the earlier testimonials:
Coca-Cola is catalyzing communication, interaction, sameness, together-
ness, and humanity across the barbed-wire borders. But as Hall has also
classically noted, “Certain codes may, of course, be so widely distributed
in a specific language community or culture, and be learned at so early an
age, that they appear not to be constructed. . . . This has the (ideological)
effect of concealing the practices of coding which are present. But we
must not be fooled by appearances.” 12
Indeed, a more scrutinizing eye may read the codification of differ-
ence not just in the advertisement’s script, but also in its images. In one
sequence, for example, participants at the interface appear to be engaged
in a competitive dance-off between each other rather than a digital simu-
lacrum of communal harmony. In this and other ways which I have pre-
viously mentioned, the purported happiness produced via the Coke ma-
chine is possible only in and through a number of conditions: 1) The
assumption that unhappiness is the normal state between residents in
both metropolises; 2) that such unhappiness is due to religious disharmo-
ny that can be identified as the residual trauma of the Partition; and 3)
that the Coca-Cola Corporation can replace the paternal colonizer in es-
tablishing ethos and order between these unhappy patrons. While the
first two contentions can indeed be read as sweeping generalizations, I
would argue that the third contention is caught up in identificatory web
that enables Coke to profit off the trauma of Partition in its digital adver-
tising campaign. This identificatory web is a complex one. Although the
digital mechanism trumpets happiness and friendship between users at
the opposite ends of the interface, I would argue that identification oc-
curs through difference not togetherness. It occurs, in other words,
through Coca-Cola’s predication that all South Asians are indeed differ-
ent from one another based on inherent, natural dictums delineated by
the many rationalities of Partition.
This is underscored by the opening and concluding testimonials
where tense difference and lack of communication transform into har-
monic unity dispensed through Coke machines on either side of the bor-
der. While it may seem a commonsense statement to say that all people
60 Rahul K. Gairola

are different from one another, this notion is at once the driving force
behind the market logic of transnational capitalism at the same time that
the difference must stage the condition that the machines in Lahore and
New Delhi reconcile through Coca-Cola sales. As such, these machines
and this advertisement do not aim to produce happiness between the
subjects on either side of the border, but instead produce difference and
dissonance between these consumers. Thus the spectacular lie of Coca-
Cola perpetrated through US multinational digital advertising: it trum-
pets that its product inaugurates moments of happiness between people
who are “really” the same but in different geographies. But as I have
revealed, its message and sales capitalize on the semblance of differ-
ence—violent, traumatic difference and the pain of separation—from the
get-go to warrant the consumption of soda. Indeed, even the possibility
of a bad gesture, wrong touch, physical violence, or mob lynching is
abstracted and held at bay, only made possible through a virtual punch,
kick, blow, assault in the vacancy of real bodies.
Titled Reunion, the Google advertisement is manipulative in a differ-
ent manner but to similar ends. The ad portrays the elderly (Hindu)
Baldev in Delhi tearfully reminiscing about Yusuf, his (Muslim) pre-Par-
tition childhood friend from Lahore, with his granddaughter, Suman.
Baldev’s savvy granddaughter contacts Yusuf’s grandson in Lahore with
a few touches on her smart phone’s Google search app. Within sec-
onds . . . emotional magic! On either end of the handset, the grandchil-
dren use Google to facilitate plans for the wistful Yusuf to procure an
entry visa into India and even check the weather. The happy ending is
that Yusuf travels to Delhi and meets his old friend on his birthday, and
both happily raise their arms up to the sky sitting cross-legged in the
monsoon rains. The first reunion may lead to a marital union as both
grandchildren shyly gaze at one another. 13 This subtle suggestion is that
Google products can transcend religious divisions and catalyze kinship
bonds between generations. Again, here American transnational corpora-
tions can allow Indians and Pakistanis to breach the residue of the Long
Partition as long as they embrace the digital mechanisms of transnational
capitalism that profit US multinationals.
Google indeed hoped to lend a sense of authenticity to the advertise-
ment in selecting Sukesh Kumar Nayek to write the ad and Amit Sharma
to direct it. It was published on November 13, 2013, on YouTube and
televised two days later with much fanfare and applause. For example,
Max Fisher of the Washington Post claims, “Yes, it’s an ad, meant to prod
people in one of the world’s largest markets into using Google ser-
vices. . . . But what this video shows is the human cost of dividing what
would today be the world’s most populous society had it not split, as
well as the hope of, not exactly a national reunion, but a cultural one.” 14
An appraisal in Time magazine holds that the advertisement showcases
that “the personal connections between Indians and Pakistanis run deep”
 Migrations in Absentia 61

despite the tensions between both governments. 15 Even in South Asia,

the commercial was well received, with Ritu Singh of Zee News stating,
“This heartwarming ad is sure to overwhelm you.” 16 While I do not want
to abstract these human emotions to the point where they are treated as
insignificant in the frame of cultural critique, we must engage an analysis
of the ad that goes beyond the surface message transmitted by the im-
ages, music, and stated message postulated by Google.
This advertisement opens with a long establishing shot of the dome of
Old Delhi’s Jama Masjid, or “world-reflecting mosque,” thus giving a
sense of exotic historicity to the setting. Baldev wistfully shows his
granddaughter Suman a faded, sepia photograph of himself and Yusuf as
boys in Baldev’s shop. Before the departure of the British colonizers, the
boys would fly kites in a large park by an ancient gate, then go to Yusuf’s
sweet shop and steal “jhajariya,” a regional confectionery made of corn,
milk, and ghee (clarified butter). Approximately thirty seconds into the
3:32-minute-long commercial, a nostalgic, acoustic guitar-lined song
about bachpan (childhood) compliments the sequence of Suman on her
laptop typing “park with ancient gate in lahore” into Google India. We
should note here that while this advertisement differs from the Coco-
Cola one, both appeal to the “bodily horizon” of the subjects in the con-
structed narratives and of the viewers of them. Indeed, it is only after
Googling “jhajariya” and discovering that it is a confection that Suman is
able to subsequently discover that Fazal Sweets is the “oldest sweet shop
near mochi gate lahore [sic]” in the search engine. As such, soda and
sweets serve as humanizing bridges to bring people together across the
Indo-Pak border in and through mechanical devices that do not consume
such products.
The second appeal to the bodily horizon is the deployment of a wistful
soundtrack to appeal to viewers’ hearing sense. Suman locates Fazal
Sweets via Google and contacts Ali, Yusuf’s grandson, in Lahore and asks
him if he remembers stealing the sweets with his old childhood friend
with a playful Hindi song on the soundtrack. Both the use of Hindi and a
Hindi song also lend a sense of authenticity and history to the commer-
cial’s narrative. This accentuates Sharma’s aesthetic choice of close-up
shots bathed in soft, golden lighting on Yusuf’s face when speaking to
Suman. Observing the nostalgic countenance of his grandfather, Ali con-
veniently pulls out his smart phone and Googles “Indian visa require-
ment.” Juxtaposed against this sequence is a scene of Suman and a tearful
Baldev sitting in a park with India Gate prominently visible in the back-
ground. 17 The suggestive rhetoric of the sequence semiotically links Bal-
dev’s nostalgia for his childhood friend to a recognizable edifice that
memorializes the heyday of the British Raj. It moreover serves as a mov-
ing counterpoint between the close shots of Yusuf reveling in the memo-
ry of mischievous childhood mishaps with Baldev and the latter’s trau-
matic disclosure (near India Gate) to Suman: “In the wake of Partition,
62 Rahul K. Gairola

we fled to India in the middle of the night . . . I think of Yusuf all the
time.” 18
As such, the Google ad frames the search engine and its handheld
devices as convenient arbiters of happiness through memory and nostal-
gia. The happy ending is that Suman and Ali coordinate with one another
and Google to procure Yusuf an Indian visa, and Suman moreover inter-
cepts the pair on time, with the help of Google’s real-time arrival infor-
mation for Pakistan International Airlines from Lahore. This is the last
time we see a handheld device before the heart-warming reunion with
Yusuf at the threshold of Baldev’s doorstep. This conclusion to the ad
emphasizes a shift from the memory of good times to the production of
new memories as Suman and Ali coyly glance at one another as the
patriarchs embrace—a gesture that suggests that the reunion of Baldev
and Yusuf could lead to a marital union between their grandchildren that
would lead to the consolidation of wealth and property between rival
nations that previously, as I demonstrated at the opening of this essay,
labored hard to prevent this. While the heteronormative undercurrents
here are subtle, the light-skinned complexion of all the actors combined
with the upper-middle-class status of the characters signifies Google’s
vision of communal harmony through skin color and class status in both
Pakistan and India.
This happy ending reflects the massive number of views that the Re-
union ad has had to date; nearly thirteen million views are registered on
YouTube alone. Google also published a number of other advertisements
featuring Reunion actors/characters on the same day that it was published
on YouTube, which suggests a multipronged marketing campaign of
uniquely South Asian Google Search items which anticipated the wide
success of the reunion marketing campaign. These additional digital ad-
vertisements include “Google Search: Fennel,” “Google Search: Sugar-
free,” “Google Search: Cricket,” and “Google Search: Anarkali.” Again,
these ads target themes that are central to South Asian culture—culinary
staples and popular entertainment. I would like to briefly comment on
the “Google Search: Anarkali” commercial. This one is particularly crafty
because it refers to both a famous bazaar in Lahore and the legendary
slave girl for whom the market is named. Anarkali’s fraught story of
romantic yet tragic love for a prince against all odds is well known
throughout South Asia through the blockbuster Bollywood film Mughal-
e-Azaam (1960) that detailed her life. In the context of the ad, Baldev and
Yusuf attempt to capitalize on the film’s theme of eternal love by suggest-
ing that Suman find an “Anarkali suit” for Yusuf’s granddaughter with
Ali in tow. When Suman reveals that she can use Google to find the suit
without going to the mall, the men become visibly disenchanted. In re-
sponse, the savvy Suman uplifts them by concluding that she can none-
theless go out for chaat with Ali. In this manner, Reunion has an afterlife
 Migrations in Absentia 63

that casts Google Search as a search engine for matrimonial match, love,
family, community—in a word, happiness.
If we evaluate both advertisements together in the context of the Long
Partition, we can draw a few informed, albeit contentious, conclusions.
The first key conclusion I would propose is that this kind of advertising,
operating through Coca-Cola and Google, is marketing its ware by coerc-
ing its target audience to identify with the US. Identification with and
“profound and disturbing” mimicry of the West was an effective hege-
monic strategy deployed by the British imperialists in striving to assimi-
late the “natives” spread throughout the Empire to British standards and
sensibilities. 19 According to Rey Chow, “In the contexts in which cross-
cultural encounters entail the imposition and enforcement of one group’s
(typically Westerners’) superiority over another (typically the ‘natives’ of
African, Asian, American, Australian, and New Zealand cultures), mime-
sis is a routine rite of initiation: those from the so-called inferior group,
the colonized or semicolonized are bound to want to imitate their sup-
posedly superior aggressors as part of their strategy for social survival
and advancement.” 20 Amrijit Singh and Peter Schmidt further assert that
mimicry must be viewed in its more complicated social articulations.
They write, “This double-edge aspect of mimicry—homage as well as
menace to the colonizer’s identity and authority—is present in the idea of
brown-skinned Englishmen.” 21 That is to say that ambivalence marks the
modality of colonial domination because mimicry of the colonizer pays
tribute to the imperium in the same moment that it threatens it by at-
tempting to emulate the colonizing authoritarian. 22 When we transpose
Singh and Schmidt’s notion to the multinational corporate marketing
ploys in the context of the genealogy of the Long Partition, we see these
identificatory contradictions globally staged at a hyperreal rate.
Moreover, part of the marketing strategy is not only to establish the
semblance of sameness, cultural affiliation, with Westerners by drinking
Coca-Cola and using Google as they do, but also to establish sameness
with the residents living in rival nations. Indeed, the happiness produced
by both products entails identification with the other as “one of us,” as
confirmed by the very human senses of taste, sound, sight, and touch.
The digital medium complicates the identificatory web made possible by
the user interfaces promoted by the advertisements and the technological
tools used by viewers to access them. While both commercials encourage
their subjects and viewers to identify with each other in the interest of
driving home the emotional affect of the message, it is only through the
pre-establishment of difference that this can possibly occur. Here, trans-
national capitalism’s marketing campaign is a familiar wolf in sheep’s
clothing: recognition of the Indian/Pakistani “other” can be transcended
by mimesis of the Occident/Global North, and more specifically in the
context of twenty-first-century happiness, with engagement in the profit-
able technocultures of the West. This leads to a question, then, whose
64 Rahul K. Gairola

answer perhaps most effectively explains the shared goal of both adver-
tisements: if happiness is a longing for that which has not yet been expe-
rienced, what experience, precisely, does the abstract concept of happi-
ness yearn for as it is presented in these advertisements?
I would assert that the shared goal is bound up, in the genealogical
framing of the Long Partition, with the experiences of displacement, mi-
gration, immigration, the bodily horizon in relation to territory, home,
belonging, etc.; that is to say, the shared goal of both ads is preoccupied
with the unbridled freedom of movement across borders and the magical
capabilities of the advertised products to bestow that transnational privi-
lege to consumers. It appeals to those who become diasporic subjects
because they must flee their homelands (Baldev and his family) and those
who become diasporic due to the Radcliffe Line’s callous demarcation of
two nascent nation-states (Yusuf and those in the Coca-Cola ad). The
advertisements, in other words, market their products through the digital
medium which engages in time-space compression by promising time
and space compression for the “bodily horizon” that Ahmed theorizes.
As John Torpey notes, economic liberalization has been associated with
freedom of movement since the late 1800s. 23 He continues that liberal
Western governments developed passports to facilitate “effective distinc-
tions between native and foreigner founded on documents” and also “to
legitimate movement.” 24 Though limited to Europe, Torpey’s study ac-
knowledges “the extreme explosiveness of the racial politics of passports
in the decolonizing United Kingdom, as well as the broader problem of
who among the varieties of British subjects was to have unrestricted ac-
cess to the territory of the U.K.” 25
I would moreover venture that decolonization led not only to insecure
mimicry of British governance in India and Pakistan, but also of British
immigration policies and their corresponding mix of racism and xeno-
phobia to limit movement across borders by branding postcolonial sub-
jects as “others.” Indeed, one of the long-lasting ramifications of decolo-
nization of South Asia is the ongoing racism, classism, Islamaphobia,
Indophobia, and other forms of bigotry that limit and curtail movement
between Pakistan, India, and the smaller nations of South Asia. To this
day, the visa procurement process for nationals of India and Pakistan to
visit each other’s country is typically arduous, convoluted, expensive,
and tainted by institutional bigotry and corruption. As Yasmin Khan
writes:
The permanent separation of Indians and Pakistanis from each other,
and their inability to cross the new border, was the most long-lasting
and divisive aspect of Partition. . . . In the summer of 1947 few could
appreciate the full connotations of the division which would ultimately
result in some of the harshest border regulations in the world. . . . By
1951 Indians and Pakistanis required a passport and visa to cross Rad-
cliffe’s infamous line in the west of the country. . . . Naturally, the poor
 Migrations in Absentia 65

and illiterate could not afford the passport fee and [navigate] the legal
minefield of Pakistani and Indian citizenship caused by hardship and
complications. 26
Khan’s historical account of 1947 and 1951 offers a panoramic trajecto-
ry into the ramifications of such policies today. Indeed, in the wake of the
worldwide “War on Terrorism” and increasing economic injustice in the
Global South, the mechanisms that cause poverty and illiteracy have ex-
acerbated and produced innovative class, gender, color, and sexuality
divisions. This does not even take into account that engagement in tech-
nology is itself a grammar of the West’s digital hegemony. Indeed, when
we apply this argument to these advertisements, we see that they operate
like virtual passports, promising the freedom of movement but in a non-
conventional manner. I would argue that Reunion suggests that Google
Search offers a passport into the past, into the halcyon days before Parti-
tion when the British established rule and order, and moreover suggest
that it can facilitate quick visas for seamless travel to India from Pakistan,
ultimately skirting the real complications that Pakistani nationals face
when obtaining travel documents to India. The promise of movement
constitutes the happiness that Google is marketing to upper-middle-class
viewers, and moreover links familial harmony and domestic bliss to its
product.
One could argue that Coca-Cola’s “Small World Machines” advertise-
ment takes this one step further because it promises happiness and con-
nection without leaving the vicinity: its digital interface acts like a tele-
portation device that bridges the time and space gap while breaching the
complications of visa and flight procurement. It allows the humanistic
interaction to be experienced with the other national in absentia and
moreover promotes itself as a spectacle in the bourgeois space of the
shopping mall and market bazaar. The mimetic impulse to copy the West
by consuming Coca-Cola is codified through the rhetoric of mimicking a
South Asian “brother” or “sister” on the other side of the border after
going through great pains to establish difference between Pakistanis and
Indians. Thus the paradox of these advertisements: while they seem to
promise that the “bodily horizon” will engage in happy moments that
appeal to human senses of taste, touch, smell, sight, etc., they are instead
offering what I would call “migrations in absentia,” or the sum experi-
ence of traveling to another place and imbibing all of its experiences
without the cumbersome burden of crossing national borders or dealing
with difference through lived experience. This migration in absentia and
its reconfigured bodily horizon permeates the cybersphere in contrast
significantly to the material violations of bodily horizons that occurred
during the migrations/displacements before and after August 1947. It
trivializes and invalidates what Nalini Iyer and Amy Bhatt have de-
66 Rahul K. Gairola

scribed as a divisive “death knell” that uprooted nearly thirteen million

people as Hindus fled east and Muslims shifted west. 27
People virtually touching through web cams cannot rape, mutilate, or
decapitate the other. There is no threat of losing one’s self or one’s land
here—this is a sterile yet safe kind of touching. Before and during the
Partition, the British acted as mediators and even commissioned Radcliffe
to draw up the plan before they left the subcontinent. In the Long Parti-
tion, the digital advertising of corporations arbitrate virtual movement,
thus facilitating the migration of absent bodies even as sensory pleasures
appeal to their traumatized psyches.
This is not to say, however, that these ads are ultimately successful.
For if “migrations of absentia” are one of the key promises made by
American multinational corporations in their manipulation of the trauma
incurred by the division of South Asia, we must also recognize the agen-
cy and tactics of resistance in which scattered South Asian diasporas are
engaged throughout the digital realm. Indeed, they are producing migra-
tions of absentia throughout digital windows to produce alternative ac-
counts of Partition. Just a few of these include the online Sindhi Voices
Project spearheaded by Natasha Raheja and Neena Makhija, the South
Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA) directed by Samip Mallick,
and the online 1947 Partition Archive. These resources counter the myths
produced by market-motivated advertisements that seek to profit off the
happiness and nostalgia around Partition myths. Indeed, I would argue
that these digital archives also engage in “migrations of absentia,” but not
those that promise a capitalistic transgression of the very national bor-
ders that continue to demarcate self and other. Rather, these digital
archives empower and enable viewers to “migrate” into a collective past
whose biographical stories are narrated by survivors. Moreover, these
survivors have donated their time and resources beyond the shadows of
a capitalist agenda, and their stories range the emotional gamut from
“happy” to horrific, nostalgic to forgetful, painful to joyous, and bitter to
celebratory. As such, the archives engage in Partition affect beyond the
essentialized feeling of “happiness” that Coca-Cola and Google must
market for their shareholders.
This essay has critically examined Coca-Cola’s Small Worlds and Goo-
gle’s Reunion digital advertisements to argue that their marketing strate-
gies draw upon familiar colonial tropes like “The White Man’s Burden”
and Western mimicry to create the illusion that South Asians now de-
pend on these products to reunite decades after the Partition: Coke is the
new chai, which South Asians can sip with estranged childhood friends
that Google allows them to rediscover. While the threat of traditional
violence is no longer efficient or necessary, the ideological and economic
violence wrought by twenty-first-century capitalism and its hegemonic
advertising, as I have demonstrated, must indeed be kept in check. We
must critically examine the ways and means of digital advertising pro-
 Migrations in Absentia 67

duction, the histories and interests behind the message, and the gains
made by framing Coca-Cola and Google as such to the target market of
upper- and middle-class residents of India and Pakistan with respect to
the Long Partition. For example, the Coca-Cola machines were placed in
shopping malls in both Lahore and New Delhi. This suggests that despite
the advertisement’s claim to transcend the colonialist split of the subcon-
tinent, the geographical placement of these machines and the demogra-
phy to which they appeal is intricately bound up with class divisions and
conspicuous public consumption that punctuate the very anxieties upon
which partition of the Punjab was predicated.
The Google advertisement romanticizes heteronormative bonds that
underpin upper-middle-class Hindu and Muslim lives, thus suggesting
that neoliberal lifestyles can breach the bitter divisions of national rivals. I
do not here intend to undermine the raw emotions and/or nostalgia be-
hind the subjects and sentiments portrayed in these adverts, but rather to
critically interrogate the marketing of products that utopically represent
migrations in absentia, and the ethical dilemmas that may arise from this.
Yet I would say by way of conclusion that these advertisements do far
more harm to those they purport to benefit than the help they promise to
deliver. The empowering bit in all this is that we identify this reality and
draw from it a bittersweet happiness that is not manipulated by fancy
soda machines or flashy handheld devices. It is necessary, against the
mesmerizing backdrop of digital branding and the dissemination of these
advertisements, to recall that transnational technologies are not fail proof.
According to David Morely and Kevin Robbins,
Certainly one should not overestimate the freedom of the media consu-
mer to make whatever he or she likes of the material transmitted. . . .
Equally, we should not fall into any technologically determinist argu-
ment. Even if media technologies have, historically, been developed
and controlled by the powerful countries of the West, they are, none
the less, always capable of being appropriated and used in other ways
than those for which they were intended. 28
As I have elsewhere argued in the context of queer women in South
Asian cinematic representation, visual culture can be used as a “transna-
tional tool for subaltern speech.” 29 In this frame, critical lenses of postco-
lonial digital humanities, or #DHpoco, must vigilantly interrogate the
subjects and representations of corporate digital marketing’s representa-
tion of South Asia and the Global South, and its continued drive to extri-
cate resources from the subcontinent. This is especially crucial as South
Asia and its diasporas grapple with the religious, nationalistic, sexist, and
queerphobic violence that punctuates the ongoing trauma of the Long
Partition. Indeed, in light of a historical event that continues to make
travel between both countries difficult for the nationals who live in and
beyond South Asia, we must also note that migrations in absentia are
68 Rahul K. Gairola

false hopes and empty promises; like the sugar high of Coca-Cola and
jhajariya they come and go quickly. Though the promise of having easy
access to those we love without having to actually be present is enticing
and becomes larger than life when such advertisements go viral, we must
always unearth whose happiness is being privileged and whose is being
compromised, and by who, in the context of the Long Partition.

NOTES

1. Roopika Risam and Adeline Koh, “Mission Statement,” Postcolonial Digital Hu-
manities, [Link] (Ac-
cessed on March 22, 2015).
2. Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern
South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (New York: Columbia University Press,
2007), 2.
3. Ibid., 133–34.
4. Radhika Gajjala, Cyberculture and the Subaltern: Weavings of the Virtual and Real
(New York: Lexington Books, 2013).
5. Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010),
24.
6. Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. and ed.
Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 159.
7. Amanda Ciafone, “Water for Life, Not for Coca Cola: Transnational Systems of
Capital and Activism,” The Sun Never Sets: South Asian Migrants in an Age of U.S. Power,
Vivek Bald, Miabi Chatterji, Sujani Reddy, and Manu Vimalassery (New York: New
York University Press, 2013), 205.
8. Seema Gupta, K. Naganand, and Avneesh Singh Narang, “Image Advertising:
The Advertising Strategies of Pepsi and Coca Cola in India,” tejas@iimb: Best of Faculty
Student Collaborative Enquiry, [Link] (Accessed on Sep-
tember 14, 2014).
9. [Link]
10. Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010),
27–28.
11. Stuart Hall, “Encoding and Decoding,” in The Cultural Studies Reader, 3rd ed.,
ed. Simon During (New York: Routledge, 2007), 483.
12. Ibid., 481.
13. [Link]
14. Max Fisher, “This Powerful Video Is Dominating Indian Social Media. Here’s
Why.” [Link]
ful-video-is-dominating-indian-social-media-heres-why/ (Accessed on November 15,
2013).
15. Nilanjana Bhowmick, “Why Indians and Pakistanis Find This Ad Incredibly
Moving.” [Link]
incredibly-moving/ (Accessed on November 14, 2013).
16. Ritu Singh, “Google Search: Reunion Video goes viral, reconnects India and
Pakistan.” [Link]
goes-viral-reconnects-india-pakistan_890072.html (Accessed on November 14, 2013).
17. The India Gate, originally designated as the “All-India War Memorial,” was
commissioned by the Imperial War Graves Commission and inaugurated by Viceroy
Lord Irwin on February 12, 1931, to commemorate the Indian soldiers who died fight-
ing for the Allies in World War I.
18. My translation is more literal despite the translation supplied by Google in the
subtitles.
 Migrations in Absentia 69

19. Homi Bhabha, “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse,”
October 28 (Spring 1984), 126.
20. Rey Chow, Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2012), 93.
21. Amritjit Singh and Peter Schmidt, eds., Postcolonial Theory and the United States:
Race, Ethnicity, and Literature (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000), 24.
22. In his formulation of colonial ambivalence, Homi K. Bhabha writes: “The am-
bivalent identification of the racist world . . . turns on the idea of man as his alienated
image; not Self and Other but the otherness of the Self inscribed in the perverse
palimpsest of colonial identity.” See: Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New
York: Routledge, 1994), 40 and 44.
23. John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 92.
24. Ibid., 56.
25. Ibid., 151.
26. Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2007), 194–95.
27. Amy Bhatt and Nalini Iyer, Roots and Reflections: South Asians in the Pacific North-
west (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013), 53.
28. David Morley and Kevin Robbins, “Under Western Eyes: Media, Empire, and
Otherness,” The Media Studies Reader, ed. Laurie Ouellette (New York: Routledge,
2013). 363–78; 364.
29. Rahul Gairola, “Burning with Shame: Desire and South Asian Patriarchy, from
Gayatri Spivak’s ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ to Deepa Mehta’s Fire,” Comparative Liter-
ature 54, 4 (Autumn 2002): 314.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Agamben, Giorgio. Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. Trans. and ed. Daniel
Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999.
Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke UP, 2010.
Bhabha, Homi. “Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse.” Octo-
ber 28 (Spring 1984): 125–33.
———. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994.
Bhatt, Amy, and Nalini Iyer. Roots and Reflections: South Asians in the Pacific Northwest.
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2013.
Bhowmick, Nilanjana, “Why Indians and Pakistanis Find This Ad Incredibly Mov-
ing.” [Link]
incredibly-moving/. Accessed on November 14, 2013.
Chow, Rey. Entanglements, or Transmedial Thinking about Capture. Durham: Duke Uni-
versity Press, 2012.
Ciafone, Amanda. “Water for Life, Not for Coca Cola: Transnational Systems of Capi-
tal and Activism.” The Sun Never Sets: South Asian Migrants in an Age of U.S. Power,
ed. Vivek Bald, Miabi Chatterji, Sujani Reddy, and Manu Vimalassery. New York:
NYU Press, 2013. 203–28.
Fisher, Max. “This Powerful Video Is Dominating Indian Social Media. Here’s Why.”
[Link]
video-is-dominating-indian-social-media-heres-why/. Accessed on November 15,
2013.
Gairola, Rahul. “Burning with Shame: Desire and South Asian Patriarchy, from Gaya-
tri Spivak’s ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ to Deepa Mehta’s Fire.” Comparative Litera-
ture 54, 4 (Autumn 2002): 314.
Gajjala, Radhika. Cyberculture and the Subaltern: Weavings of the Virtual and Real. New
York: Lexington Books, 2013.
70 Rahul K. Gairola

Gupta, Seema, K. Naganand, and Avneesh Singh Narang. “Image Advertising: The
Advertising Strategies of Pepsi and Coca Cola in India.” tejas@iimb: Best of Faculty
Student Collaborative Enquiry. [Link] Accessed on
September 14, 2014.
Hall, Stuart. “Encoding and Decoding.” The Cultural Studies Reader 3rd ed. Simon
During. New York: Routledge, 2007. 477–87.
Khan, Yasmin. The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2007.
Morley, David, and Kevin Robbins, “Under Western Eyes: Media, Empire, and Other-
ness.” The Media Studies Reader, ed. Laurie Ouellette. New York: Routledge, 2013.
363–78.
Risam, Roopika, and Adeline Koh. “Mission Statement.” Postcolonial Digital Human-
ities. [Link] Ac-
cessed on March 22, 2015.
Singh, Amritjit, and Peter Schmidt, eds. Postcolonial Theory and the United States: Race,
Ethnicity, and Literature. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000.
Singh, Ritu. “Google Search: Reunion Video goes viral, reconnects India and Paki-
stan.” [Link]
viral-reconnects-india-pakistan_890072.html, accessed on November 14, 2013.
Torpey, John. The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State. Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Zamindar, Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali. The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South
Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.
 Part II

Nations and Narrations

 FIVE
Exorcizing the Ghosts of Times Past
Partition Memoirs as Testimony

Tarun K. Saint

In this essay I hope to show how memoirs about the historical experience
of the Partition of India engaged with this moment in complex and dis-
tinctive ways, encompassing both the personal and public domains, often
articulating that which was relegated in the official historical discourse
(whether in India or Pakistan) to the margins. 1 Such life-writings in many
cases tended to be fragmentary and subjective, as emotions otherwise
repressed came to the fore and tinged the description of extremely pain-
ful events and aspects of this experience usually deemed unspeakable.
Nonetheless, significant memoirs did bear witness to the event, uncover-
ing hidden and untold stories that were often lost to memory, thus per-
forming an important testimonial function, even as South Asia continues
to be haunted by the specters of this traumatic history.
There are several interesting political memoirs about the protracted
transfer of power negotiations that eventually led up to the decision to
partition the subcontinent, as well as accounts by prominent individuals
of the fallout of the phase of parlaying for power. Prominent among these
are former Congress President Maulana Azad’s India Wins Freedom 2 and
Ram Manohar Lohia’s Guilty Men of India’s Partition, 3 as well as reminis-
cences and witness accounts from Pakistan such as Jahan Ara Shahnaw-
az’s Father and Daughter: A Political Autobiography 4 and Shaista Suhra-
wardy Ikramullah’s From Purdah to Parliament. 5 Azad’s volume was in-
itially published in a truncated form due to his own sense that some of
the judgments about men and events were not ripe for publication. The

73
74 Tarun K. Saint

appearance of this volume in its complete, unexpurgated form more than

thirty years after publication shed further light on conflicts and ideologi-
cal differences at the highest level of the nationalist movement, especially
within the Congress party. Azad’s sense of dismay at the hostage theory
propagated by communal elements at the time of the acceptance of the
Partition demand is especially noteworthy. Azad sharply criticized the
acceptance of the Partition on the basis of the minorities in each country
being held hostage to the security of the minority community in the
other, since this idea of retaliation as a method of assuring the rights of
minorities seemed barbarous to him. 6
Socialist leader Lohia’s memoir, written in 1961 (which began as a
rejoinder to Azad’s volume), makes an independent analysis from a so-
cialist standpoint of the reasons for the Partition. 7 In contrast, the auto-
biographical narrative of Shahnawaz (from Pakistan) traces the political
history of her husband Mohammad Shafi, a prominent Muslim League
politician, as well as her own involvement in the Pakistan movement
after his death. She also gives us an account of the transformation of her
own daughter Mumtaz’s political ideology, from being a Congress fol-
lower to a Muslim League supporter. 8 Similarly, Begum Shaista Ikramul-
lah gives us a personal description of her experience as a supporter of the
Muslim League in East Bengal, who was later to become a parliamentar-
ian in Pakistan speaking up for causes specific to East Pakistan. 9 In both
these narratives the transition from the secluded sphere of the zenana, or
the inner courtyard, to the realm of active politics is presented with sensi-
tivity and insight.
More recently, studies of the Partition based on memories of survi-
vors, especially women who were abducted during the violence, by Ur-
vashi Butalia, 10 Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin, 11 and Veena Das 12
brought up critical questions as regards earlier silences in mainstream
Partition historiography, specifically with respect to the extent of sexual
violence that occurred then. The interconnections between history and
memory have been further explored in attempts to revisit some of the
conundrums pertaining to the settlement that was arrived at, including
the speed and pace at which the decision was sought to be implemented,
and the ferocity and scale of the collective violence that was unleashed,
leading up to one of the longest and most extensive mass migrations in
human history. 13 However, the debates pertaining to political history and
its narrativization by politicians and community leaders are outside the
purview of this discussion.
In this essay, instead, I will focus on selected personal memoirs about
the Partition of India. While the tone of these memoirs may be personal,
these accounts draw in distinctive ways on the socio-political context of
the time, generating different perspectives on the processes at work lead-
ing up to the Partition and its catastrophic aftereffects. The translation in
recent times of some of the key memoirs which had not received ade-
 Exorcizing the Ghosts of Times Past 75

quate attention in either literary or historical discourses has enabled a

renewed critical focus on these texts. The pervasiveness of the Partition’s
afterlife and continuing manifestations of historical trauma in the present
further necessitate this critical engagement with a seemingly minor gen-
re. For one can discern an unmistakable resonance between some of the
critical questions raised in these narratives and the continuing reverbera-
tions of the Partition debacle.
I focus on Anis Kidwai’s In Freedom’s Shade 14 (1974, trans. 2011) and
Kamlaben Patel’s Torn from the Roots 15 (1977, trans. 2006), both touching
upon the recovery of abducted women and the problems of rehabilita-
tion, in the first part of my discussion. In the next section I briefly discuss
two very different memoirs by Hindu migrants from West Punjab, Pra-
kash Tandon’s Punjabi Century 16 (1968) and “The Sixth River: A Diary of
1947” 17 (1948, trans. 2001), an extract from a memoir by Fikr Taunsvi (the
pen-name of Ramlal Bhatia), as well as a memoir by a Muslim migrant
from Delhi to Karachi, Abdul Rahman Siddiqi’s Smoke without Fire: Por-
traits of Pre-Partition Delhi 18 (2011). The basis for this selection from a
considerable range of memoirs which are being rediscovered and trans-
lated afresh is their respective historical significance, as well as the ability
to bring to the fore some of the moral ambiguities pertaining to Partition
violence and its afterlife. The contention of this essay is that some of these
significant life-writings about this critical event transcended the immedi-
ate context of writing, bearing witness to both the darker aspects of Parti-
tion violence as well as resistance to such violence by committed individ-
uals and groups. As modes of testimony, these narratives continue to
provide inspiration for those reckoning with the impact of extreme forms
of violence on the mind and on society, whether social scientists, activists,
or imaginative writers. 19
In Freedom’s Shade, written in Urdu in 1949 but published in 1974, and
only recently translated into English by Ayesha Kidwai in 2011, is per-
haps the most important memoir about the collective violence, mass dis-
location, and the rehabilitation efforts that followed. 20 The author’s hus-
band Shafi Mohammed Kidwai (a civil servant based in Mussoorie) was
killed, likely as a result of his efforts to prevent the forcible takeover of
evacuee Muslim properties in Mussoorie. Anis Kidwai then came to Del-
hi to meet Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi advised her to take up constructive
work, since he could ill afford to allow a person of her caliber and talents
to remain on the sidelines in mourning. 21 As a result she became in-
volved in the efforts to ensure a safe passage for Muslims who were
migrating to Pakistan, and who came to Delhi to live in refugee camps
that had been set up for them in the Purana Qila (old fort) area as well as
in the grounds of Humayun’s Tomb. What is remarkable about this me-
moir is the way the author sensitively comes to terms with such traumat-
ic memories; Kidwai represents both personal experience and collective
suffering both dispassionately and in a literary register. Indeed, this ac-
76 Tarun K. Saint

count qualifies as a literary memoir, not only because of Kidwai’s many

citations of couplets in Urdu, but also as a result of her reflective stance
on the transitions that were taking place across North India, with specific
reference to the plight of minority communities.
“September 1947 arrived, bringing in its wake scores of anxieties and
tribulations.” 22 Kidwai begins by giving a sense of the psychological
brunt of the moment of the partition, with the widespread Hindu-Mus-
lim rioting that followed Direct Action Day (16 August 1946) in Calcutta,
as well as collective violence in Noakhali, Bihar, Multan, Rawalpindi, and
Garhmukhteshwar. Kidwai acknowledges that both Multan and Rawal-
pindi had seen terrible massacres of Hindus and Sikhs, based on a de-
scription by a Muslim friend. She is evenhanded in her criticism of the
exultation with which people greeted the misfortunes of others. Kidwai
wonders as regards what sort of a nation might emerge that gave birth to
such heroic “braves.” 23 In her words, a strange bestiality was born in
those days. 24 For her, 15th August, the designated day of liberation, was
the day of freedom certainly, but also a freedom “slashed and streaked
with blood.” 25 “All the years we had waited and struggled, were they all
for this moment?” she asks, while witnessing the consecration of the new
nation-state by Brahmin priests (along with some rituals performed to
console the minorities) and the inauguration of what she fears to be a
new Brahminical order. 26 She thus articulates the acute sense of betrayal
of hopes of many who had participated in the non-violent struggle for
independence. It is a measure of her resilience and fortitude that Kidwai
was able to muster up the energy and commitment to get deeply in-
volved in the subsequent rehabilitation efforts as well as the attempts to
restore peace in the city of Delhi through the formation of a pacifist
organization, the Shanti Dal. 27
In subsequent chapters of this memoir, Kidwai shares a sense of per-
sonal anguish at the collective descent into depravity that she witnessed,
partly as a result of her own experience of loss, but also based on person-
al observation. Kidwai critiques the state-sponsored efforts at rehabilita-
tion of refugees and also identifies some of the problems with the basis
for the nation-states’ functioning that would beset independent India and
continue to beleaguer the country for years to come. The asymmetrical
and unjust treatment of sections of the Muslim minority, who were too
often treated as if they already belonged to another country or were soon
intending to migrate, as well as the predicament of abducted women
who, in some cases, were sought to be restored forcibly to their families
in the wake of the decision of the two countries to sign the agreement to
this effect, are delineated with empathy. The outrageous conduct of
government officials at the time of Partition, who misused their positions
in order to be able to grab the “hottest” women for themselves, and the
grotesque system of ratings that was established, according to which the
spoils were distributed down the hierarchy, are unsparingly laid bare. 28
 Exorcizing the Ghosts of Times Past 77

Here Kidwai bears witness to the complicity of the state (and power-
ful interests within it) in forms of gendered violence that seemed to re-
ceive a tacit sanction at this time. It is as if the abdication of the ethical
compact became especially visible for her during such transactions,
ushering in a monstrous inversion of codified assumptions about the
“sanctified” place of women in society. Perhaps as a result of her acute
sense of moral horror at the opening out of such zones of irresponsibility,
Kidwai’s tone does appear at times censorious and moralistic, even judg-
mental, in her condemnation of the waywardness of some of the ab-
ducted women. 29 According to her, some of them were prone to take
advantage of the situation they were in, in order to indulge in licentious
behavior. 30 Kidwai’s personal involvement with the situation may have
prompted such a stance as she sought the restitution of a baseline of
rectitude, in the context of having to engage with a multitude of such
cases that were brought to her attention during the efforts to rehabilitate
abducted women.
Kidwai offers her testimony so that the history in the making that she
was both part of and witness to would not be forgotten by later genera-
tions. The memories presented in this narrative are extremely significant
in the context of the paucity of such testimonial narratives. In Freedom’s
Shade is also a personal statement about a process of recovery through
writing from the deeply traumatic experience that she went through. 31
Kidwai grapples with the memory of personal loss and breakdown of
moral order in the public domain, as well as the later trauma of victims
she encountered from both communities, while assuming the role of so-
cial activist. Indeed, it is social activism that gave her the strength to
reject the rhetoric of blame as well as the tendency to act out repetitively
the symptoms of trauma, a phenomenon which she may have witnessed
herself in the camps. Through the constant and concerted efforts she
made to mitigate the suffering of others who had experienced similar
bereavement, Kidwai worked through her own memories of traumatic
loss. In her later reconstruction of this personal engagement and unre-
lenting activism, often in the face of bureaucratic indifference and hostil-
ity as well as political opposition, we get a sense of the ambivalences of
the moment of Partition and its aftermath, as Kidwai contended with the
likelihood of violence being perpetrated by former victims. Even so, she
ascribes responsibility for such arson and violence to the effects of RSS
(Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) propaganda. 32 Her narrative thus gives
us a sense of the prevalence of what Primo Levi termed the “gray zone,”
as victims themselves became perpetrators. 33 Despite her vulnerability to
accusations of bias and even personal attacks, she was able to contend
with the challenges she faced, often as a result of the friendships and
personal relations she had established along the way. This text also indi-
cates Kidwai’s resistance to the propensity to get sucked into a cycle of
78 Tarun K. Saint

vindictive rage and projection of grief and fury onto the perceived ene-
my.
As testimony and as record of her journey across the landscape of riot-
ravaged post-partition Delhi, In Freedom’s Shade is comparable to impor-
tant testimonies produced in the aftermath of the Holocaust by Primo
Levi, Elie Wiesel, and others. 34 This memoir traverses the intersection
between personal spaces and public domains, mapping the ravages of
time and history with accuracy and in detail. Just as was the case with
such attempts to bear witness to the horrors of the Holocaust that were
insufficiently recognized and at first consigned to oblivion, Kidwai’s nar-
rative did not initially receive adequate attention; it was published in
Urdu only in 1974. After this an Urdu edition brought out by the Nation-
al Book Trust appeared in 1978 and the Hindi translation in 1981, also
published by the National Book Trust. Finally, in 2011 the English trans-
lation appeared, though extracts had been published earlier. This delay in
reckoning with this major memoir may be symptomatic of widespread
collective amnesia in the wake of the Partition as well as modes of struc-
tured forgetting. Such erasure of historical memory may have been a
contributory factor to near cyclical repetition of instances of collective
violence, as well as the systematic targeting of women in the years fol-
lowing the Partition. The translator Ayesha Kidwai herself acknowledges
having truly read this memoir only after the Gujarat pogrom of 2002,
despite the fact that this memoir was written by her grandmother. 35 This
English translation, however belated, has nonetheless acquired a new
kind of valence in the context of the crisis following the events in Gujarat
in 2002, which seemed to uncannily replay some of the events described
for us by Kidwai in her memoir. Thus the English translation and the
biographical essay accompanying it became a new testimonial form, as a
mode of both primary and secondary witnessing. This memoir has thus
enabled a revisiting of the moment of 1947 in the light of the present-day
context of repetition of instances of extreme violence.
Kamlaben Patel’s Torn from the Roots (published initially in 1977 in
Gujarati and translated into English in 2006) is another important memoir
by a participant in the humanitarian efforts to restore abducted women to
their families. 36 Patel was a prominent social worker from Gujarat who
became involved from November 1947 in the activities of Operation Re-
covery, headed by Mridula Sarabhai. She was primarily based in Lahore
and had specific responsibilities allocated to her. These included making
arrangements for accommodating abducted women who were rescued in
the Gangaram Hospital in Lahore, as well as deciding which districts of
Pakistan the women social workers would be sent to find the abducted
women. She then had to arrange for the rescued women to be sent to the
Gandhi Vanita Ashram in Jalandhar in India. Furthermore, Patel’s task
was to keep in touch with officials of various departments in Pakistan to
 Exorcizing the Ghosts of Times Past 79

ensure that the agreement that had been signed between the govern-
ments relating to these women was put into practice. 37
In the process of recovery, she came across instances of men bursting
into tears while coming to terms with the fact that they would be separat-
ed from the women that they had abducted; after hearing so many simi-
lar stories, her senses became numbed. 38 Patel also became aware of the
strong feelings of guilt on the part of women, some of whom felt the need
to convince the officers who had come to rescue them that they had
committed no wrong. 39 At a certain point, Patel was taken to a village
where a well full of dead bodies was shown to her, into which the women
had jumped rather than face dishonor. 40 As a result of this, the well had
fallen into disuse and the people living nearby had left the area. Patel’s
narrative falls short of criticizing the dominant assumptions about chas-
tity and honor that compelled many such women to commit suicide in
this manner. Later feminist analysis by Butalia underlined the patriarchal
basis of the societal codes in question. 41 Such discoveries, as in the case of
Kidwai’s memoir, undoubtedly had a deeply disturbing effect on the
author. However, this narrative adopts a dispassionate tone while de-
scribing the various aspects of the recovery operation which the author
was part of as an official representative of the government of India in
Pakistan.
Another important problem Patel dealt with was the fate of children
born in the wake of abduction. While the Joint Secretary of the Ministry
of Recovery and Rehabilitation in India sought to make the claim that
children born in such circumstances should be regarded as war babies,
Patel believed otherwise. For as she argued, while men responsible for
the birth of war babies go back to their own countries, babies are always
brought up by their mothers, and therefore such children should not be
snatched away from their mothers. Finally, the decision was taken to
allow mothers to choose whether they wished to bring their children
along or leave them behind in Pakistan. While special homes were set up
for abandoned children, the Government of India eventually became
their guardian. 42
Patel wonders at one point whether a suspension of moral codes takes
place, and if the distinction between good and evil collapses at times of
extreme crisis. She too invokes the metaphor of bestiality while seeking to
explain the extent of violence in the Punjab. 43 However, it is ironic that
while on one hand collective violence disrupted family lives and de-
stroyed community-based modes of existence, widespread strife also led
at least to an extent to the suspension of social stigma pertaining to the
women abducted by strangers. As she argues, with an implicit under-
standing of the codified structures that underpin such attitudes, many of
the 10,000 to 12,000 women who had been abducted (an underestimation
of the actual numbers involved) would not have been reinstated but for
the crisis prevalent at the time. 44 Patel’s reflections on the dissolution of
80 Tarun K. Saint

categories of good and evil during this moment of extreme violence seem
to stem from her perplexity as regards the magnitude and scale of vio-
lence in the Punjab. Unlike Kidwai’s account, which is scathing in its
denunciation of forms of pathological violence that she came to hear of in
her interaction with the victims of Partition violence in Punjab and else-
where, Patel is on the whole more restrained in her description of the
reality of such violence and its effects on the mind and body of the vic-
tims.
Even so, this volume does capture the sense of ambiguity and ambiva-
lence that would later become the basis for some of the great short stories
on the subject of the abducted women and their eventual restoration (or
not) to their families; for instance, Rajinder Singh Bedi’s “Lajwanti.” 45
The suspension of moral codes and ethical precepts she writes about on
one hand led to some of the worst excesses, but ironically enough there
was at times a setting aside of taboos pertaining to sexuality that often led
to an instinctive rejection of women whose honor was deemed to have
been tarnished. It is such moments that this narrative acquires a testimo-
nial function, beyond the descriptive account of her experience and per-
sonal difficulties while undertaking the task assigned to her across the
border in the newly formed nation-state of Pakistan. For while this narra-
tive seems to lack the literary flair and capacity for introspection that we
find in Kidwai’s memoir, the somewhat different perception of the gray
area that came to the fore in the context of large-scale disruptions of
established and codified structures of understanding and value is note-
worthy. The duality of the Partition cataclysm, with its simultaneously
disruptive effects and at times unintended consequence of necessitating
rethinking of inherited prejudices and taboos, is the subject of Amrita
Pritam’s Pinjar (trans. The Skeleton) as well. 46 Well-known Punjabi poet
Pritam’s novella sensitively depicts the difference between the treatment
of women abducted prior to Partition and during the large-scale abduc-
tions that took place in the years 1947 to 1948.
Prakash Tandon’s Punjabi Century (1968) is another fascinating auto-
biographical account of not just an individual but of a Punjabi family of
the Khatri caste, chronicling events from 1857 to 1947. 47 Although this
work does not, strictly speaking, qualify as a Partition memoir, there is a
reference in conclusion to the dispersal and scattering of the Tandon
family once they were forced to migrate after the Partition. In the final
chapter and in the epilogue, Tandon depicts how his educated and well-
off family was forced to give up its land-holdings and properties and
make a fresh start in the months after the Partition, and the travails faced
by the family while joining a military evacuation convoy which took
them away from their home in Gujrat, their homeland in west Punjab, via
Lahore to Amritsar and later to Delhi and Karnal.
 Exorcizing the Ghosts of Times Past 81

Today we have no one left in Gujrat. All the Hindus came away at
partition. It is strange to think that in all the land between Rabi and
Chenab, from Chenab to Jhelum and from Jhelum on to Indus, in the
foothills and in the plain down to Panjnad where the five rivers eventu-
ally merge, land which had been homes of our biradari since the dawn
of history, there is no one left of our kind. 48
This statement captures the poignancy of the situation of many refugees
who had not expected that they would never be able to return to their
own homelands and places of birth. The profound disruption of a way of
life and a culture is well captured in the final section of this memoir
which serves as an auto-ethnographic account and perhaps even as an
epitaph for the culture of the Khatri community of West Punjab. Al-
though this family reestablished itself in Bombay and reacquired a cer-
tain level of prosperity, the patterns of life and the modes of being preva-
lent in West Punjab had been irrevocably altered and to a large extent
lost. Tandon is sensitive to the human dimension of the process of recov-
ery and rehabilitation of abducted women as well. He alludes to several
cases of men who had abducted Muslim women falling in love with them
and then becoming increasingly distraught at the prospect of being sep-
arated during the recovery efforts. One of them preferred to go on the
run and refused to take his abducted Muslim wife for treatment to the
hospital at the time of the delivery of their child, which resulted in her
eventual death in the field where they had been hiding. 49 Such tragic
outcomes of the state-sponsored rehabilitation and recovery process are
frankly acknowledged by Tandon, though not in as much detail as we
find in Kidwai’s and Patel’s accounts, and later in the work of Butalia and
Menon and Bhasin. Indeed, he is at times rather dismissive of the actions
of social workers (whom he describes as “cold, passionless women”) try-
ing to get on the trail of women who were proving difficult to locate. 50
In contrast, Abdul Rahman Siddiqi’s Smoke without Fire: Portraits of
Pre-Partition Delhi (2011) seeks to recapture memories of the way of life of
Muslim families in Old Delhi in the time leading up to the Partition. 51
Siddiqi deals with the experience of Partition violence and forced dis-
placement in the last chapter of this memoir. Prior to 1947 Siddiqi
worked as a reporter for the pro–Muslim League newspaper Dawn
(founded by Jinnah in 1942). After August 15, an Indian edition of this
newspaper continued to appear, while editorials were sent from Karachi,
where the editor Altaf Hussain had reestablished the newspaper. How-
ever, it was felt that the tone of these editorials was too strident (reminis-
cent of the pre-Partition days); therefore the Delhi edition began to carry
its own editorial. Siddiqi then describes the burning of the offices of
Dawn in the aftermath of the bombexplosion in the Fatehpuri mosque, in
early September 1947. 52 With this act of vandalism and arson, the some-
what utopian dream of a binational newspaper was shattered; soon after
this the author migrated to Pakistan.
82 Tarun K. Saint

Siddiqi’s memoir, written recently, includes references to Nehru’s

speech at Ballimaran in old Delhi, interrupted by Sikh slogan shouters,
which led to a stampede in which the author lost his shoes (the nickname
“joota–chorr” or “shoe shedder” stuck with him for a lifetime as a result),
as well as to the difference made by Gandhi upon his arrival in Delhi
(even though Siddiqi disagrees with Gandhi’s assignation of responsibil-
ity for the ‘madness’ of rioting to both communities). Siddiqi candidly
acknowledges uncanny aspects of the Partition experience in August
1947—while the violence had begun to peak with shooting in the streets,
the twenty-three-year-old journalist and his friends kept “romancing” (a
euphemism for visits to the kothas where the courtesans plied their
trade). Siddiqi confesses to feeling a strong sense of guilt after one such
visit to Farash Khana; upon returning, he felt as if everyone in the crowd
around him knew what he had done. Though Eros might indeed flourish
even in the times of massacres, the ambivalent psychic costs of such
forays, even as Thanatos seemed to hold sway, are noted here with hon-
esty. This becomes even clearer in his account of how a maulvi or cleric
raped a young (Muslim) Mewati girl from Gurgaon who had gone to the
mosque for shelter. Many perpetrators of sexual violence certainly did
not, in this time of extreme violence, respect boundaries of either religion
or community. 53
While the unique experiences of authors of the life-writings discussed
above are crucial to the kind of descriptive language being evolved, some
writers of memoirs took recourse to literary devices such as satire to
articulate their sense of outrage, disbelief, and anguish at the partition’s
impact on society and culture as well as civilizational values. Let us now
turn to an extract in translation from “The Sixth River: A Diary of 1947,” a
dryly ironic memoir of Partition written in Urdu in 1948 by Fikr Taunsvi,
the pen-name of Ramlal Bhatia, a Hindu columnist and satirist based in
Lahore, who migrated to India in November 1947. 54 The title refers to the
sixth river, a river of hate and blood that had begun to flow in the Punjab
during the Partition. The extract opens with the diary entry for August 9,
1947, when a bomb explosion took place in a cinema house in Lahore. 55
In a passage that echoes contemporary reportage, he describes how the
bodies were conveyed to hospital in tongas, some of whom had been
literally dismembered by the blast. A personal and self-ironic tone is
evident; Taunsvi laments that as a result, he and his friend Arif could not
have their evening tea at the Nizami hotel, nor conduct their “learned”
conversations on politics and literature. It occurs to him that the hooli-
gans of Lahore had given a fitting response to the bangles sent to them
from Amritsar. The logic of slighted masculinity and of untrammeled
retribution seemed to have taken over, as after this explosion, a hundred
and fifty “cowards” were put to death. Meanwhile, the police watched
the “beautiful” sight of burning houses, while trucks carrying the mili-
tary roamed all over the place. As Taunsvi puts it, it was as if human
 Exorcizing the Ghosts of Times Past 83

bodies were going cheap in the market and everyone was satisfied, rich
and poor, the rulers and the ruled. 56
In Taunsvi’s ironic view, given the absurdity of the Partition, art, liter-
ature, philosophy, and science all had become mute; all were in mourn-
ing. 57 Taunsvi looks towards images of Einstein, the Buddha, Ghalib, and
Iqbal and suggests in a rather hyperbolic vein that lines be drawn every-
where so that the rivers and mountains in Punjab were divided, for other-
wise people would suffer themselves to be cut into pieces, but never
allow themselves to be free. However, the images of Mahatma, the Bud-
dha, and Iqbal merely stare back at him, seemingly dumb in the face of all
that was happening. 58 Next, Taunsvi sees a burning building where
scores of workers had been employed to bind printed copies of the holy
Quran. A Hindu named Bishan Das inhabited the upper story of this
building. So, while on the top floor Das’s son was likely to be burned to
death, on the bottom floor the holy Quran and God’s law were in flames,
while Hindus and Muslims jointly attempted to extinguish the fire.
Taunsvi brings in an element of black humor as he admits to enjoying
this absurd spectacle, for according to him a new kind of history was
being written. 59 The deployment of blistering irony here is reminiscent of
“Siyah Hashye” (trans. “Black Margins”), Sa’adat Hasan Manto’s vig-
nettes written soon after the Partition. 60 Once again the grotesque duality
of the Partition experience comes to the fore, as this episode grimly illus-
trates, as the arson attack separates Hindus and Muslims, then in a maca-
bre moment, brings them together.
On August 14, an extraordinary day according to him, the narrator
wonders why a short story writer like himself, who could easily have
been done to death, is walking the streets in this raging hurricane of
blood and fire. 61 Indeed, he believes that there have been quite enough
sacrifices for Islam. Here Taunsvi deploys caustic irony to subvert the
ideological basis for Jinnah’s two-nation theory. The deployment of such
techniques is not unlike Manto’s approach in non-fictional pieces such as
“A Stroll through the New Pakistan” (trans. of “Savere Jo Kal Meri Ankh
Khuli”). 62 Taunsvi and Manto certainly opened up a space for a radical
interrogation of nationalist pieties and settled conceptions of selfhood
and identity, freely incorporating such “literary” devices in their person-
al accounts. The scope of the memoir and life-writing was corresponding-
ly extended with the emergence of such hybrid models of remembrance
and resistance.
On August 15 he tells us that the radio screamed Freedom all night,
but he wonders why firing of guns also continued through the night. 63
The difference between the freedom that had been dreamed about and
the reality of the sacrifice of innocent children, young women, and old
people becomes abundantly clear, even as the narrator and his friend
remained imprisoned indoors on the day of freedom. On August 17,
further horrific news comes to his attention, as the whole of Punjab seems
84 Tarun K. Saint

to have gone up in flames, despite the efforts of the Punjab Boundary

Force. 64 Taunsvi wonders about the continuation of violence despite the
efforts of this military force, which had been assigned the task of stem-
ming the rioting. While each side sought to blame the other, what re-
sulted in his view were an increase in responsibility for both sides and a
corresponding increase in the number of the dead. Taunsvi makes the
wry observation that we seemed to have gone back to the Stone Age; he
wonders if perhaps British politicians and statesmen thought that unless
we recede to the Stone Age we cannot attain Nirvana and the true taste of
freedom. 65
Here the mode of the memoir becomes a vehicle for critical question-
ing of the topsy-turvy world and inverted value system ushered in by
Partition. The narrative voice shifts from seeming levity to near despair,
while retaining a sense of the absurd in the face of the implosion of a way
of life. The writer’s ironic vision underpins his indictment of the situation
unfolding in Lahore in this moment of ethical and social catastrophe.
Lahore, the erstwhile cultural capital, seemed to have become bereft of
reason and the capacity to make moral judgments. The arid and barren
landscape of riot-torn Lahore becomes a figure for the degradation of
cultural and civilizational values inherited from yesteryears. While regis-
tering his sense of near-helplessness and bewilderment in the face of this
disaster, Taunsvi makes a stringent critique by establishing a distance in
aesthetic terms from the prevalent collapse of rationality and moral
codes, through the use of satire. He identifies a collective regression in
the body politic in conclusion in his reference to the collective descent
into the Stone Age. The narrative seems to poke fun at clichéd ascriptions
of culpability to the departing colonial rulers; however, there is no facile
exculpation of blame either. Rather, Taunsvi achieves a negative critique
of negative values that seemed to have engulfed Lahore in a monstrous
embrace, a process that may have been initiated during the phase of
colonial subjection.
“The Sixth River: A Diary of 1947” 66 thus appears as an atypical in-
stance of testimony, not merely cataloguing and recording the moral de-
basement and horrors being witnessed, but rather registering grief, moral
indignation, and anger, emotions sublimated through the use of satirical
barbs that unmask the pretensions of the community and political leaders
intent on celebrating newly acquired independence. While there is a pro-
found sense of historical trauma stemming from the disruptions ushered
in by the Partition in this fragmentary memoir, there is no element of
either the nostalgic or the sentimental here. Indeed, Taunsvi takes an
ironic view of simplistic nationalist and communitarian explanations of
communal violence that project responsibility for this breakdown of mo-
ral norms onto the “other” or onto the perceived enemy. The searing
costs of the loss of the capacity for accommodation and coexistence,
Taunsvi discerns, may be long-standing and continue to reverberate into
 Exorcizing the Ghosts of Times Past 85

the future. Through his writing of this “fictive” memoir he seems to

perform the creative act of mourning, which Dominick LaCapra, follow-
ing Freud, associates with working through the aftereffects and belated
manifestations of historical trauma. 67
We thus find in important memoirs about the Partition a range of
concerns and distinctive stances and voices. The narratives by Kidwai
and Patel capture in different ways the collective trauma of the abducted
women, as well as in Kidwai’s case the large-scale rehabilitation efforts,
while achieving the resonance of testimony to inarticulate suffering as
well as fragmentary resistance to orchestrated forms of collective vio-
lence. Tandon’s and Siddiqi’s narratives are more conventional and nos-
talgic chronicles of personal and family history to which the Partition
becomes a termination point of sorts, prior to a new beginning. On the
other hand, as we saw, the extract from Taunsvi’s diary unsettles as-
sumptions pertaining to such memoirs about the moment when Indepen-
dence was attained. He takes a skeptical stance with respect to nationalist
illusions and alludes to the risks faced by writers, thus acknowledging
without self-pity or nostalgia the climate of intolerance and hostility to
such contrarian perspectives and viewpoints at this moment of celebra-
tion and self-glorification. The prevalent mood of nationalist euphoria in
both India and Pakistan meant that such self-reflexive and self-critical
responses to moral ambiguities generated in the context of the attainment
of Independence/Partition would not necessarily always be welcome. The
long and at times inglorious history of publication of many of the life-
writings here under discussion is evidence of collective apathy and disre-
gard of works that plumbed the zero degree in their representation of the
collective descent into nihilism and depravity, as well as the sporadic yet
enduring resistance to such tendencies. Such testimony, despite the inad-
equate public reckoning with Partition’s fallout, has, nonetheless, proved
enabling in the ongoing task of exorcizing the ghosts of Partition-era
collective violence.

NOTES

1. Among the major anthologies, Mushirul Hasan’s India Partitioned, Vol. 2, in-
cludes excerpts from autobiographies/memoirs by writers and activists such as Khwa-
ja Ahmad Abbas, Josh Malihabadi, Aruna Asaf Ali, Kamladevi Chattopadhyaya, and
others. See Mushirul Hasan, ed., India Partitioned, 2 Vols. (New Delhi: Roli Books,
1997). Ahmad Salim’s collection Lahore 1947 incorporates reminiscences by Fikr Tauns-
vi, Satish Gujral, Prakash Tandon, Khushwant Singh, and Amrita Pritam, among oth-
ers. See Ahmad Salim, ed., Lahore 1947 (New Delhi: India Research Press, 2001). Ritu
Menon has edited an excellent anthology of nonfictional writing by women from
across South Asia, including Sara Suleri, Ismat Chughtai, Anis Kidwai, and Kamla
Patel. See Ritu Menon, ed., No Woman’s Land: Women from Pakistan, India and Bangladesh
Write on the Partition of India (New Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2004).
2. Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, India Wins Freedom (New Delhi: Orient Longman,
2003).
86 Tarun K. Saint

3. Ram Manohar Lohia, Guilty Men of India’s Partition (New Delhi: Rupa, 2009).
4. Jahan Ara Shahnawaz, Father and Daughter: A Political Autobiography (Karachi:
Oxford University Press, 2002).
5. Shaista Suhrawardy Ikramullah, From Purdah to Parliament (revised and ex-
panded ed. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1998).
6. Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, India Wins Freedom (New Delhi: Orient Longman,
2003), 216.
7. Lohia, Guilty Men of India’s Partition (New Delhi: Rupa, 2009), 1.
8. Jahan Ara Shahnawaz, Father and Daughter: A Political Autobiography (Karachi:
Oxford University Press, 2002), esp. 1–49.
9. Shaista Suhrawady Ikramullah, From Purdah to Parliament (revised and ex-
panded ed. Karachi: Oxford University Press), esp. 1–78.
10. Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (New
Delhi: Penguin, 1998).
11. Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition
(New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998).
12. Veena Das, Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India
(New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), and Life and Words: Violence and the Descent
into the Ordinary (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007).
13. Gyanendra Pandey’s work has been of crucial importance in this regard (espe-
cially Gyanendra Pandey, Remembering Partition [Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press. 2001]).
14. Anis Kidwai, In Freedom’s Shade, trans. Ayesha Kidwai (New Delhi: Penguin,
2011).
15. Kamla Patel, Torn from the Roots: a Partition Memoir, trans. Uma Randeria (New
Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2006).
16. Prakash Tandon, Punjabi Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1968).
17. Fikr Taunsvi, “The Sixth River: A Diary of 1947,” in Lahore 1947, ed. Ahmad
Salim (New Delhi: India Research Press, 2001).
18. Abdul Rahman Siddiqi, Smoke without Fire: Portraits of Pre-Partition Delhi (Delhi:
Aakar Books, 2011).
19. Manas Ray’s “Growing Up Refugee” is an example of a second-generation me-
moir, revisiting memories of growing up in a refugee camp in Calcutta with a self-
consciously theoretical perspective. Manas Ray, “Growing Up Refugee,” in Partitioned
Lives: Narratives of Home, Displacement and Resettlement, ed. Anjali Gera Roy and Nandi
Bhatia (New Delhi: Dorling Kindersley, 2008), 116–45.
20. Anis Kidwai, In Freedom’s Shade, trans. Ayesha Kidwai (New Delhi: Penguin,
2011).
21. Ibid., author’s preface to the 1974 edition, xvi.
22. Ibid., 1.
23. Ibid., 2.
24. Ibid., 3.
25. Ibid., 4.
26. Ibid., 6.
27. Ibid., 199–214.
28. Ibid., 141–47.
29. On the emergence of zones of irresponsibility in the context of the Holocaust,
when Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” found fullest expression, see Giorgio Agam-
ben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen
(New York: Zone Books, 1999), esp. 20–22.
30. Anis Kidwai, In Freedom’s Shade, trans. Ayesha Kidwai (New Delhi: Penguin,
2011), 149–50.
31. I discuss the role writing, particularly “fictive” testimony, may play while com-
ing to terms with traumatic experiences like the Holocaust and the Partition in greater
 Exorcizing the Ghosts of Times Past 87

detail in an earlier study. See Tarun K. Saint, Witnessing Partition: Memory, History,
Fiction (New Delhi: Routledge, 2010), esp. 1–60.
32. Anis Kidwai, In Freedom’s Shade, trans. Ayesha Kidwai (New Delhi: Penguin,
2011), 215–27.
33. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (London:
Abacus, 2002), esp. 22–64.
34. Ibid., also Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity, trans.
Stuart Woolf (New York: Touchstone, 1996, first published 1958), as well as Elie Wie-
sel, Night, trans. Stella Rodway (London: Penguin, 1987; first published 1958).
35. Ayesha Kidwai, “Translator’s Introduction” in Anis Kidwai, In Freedom’s Shade,
trans. Ayesha Kidwai (New Delhi: Penguin, 2011): vii.
36. Kamla Patel, Torn from the Roots: a Partition Memoir, trans. Uma Randeria (New
Delhi: Women Unlimited, 2006).
37. Ibid., 1–8.
38. Ibid., 15
39. Ibid., 18.
40. Ibid., 19.
41. Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (New Delhi:
Penguin, 1998), 166–74.
42. Patel, Torn From the Roots: a Partition Memoir, trans. Uma Randeria (New Delhi:
Women Unlimited,2006), 144–48.
43. Ibid., 151–53.
44. Ibid., 152.
45. Rajinder Singh Bedi, “Lajwanti,” trans. Author, in India Partitioned, Vol. 1., ed.
Mushirul Hasan (New Delhi: Roli Books, 1995), 179–91.
46. Amrita Pritam, “The Skeleton,” trans. Khushwant Singh in The Skeleton and That
Man (New Delhi: Sterling, 1987). Trans. of Pinjar.
47. Prakash Tandon, Punjabi Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1968; first published 1961).
48. Ibid., 249.
49. Ibid., 250–53.
50. Ibid., 251.
51. Abdul Rahman Siddiqi, Smoke without Fire: Portraits of Pre-Partition Delhi (Delhi:
Aakar Books, 2011).
52. Ibid., 275–81.
53. Ibid., 290–97.
54. Fikr Taunsvi, “The Sixth River: A Diary of 1947,” in Lahore 1947, ed. Ahmad
Salim (New Delhi: India Research Press, 2001).
55. Ibid., 13.
56. The preceding paragraph draws on ibid., 13–14.
57. Ibid., 14.
58. Ibid., 15–16.
59. Ibid., 16–17.
60. Sa’adat Hasan Manto, “Black Margins,” trans. Mushirul Hasan in India Parti-
tioned: The Other Face of Freedom, ed. M. Hasan, Vol. 1 (New Delhi: Roli Books, 1997,
88–101, trans. of “Siyah Hashye”).
61. Taunsvi, “The Sixth River: A Diary of 1947,” in Lahore 1947, ed. Ahmad Salim
(New Delhi: India Research Press, 2001), 22
62. See Sa’adat Hasan Manto, “A Stroll through the New Pakistan,” trans. Aakar
Patel, in Why I Write: Essays by Saadat Hasan Manto, ed. and trans. Aakar Patel (Chen-
nai: Tranquebar, 2014, 83–90, trans. of “Savere Jo Kal Aankh Meri Khuli”).
63. Taunsvi, “The Sixth River: A Diary of 1947,” in Lahore 1947, ed. Ahmad Salim
(New Delhi: India Research Press, 2001), 24
64. Ibid., 27.
65. Ibid., 27.
66. Ibid.
88 Tarun K. Saint

67. Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2001), 142–44.

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First published 1959. Complete version, 1988.
Bedi, Rajinder Singh. “Lajwanti.” Translated by author. In India Partitioned. Vol. 1. Ed.
Mushirul Hasan. New Delhi: Roli Books, 1995. 179–91.
Butalia, Urvashi. The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India. New Delhi:
Penguin, 1998.
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Das, Veena. Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary. New Delhi:
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Hasan, Mushirul, ed. India Partitioned. 2 Vols. New Delhi: Roli Books, 1997.
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2011. Trans. of Azadi ki Chhaon Mein, 1974.
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vii–ix. New Delhi: Penguin, 2011.
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versity Press, 2001.
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Levi, Primo. Survival in Auschwitz: The Nazi Assault on Humanity. Translated by Stuart
Woolf. New York: Touchstone, 1996. First published 1958.
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published 1961.
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tioned: The Other Face of Freedom, ed. M. Hasan, Vol. 1. New Delhi: Roli Books, 1997,
88–101. Trans. of “Siyah Hashye.”
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Patel, in Why I Write: Essays, by Sa’adat Hasan Manto. Ed. Aakar Patel. Chennai:
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 SIX
Difficult Choices
Work, Family, and Displaced Women in
Partition Writings

Debali Mookerjea-Leonard

Among the many transformations which accompanied, and were to some

extent caused by, the Partition in the lives of displaced middle-class Hin-
du Bengali women was their large-scale participation in wage labor.
Forced evacuation, dispossession, and often the loss of male breadwin-
ners in inter-community violence, compelled many formerly homebound
women to seek paid employment outside the home in an effort to fore-
stall the family’s economic collapse. Educated women favored teaching
positions, but the displaced lacked the luxury of being selective about
their field of work. Thus, some women found employment as clerks,
nurses, cooks, au pairs, and maidservants; others received training in the
arts and crafts; and still others applied for jobs which, for middle-class
Hindu Bengali women, had so far been stigmatized: door-to-door selling,
telephone operating, hawking, and even careers in the entertainment in-
dustry. It was a liberating experience for many, and wages held the
promise of self-reliance.
For educated upper- and middle-class Bengali women opportunities
for professional employment had first opened up in the late-nineteenth
century (mostly in the fields of education and medicine), but even in the
early decades of the twentieth century applicants were few and far be-
tween. However, changes in the economy of the region alongside the
displacement and dispossession that followed the Partition altered this
circumstance considerably. Now, women in large numbers began to seek

91
92 Debali Mookerjea-Leonard

salaried-work outside the home. Attending to this important social recon-

figuration, historian Gargi Chakravartty, in her study Coming Out of Par-
tition: Refugee Women of Bengal, notes,
Generally, Partition’s gender dimension evokes images of violence,
rape of women, cases of abandoned and missing women, and the trau-
ma of a communal situation, but the silent metamorphosis of a wom-
an’s life remains unnoticed. The sense of sharing responsibility, and at
times taking on the entire burden of the family, was a new phenome-
non in the trajectory of women’s search for identity in Bengal. 1
But this significant social change did not pass unnoticed, not in litera-
ture. While endeavors to preserve memories of Partition and its impact
through oral reminiscence are more recent, Bengali fiction, beginning in
the late-1940s, bears testimony to the changes Independence and Parti-
tion wrought in the lives of displaced middle-class women. Women pro-
tagonists, in this body of writings, who enter the labor market include
Arati Majumdar in Narendranath Mitra’s Abataranika (The Staircase, 1949),
Bina Guhathakurta and Kamala Mukherjee in Mitra’s Durabhashini (Lady
Telephone Operator, 1952), Neeta in Shaktipada Rajguru’s Meghe Dhaka
Tara (The Cloud-Capped Star, 1962), Sutara Datta in Jyotirmoyee Devi’s
Epar Ganga Opar Ganga (The River Churning, 1968), Pushpabala in Sama-
resh Basu’s “Pasharini” (“Peddler-Woman”), Nirupama in Dibyendu Pal-
it’s “Maachh” (“Fish”) to name a few. These novels and short stories cap-
ture with sensitivity the quiet courage of women who, without knowing,
or intending to, transformed the mindscape of Bengali middle-class
women—both displaced and non-displaced—making their employment
outside the home not only socially acceptable but also respectable. Com-
posed often in the melodramatic mode, this body of Bengali literary writ-
ings documents social and historical processes, and in the absence of
other forms of contemporaneous testimonies, serves as an important
record of the historical experience of Partition.
Bengali Partition fiction details the subtle nuances of working wom-
en’s experience in the home and the world, her freedom (and unfree-
dom), fears, and psychological dilemmas. Many also address the issue of
the young woman’s self-sacrifice at the altar of the family. Through a
reading of Dibyendu Palit’s short story “Maachh” (“Fish”) and Shaktipa-
da Rajguru’s novel Meghe Dhaka Tara (The Cloud-Capped Star), the first
section of this chapter, “Dutiful Daughters: Nirupama and Neeta,” exam-
ines the circumstances of the single working woman, from the middle
class. I argue that both of these writings reproduce the trauma of Parti-
tion in Nirupama’s and Neeta’s grim experience of imprisonment within
the double bind of wage labor and the family—they fail to find, on the
one hand, individual self-realization through wage labor, and, on the
other, fulfillment within the traditional family. Each narrative appre-
hends this in the dialectical tension between the woman’s recognition of
 Difficult Choices 93

her financial responsibilities towards her natal family and the gratifica-
tion of her romantic and individual aspirations. Together the narratives
critique the reproduction of patriarchy through the women’s seeming
emancipation.
But what about women who were intentionally dislodged from the
family? This question animates the second section of this chapter, “Sutara
and a Room of Her Own.” Sutara Datta, in Jyotirmoyee Devi’s novel Epar
Ganga Opar Ganga (The River Churning), 2 offers a counterpoint to both
Nirupama and Neeta. Repeatedly traumatized, she, nevertheless, gains
autonomy through education and employment, ultimately presenting an
example of the self-sufficient single woman. But her freedom comes at a
price.

DUTIFUL DAUGHTERS: NIRUPAMA AND NEETA

In her reminiscences, “Women Become Breadwinners,” Hena Chaudhuri

writes:
[A] couple from Bangladesh, who had come to our department in
search of some documents, once asked me as to why there were so
many unmarried women in West Bengal. Perhaps sociologists will be
able to answer the question better. But I feel that Partition is partly
responsible for this. Girls became bread-earners in many families. They
became the shock absorber, sheltering the younger siblings from the
harsh realities of life. As a result, they often decided not to marry and
have a family of their own. . . . My father, after migrating to this side,
would often tell my elder sister, Didi, “Now, you are my eldest son,” as
my brother and she were the eldest of the lot. In fact, after my father’s
death, it was Didi who took over the mantle of running the family, and
remained a spinster. 3
Offering literary counterparts of Hena Chaudhuri’s sister, Palit’s
“Maachh” and Rajguru’s Meghe Dhaka Tara also give readers a glimpse
into the texture of the women’s experience. Dibyendu Palit’s short story
“Maachh,” or “Fish,” set in a small town in Bihar, tells the story of Niru-
pama. Coming from a displaced family comprised of an aged father, a
bed-ridden mother, and three younger siblings (Monu, Tulu, and Bulu),
Nirupama herself is a school teacher. Disenchanted with her work, she
eagerly anticipates her upcoming wedding. One evening, while out with
her fiancé Bijon, Nirupama encounters poverty in so raw and desperate a
form as to lead her to break off her engagement.
Nirupama’s deep inner conflict is captured through the third-person
narrator’s repeated juxtaposition of opposites: Her demanding work-
schedule during the day versus the quiet relaxation of the evening (repli-
cated in the opposition of the scorching summer sun to the tranquil
moonlight); her resentment at being exploited at work versus her pleas-
94 Debali Mookerjea-Leonard

ure in Bijon’s company, the determination to be of assistance to her fami-

ly versus her fear of remaining single, in short, her duty to her family
versus her desire. And, until the end of the narrative, Nirupama continu-
ally vacillates between the two.
That Nirupama feels no pleasure in her professional employment is
laid out in her exhaustion at working two jobs, as a private tutor and a
school teacher, and her growing indignation at the guardian of the stu-
dent she instructs as well as the principal of the school, for taking advan-
tage of her vulnerability. Her feeling of entrapment is further heightened
by the sarcastic laughter from students at her failure to solve a math
problem. She endures it, because her family needs her salary. Nirupama’s
life at home is also demanding—she is expected to complete her share of
household chores—and chaotic, as is suggested by the altercation with a
neighbor. Relief comes in the shape of Bijon. After her long fatiguing day,
she craves his embrace, because in his arms “there’s only happiness and
security!” 4 Nirupama daydreams about him and cherishes their evenings
together. Yet, her response to his question on whether their marriage will
make her happy, to which she “absentmindedly” replies with “who
knows,” 5 suggests that her dilemmas remain far from being resolved.
Nirupama’s impending marriage to Bijon poses a direct threat to the
family’s economic security. His visits to Nirupama’s home and her enjoy-
ment of his company thus occasion anxiety in her family (represented
metonymically through her three siblings). When Bijon invites Nirupama
for a walk in the park, “a silhouette of pleasure crossed her pupils mo-
mentarily,” 6 but she notices her three siblings watching her, “There was a
look of fear in their eyes.” 7 The family fears losing her to Bijon and tries
to disrupt their relationship. For instance, one evening just as she pre-
pares to go out with him, “Bulu held the end of her saree with both
hands; and with helpless eyes was staring at Nirupama’s get up.” 8 That
the unnamed “fear” conveyed in Bulu’s “helpless eyes” is financial, at
least in part, is made explicit when Bijon, in an effort to resolve the
situation, hands Bulu a coin, and the child scampers away. The meta-
phorical tug-of-war over Nirupama between her family and Bijon sets the
scene for the story’s denouement.
During her brief excursion with Bijon into the Butchers’ Quarters, 9 a
part of the town populated by refugees, Nirupama comes across a har-
rowing scene,
A thin boy, very dark, a distended pumpkin-like belly below his jutting
ribs. Gripping his neck like a pincer was a middle-aged woman, emaci-
ated, a piece of dirty cloth hung from her waist down to her knees, two
rag-like breasts on her bare chest. . . . The boy was shrieking desperate-
ly; and with his teeth he clenched something, only a part of it was
inside his mouth. The woman was pressing on his throat with one
hand, and with the other she was tugging at the remainder of the thing
dangling from his mouth.
 Difficult Choices 95

. . . The weak light of the lantern flickered on the object. A fish!

The boy’s eyes were bulging. The woman with the ogreish mien
uttered a few rasping words, “Let go, let go I say.”
The boy made a gurgling sound. . . . He didn’t open his mouth, he
clamped his teeth, and made a brutish effort to swallow the fish whole.
“If you wolf down all of the fish, what will the rest eat? Let go I say!
Okay, just wait! I’ll strangle you to death.”
Again, a whimper! A choking sound from the boy.
It was unbearable. . . . A fish, for just a piece of fish! 10
Bringing the narrative to a certain culmination is this brutally dark vi-
sion, where a woman chokes her malnourished son who is trying to
ingest uncooked fish meant for consumption by the entire family. In this
time of scarce resources, the mother, with a family to feed, cannot afford
maternal indulgence or compassion, whereas the famished boy, for his
part, is incapable of charity towards his family. He would rather con-
sume the fish raw but whole than content himself with a smaller piece
cooked and shared with the rest. That for many refugees moral norms
were putrefying under the assault of poverty is amplified by the image,
repeatedly invoked, of a vulture hovering nearby. Similarly, the name of
the neighborhood, “Butchers’ Quarters,” serves to heighten the macabre
ambience of a passage that culminates in an undernourished boy’s at-
tempt to swallow whole a raw fish. For Nirupama, this ugly conflict
between mother and child exposes the poverty-induced death of decen-
cy. That this takes place in a neighboring refugee family, also from East
Pakistan (a fact reinforced by the mother’s use of the East Bengali di-
alect), inspires terror in her, impressing upon her a baleful vision of her
own family hopeless and destitute: Nirupama “recalled Tulu and Bulu’s
greedy, piteous faces. The dark circles under Monu’s eyes. . . . Who
knows why Nirupama thought that the woman resembled her mother?
And her father, gasping for breath, collapsed on the street, face-first.” 11
The reader has also been informed that Nirupama knows that her sib-
lings Tulu and Bulu “cry daily at meal-times for a piece of fish.” 12 Now
suddenly, she realizes unmistakably that, if she marries and thereby de-
prives her parents and siblings of her economic support, her family too
will be reduced to a similarly desperate condition, losing in the process
all dignity and decorum. It is respectability and decency—the accoutre-
ments of middle-class life—that Nirupama decides to preserve for her
family.
As the narrator’s interjection—“Who knows why Nirupama thought
that the woman resembled her mother?”—suggests, the mother-son tus-
sle is emblematic of Nirupama’s irreconcilable dilemma within. The fish,
a desired staple of the Bengali diet, is here a symbol of well-being or
wealth. The hungry child, who wants the entire fish to himself, represents
Nirupama’s “greedy-self” or libido that aspires to a life of comfort with
Bijon. The boy’s mother, on the other hand, solicitous of the welfare of the
96 Debali Mookerjea-Leonard

collective (the family) rather than of the individual alone (her son), is a
symbol of Nirupama’s “dutiful-self,” less her ego than her super ego. The
dutiful-self suppresses the greedy-self’s impulse to enjoy the good life
(the fish) alone, and, ultimately, the dutiful-self prevails. That said, just as
the famished child’s need for food is genuine and from his point of view
the mother is brutal even if she is right, in the same way, Nirupama’s
desire for marriage and personal fulfillment is a legitimate need, and the
burden of duty is unbearable. In the grueling poverty so many migrant
families experienced in the post-Partition era, the individual’s legitimate
need for self-realization can only be greedy. It is, therefore, forfeited to a
collective good, which, nonetheless, precious few could actually enjoy.
The individual’s duty in such a world has grown tantamount, the story
implies, to self-sacrifice. The conflict raging within Nirupama, in this
sense, reflects at a personal level an unremittingly antagonistic relation-
ship between the individual and society playing itself out historically.
Nirupama’s psychological tug-of-war ends; she has made her choice.
The family has won the prize fish, prevailing upon her to keep her job
and forsake the marriage with Bijon. But this resolution of her dilemma
brings her no happiness, nor even relief. Although her decision is volun-
tary, Nirupama communicates to her mother her refusal to wed Bijon in a
“curiously harsh, lifeless voice,” accompanied by a “sharp” smile and
repressing a “brokenhearted sigh.” 13 Her self-suppression is palpable.
The lifelessness in question, her story implies, extends beyond her mere
tone of voice, reaching to her very condition. It indicates an end to the
future with Bijon in which she expected to find joy. She knows that she
has rejected Bijon’s “invitation” to a beautiful life and, instead, allowed
her family to “drag her into the grindstone of narrowness and stupor.” 14
Nirupama, meaning “the incomparable woman,” lives up to her name;
she sacrifices her personal happiness and puts the needs of her family
first.
If Nirupama is horrified by the lack of compassion in another refugee
family, Neeta, in Shaktipada Rajguru’s Meghe Dhaka Tara (The Cloud-
Capped Star), lives with it. Like Nirupama, Neeta too prioritizes the needs
of her family over herself, but for her the consequences are devastating.
Neeta’s family has been displaced from Pirgunj, in East Pakistan, to the
outskirts of Calcutta. Generous Neeta uses her stipend and her small
income to indulge the many demands of her siblings — her unemployed
older brother Shankar, her pampered younger siblings Geeta and Montu,
while also covering the living expenses of her inamorato, Sanat. The fam-
ily’s dependence on her grows when she becomes breadwinner after her
father Madhab’s retirement and injury. Silent in the face of her father’s
passivity as well as her mother’s machinations to separate her from Sa-
nat, Neeta works a clerical job by day and tutors students in the evening,
struggling to give her family a better life. Exhausted and living in un-
wholesome conditions, Neeta eventually contracts tuberculosis. Her old-
 Difficult Choices 97

er brother, Shankar, now an established singer, takes her to a sanatorium

in the hills, where she dies.
Both “Maachh” and Meghe Dhaka Tara are premised on the belief that
once married, a daughter’s income will no longer be available to her natal
family. Thus for both Nirupama and Neeta, there is no compatibility
between romance and the prospect of personal fulfillment through em-
barking upon a life and family of their own, on the one hand, and their
desire to financially support their families, on the other. The difference
between them is that whereas Nirupama opts to support her parents over
a life with Bijon, Neeta has no choice: Her most personal decision, i.e., her
romance with Sanat, is hijacked by her mother. Neeta and her mother,
Kadambini, represent, so to speak, the spiritual and material aspects of
the refugees’ predicament: Neeta fights to preserve dignity, and her
mother to survive. While “Maachh” briefly raises the specter of a brute
struggle for survival in the young boy’s efforts to swallow whole a fish,
Meghe Dhaka Tara develops it with greater depth and pathos. And it is
accomplished primarily through the figure of the mother, Kadambini.
Although there are (rare) shades of maternal tenderness in Kadambini,
her motherly instincts have been blunted by the poverty suffered in the
wake of the family’s relocation and dispossession. She is unashamedly
grasping, and, with low cunning, deals a death blow to Neeta’s relation-
ship with Sanat. Fully aware of Neeta and Sanat’s burgeoning attraction,
she ponders, “Neeta is essential to this household. She can’t be let go. She
earns a living. As for looks, she’s much too plain. If, on the other hand,
Geeta can be hitched to an eligible man like Sanat, Kadambini will be
relieved of a huge burden.” 15 These sentiments are reinforced in a con-
versation with her husband when he raises the subject of Neeta’s mar-
riage, to which Kadambini vehemently protests, “And us? What will we
do after that, suck on our thumbs? . . . Have you considered what’ll
happen to this household if you marry Neeta off?” 16 Like the child Bulu
in “Maachh” clutching Nirupama’s saree to stop her from leaving with
Bijon, Kadambini, in order to calm her own very real fear of starvation,
latches on to Neeta securing her salary for the exclusive use of the family
by thwarting her romance with Sanat. In this sense, we might say that
both Meghe Dhaka Tara and “Maachh” are haunted not only by the refugee
crisis brought on by Partition, but also by that other man-made trauma of
the period, the devastating Bengal famine of 1943, which resulted in over
three million deaths. At all events, to survive in these stories even moth-
ers, perhaps especially mothers, must resort to the most calculated acts of
self-preservation. Kadambini maneuvers pretty Geeta’s successful seduc-
tion of Sanat, thereby unburdening herself of the daughter who contrib-
utes nothing to the household (by way of chores or expenses), while
keeping the proverbial golden goose in hand.
The non-maternal (if nonetheless dutiful) mother present both in this
novel and in “Maachh,” marks a significant shift from the stereotype of
98 Debali Mookerjea-Leonard

the nurturing mother celebrated in much of Bengali artistic produc-

tions. 17 In both narratives, the mothers are equated with monsters: “rak-
shasi,” 18 meaning ogress, is used in “Maachh” to describe the mother as
she throttles her malnourished son, whereas in Meghe Dhaka Tara, Neeta
overhearing her mother scheming to marry Geeta off to Sanat imagines
her as a “doitya” 19 or demon. In a startling reversal mothers have turned
inhuman, demoniac. Of course, in Kadambini’s defense, her utilitarian
calculus is not for self-preservation alone. Like the mother in “Maachh,”
she too acts on behalf of her family. She too sacrifices the happiness of a
single child so that she, her husband, and all the children may eat. But in
Meghe Dhaka Tara the image of the callous mother is repeatedly invoked.
For instance, on Geeta’s wedding day when guests have gathered at the
home and the morning ceremonies are in progress, her father Madhab
sits apart listening to the din, he notes that “rising above [the tumult] are
the wails of children and the sound of their mothers’ merciless thrash-
ing.” 20 This seemingly extraneous detail serves as a reminder of Kadam-
bini’s betrayal of Neeta. The novel suggests that economic indigence has
also prompted an immaterial poverty and that circumstances have con-
spired to atrophy Kadambini’s conscience: “In the abundance of their
Pirgunj home, she was the grihalakshmi. 21 Today, the difficult struggle for
survival has cast its dark shadows all over her. She has become increas-
ingly ruthless in order to survive.” 22 The same is reinforced in Neeta’s
imagination of her mother as a cornered cat baring its fangs and claws.
(Generally speaking, in this novel as in “Maachh,” animal imagery pro-
liferates as so many metaphors for brutalization.) In other words, prevail-
ing social and economic conditions have structurally undermined the
older family form, “emancipating” women into wage labor in the pro-
cess, but all to a horrifically dystopian effect.
More than mere change is involved in the novel’s depiction of the
upendings and inversions of Kadambini and Neeta’s roles. The unmar-
ried daughter Neeta is the provider for the family; the giver of life, but
not to new life, rather by arranging for the publication of her father’s
book, she renews his will to live; and finally, she takes over the role of a
nurturer, supporting and encouraging Shanker to build a career as a
musician. In short, Neeta is the self-sacrificing parent that never had a
family of her own. The vitiating of the mother-child bond and the disper-
sal of Kadambini’s other children (Shankar, Geeta, and Montu) serves as
a metaphor for the rupturing of human relationships through eruptions
of violence surrounding the Partition, and the refugees’ “parting” from
an uncaring mother(land). The pitiless mother/motherland is the antithe-
sis of the bountiful Bangamata (Mother Bengal) of nationalist writings.
The duality of the simultaneously caring and chastising Mother is cap-
tured in one of Rabindranath Tagore’s songs. While the first stanza of
“Aji bangladesher hridoy hote kokhon aponi/ Tumi ei aporup rupe bahir hole
janani!/ Ogo Ma tomay dekhe dekhe ankhi na phire!” 23 (“You emerged from
 Difficult Choices 99

the heart of Bengal in boundless splendor, Mother, I cannot take my eyes

off you!”) appears to offer unequivocal praise of Mother Bengal, subse-
quent stanzas make clear that her splendor is built on a series of
contrasts. (The second stanza, for instance, opens with, “Daan hate tor
khargo jwale, baan haat kare shankaharon,/Dui nayone sneher hansi, lalatnetra
agunboron” meaning “In your right hand is a blazing sword, while your
left hand dispels our fears/A loving smile plays in both your eyes, while
the third eye is aflame.”) In Meghe Dhaka Tara, Neeta and Kadambini
together depict complementary aspects of the Bangamata: her generosity
and her harshness. Partition’s destabilizing effects are further indicated
by the incapacity of the pater familias and original breadwinner, Neeta’s
crippled father, to marry off his daughter, i.e., to establish her within the
traditional family form through marriage.
Neeta, Rajguru’s novel repeatedly suggests, is a dynamic young wom-
an, with lofty aspirations. Her compassion and her profound sense of
responsibility towards those around her serve to betray her, so that in the
end, the only pleasure she has left is her masochistic enjoyment of her
own suffering. Thus, she stoically consoles herself on the loss of Sanat
with the third-person reflection, “For the well-being of her family, she
has given her salary, her labor, what if she has to sacrifice some more for
her sister! The ultimate sacrifice.” 24 Such reflections in which Neeta
seems to come to terms with her destiny ring ironic and hollow. The
rhetoric of self-sacrifice implies free will, yet the “will” exercised here is
not her own. Rather, her happiness has simply been sacrificed. Instead of
being freed from dependence by wage labor, Neeta is only free to labor
and to consecrate her wages to those dependent upon her. Throughout
the novel she remains uncomplaining of the injustices and betrayals by
those around her. Though cognizant of Kadambini’s subterfuges to sep-
arate her from Sanat, Neeta refrains from protesting her mother’s inter-
ference, or Geeta’s seduction of Sanat, or even Sanat’s change of heart.
Neeta is not shorn of agency, instead, she relinquishes it. In passively
suffering the consequences of others’ actions, Neeta sacrifices the very
individuality that wages might have helped to sustain. For this reason,
her self-effacing filial love, her exemplary generosity, her gentle toler-
ance, and her death are laden with pathos but fall short of tragic dignity.
Her self-imprisoning attachment to her family is a form of traumatic
bonding, where despite the abuse she suffers, she empathizes with them,
identifies with them, and, of course, financially supports them. It is be-
cause of her ability to bring home an income that her mother will not
spare her. In the context of pervasive unemployment, Neeta’s entrance
into the labor market is tantamount to enslavement to the needs of every-
one she loves. But although she is the breadwinner, she is “denied its
gendered privileges.” 25
Freedom for Neeta comes in the shape of her terminal disease. Her
body’s expiration alone ends its further exploitation. In this sense, the
100 Debali Mookerjea-Leonard

freedom from labor, the free time that labor promises, is accessible to her
only through death. Though fairly widespread in Bengal at the time, her
tuberculosis also operates as a metaphor in the following two ways: (i) it
intensifies the feeling of Neeta’s entrapment—there is no air left for her to
breathe, suffocating her to death (paralleling the image of the mother
choking her son in “Maachh”); and (ii) it indicates a broader social rot by
which all norms of ethical conduct and decency have wasted away and
the compassionate and unselfish perish.
Neeta is an “angel-woman” since “it is the surrender of her self—of
her personal comfort, her personal desires, or both—that is the beautiful
angel-woman’s key act, while it is precisely this sacrifice which dooms
her both to death and to heaven. For to be selfless is not only to be noble,
it is to be dead.” 26 Speaking of the “angel-woman,” it is worth noting that
Ritwik Ghatak’s film Meghe Dhaka Tara (1960), through music and im-
ages, draws upon the symbology of the Mother Goddess, in its presenta-
tion of Neeta. 27
But what if Neeta or Nirupama, or, more generally speaking, a single
woman with an income, chose to live independently? That possibility is
explored through the story of Sutara in Jyotirmoyee Devi’s Epar Ganga
Opar Ganga.

SUTARA AND A ROOM OF HER OWN

On the changes prompted by displaced women’s participation in the

labor market Gargi Chakravartty writes, “The economic responsibility of
the family had so far been with the male members; it was always as-
sumed that sons were to be the bread-earners of the family. Now daugh-
ters began to shoulder the burden, facilitating a major breakthrough in
the attitudes of a patriarchal society.” 28 Wage labor outside the home
offered women some release from traditional gender roles, expanding
their access to participation in society while curbing patriarchal vigilance
over them. Crucially, it allowed some women a degree of economic inde-
pendence. However, as my reading of “Maachh” and Meghe Dhaka Tara
suggests, while the participation of women in the labor market and their
presence in public defied conventional gender roles and contributed to
some reorganization of the family, Chakravartty’s rhetoric of a “major
breakthrough” in patriarchal practices is challenged by these literary rep-
resentations of the period. To take one small instance, the fact of Nirupa-
ma and Neeta’s professional employment does not fundamentally alter
their responsibilities within the home: Both replace their brothers as sup-
porters of their families, but upon return from work, they are still ex-
pected to perform their share of “woman’s work,” i.e., domestic chores.
In her study of the consequences of Partition and migration on women
 Difficult Choices 101

and the family, historian of the Bengal Partition Joya Chatterji is cautious-
ly optimistic:
Displacement, of course, was not automatically the harbinger of
progress, still less of the emancipation or “empowerment” of refugee
women in some simple or linear progression. Working women tended
to have little control over the wages they earned. Despite the growing
contribution their salaries made to the family’s domestic economy,
their control over their own lives was by no means securely established
just because they had become wage-earners. Yet some refugee women
did begin to achieve a measure of freedom and opportunity by joining
the paid workforce or by gaining an education. These developments
caused significant shifts in the social mores of caste Hindus. “Decent”
women, traditionally tucked away in the antahpur, now went out and
about in the big world, bringing irreversible changes in Hindu middle-
class notions of propriety and respectability. 29
In this passage, Chatterji underlines the important link between the sala-
ried worker’s limited emancipation and her lack of control over her
wages. There were exceptions, of course, particularly in the cases of sin-
gle working women who lived apart from the family. Chatterji speaks of
a Partition-facilitated social phenomenon of a rising “number of men and
women, mainly from humble backgrounds, who lived as single persons
outside any family structure whatsoever.” 30 A literary complement to
Chatterji’s claim is suggested in Sutara Datta in Jyotirmoyee Devi’s novel
Epar Ganga Opar Ganga.
When Hindus in her East Bengal village are attacked during the
Noakhali riots of 1946, the adolescent Sutara Datta is separated from her
parents and older sister. A Muslim neighbor, Tamizuddin, finds her un-
conscious and brings her to his residence where his family takes care of
her. Despite Tamizuddin’s communications, Sutara’s brothers—Sanat,
Subodh, and Sudhir—living in Calcutta, show little inclination to bring
her over. Their unwillingness is based on a suspicion of her having been
violated in the attack and her long stay with the Muslim family. Still on
Sutara’s insistence Tamizuddin delivers her to her brothers and extended
family in Calcutta, in the home of Sanat’s in-laws. The elderly women in
the Hindu household disapprove of her “contaminating” presence, and
in a move to keep Sutara away from the family, her brothers send her to a
boarding school and, later, to college dormitories. She completes her edu-
cation and is employed as a professor of history in a women’s college in
Delhi. She finds accommodations in a hostel for working women.
Insofar as Bengali literary writings are concerned, Epar Ganga Opar
Ganga offers an uncommon glimpse into the life of an unmarried woman,
from the middle classes, living outside the family fold. The novel cele-
brates the resilience of the women in the hostel while at the same time
acknowledging their solitude, “At the corners of the garden a few euca-
lyptus trees stood straight and tall, apart and lonely. . . . Like the women
102 Debali Mookerjea-Leonard

residents of the hostel. Solitary trees lacking shrubbery, fruits and flow-
ers, branches and twigs. Storms would bend but couldn’t break them.” 31
The community of women in the hostel suggests an alternative to the
traditional family form. In contrast to the repeated trauma brought upon
Sutara by her surviving family who offer no sanctuary, nor show the
slightest concern for her well-being, the hostel is a haven of support. Here
Sutara feels comfortable sharing her past. Here she is not rebuffed by her
listeners but met with friendship; and, despite the knowledge of her pro-
longed stay in a Muslim home, she is invited to attend Hindu ceremonies
and taken on pilgrimages. In other words, she is absorbed without preju-
dice into a new form of community. In addition, living outside the family
fold she escapes patriarchal control over her sexuality and mobility. Her
unrestricted freedom is clear in her travels with her colleagues to the
mountains, and in her ability to make decisions on the offers of marriage
she receives (from Tamizuddin’s family, and from Pramode, her sister-in-
law Bibha’s brother). While the novel is strident in its criticism of the
traditional family form, the prospect of Sutara’s reinsertion into middle-
class domestic life through the promise of marriage cuts short the explo-
ration of the life of an economically self-sufficient single woman.
Sutara’s musings about her living quarters in the hostel, with a nod to
Virginia Woolf (with whose writings Jyotirmoyee Devi was deeply famil-
iar), raises the issue of women’s independence, particularly, economic
empowerment, and intensifies the novel’s feminist content: “[I]t was a
room of her own, her place acquired with her earnings. . . . For now, her
brothers wouldn’t have to provide for her. They wouldn’t even have to
spare her a thought. Has she become independent? Are women ever
independent?” 32 Sutara’s understanding of her autonomy and personal
well-being is grounded in the economics of ownership—her ownership
of her room, her private space made possible by her salary. Used recur-
rently in the first sentence of the passage above is the word “nijer” which,
in the present context, translates to “her own”; so that a more literal
translation would be “[I]t was a room of her own, her own place earned
with her own earnings” (italics mine). After being repeatedly moved
around at the will of her brothers and the extended family—from her
village to Calcutta and, then, from the home of Sanat’s in-laws to the
boarding school, and college dormitories—her room offers a sense of
stability. It is a haven for which she is not indebted to anyone. Within that
rented space, Sutara is free.
The novel underscores the significance of Sutara’s autonomy, reiterat-
ing it in the final chapter when she ponders how her marriage to Pra-
mode might impact her life, “For the last four-five years she has sup-
ported herself. She is independent. Respected in her field of work.” 33 The
question raised at the end of the previous passage—“Are women ever
independent?”—is tentatively answered here: Sutara is an independent
woman. Financial independence serves as her escape route from a pos-
 Difficult Choices 103

sible future in a women’s home or a government-sponsored Permanent

Liability Camp for displaced persons. Most importantly, her autonomy
gives her a “voice”: It is a metaphor for her loss of social agency that
between Sutara’s restoration to her family in Calcutta and her finding
employment at Delhi she rarely speaks: She is simply the object of the
compassionate or repulsed gaze of the extended family. But the silent,
frightened, passive adolescent of the first half of the novel is replaced in
the second by a bolder and livelier woman who is no longer ashamed to
share her story. In addition, Sutara’s wages and the distance she puts
between herself and her family by relocating to Delhi, enable her to live
as she wants—going on pilgrimages, meeting with her Muslim friends
from Noakhali, and so on.
The chief distinction between Nirupama and Neeta, on the one hand,
and Sutara, on the other, is that Sutara resists victimhood. While Neeta
practically embraces it and Nirupama is a martyr by choice, Sutara
transcends her victimhood and thwarts being defined by her circum-
stances alone. Neeta’s sacrifice of her individualism ends in death, Niru-
pama’s in “lifeless”-ness, only Sutara’s response is life-affirming. This is
not to say that Sutara’s story is one of simple triumph over circum-
stances. Her self-actualization comes at great personal cost—the murder
of her father, the abductions of her mother and older sister, the assault on
her; this is followed by the trauma over her marginalization by surviving
family members, and repeated shaming by the extended family. Above
all, she is lonely. She is free to make her way in the world, but Sutara is
not free from haunting memories and shattering grief. Her freedom is
predicated on loss and trauma.
Ultimately, all three narratives examined in this chapter concur, al-
though in different ways, that the family is a site of repression, and that
the emergence of the free autonomous women is possible only where the
family is kept at a distance. In “Maachh” and Meghe Dhaka Tara, the obli-
gation to the indigent family places a burden on the individual. Nirupa-
ma’s analogy of the grindstone, in contemplating life with her family, is
equally evocative of the pounding Neeta takes daily. The choices before
the young women are hard: Either to be dutiful to the family and surren-
der the possibility of personal fulfillment, or to be genuinely free but
stripped of the family, and shunned.
Taken together, “Maachh,” Meghe Dhaka Tara, and Epar Ganga Opar
Ganga all indicate an inherent tension between women’s affective and
familial bonds that wage labor alone did not allow them to successfully
negotiate. Rather, in post-Partition Bengal, women had not only to gain
skills and enter the workforce, but they also had to discard their closest
bonds. In this sense they had to repeat the uprooting they suffered as
refugees, only this time consciously and as individuals. This was, and
remains, a most perilous and painful passage.
104 Debali Mookerjea-Leonard

NOTES

1. Gargi Chakravartty, Coming Out of Partition: Refugee Women of Bengal (New Del-
hi: Bluejay Books, 2005), 86–87.
2. Initially titled Itihashe Stree Parva, this novel was first published in the autumnal
issue of the journal Prabashi in 1966; it was published in book form under its present
name in 1968. See Jyotirmoyee Devi, Epar Ganga Opar Ganga (Calcutta: Rupa and
Company, 1968). The novel has been translated into English as The River Churning by
Enakshi Chatterjee and published by Kali for Women, 1995. However, I have used my
translations in this essay.
3. Hena Chaudhuri, “Women Become Breadwinners,” in Jashodhara Bagchi and
Subhoranjan Dasgupta eds., with Subhashri Ghosh, The Trauma and the Triumph: Gen-
der and Partition in Eastern India vol. 2 (Calcutta: Stree: 2009), 85–86.
4. Dibyendu Palit, “Maachh,” in Raktamonir Haaré: Deshbhag-Swadhinatar Galpo San-
kalan (In a Necklace of Garnets: Collection of Stories on Partition and Independence) vol. 1,
edited by Debes Roy (Calcutta: Sahitya Akademi, 2005; first published 1999), 215–25.
All page numbers refer to this text. All translations from the text are mine. 221.
5. Ibid., 223.
6. Ibid., 222.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Given that butchers were predominantly Muslims, and the story is set in Bihar
where there was a tidal wave of anti-Muslim violence in retaliation for the attacks on
Hindus in Noakhali and Tippera in 1946, the Butchers’ Quarters locality deserted by
its original inhabitants is a reminder of Partition’s violence.
10. Ibid., 224.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., 219.
13. Ibid., 225.
14. Ibid., 222.
15. Shaktipada Rajguru, Meghe Dhaka Tara (Cloud-Capped Star) (Calcutta: Dey’s Pub-
lishing, 2001), 32. This novel was first published by Calcutta: Granthapitha, 1962. All
page numbers used in this essay refer to the 2001 edition published by Dey’s Publish-
ing. All translations from the text are mine.
16. Ibid., 53.
17. Ramprasad Sen’s Shyama Sangeet, or songs dedicated to the goddess Kali, Rabin-
dranath Tagore’s poetry and songs, Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s short story “Bin-
dur Chhele” (“Bindu’s Son”), paintings by Jamini Roy, and more recent productions
such as the Bengali jatra (folk theater) entitled Ma Tumi Debi (“Mother, You are a
Goddess”) present images of the nurturing, loving mother.
18. Dibyendu Palit, “Maachh,” in Raktamonir Haaré: Deshbhag-Swadhinatar Galpo San-
kalan (In a Necklace of Garnets: Collection of Stories on Partition and Independence), vol. 1,
edited by Debes Roy (Calcutta: Sahitya Akademi, 2005 ), 224.
19. Rajguru, Meghe Dhaka Tara (Cloud-Capped Star) (Calcutta: Dey’s Publishing,
2001), 35.
20. Ibid., 63.
21. Grihalakshmi: housewife who brings prosperity and happiness to the home.
22. Ibid., 69.
23. Rabindranath Tagore, “Aji Bangladesher Hridoy hote kokhon aponi,” in Geetabitan
(Swadesh section) (Calcutta: Viswabharati, 1995, first published 1931), 255–56.
24. Rajguru, Meghe Dhaka Tara (Cloud-Capped Star) (Calcutta: Dey’s Publishing,
2001), 51.
25. Jashodhara Bagchi and Subhoranjan Dasgupta, eds., The Trauma and the Tri-
umph: Gender and Partition in Eastern India, vol. 1 (Calcutta: Stree: 2003), 5.
 Difficult Choices 105

26. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer
and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1979), 25.
27. Ritwik Kumar Ghatak, “Parichaloker Katha” (“Director’s Words”), in Meghe Dha-
ka Tara (Meghe Dhaka Tara: A Film Script by Ritwik Kumar Ghatak) (Calcutta: Ritwik
Memorial Trust, Dey’s Publishing, 1999). Translation mine. N.P.
28. Gargi Chakravartty, Coming out of Partition: Refugee Women of Bengal (New Delhi:
Bluejay Books, 2005), 87.
29. Joya Chatterji, The Spoils of Partition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2007), 153–54.
30. Ibid., 152.
31. Jyotirmoyee Devi, Epar Ganga Opar Ganga (Calcutta: Rupa and Company, 1968),
145. All page numbers refer to this text. All translations from this novel are mine.
32. Ibid., 71.
33. Ibid., 145.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bagchi, Jashodhara, and Subhoranjan Dasgupta, eds. The Trauma and the Triumph:
Gender and Partition in Eastern India, vol. 1, Calcutta: Stree, 2003.
Bagchi, Jashodhara, and Subhoranjan Dasgupta, eds., with Subhashri Ghosh, The Trau-
ma and the Triumph: Gender and Partition in Eastern India, vol. 2. Calcutta: Stree: 2009.
Basu, Samaresh. “Pashirini” in Raktamonir Haaré: Deshbhag-Swadhinatar Galpo Sankalan
(In a Necklace of Garnets: Collection of Stories on Partition and Independence) vol. 1,
edited by Debes Roy. Calcutta: Sahitya Akademi, 2005 (first published 1999).
190–205. All translations from the text are mine.
Chakravartty, Gargi. Coming Out of Partition: Refugee Women of Bengal. New Delhi:
Bluejay Books, 2005.
Chatterji, Joya. The Spoils of Partition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Chaudhuri, Hena, “Women Become Breadwinners.” In The Trauma and the Triumph
vol. 2. Jasodhara Bagchi, Subhoranjan Dasgupta, eds., with Subhashri Ghosh. Cal-
cutta: Stree, 2009.
Ghatak, Ritwik Kumar. “Parichaloker Katha” (“Director’s Words”) in Meghe Dhaka Tara
(Meghe Dhaka Tara: A Film Script by Ritwik Kumar Ghatak). Calcutta: Ritwik Memorial
Trust, Dey’s Publishing, 1999. Translation mine.
Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and
the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.
Jyotirmoyee Devi. Epar Ganga Opar Ganga. Calcutta: Rupa and Company, 1968. All
page numbers refer to this text. All translations from this novel are mine.
Mitra, Narendranath. Abataranika, Reprinted in Galpamala vol. 1. Calcutta: Ananda
Publishers, 1986. 122–43. First published in Anandabazar Patrika, Puja number, 1949.
Mitra, Narendranath. Durobhashini, in Upanyasa Samagra vol. 1. Calcutta: Ananda,
2004. First published in Ganabarta under the name Akathita (The Woman Unsung), in
1951.
Palit, Dibyendu. “Maachh” in Raktamonir Haaré: Deshbhag-Swadhinatar Galpo Sankalan
(In a Necklace of Garnets: Collection of Stories on Partition and Independence) vol. 1,
edited by Debes Roy. Calcutta: Sahitya Akademi, 2005 (first published 1999).
215–25. All page numbers refer to this text. All translations from the text are mine.
Rajguru, Shaktipada. Meghe Dhaka Tara (Cloud-Capped Star). Calcutta: Dey’s Publish-
ing, 2001. This novel was first published by Calcutta: Granthapitha, 1962. All page
numbers used in this essay refer to the 2001-edition published by Dey’s Publishing.
All translations from the text are mine.
Tagore, Rabindranath. “Aji Bangladesher Hridoy hote kokhon aponi” in Geetabitan (Swa-
desh section). Calcutta: Viswabharati, 1995 (first published 1931). 255–56.
 SEVEN
Refugees as Homo Sacers
Partition and the National Imaginary in
The Hungry Tide

Amrita Ghosh

After the 1971 war of Independence for Bangladesh, the refugees from
the Eastern border between India and Bangladesh were particularly mar-
ginalized within the field of Partition studies. There was a huge “disinter-
est in the refugee problematique” 1 after the 1971 war and the Eastern
border was especially neglected in the larger politics of Partition, which
automatically came to be represented by the iconic Western side. 2 Aca-
demically, too, historians note a massive gap and silence over the refu-
gees who were almost “invisible” in historical accounts. 3 The “refugee
problem” becomes largely framed into two issues—first, as Rahman and
Schendel explain, there has been a dominant focus on the migration of
refugees from erstwhile East Pakistan into Eastern India (not vice versa),
and second, records on refugees are all directed towards the migration
into Calcutta and its camps. More importantly, these writings reveal the
“state policies towards newcomers and in terms of the effects that refu-
gees had on policies in Calcutta and the rest of West Bengal” 4; the focus
was also on refugees who were from the educated Bengali upper and
middle class. Thus, statist policies ignored certain refugees from the na-
tional consciousness whose voices or deracination were not rendered
worthy of archival importance.
This essay focuses on the mass displacement of Dalit refugees in the
aftermath of Partition from the Eastern border through an investigation
of Amitav Ghosh’s novel The Hungry Tide. My investigation of Ghosh’s

107
108 Amrita Ghosh

novel primarily focuses on the Morichjhapi siege of 1979 when many

subaltern refugees were killed and evicted by the state in the island of
Morichjhapi, Sundarbans. Here, I explore the dynamics between the state
and the marginalized people where the Dalits are negated from the na-
tional imaginary. I argue that Ghosh not only creates a subaltern voice by
letting the Dalit refugees “speak” about the silenced incident, but I also
analyze Sundarbans as a “heterotopia” (in Foucault’s terms) in the hinter-
lands of the border, which the statist ideology cannot incorporate within
the seamless imaginings of the post-Partition nation-state. As the text
shows, the heterotopic borderlands become dynamic spaces that recon-
figure defined national territories, and the subaltern refugees become a
threat to the “pure” national construct by subverting the neatly defined
boundaries of caste and religion.
My essay also has a double focus on Sundarbans, both as a heteroto-
pia and a “camp-like” space where the refugee subject, in Giorgio Agam-
ben’s words, becomes the “homo sacer—” human beings stripped to their
bare naked life which permits state killing of such “banned,” “taboo”
subjects.” 5 Here Agamben’s notion of the bare life becomes crucial to
show how the state curbs potential possibilities within the deviant
heterotopic space of Sunderbans by exerting its biopower and killing the
Dalit refugees by impunity. Thus, the existence of a heterotopia, as delin-
eated in Ghosh’s text, exemplifies the role of sovereignty and its effects in
the post-partitioned nation. I divide the rest of the essay into two sec-
tions. In the first, I provide a brief background and social history of the
refugee “problem” in the Eastern side and the construct of the term “refu-
gee” that negates class and caste difference. The essay also uncovers the
silenced history of “Morichjhapi massacres” which forms a crucial sub-
text in Ghosh’s novel The Hungry Tide, as discussed in the second section.

THE EASTERN BORDER, REFUGEES, AND MORICHJHAPI

The Western divide of Partition was primarily determined by religion.

For the Punjab border the classification of refugees was broadly defined
on a religious basis, as Hindus or Muslims, with a weak focus on the Sikh
community. However, the Eastern side was more complicated with class
and caste being more significant determinants. Partition of the Eastern
side was also unique because of the “fuzzy” identity of Bengalis from
both Hindu and Muslim communities. 6 Tai Yong Tan and Gyanesh Ku-
daisya’s extensive work on the Partition explains that the overall Hindu-
Muslim divide was “subsumed under the larger panoply of a Bengali
cultural and linguistic identity.” 7 Both Hindu and Muslim Bengalis
shared similar socio-cultural traditions, customs, and “Food habits and
entertainment patterns were also characterized by a high degree of simi-
 Refugees as Homo Sacers 109

larity.” 8 Therefore, dividing Bengal along religious and communal lines

was more problematic than the Punjab division.
Rahman and Schendel further explain that a large number of people
crossed the borders of Bangladesh and dispersed to West Bengal, greater
Assam, Tripura and parts of Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, and Andaman is-
lands. Within this group of refugees, a huge section of the Bengali popu-
lation crossed over into West Bengal, “who never became beneficiaries of
government ‘rehabilitation programmes.’” 9 These people were not from
the bhodrolok 10 class and consisted of the nimnoborno and nimnoborgo 11
classes. 12 After the initial Partition of India in 1947, there was a large-
scale migration of refugees from East Pakistan into West Bengal who
were from Hindu upper and middle classes. Most of these refugees could
buy properties and “already had contacts in Calcutta, through education-
al and kinship links, and could look forward to pursuing professions and
trades in their new surroundings.” 13 Here, I do not wish to downplay the
deracination, displacement, and trauma that people underwent post 1947
and once again in 1971, but I am interested in understanding the term
“refugees” and how the government aided or was remiss in providing re-
settlement programs for displaced people. Particularly, the word “refu-
gee” becomes a catchall, homogenized term that obliterates and delo-
calizes difference. I am especially interested in investigating the predica-
ments of those who never saw aid trickling down to them because of
their class and caste. According to Schendel and Rahman only a small
part of the larger eastern migration has been documented, which also
Partition historiography has erased from cultural memory. 14
This essay focuses on a certain class of refugees who threaten the
“bildung” of the nation through an investigation of Ghosh’s novel The
Hungry Tide. Before delving into Ghosh’s work, it is important to trace a
brief history of the Morichjhapi massacre of 1979 and the reason for refu-
gee migration to the eastern archipelago of Sundarbans. This next section
is significant because it not only charts the political backdrop from the
1947 Partition and the 1971 war of Bangladesh that resulted in more
refugees in West Bengal, but it also shows the spatial significance of
Sundarbans.
Sundarbans, literally, as the Bengali term suggests, means “Beautiful
Forests.” The Sundarbans is a large archipelago and the world’s largest
tidal halophytic mangrove forest situated in a vast stretch between India
and Bangladesh. This space is a unique ecosystem that harbors some of
the world’s most endangered flora and fauna, including the endangered
Royal Bengal Tiger. The islands are constantly affected by high tides and
offer some of the most hostile living spaces in the world. The inhabited
areas of Sundarbans have a predominant Islamic influence from the early
Sufi saints who were believed to have introduced agriculture in the re-
gion around 1200 AD. Through them the region saw a steady spread of
Islam. The Partition affected Sundarbans in an interesting way because
110 Amrita Ghosh

the deltaic islands were divided into three main districts, namely, Twen-
ty-Four Parganas, Jessore, and Bakurgunj. Twenty-Four Parganas forms a
part of the state of West Bengal in India, and Jessore and Bakargunj are in
Bangladesh. Thus, Sundarbans forms this in-between liminal space, very
close to the Indian and Bangladeshi borders.
The Bangladeshi refugees felt that their only natural option was to
resettle in West Bengal, India. 15 As Kudaisya and Tan explain, “Having
faced persecution and intolerance in East Bengal, they believed it was
their legitimate claim to seek rehabilitation within West Bengal, which
they now felt was their natural habitat.” 16 The state accepted refugees
who were from Hindu upper and middle classes for whom finding reha-
bilitation and vocational resources was not difficult. From the 1950s, the
West Bengal government faced a different problem with refugees who
either belonged to the lower urban strata or came from the East Bengal
countryside. This change in the character of the refugees aggravated
the problem of the authorities, not just in terms of the sheer numbers
who now made claims upon the government’s resources, but also in
the resourcefulness which they displayed in rebuilding their own
lives. 17
The government set up a new project titled “Dandakaranya” because
they did not want lower-caste people to become “squatters” in the land. 18
The Dandakaranya site chosen for the refugees were areas in Madhya
Pradesh and Orissa. The main problems for these sites of resettlement
were lack of resources, including drinking water, irrigation, arid rocky
soil, and lack of vegetation that impacted the refugees’ agricultural prac-
tices. Thus, the Dandakaranya refugees were an alienated group whose
humanity was in question for the state.
In 1978, the Leftist government decided to send these refugees to a
small village in the Sundarban islands, named Morichjhapi. The state’s
only condition was that the refugees should not expect any aid for their
settlement in Sundarbans. It is, however, debated as to whether the state
was aware of the Morichjhapi settlements or if there was indeed an invi-
tation to the Dandakaranya refugees to establish settlement in Sundar-
bans. However, Annu Jalais agrees that the Communist Party promised
settlement in the Sundarbans to refugees should they come to power. 19
Despite the disagreement, the expectation was apparent—without state
help these “sub-human” refugees could never survive the dangerous
forestlands of Sundarbans.
In the northern island of Morichjhapi, Sundarbans, the marginalized
refugees gradually constructed a township of their own. 20 Within seven
to eight months, the unviable space was transformed as the refugees
slowly migrated. This remarkable exemplification of survival and coop-
erative spirit by the Dalit refugees surprised the state, which found it
difficult to believe that illiterate, rural people set up such a transforma-
 Refugees as Homo Sacers 111

tion of a tiny island without any government aid. 21 The refugees felt that
the government’s interest in them would mean the state would finally
allow refugees to return to West Bengal or establish permanent settle-
ment in Sundarbans. 22 Ironically, the state thought that the Morichjhapi
story would attract even more refugees from across the Bangladesh bor-
der to come and settle in Morichjhapi. In early 1979 the police started
killing people in Morichjhapi and the state was successful in driving
away the refugees from this island in Sundarbans, in order to protect the
ecosystem and the tiger reserves. The Morichjhapi massacres become my
entry point to explore Ghosh’s novel in its larger focus on state policies
that uphold “saving forests and tigers” more than protecting people.

THE HUNGRY TIDE: IMAGININGS OF A

HETEROTOPIC SUBALTERN SPACE

Ghosh’s novel presents an intertwined twin plot within a fragmented

narrative; part of the plot focuses on an Indian-American cetalogist, Piya
Roy, who visits the Sundarbans from Seattle to research the rare riverine
dolphins found in the rivers of Sundarbans. This narrative is then merged
with the larger Morichjhapi massacre of the late seventies. Morichjhapi
lurks behind in the diary written by Nirmal Bose interweaving with the
present story of Nirmal’s nephew, Kanai Dutt helping Piya’s scientific
research in Sundarbans. The meeting of Kanai and Piya becomes the
culmination of past and present and produces a space to uncover the
story of the subaltern killings, a history that has been silenced for most of
the Bengali elites of old and new generations. 23 It is also significant that
the diary represents Morichjhapi fictionally for the first time in English. 24
Initially, Sundarbans is represented as a space of “radical alterity” for
the elite figures in the novel. With the exception of the subalterns such as
Kusum, Fokir, Horen, and the locals who assist Piya in her research, all
upper-caste characters, including the radical Nirmal, view Sundarbans as
an othered space. This area filled with forests, chors, and riverines
presents itself as a hostile space for the elite imagination. The very first
time Nirmal and Nilima enter Sundarbans they are struck by the unfamil-
iarity of the place—“What little they knew of rural life was derived from
the villages of the plains: the realities of the tide country were of a
strangeness beyond reckoning.” 25 Nilima and Nirmal find Sundarbans as
an alien place with rivers teeming with crocodiles and estuarine sharks
and learn to live with the daily news of death from attacks by tigers,
snakes, and crocodiles. David Theo Goldberg in The Racial State argues
that the homogeneous order of the state constantly attempts to control
the threat of heterogeneity by relegating the latter to the state/space of
nature. 26 Goldberg adopts the Hobbesian notion of “the state of nature”
in which Hobbes explains that the goal of the modern state is to “seek
112 Amrita Ghosh

stability . . . in the face of instabilities.” 27 According to Goldberg, the

“state of nature” is in a war-like state where difference and “otherness”
predominates; whereas the modern state is a settled order where hetero-
geneity is subsumed and controlled. The “modern state is homogenously
fashioned” against all the savagery of nature. 28 In this light, urban char-
acters of the novel misread nature initially as a state of difference and
war.
Elsewhere, when Piya begins her excursions to search for the river
dolphins with Fokir as her guide, she also views the nature and the place
as a space of otherness. As Ghosh narrates,
Staring at it now she was struck by the way the greenery worked to
confound the eye. It was not just a barrier, like a screen or a wall: it
seemed to trick the human gaze in the manner of a cleverly drawn
optical illusion. There was such a profusion of shapes, forms, hues and
textures that even things that were in plain view seemed to disap-
pear. 29
Piya’s encounter with the Sundarban forests is strikingly reminiscent of
Marlowe’s “oppressive wonder” as he views the deep jungles of Congo
in Heart of Darkness. 30 Like Marlowe’s “colossal jungle so green,” and his
description of the “great wall of vegetation,” 31 Piya too initially views
Sundarban as a “heart of darkness” which disorients her “human gaze”
by its sprawling greenery. These instances of otherness are important to
discern a radically othered discourse of nature and elements of Sundar-
bans that serve as an epistemological terrain for the elite upper classes.
For Nirmal, Pia, Nilima, and Kanai, Sundarbans is initially an alien space
evoking awe.
It is also noteworthy to mention the politics in the naming of the chain
of archipelago islands as “Sundarbans.” Nirmal, along with Fokir, refer
to Sundarbans as bhatir desh or the “tide country.” For the local popula-
tion too Sundarbans is bhatir desh. Kusum, as recorded in Nirmal’s diary,
remarks, “we are tide country people” 32 and claims that river and tides run
in their blood which also emphasizes the perfect symbiosis that the subal-
terns have with the space—the space becomes an identification of self for
them. The distinction behind naming the forest “Sundarbans” as opposed
to the subaltern naming of bhatir desh reveals a “worlding of the world”
(to use Gayatri Spivak’s term for explaining epistemological hegemony)
of Sundarbans, an official reminder of conserving beautiful forests and
nature. This kind of “naming” negates the human element against the
locally referred term that denotes “desh”—a land/space inhabited by
people. In fact, this taxonomy also helps the larger cause of putting the
forests on the world map since the reason why Sundarbans is so popular
worldwide is because it is the home of the Royal Bengal Tiger. With that,
it also elaborates on some of the politics of controlling forest spaces as
“reserved” areas. Much of the forested areas of Sundarbans are under
 Refugees as Homo Sacers 113

government control. These are called “reserved” forest areas. “Reserved”

forests are controlled spaces where “wild” life is enjoyed from a distance.
These spaces bear comparison to other controlled visual spaces such as
museums and zoos. Opposed to that is the threat of the “wild” forest in
the hegemonic imaginations. Hence, the naming of this radically “differ-
ent” space as “beautiful forests” affirms the state’s controlling of the
wilderness, a source of potential threat but a means to selling exotica on a
global scale.
In this contest between human survival and conservation of forests
and animals, the Morichjhapi incident embodies how the upper classes
silence any subaltern voice. For instance, the Morichjhapi massacre as
described by Nilima represents the official statement against the refu-
gees. When Nilima broaches the Morichjhapi case to Kanai for the first
time, she explains to her nephew that the refugees had grabbed some of
the forest islands for habitation. Through Nilima we get a glimpse of the
Bengali elite response towards the Morichjhapi incident. For Nilima, a
liberal, educated upper-class woman, the forests are “occupied” by the
refugees, which thrusts a sense of illegality in the narrative. Elsewhere in
the novel, when Kanai urges Nilima to elaborate on what happened in
Morichjhapi, Nilima reiterates the statist discourse that Morichjhapi was
a part of the Sundarbans tiger conservation project. Nirmal’s diary later
reveals that she had refused to provide treatment to the dying refugees
saying, “Those people are squatters; that land doesn’t belong to them. . . . What
will become of the forest, the environment? (Nirmal’s diary). 33 At this point,
Kanai is also representative of the Bengali Bhadralok class as he wonders
why his aunt could not bar him from supporting the refugees. His cold
summation of the Morichjhapi killings is reiterative of the hegemonic
discourse that the land belonged to the government and people died
because of their occupation of the land.
In one of the few studies available on the Morichjhapi massacre, Ross
Mallick explains that the official narrative stood on the grounds that the
Morichjhapi island was under a forest reserve act in Sundarbans 34 and
that “unauthorized occupation of Morichjhapi which is a part of the Sun-
darbans Government Reserve Forest Act” disturbs the “forest wealth and
create[s] ecological imbalance.” 35 Yet, it was a well-known fact that since
1975 the government had cleared away mangrove forests to replant a
government-allowed “program of coconut and tamarisk plantation to in-
crease state revenue.” 36 Thus, the state had already tampered with the
natural habitat and transformed the forests, for the protection of which
they were barring refugees from settling down there.
Significantly, the depiction of Sundarbans in the novel as a space of
extreme otherness charts the ultimate shift in the characters’ visions and
the possibility of newer identities. Ghosh traces the emergence of Sundar-
bans, as a heterotopia that topographically resides at the borders of the
nation and also figuratively becomes a subversive space, a contested
114 Amrita Ghosh

“counter site” in Foucault’s words. 37 In this context, the topography of

the eastern borderland is worthy of attention. Largely, borders presup-
pose land divisions. However, the peculiar feature of the eastern border-
lands is that it is predominantly riverine. Chors and islands pose a specific
problem of demarcation—a heterotopia in a sense, where the boundaries
continuously shift. 38 Such areas can never be stable markers of space and
hence mark the anxiety of the landed, rooted order of the state. Hence,
Sundarbans facilitates the crossing of multiple boundaries in Ghosh’s
text. According to Foucault, heterotopias are “othered” spaces against
normative spaces within the society. Thus, heterotopias are mostly found
at the margins of society. In the case of The Hungry Tide, the setting of the
novel in Sundarbans opens up this heterotopic site that presents devious
possibilities where the boundaries between land and sea, subaltern and
elite, territorial borders and distinctions between human and non-human
are questioned.
Ghosh begins the novel by tracing the uniqueness of Sundarbans as a
liminal space:
it is almost impossible to believe that here, interposed between sea and
the plains of Bengal, lies an immense archipelago of islands. . . . The
river’s channels are spread across the land like a fine-mesh net, creating
a terrain where the boundaries between land and water are always
mutating, always unpredictable. 39
Ghosh’s description highlights the land’s liminality not only in its topo-
graphic location between India and Bangladesh, but as the extract sug-
gests, Sundarbans also forms this unique space where land undergoes
restructuring daily. Borders are erased and reconstructed with everyday
tides and the markers between sea and land, land and water are in a
continuous liminal zone in this land. So close to mainland India, yet
Sundarbans enact a heterotopia where the inhabitants’ hybridized castes
and religions go against the mainland’s strict essentialisms of caste and
religion. Here “it was impossible to tell who was who, and what inhabi-
tant’s castes and religious beliefs were.” 40 In fact, in Sundarbans both
Hindu and Muslim inhabitants merge in a liminality which gives rise to a
subversive third space through the figure of the forest goddess Bon Bibi. 41
In the chapter titled “The Glory of Bon Bibi,” Ghosh traces the history
of the tiger goddess that the Sundarban natives worship to protect them
from the Royal Bengal Tiger. Kanai, the “outsider” from Delhi is sur-
prised to find out from Kusum, one of the female subalterns, that the
genesis of the tiger goddess is not from Ganga. 42 Through the popular
folk theater of Sundarbans, Kanai learns the Islamic genesis of Bon Bibi:
that the scene was set in Medina, Islam’s holiest place. 43 Ghosh empha-
sizes a unique syncretism between Hindus and Muslims who worship a
goddess borne out of an Islamic tradition, and yet, as in the usual Hindu
ritual, the figure of Bon Bibi also allows idol worship. Later in the novel,
 Refugees as Homo Sacers 115

Nirmal watches Horen, a resident of Sundarbans, and Kusum worship

Bon Bibi in the jungle and is struck by the liminality of the ceremony. As
he states, “I’d thought I was going to a Hindu puja. Imagine my astonishment
on hearing Arabic invocations!” 44 Later he also observes that the Bengali
used in the invocation is a confluence in Arabic, Persian, and Bengali
languages that underscores the hybrid ritual. Bon Bibi’s worship posi-
tions Sundarban as a heterotopia where a goddess symbolizing syncre-
tism between both religions defies the normative productions of space.
Ghosh uncovers the subaltern political agency of Dalit refugees
through Nirmal’s diary that dates back to May 15, 1979, the time of the
Morichjhapi massacre. Nirmal’s diary reveals that he had first heard of
“refugees’ boldness” in settling in Morichjhapi from the other teachers of
the Lusibari area in Sundarbans. With the help of one of the locals, Horen
Noskor, Nirmal reaches Morichjhapi and, looking at the island, Nirmal is
shocked to discover an intricate order and an organized township built
on whatever is available to the refugees. It is a striking moment in the
novel that reveals that the so-called lower-class pariahs can produce such
organized living that defies their status as objects. Through Nirmal,
Ghosh retrieves subaltern cooperative agency in the refugees’ construc-
tion of a township in Morichjhapi. Nirmal later admits, “What I saw was
quite different from the picture in my mind’s eye.” 45 For Nirmal who had
always dreamed of a revolution, the sight of a transformed Morichjhapi is
a source of a great excitement. Also particularly noteworthy is Nirmal’s
change in vision which becomes a “true” moment of “watching.” Hans
Jonas in an essay titled “The Nobility of Sight” traces the etymology of
“watching” to the word theoria, meaning to watch or gaze. But he notes
that the watching at the level of sight is distinct from truly “watching” a
scene. He, thus, separates the seeing of the image and how the imagina-
tion handles it later. 46 In this sense, Nirmal’s imagination is transformed
by this “theoretical truth.” 47 This act of watching also records the recon-
struction of his knowledge about these people as creators with agency as
opposed to sub-humans who are burdens to the state.
The text, henceforth, presents the emergence of a Dalit mobilizing,
constructing a vision of a subaltern space. For Nirmal it is a new vision of
watching those without power create something new in the harshest of
spaces. This radical reorientation in the modality of vision also represents
a claim towards the production of a subaltern space by the Dalits. Terri
Tomsky also rightly points out that the use of Nirmal’s diary as a retriev-
er of silenced histories “critique[s] the failures of institutionalized acade-
mia to account for such atrocities” and also urges “ethical action in the
failure of local, metropolitan and international organizations.” 48 Against
the state’s political pressures that issued eviction orders, the Dalit refu-
gees present radical social and political imaginaries. One of the most
poignant moments in the text is the refugees’ resistance against state
attack on Morichjhapi. The Dalit refugees in their collective resistance to
116 Amrita Ghosh

the state eviction chant—“Amra kara? Bastuhara; Morichjhapi charbona!

(Who are we? We are the dispossessed. We will not leave Morichjhapi).” 49 This
Dalit refugee protest against the state is a significant moment of recogni-
tion for both the state and the Dalits. For the latter, it is a culmination of
collective consciousness and their counter resistance to the state indicat-
ing their claim towards this space. It is also a moment that Nirmal recog-
nizes as planting the seeds for a possible “Dalit nation.” Ghosh gives
direct prominence to the gendered subaltern voice through Kusum, who
tells Nirmal of the plight of being reduced to a sub-human or non-human
status by the state in its continued glorification of the forest and tiger
conservation project. Nirmal records her plea in his diary. Although
killed by the state, Kusum’s testimony reveals they are not muted sub-
jects against the sovereign power. Nirmal significantly reminds us that
Kusum is his muse and that he is not just retrieving Kusum’s subaltern
voice through his diary; rather she herself becomes a site of resistance
claiming to be heard.
Ultimately, the statist order is threatened with a “Dalit nation” and it
transforms the powerless refugees into what Giorgio Agamben describes
as the homo sacer. Agamben analyzes the relationship between people and
state power in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life and states that the
figure of homo sacer possesses sub-human status. The refugees of Morichj-
hapi in their resistance against the state to claim a territorially bounded
space and a human status are similar to the figure of homines sacri. The
state strips them of their voice and political agency and reduces them to
the naked bare life that may be killed and thus ousted from the nation-
state. In this sense, it is a reduction of a “human” to a sub-human state.
The production of the homo sacer also reveals the “beastilization of man”
that permits state killing. 50 But Agamben’s concept goes beyond this, in
that the production of homines sacri represents the originary activity of
sovereign power. Thus, “the sovereign is the one with respect to whom
all men are potentially homines sacri, and homo sacer is the one with re-
spect to whom all men act as sovereigns.” 51 The notion of the homo sacer
is not only about the production of killable bodies, but also the reduction
of subjects into forms of sheer nonvalue. That is why homines sacri can be
killed but not sacrificed. Here, it is significant to note that the act of
sacrificing implies value—the sacrificed subject is a valued object. The
homines sacri, on the other hand, are produced by the state as non-values.
Reduction into nonvalue and the production of killable bodies occur si-
multaneously in the case of a homo sacer.
Therefore, the figure of the refugee as the homo sacer “represent[s]
such a disquieting element in the order of the modern nation-state [and]
put[s] the originary fiction of modern sovereignty in crisis.” 52 Kusum’s
testimony as to who these people are who “love animals” more than
human beings highlights the predicament of the refugees who are objec-
tified as the barest form of disposable life that can be killed by the state
 Refugees as Homo Sacers 117

with impunity. Agamben’s analysis is focused on the concentration

camp, as a space which is beyond ordinary law and is in a continuous
state of exception. In his words, “The camp is the space that is opened when
the state of exception begins to become the rule.” Analyzing Morichjhapi in
this light, it becomes akin to a camp that can imprison any refugees to
protect the “security of the state.” 53 Nirmal’s diary highlights this state of
exception in Sundarbans by noting the state’s declaration of Section 144 of
Indian law. By imposing this law, the state barred people for assembling
in Morichjhapi in 1979. The “siege” of Morichjhapi, is hence reminiscent
of a camp-like state where the state usurps all forms of “liberty, freedoms
of expression and of assembly.” 54 Through the figure of the homo sacer,
the state distinguishes between the forms of life it will protect and the
“others” that can be killed in order to maintain national sovereignty.
In an article titled “Out of Place?” John Thieme observes, “Historical-
ly, transient peoples have tended to be perceived as an ontological
threat.” 55 As suggested earlier, in the context of Morichjhapi and the
nimnoborno refugees, it is certainly class and caste but also the fear of
“transient” people who threaten the “sedentarist epistemologies” 56 of a
nation’s social order. The “lower class” refugees shunting around the
nation’s “stable” space from West Bengal to the Dandakaranya camp and
then into Sunderbans threatens the national stability. Even when the
news of the Morichjhapi siege trickles into the urban media through the
young man who escapes to Calcutta, the state refuses to end the siege. 57
Nirmal’s diary also notes that despite a growing public furor and a High
Court ruling that the blocking of the settlers was not legal, the siege and
killings continued in Morichjhapi.
Ultimately, Ghosh’s text shows dynamic possibilities in which mono-
lithic identities reemerge in newer ways. Here, the imaginings of a subal-
tern space also lead to a third space devoid of distinctions between subal-
terns and elites. Kanai who is initially constructed as the “othered” elite,
later realizes the predicament of the refugees. When Piya is horrified with
a tiger’s burning to death orchestrated by the villagers, Kanai for the first
time shows a moment of recognition. As he states:
If there were killings on that scale anywhere else on earth it would be
called a genocide, and yet here it goes on almost unremarked: these
killings are never reported, never written about in the papers. And the
reason is just that these people are too poor to matter. 58
For the first time, Kanai, the modern Bengali elite from Delhi, far re-
moved from understanding the political and social alienation of the peo-
ple of Sundarbans, identifies with them and recognizes their daily at-
tempts to attain “human” status against the state apparatus. He shifts
from his upper-class positionality, where he finds people like Piya and
himself complicit in the valorization of nature and fauna at the cost of
people. He reminds Piya that her concern to protect the unique river
118 Amrita Ghosh

dolphins is coupled with her disregard of people. Interestingly, this sec-

tion of the novel about the Royal Bengal Tiger also reveals that the non-
human, the animal here is laden with a value, an exotic signifier for the
national and Western audience, whereas the refugees are reduced to a
non-value whose “bestiality” becomes a reason for them to be killed. The
exotic wildlife highlight Sundarbans for what value they bring, but the
sovereign power denies life to the subaltern refugees, who are reduced to
the barest form of existence. It may be argued that the tide’s washing
away of Nirmal’s diary is perhaps an indication that the subaltern voice
uncovered through the Morichjhapi incident is silenced forever, that after
all, the “subaltern still cannot speak.” Yet, the diary’s washing away in
the tide is perhaps also fitting because it marks the washing away of
Kanai’s elitism and the emergence of a newer consciousness so that Kanai
himself may “speak” about the silenced Morichjhapi case.
Ghosh’s text presents a scenario where characters cease to attain their
essentialized subjectivities, trapped in their class, caste, and religious ori-
gins. Instead, the liminal space of Sundarbans gives rise to hybrid iden-
tities whose class, caste, language, and religion are uniquely blurred. For
instance, as suggested earlier, Nirmal is surprised by the fusion of lan-
guages in the scriptural book titled “Miracles of Bon Bibi or the Narrative
of Her Glory.” He realizes that the tide country is shaped by various
languages: Bengali, English, Arabic, Hindi, and Arakanese. 59 For Nirmal,
Sundarbans may have once been radically alien space, but his vision is
gradually altered. His initial exclamation that Sunderbans is an empty
space in primordial time shifts to admitting that this wasn’t true. In fact,
Nirmal finds his own identity in question in Morichjhapi when he hears
the refugees chanting in unison declaring they will not leave Morichjha-
pi. Nirmal, the idealist professor, may have harbored secret ideas of a
subaltern revolution, but it is here for the first time that he shares a
moment of shared humanity with the “dispossessed” of Morichjhapi and
questions, “Who was I? Where did I belong? . . . In India or across the
border?” 60 He later joins the refugees to voice the same chant “Morichj-
hapi chharbona” (“we will not leave Morichjhapi”) with them—a mo-
ment that truly signifies that Nirmal has “heard” the subalterns. Most
importantly, it is also a moment when Nirmal ceases to produce a roman-
ticized subaltern subject and becomes one of “them” in defiance of the
state police as the aporia from “they” to “we” is erased. In a shocked
moment of recognition, Nirmal questions, “Who indeed are we,” which
stresses this transformation from “they” to “we.”
Even Piya, the American scientist, ultimately refers to Sundarbans as
her home, and Ghosh also presents a space where Piya and Fokir find an
unspoken bond that is beyond language, class, and caste. It may be true
that Fokir’s death in the end in the tide may be read as a reminder that
the subaltern and the upper-class American woman can never meet; yet,
the ending of the novel with the foregrounding of Moyna (Fokir’s wife)
 Refugees as Homo Sacers 119

and Piya’s friendship, with the establishment of a Fokir Memorial Trust

to include locals in scientific research, reflects Piya’s identification with
the subalterns and her urge to find a “home” in the tide country.
One may contend that in analyzing Sundarbans as a heterotopic “sub-
altern space” I fall into the similar trap of essentializing the subaltern.
Yet, my focus has been two-fold in this argument—first, I explore the
liminal space of Sundarbans as a heterotopia that enables a subaltern
space where the refugees demonstrate their political agency. Second, this
deviant heterotopia also opens up a crucial third space which has the
very potential to erase the “subaltern,” by emerging a blurring of iden-
tities to negate any notion of class, caste, religion, and origins. As Spivak
reminds us, it is important not to “keep the subaltern in the space of
difference” by “museumizing subalternity.” 61 That is precisely what
Ghosh’s text produces— a possibility of a dynamic space against the
national status-quo of contested spaces. The Hungry Tide allows for re-
writing the national imaginary in the post-Partition historiography by
retrieving a silenced subaltern history of displaced people.

NOTES

1. Willem Van Schendel and Md. Mahbubar Rahman, “‘I Am Not a Refugee’:
Rethinking Partition Migration,” Modern Asian Studies, 37, 3 (2003): 555.
2. Shelley Feldman, “The Silence of East Bengal in the Story of Partition,” Interven-
tions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 1, 2. (1999): 168.
3. Rahman and Schendel observe that there is no entry on refugees in the three-
volume History of Bangladesh published in Dhaka, Bangladesh, or The Journey to Paki-
stan published in Pakistan. For details on the “refugee problematique,” see Md. Mah-
bubar Rahman and Willem Van Schendel, “‘I Am Not a Refugee’: Rethinking Partition
Migration” Modern Asian Studies, 37, 3 (2003): 551–84.
4. Ibid., 555.
5. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Hell-
er-Roazen (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press 1995), 79.
6. Gyanesh Kudaisya and Yong Tai Tan, The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia
(London: Routledge 2000), 141.
7. Ibid.,141
8. Ibid., 143
9. Ibid., 556–57.
10. The Bengali term bhodrolok in literal translation means “proper men.” The word
connotes a specific class of people, generally forming the elite bourgeoisie upper and
middle classes of West Bengal.
11. The word nimnoborno means lower sect and Dalit people. In pre-Independence
and postcolonial India, these people suffered the worst discrimination and hardship
and are perhaps the most marginalized group in the subcontinent.
12. I am indebted to my grandfather, Ranjit K. Roychoudhary, who explained to me
the history of Bengali refugees and their class affiliations in post-independent India.
According to him, not all displaced people were “refugees,”—a term that particularly
meant dispossessed and marginalized people post-Partition. After a forced migration
from East Bengal after the Partition (Jessore district in Bangladesh), he found new
settlement and a home in West Bengal (Calcutta) but did not find any discrimination
or problems like that those of the nimnoborno people.
120 Amrita Ghosh

13. Gyanesh Kudaisya and Yong Tai Tan, The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia
(London: Routledge 2000), 147.
14. Md. Mahbubar Rahman and Willem Van Schendel, “‘I Am Not a Refugee’:
Rethinking Partition Migration,” Modern Asian Studies, 37, 3 (2003): 576.
15. Gyanesh Kudaisya and Yong Tai Tan, The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia
(London: Routledge 2000), 146.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid., 147.
18. “Squatters” and land-grabbers were the terms used by the state to describe
refugees who settled in vast unused lands in and around Calcutta. The squatters were
also from the Namashudra group, a backward class and lower caste that later formed
the “Untouchables.” Kudaisya and Tan trace the state’s crisis and lack of concern for
these people because of their caste. The West Bengal elites and the government felt
these people were a huge burden on the state’s resources and capital and would
become obstacles for the future of the postcolonial nation. (The Aftermath of Partition in
South Asia, 150).
19. Annu Jalais, Forest of Tigers: People, Politics and Environment in the Sundarbans
(New Delhi: Routledge 2010), 165.
20. Morichjhapi is an island on the southern edge of Sundarbans.
21. Humanity Attacked: Morichjhapi Genocide, Documentary, Dir. Tushar Bhattachar-
ya. Rights Alert India Production, 2009.
22. Annu Jalais, Forest of Tigers: People, Politics and Environment in the Sundarbans
(New Delhi: Routledge 2010), 167.
23. Several interviews of people in West Bengal that I had conducted, reveal that
very few people know what Morichjhapi refers to. Mostly, Morichjhapi triggers no
meaning and the event has been erased from cultural memory.
24. There is only one other Bengali novel Purbo-Paschim (in translation East-West) by
Bengali writer Sunil Ganguly, which has a chapter representing the Morichjhapi inci-
dent. Fictionally, there are no other depictions of this incident anywhere and academi-
cally too, there are only a handful of works on the Morichjhapi massacres.
25. Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006),
66.
26. David Theo Goldberg, The Racial Slate (Malden: Blackwell Publishers 2002), 274.
27. Ibid., 39
28. Ibid., 274
29. Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006),
125.
30. Joseph Conrad, The Heart of Darkness (New York: W. W. Norton and Company
1988), 17.
31. Ibid., 16, 32.
32. Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006),
137.
33. Ibid., 177
34. Ross Mallick, “Refugee Resettlement in Forest Reserves: West Bengal Policy
Reversal and the Marichjhapi Massacre,” The Journal of Asian Studies, 58, 1 (1999):
104–25.
35. Mallick quoted in Annu Jalais, Forest of Tigers: People, Politics and Environment in
the Sundarbans (New Delhi: Routledge 2010), 167.
36. Ibid.
37. Michel Foucault explains the heterotopia as deviant spaces where subjects’ “be-
havior is deviant in relation to the required mean or norm are placed.” “Of Other
Spaces, Heterotopias,” The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (New York:
Routledge, 2002), 229–36.
38. The word chor in Bengali means a tiny island which is affected by the ebb and
flow of tides and is often submerged by water and at other times, land is visible. Such
 Refugees as Homo Sacers 121

chors make it highly problematic to ascertain the presence of state and national borders
in the Sundarban region.
39. Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide (New York:Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006),
6.
40. Ibid., 66.
41. Bon Bibi in translation literally means “Lady of the Forest.”
42. In Hindu mythology, it is believed that Ganga (the river that borders Sunder-
bans) is the genesis of many gods and goddesses.
43. Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006),
85.
44. Ibid., 204.
45. Ibid., 141
46. Hans Jonas, “The Nobility of Sight,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 14,
4 (1954): 507.
47. Ibid., 515.
48. Terri Tomsky, “Amitav Ghosh’s Anxious Witnessing and the Ethics of Action in
The Hungry Tide,” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 44, 1 (2009): 58.
49. Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006),
211. Translation of Bengali text is mine.
50. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Hell-
er-Roazen (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1995), 3.
51. Ibid., 84.
52. Ibid., 131.
53. Ibid., 166–67.
54. Ibid., 168.
55. John Thieme, “‘Out of Place’: The Poetics of Space in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hun-
gry Tide and Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghosh,” Commonwealth, 31, 2 (2009): 35.
56. Ibid., 35.
57. Amitav Ghosh, The Hungry Tide (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006),
215.
58. Ibid., 248.
59. Ibid., 205.
60. Ibid., 211.
61. Leon De Kock, “Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: New Nation Writ-
ers Conference in South Africa,” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, 23,
3 (1992): 46.

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Humanity Attacked: Morichjhapi Genocide. Documentary. Dir. Tushar Bhattacharya.
Rights Alert India Production, 2009.
Jalais, Annu. Forest of Tigers: People, Politics and Environment in the Sundarbans. New
Delhi: Routledge, 2010.
122 Amrita Ghosh

Jonas, Hans. “The Nobility of Sight.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 14, 4
(1954): 507–19.
Mallick, Ross. “Refugee Resettlement in Forest Reserves: West Bengal Policy Reversal
and the Marichjhapi Massacre.” The Journal of Asian Studies, 58, 1 (1999): 104–25.
Rahman, Mahbubar and Willem van Schendel. “‘I am Not a Refugee’: Rethinking
Partition Migration.” Modern Asian Studies, 37, 3 (2003): 551–84.
Tan, Yong Tai and Ganesh Kudaisya. The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia. London:
Routledge, 2000.
Thieme, John. “Out of Place? The Poetics of Space in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide
and Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost.” Commonwealth, 31, 2 (2009): 32–43.
Tomsky, Terri. “Amitav Ghosh’s Anxious Witnessing and the Ethics of Action in The
Hungry Tide.” The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, 44, 1 (2009): 53–65.
 Part III

Borders and Borderlands

 EIGHT
Property, Violence, and Displacement
Partition in Sindh

Nandita Bhavnani

This chapter seeks to dwell on three aspects of Partition that are yet to
receive the full extent of scholarly attention that they deserve: Sindh’s
experience of Partition; the relatively low level of violence in Sindh at a
time when several parts of the northern subcontinent were immersed in
brutal violence; and the role of landed property as a major motive for
subsequent communal violence against minorities, with the intention of
displacing them.

THE RELATIVE ABSENCE OF PARTITION VIOLENCE BETWEEN

SINDHI HINDUS AND SINDHI MUSLIMS

Since 1997, with the burgeoning of Partition studies, and parallel interests
in popular culture and media, the Partition of India has become synony-
mous with obscene levels of violence which left at least fifteen million
people displaced and one million killed during the upheaval of 1946–48.
Yet Sindh remained relatively peaceful till some months after Partition.
The announcement of Partition on 3 June 1947 engendered a climate of
anxiety, suspicion, fear, and panic among Sindhi Hindus, a minority of
approximately 27 percent who feared communal violence and discrimi-
nation in the new state of Pakistan. Yet, until December 1947, there was
only one major outbreak of violence in Sindh. In early September 1947,
Sikhs migrating to India were attacked and killed on a train outside the
central Sindh town of Nawabshah; between fifteen and twenty Sikhs

125
126 Nandita Bhavnani

were killed and about seventeen were injured. Apart from this incident,
there were only a few stray cases of looting and murder, motivated by
theft as well as by communal passions.
Although this essay deals with physical violence, it is, nevertheless,
important to keep in mind that violence need not always be physical.
Intimidation, coercion, and communal discrimination are also traumatiz-
ing forms of violence. As Meghna Guhathakurta observes:
Violence is not always to be measured by outward acts of murder,
looting or abduction. . . . Violence typifies a state where a sense of fear
is generated and perpetrated in such a way as to make it systemic,
pervasive, and inevitable. . . . In the many communal riots which both
preceded and followed the Partition, it was the fear of being perse-
cuted, dispossessed, not belonging, rather than actual incidents of vio-
lence, that caused many to flee. . . . Fear is less derived from actual acts
of violence than it is from perceptions of violence. 1
Similarly, in Sindh, there were a growing number of instances of com-
munal discrimination and intimidation in the months shortly before and
after August 1947, especially in the hinterland. There were instances
where Hindu agricultural lands were forcibly taken over by Sindhi Mus-
lims. In some of these cases, the Hindu owners had already migrated to
India, in other cases they were still living there. There were other in-
stances where Hindu landowners found that their Muslim sharecroppers
refused to hand over their share of crops to them. Cows were stolen
while Hindu shops and homes were burgled. In some cities in Sindh,
muhajirs, Muslim refugees from India, forcibly occupied Hindu homes
and shops, evicting the owners.
While Sindh did experience a heightened degree of communal tension
during the months immediately before and after Partition, it witnessed
remarkably little communal violence as compared to the rest of northern
India. This absence of large-scale communal violence—between Sindhi
Hindus and Sindhi Muslims—was extraordinary, considering the com-
munal hostility that had engulfed the subcontinent at the time; it was
unusual enough for politicians and community leaders of that era to pay
accolades to it from time to time.
At a popular level, Sindhis on both sides of the border today attribute
this absence of violence to the “inherently peaceable Sufi-flavoured cul-
ture” of pre-Partition Sindh. Yet, while Sindh possessed a strong culture
of religious tolerance, it also possessed a history of communal friction
and even communal violence. This chapter seeks to explore possible rea-
sons for the relative absence of Partition violence in Sindh, by delving
briefly into the history of communal relations in the region, against the
backdrop of the socio-economic and political framework of pre-Partition
Sindhi society.
 Property, Violence, and Displacement 127

Pre-Partition Sindhi Society

Before the British conquest of Sindh in 1843, Sindhi society had a
relatively clear structure and hierarchy. The rural-urban divide and the
class divide seem to have more or less coincided with the communal
divide. The Baluch chieftains occupied the higher rungs of the social
pyramid, with the Baluchi Talpur rulers at the very top. Predominantly
an urban community, the Hindus were generally middle-class traders
and moneylenders, with a sub-minority of Amils, who were administra-
tors and accountants to the Talpurs. A smaller number of Hindus catered
to the commercial needs of the Sindhi hinterland where they supplied
provisions and lent money to both landowners or waderos, and peasants
or haaris. The bulk of the population, the haaris were, however, severely
dominated by both Muslim landowners and Hindu moneylenders and
government officials.
Sufism in Sindh had, over the centuries, evolved from the intermin-
gling of gentler, more tolerant versions of Hinduism, Sikhism, and Islam.
This engendered a deep belief in the oneness of God—wahdat al-wujud or
advaita—which was the basis for the worship of this one God in multiple
forms, whether guru, pir, or deity. It was in this climate of religious
tolerance that Hindus could be followers of Sufi pirs or Sikh gurus, and
Muslims could visit Hindu shrines. This environment also encouraged
much cultural borrowing between Hindus and Muslims, and, through its
core belief in humanism, fostered communal harmony.
Thus we can see that in pre-colonial Sindh, Hindus, and Muslims
shared an ambivalent and checkered relationship. On the one hand, there
was a hierarchy of domination between the ruling Muslims, the Hindu
middle class, and the Muslim peasantry, marked by distrust and exploi-
tation. On the other hand, there was a political and commercial symbiosis
between the two communities, against a backdrop of a high degree of
religious heterodoxy and cultural sharing.

Impact of Colonial Rule

Colonial rule had a tremendous impact on Sindh, in terms of altering
the power equation between Hindus and Muslims. Earlier, under the
Talpurs, Hindus were generally not permitted to own land, but now
under the British, they could do so. Moreover, the misguided revenue
policy of the British impoverished many Muslim landowners. This, com-
bined with the extravagant lifestyles of many of these landowners, and
the exorbitant rates of interest charged by Hindu moneylenders, resulted
in a significant quantum of land being transferred from Muslims to Hin-
dus over the decades. By the turn of the century—after just fifty years of
British rule—Hindus owned, or controlled through mortgage, more than
128 Nandita Bhavnani

42 percent of the arable land in Sindh. 2 Considering that Hindus were not
even a quarter of the population, this was a significant development.
British rule proved beneficial to the Hindus in other ways as well.
Merchants from Hyderabad set up a flourishing trade network, im-
printed on the far-flung outposts of the British Empire and its trading
partners, from Japan to Panama. The merchants of Shikarpur, who had
earlier had a significant presence in the Central Asian economy, now
shifted their attentions to other cities in British India, such as Mumbai
and Chennai. Former Hindu bureaucrats in the Talpur government now
learned English, and adopted western schooling and western clothes.
With the majority of schools, teachers, and students being Hindu, this
community dominated education in Sindh. This further gave them a dis-
proportionately large share in the bureaucracy and courts of justice by
the turn of the century. By 1917, Hindus occupied between 56 percent to
77 percent of senior government posts, while Muslims occupied only
between 8 percent to 22 percent, despite the fact that they were a majority
in Sindh. 3 Given their dominance in trade, education, and the bureaucra-
cy, not to mention the increase in their land ownership, the Hindus’ star
was clearly on the ascendant during the colonial era.
On the other hand, Muslims in Sindh, as elsewhere in the subconti-
nent, were not as quick to take to western education. Moreover, many
among the Muslim elite, coming from a landowning background, did not
attach much importance to education, while most of the peasantry could
not afford it. Moreover, the Muslim education system of maktabs or
schools, and madrasas or colleges, had withered in the absence of royal
patronage. Although the Sind Madrasatul Islam (a premier school for the
sons of the Sindhi Muslim elite, modeled on the lines of what is now
Aligarh Muslim University) was set up in Karachi in 1885, the Muslims’
weak presence in education effectively meant a similarly weak presence
in the colonial government, an important source of power.
Although the British still patronized the large landowners among the
Sindhi Muslim elite, the latter perceived themselves as having lost pres-
tige, with the cessation of Muslim rule and the loss of their land to Hindu
moneylenders. Moreover, in 1847, Sindh had been made part of the Bom-
bay Presidency, which meant that now Sindhi Muslims were a religious
minority. This shift in power dynamics—with the once-restrained Hin-
dus now exercising considerable power, and Muslims, who had ruled the
province for centuries, now in a minority and on the backfoot—had a
major impact on communal relations in Sindh. Sindhi Hindus began to
openly express their disdain for Sindhi Muslims, whom they looked
down upon as illiterate and uncultured. On the other hand, Sindhi Mus-
lim resentment of the Hindus grew: resentment for their taking over
lands from Muslim landowners; for charging exorbitant rates of interest
as moneylenders; for their domination of schools, courts, and govern-
ment offices; and for their open snobbery.
 Property, Violence, and Displacement 129

Under Muslim rule, when Hindus were subjected to any act of op-
pression, their protest remained limited to closing their shops or com-
plaining to the rulers. Now under British rule, with friction growing
between the two communities, Sindh began to witness communal vio-
lence for the first time. Although communal riots were infrequent, they
occurred across the province, from 1872 onwards, 4 triggered typically by
conversions, the playing of music in temples, and Muharram processions.
Further, voluntary conversions to Islam by Hindus only added to these
communal tensions, especially on the part of the Hindus.

The Separation of Sindh

These tensions were only heightened from the 1920s onwards, by the
demise of the Khilafat movement, the introduction of separate electo-
rates, and the communalization of politics across the subcontinent. Given
this backdrop, as well as the distance of Sindh from the rest of Bombay
Presidency and the differences between the two regions, Sindhi Muslims
began to campaign for autonomy and the separation of Sindh from Bom-
bay Presidency. Although a section of Sindhi Hindus had initially sup-
ported this movement, they soon realized that separation would render
them a religious minority once again and therefore opposed it tooth and
nail. This controversy greatly exacerbated Hindu-Muslim tensions in
Sindh.
Once Sindh achieved autonomy in 1937, the Sindhi Muslim political
elite, earlier united by the campaign for separation, now witnessed a high
degree of factionalization and in-fighting, in their race for local power.
Around this time, the Muslim League was seeking to rebuild itself across
India, after its poor performance in the 1937 elections. Seeking a means to
garner support for itself in Sindh, the Muslim League zeroed in on the
Masjid Manzilgah. This was a pair of ancient buildings in Sukkur, fallen
into disuse, and in government possession. The local Muslims sought
possession of them, claiming that one of the buildings was an ancient
mosque. However, the local Hindus vehemently opposed this, since the
Manzilgah buildings stood directly opposite the Hindu temple-island of
Sadhbelo, and the Hindus feared that the Muslims’ use of the Manzilgah
mosque would interfere with their access to Sadhbelo. The Sindh Muslim
League’s campaign for the restoration of Manzilgah to the Muslims of
Sukkur escalated into a communal controversy, polarizing Sindh. Efforts
by the Muslim League to forcibly occupy Manzilgahin in October 1939
led not only to lathi charges by the police, but also to severe riots between
Hindus and Muslims in Sukkur and its environs in mid-November 1939.
This was the most significant communal riot that Sindh had witnessed
in living memory. One hundred and fifty-one Hindus and fourteen Mus-
lims were killed, while most of the property that was destroyed belonged
to Hindus. The severity of this conflagration also left widespread regret
130 Nandita Bhavnani

in its wake, on the part of several Hindu and Muslim hardliners, who
now acknowledged their folly in stirring up communal passions.
Yet, the Manzilgah affair served its original purpose exceedingly well,
in terms of firmly establishing the Muslim League in Sindh in the early
1940s. 5 This was augmented by G. M. Syed’s 6 efforts to increase the num-
ber of Muslim League branches across Sindhs, and to boost enrollment.
In the provincial elections of December 1946, the Muslim League
achieved a landslide victory, winning 82.1 percent of the Sindhi Muslim
rural vote and 98.8 percent of the Sindhi Muslim urban vote. 7
On the other hand, the Sindhi Hindu political stance had also hard-
ened in the 1940s. The controversy over the separation of Sindh, the
instability of provincial politics after attaining autonomy, and the Man-
zilgah riots had all served to raise communal temperatures. Hindu inse-
curity was further augmented by the violence perpetrated by the Hurs in
the 1930s and 1940s, and the resulting martial law rule in Sindh in
1942–43. Thus Sindh became fertile ground for the proselytizing activities
of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), which began making serious
inroads into Sindh during this period, setting up shakhas and wooing
recruits. Thus we can see that in the 1940s, against the backdrop of the
All-India Muslim League’s campaign for Pakistan, the hardened stance of
the RSS under M. S. Golwalkar, and the rise in communal friction across
India during this period, Sindh’s religious communities also became in-
creasingly polarized in the run-up to Partition.

Sindh in 1947
In order to understand the relative absence of communal violence
between Sindhi Hindus and Sindhi Muslims at the time of Partition, it
would be worthwhile to look at the main players on the Sindhi political
stage at this time.

Sindhi Muslims
In 1947, Sindhi Muslims very much looked forward to the Muslim-
majority state of Pakistan and the return of Muslim rule to Sindh. Fur-
thermore, the advent of Pakistan also implied an increased significance
for Sindh, as it would be an important constituent of West Pakistan,
especially with Karachi—Jinnah’s birthplace—as the first capital of the
new country.
With the return of Muslim rule, Sindhi Muslims anticipated that they
would be free from the exorbitant interest rates of Hindu moneylenders
and the arrogance of Hindu bureaucrats. For example, Nuruddin Sarki,
the Sindhi writer and advocate, recalls that:
We used to read, in newspapers and magazines, that the English had
enslaved us, that we should become free, that Islam is the proper
 Property, Violence, and Displacement 131

[path], that there is equality and justice in Islam. . . . . We thought that

[Pakistan] would benefit us Muslims if we attained freedom. I also
remember that, at this point, in our minds, the stereotypical Hindu was
not the average man on the street, but a capitalist. You see, in Sindh,
especially in the cities, the merchants and other traders were Hindu. In
Shikarpur’s Dhak Bazaar, there were about 200–300 shopkeepers, but
there were barely two or three Muslim shops. In Sindh, this led to class
conflicts, to class disparity. The difference between the rich and the
poor was obvious to us, the distinction between rich Hindu merchants
and poor Muslim peasants from the lower classes. Therefore, we be-
lieved, if we secured freedom, Muslims would attain equality and hap-
piness. 8
It was expected that Muslims, and not Hindus, would dominate educa-
tion, the bureaucracy and trade. Indeed, legislative measures to address
these spheres had already begun to be enacted in the early months of
1947.
Initially, it was not widely expected, among both Hindus and Mus-
lims, that Sindhi Hindus would migrate to India. Hindus had lived as a
minority in Sindh under Muslim rule for centuries. Some Sindhi Mus-
lims, though, did expect Hindus to migrate en masse and further expected
to inherit their substantial landed properties. Other Sindhi Muslims not
only did not expect Hindus to migrate, but instead looked forward to a
reversal of roles and their future domination of the Hindus. For example,
Mohammed Ayub Khuhro, future Premier of Sindh, had allegedly said in
a speech in his 1946 election campaign: “I am looking forward to the day
when the Hindus of Sind will be so impoverished or economically weak-
ened that their women, even like poor Muslim women now, will be con-
strained to carry on their heads the midday food to their husbands,
brothers and sons toiling in the fields and market places.” 9
Moreover, the entire province was to become part of Pakistan. Sindh
was not partitioned like Punjab and Bengal, and therefore there were no
disputes at the local level over which country a particular village or area
should go to. Indeed, many Sindhi Hindus recall protection given to
them by Sindhi Muslim friends and neighbors, who were saddened to see
them depart subsequently.

Sindhi Muslim Working Class

Given the tremendous feudal power wielded by the Sindhi Muslim
elite, and the miniscule size of the Muslim middle class—comprising
mostly urban Memon and Khoja businessmen—it is not surprising that
there was an absence of grassroots social reform movements or legisla-
tion—much less any agricultural revolt—in pre-1947 Sindh. The British,
too, were reluctant to disturb a power structure which suited their re-
gime. In 1901,the Deccan Agriculturists Relief Act had been extended to
Sindh which exempted haaris from prosecution if they failed to pay their
132 Nandita Bhavnani

agricultural loans, but this hardly addressed the fundamental evils of the
system. 10
The feudal system, therefore, just about provided the haaris with sub-
sistence, and this, combined with their vicious cycle of debts made them
little more than servants of the local wadero, who could oust them for
any trifling reason. Most haaris and often the local small landholders and
artisans, too, lived in a combination of dread and awe of both the wadero
and the local Hindus, either the local moneylender to whom they were
likely indebted, or the bureaucrats in the local administration, who also
wielded considerable power. As a senior government officer noted: “Fear
reigns supreme in the life of the haari.” 11 Too repressed and entrenched in
the status quo, the bulk of the Sindhi Muslims were yet to expect any
rights for themselves, either from the Sindhi Muslim elite or from Sindhi
Hindus. It is possible that this climate of fear and awe prevented the
initiation of outright physical violence against Hindus on the part of
haaris, although there were some instances of non-cooperation and ha-
rassment on their part towards Hindus.

Sindh Government
In 1947, the newly formed Muslim League government in Sindh won
by a thumping majority and had no need of support from the Hindu
members of the Sindh Legislative Assembly. Moreover, the lessons of
Manzilgah were still fresh in public memory. It is quite likely that, due to
these factors, there was also no motivation on the part of the Sindhi
Muslim elite to instigate communal violence as before.
On the contrary, acutely aware of the communal conflagration raging
across the northern subcontinent, the Sindh Government was determined
to maintain peace in the province at all costs. In this regard, the example
of Delhi served as a stark warning. Severe anti-Muslim violence had
broken out in Delhi in early September 1947, in which Hindu and Sikh
refugees, newly arrived from West Punjab and the North West Frontier
Province 12 played a significant role. This brutal violence against minor-
ities in the capital of a supposedly secular India reflected badly on the
Congress government. In the light of this violence in Delhi, both Jinnah,
now Governor-General of Pakistan, and Khuhro, now Premier of Sindh,
were determined that similar violence should not break out in Karachi,
then the capital of Pakistan, and sully its name.
Ghulam Hussein Hidayatullah, the then Governor of the province,
Khuhro, and other senior leaders toured the province on several occa-
sions addressing peace conferences and requesting the public to stay
calm and refrain from violence. Khuhro’s government was quick to im-
pose curfew when there was any hint of communal trouble. It also
banned the carrying of weapons by the public and the collection of stones
and acids, and doubled the strength of armed escorts on trains. The Sindh
 Property, Violence, and Displacement 133

Public Safety Ordinance, meant to control communal trouble, was prom-

ulgated on 21 September 1947 and enforced on 4 October. The Sindh
government was also extremely strict with Muhajirs on the issue of their
forcible occupation of Hindu houses. Muhajirs caught in the act of for-
cible occupation were stopped, sometimes arrested, and even flogged.
The Sindh Government’s firm actions played a significant role in deter-
ring and preventing violence.

Sindhi Hindus
Partition-related violence or instances of aggression directed against
Hindus, both in Sindh and in other parts of the subcontinent, the forcible
occupation of Hindu property by incoming Muhajirs, and various meas-
ures taken by the Sindh government perceived to be anti-Hindu: all these
served to foment considerable fear and resentment among a section of
Sindhi Hindus who were appalled to find their sense of socioeconomic
superiority undermined by the Muslims’ unquestioned dominance in Pa-
kistan. This only contributed to a hardening of these Hindus’ communal
stance.
As mentioned earlier, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) had
begun making inroads into the Hindu community in Sindh in the 1940s.
On the eve of Partition, it had adopted a more militant stance, setting up
local militias, staffed by young men indoctrinated into their hardline
ideology, ostensibly under the rubric of self-defense. 13 Some members of
the RSS had been making bombs in a house belonging to a wealthy Sind-
hi Hindu, Raibahadur Totaram Hingorani, in Shikarpur Colony in Kara-
chi. (Hingorani had himself migrated to India with his family and left his
house in the safekeeping of his neighbor.) On 9 September 1947, a bomb
exploded near Karachi’s Lea Market, in which five Muslims were injured,
but there was no loss of life. On the following day, while some RSS
workers were in the process of making bombs at the Hingorani home, a
bomb exploded, killing two of the workers. The Sindh government im-
mediately cracked down on the RSS, arresting several of its workers and
banning the organization. It later came to light that the RSS was engaged
in espionage and bomb-making and also hoarded arms and ammunition
at secret locations.
Thus we can see that the Sindhi Muslim elite felt secure in their ex-
pected dominance of Sindh. Further, the bulk of the Sindhi peasantry was
too repressed to resort to violence against the Hindus, who had dominat-
ed several important spheres of power in the province and who were
therefore perceived as socially powerful. Despite some instances of intim-
idation and harassment of Hindus, there was no major outbreak of vio-
lence perpetrated by Sindhi Muslims against Sindhi Hindus. Yet, ironi-
cally, it was among a right-wing section of the Sindhi Hindus—a minor-
ity that was progressively growing proportionately smaller and less pow-
134 Nandita Bhavnani

erful with the influx of large numbers of Muhajirs into Sindh—that re-
sentment and communal animosity metamorphosed into violence which
was, however, nipped in the bud.

PROPERTY AS A MOTIVE FOR PARTITION VIOLENCE

However, there was still one more player on the stage of Sindh in 1947.
Large numbers of muhajirs had started coming to Sindh, and especially to
Karachi, as early as the winter of 1946–47. These first refugees had mostly
come from Bihar, after the communal violence that erupted in Bengal and
Bihar after Direct Action Day in 1946. In July 1947, the Sindh government
expected about 23,000 muhajirs to come to Sindh. Yet, by mid-September
1947, about 500 muhajirs were entering Karachi alone every day. By the
end of the year, there were already 300,000 muhajirs in Karachi, while
other muhajirs had been sent to other cities and towns in Sindh.
The Sindh government, which had initially given a warm welcome to
muhajirs, now found itself overwhelmed by a host of challenges. On the
one hand, Sindh’s economy had been hard hit by the migration of the
Hindu business community. Although most Sindhi Hindus migrated
from Pakistan only in 1948, a significant number of the Hindu elite had
begun to migrate in 1947 itself, taking their capital with them. Hindu
government officials had also begun to migrate, and government offices,
courts, and banks found their operations severely curtailed. Coupled
with these developments was the tremendous expense that the Sindh
government now had to shoulder, that is of building a new capital from
scratch, and also resettling lakhs of muhajirs. Like other provincial
governments across South Asia, the Sindh government found that it too
could not adequately cope with the resettlement of Partition refugees.
Numerous muhajirs had experienced violence perpetrated by Hindus
and Sikhs in India. Not only had they been uprooted or left their homes,
but they had also undergone difficult and dangerous journeys to come to
Pakistan. Many muhajirs had imagined Pakistan as an idealized country
where Muslims would automatically receive housing, jobs, and respect.
Instead these muhajirs found themselves in overcrowded refugee camps,
with appalling living conditions. They experienced a high degree of sus-
piciousness from local Hindus, in addition to waning sympathy and in-
creasing strictness on the part of the Sindh government, not to mention
growing instances of conflict with Sindhi Muslims.
Moreover, the cities that they were first sent to—Karachi and Hydera-
bad—were cities dominated by Sindhi Hindus. Often, in muhajir percep-
tion, Hindus had no reckoning in Pakistan, the proclaimed homeland for
the Muslims of South Asia; they were also seen as fifth-columnists, with
greater loyalty to India. To quote Vazira Zamindar, “By questioning their
degree of belonging and rendering [the Hindus] suspicious, an equation
 Property, Violence, and Displacement 135

emerged in muhajir opinion whereby Hindus were believed to be leaving

(sooner or later) and so their houses were there for the taking.” 14

Partition Violence
Muhajirs not only belonged to different ethnicities but also came from
varied backgrounds and classes. While some muhajirs were government
employees, and therefore entitled to government accommodation, others
were upper class or middle class and could afford to buy or rent a house.
However there were large numbers of destitute muhajirs who did not
have these means or facilities and were dependent on refugee camps and
the largesse of the Sindh government. The Sindh government on the
other hand was not only making various attempts to curtail Hindu mi-
gration (in an attempt to prop up Sindh’s economy) but was also simulta-
neously being strict with destitute muhajirs over the issue of forcible occu-
pation of Hindu property. Increasingly, a section of destitute muhajirs
began to realize that if the Hindus migrated en masse to India, their prob-
lems of finding accommodation in Pakistan would be solved.
This section of muhajirs looked down on Sindhi Muslims for not being
aggressive enough with Sindhi Hindus. They felt that, given the relative-
ly peaceful relationship between Hindus and Muslims in Sindh, Sindhi
Hindus would not migrate unless they were terrorized into doing so.
Sobho Gianchandani, the veteran communist leader, tells us that he had
heard that some hardliner muhajirs in the Mauledina Musafirkhana in
Karachi had decided to “create a disturbance so that the Hindus would
emigrate and leave their houses behind. Because they thought that the
‘shameless Sindhi Muslims’ were not ready to slaughter the Hindus!” 15
There was an outbreak of anti-Hindu violence in Hyderabad in mid-
December 1947, partly incited by news of anti-Muslim violence in Ajmer.
This was followed by a more significant pogrom in Karachi in early Janu-
ary 1948. It is widely acknowledged that these bouts of violence were
perpetrated mostly by destitute muhajirs, in the hope of terrorizing Sindhi
Hindus into emigrating, thus leaving their properties behind. It was these
pogroms that created a high degree of panic and fear among Hindus
across Sindh, triggering an exodus. It was estimated that between twelve
to fourteen lakhs of Hindus left Sindh by 1949, and a scant 1,50,000 chose
to stay behind.

Property
Landed property played an extremely significant role in the unfolding
of events during Partition. This happened in three ways. First, in many
parts of the subcontinent—Sindh, Punjab, Bengal, UP, to name a few
examples—local communities were jealous of wealthy minorities, who
owned large tracts of land, and in many cases, this gave rise to violence
136 Nandita Bhavnani

against these minorities. 16 In many cases, minority-community zamin-

dars were harassed by the locals into migrating, as also happened in
Sindh. Some were absentee landlords; others, subjected to intimidation
from Sindhi Muslim landowners and haaris, migrated from the hinter-
land to cities in Sindh; still others migrated to India. In the opinion of
Shail Mayaram, the brutal anti-Meo violence in the princely states of
Alwar and Bharatpur was driven—at least partly—by greed for Meo
property. She observes that, for the Hindu Jats who dominated these
states, “violence held the promise of swift possession of land.” 17
Second, property was also the prime motivation behind the commu-
nal violence started by refugees who had crossed from one dominion to
another and wanted accommodation for themselves. Refugees across the
subcontinent forcibly occupied houses belonging to the local minority
community, in their desperation for housing.
The brutal anti-Muslim violence in Delhi in early September 1947 was
largely brought about by refugees from West Punjab. According to Tai
Yong Tan and Gyanesh Kudaisya, about 44,000 Muslim houses were ei-
ther abandoned or forcibly evacuated during this violence. 18 Similarly, in
Dhaka, Hindus owned the lion’s share—85 percent according to one esti-
mate—of property in the city. But by the end of 1950, between 85 to 90
percent of their property had been abandoned due to fear of violence or
requisitioned by the government, or forcibly occupied by incoming non-
Bengali Muslim refugees. 19 Again, in Dharampur (near Simla), Hindu
and Sikh refugees from Pakistan had outnumbered the local Muslim pop-
ulation of the town by late August 1947. Unable to find accommodation,
and with winter approaching, the refugees threatened to massacre the
local Muslims, thus ensuring that the latter were evacuated to Pakistan,
leaving their property behind for the refugees to occupy. 20
In this respect, Sindhi Hindus also behaved like other Partition refu-
gees. After migrating to India, they forcibly occupied property belonging
to Muslims in places like Rajkot, Batwa, and Deolali, not to mention
Mumbai. Sindhi Hindus played a significant role in the riots in Godhra in
March 1948, which, in combination with a freak fire that engulfed a wide
part of the city, resulted in the emigration of numerous Muslims of that
city to Pakistan and also resulted in Sindhi refugees occupying about
3,500 Muslim properties. 21 (Godhra continues to have a history of com-
munal friction—and violence—between the local Ghanchi Muslims and
the Sindhi Hindus since then.)
This competition for property turned into a three-way contest be-
tween the local majority, incoming refugees, and the local minority in
several places, such as Ajmer, Delhi, and Gurgaon. In some cases, this
tussle became further complicated by the entry of the local government
into the fray.
South Asia was still recovering from World War II, and both the In-
dian and Pakistani governments were also trying to come to terms with
 Property, Violence, and Displacement 137

independence. As mentioned earlier, unlike the Indian government, the

Pakistani government was obliged to set up its administrative machinery
from scratch. Both the Indian and Pakistani governments found it ex-
tremely difficult to accommodate and rehabilitate large numbers of desti-
tute and traumatized refugees, not to mention government servants and
ministers. They also resorted to requisitioning property in Karachi, Delhi,
and Dhaka—often large mansions belonging to the minority community,
who were presumed to be “intending evacuees,” regardless of whether
they actually intended to migrate or not. This was effectively forcible
occupation of minority property by the government, for its own vested
interests.
There were other instances where the local government worked hand
in glove with the local majority or the incoming refugees to deprive local
minorities of their property. Master Tara Singh, the Sikh leader, actively
urged the Indian government to arrange for the evacuation of Muslims in
UP and Delhi, in order to use the property that they would leave behind
to accommodate Hindu and Sikh refugees in India. 22 After the Delhi riots
of September 1947, many Muslims found it impossible to return to their
houses. The Indian government declared the forcible occupation of Mus-
lim property as illegal but also declared that “no [non-Muslim] refugee
would be evicted for illegal occupation without being provided with al-
ternative accommodation,” 23 implying that the government would allow
refugees to continue in their occupation of the property indefinitely.
However, Hindus and Sikhs had left behind considerable more prop-
erty in Pakistan than Muslims had in India. Keenly aware of the value
and importance of this evacuee property, India and Pakistan held a series
of inter-dominion meetings in order to hammer out agreements regard-
ing transfer of property and compensation. This gave rise to an entire
industry for evacuee property. Claims offices and assessment agencies
were established and often staffed by refugees themselves, evacuee prop-
erty was cataloged, claims by incoming refugees were registered and
assessed, and compensation distributed. The long drawn-out process of
settling evacuee property claims lasted till about 1971 in India.

Sindhi-Muhajir Conflict over Evacuee Property

In Sindh, the allotment of evacuee property became a source of much
conflict between muhajirs and Sindhi Muslims. Hindus owned consider-
able urban property in Sindh, apart from their extensive agricultural
landholdings. According to one source, Sindhi Hindus owned over
28,000 properties in Karachi alone. 24 There were many instances where
property belonging to Hindus was usurped after their departure by local
Muslims. However, in both India and Pakistan, evacuee property was not
only used primarily by the state for the resettlement of incoming refu-
gees, but also perceived as a fundamental solution for the problem of
138 Nandita Bhavnani

refugee resettlement. In Sindh, too, the bulk of Hindu property was dis-
tributed among muhajirs.
This created friction in unforeseen ways. Sindhi Muslims who had
taken over Hindu property on the basis of forged or inadequate docu-
mentation now found themselves evicted. Given that they had expected
to inherit Sindhi Hindu property after the latter migrated to India, they
found this allotment of property to muhajirs particularly galling. Thus the
allotment of Hindu property became a major bone of contention between
Sindhi Muslims and muhajirs. There were deeper fissures as well: differ-
ent Muhajir claimants would also fight among themselves, sometimes
going to court, over allotment of the same property, while some Sindhi
Muslim waderos colluded to prevent the allotment of land to Sindhi
haaris (in an attempt to maintain the feudal status quo), receiving allot-
ments of land as reward. 25 In response, the haaris started a movement, the
Allottee Tehreek, to protest against these injustices and to obtain proper-
ty allotments for themselves. This movement, however, did not achieve
any significant success and was quashed by the onset of martial law in
Pakistan in 1958. Ultimately, out of 1,350,000 acres of land left behind by
Sindhi Hindus, 800,000 acres were allotted to muhajirs.

CONCLUSION

The absence of any significant Partition violence between Sindhi Hindus

and Sindhi Muslims can be attributed to a combination of various fac-
[Link] Sindh Muslim League felt politically secure enough to not feel
the need to whip up communal passions. The regrettable violence of
Masjid Manzilgah was still very much alive in public memory, and more-
over, the Sindh government was determined on maintaining Sindh’s rep-
utation as a “peaceful province.” It is also likely that a section of the
Sindhi Muslim populace expected to take over Sindhi Hindu property in
any case and so did not feel the need to resort to violence to acquire it.
Ironically enough, it was a group of right-wing Sindhi Hindus—mem-
bers of the RSS—who proved their inclination to, and capacity for, com-
munal violence. And ultimately, it was a section of muhajirs who brought
large-scale violence to Sindh, to coerce Hindus into migrating and leav-
ing their property behind for the former to occupy.
It is generally believed that Partition violence was driven mostly by
communal hatred and/or revenge for other, earlier riots. Yet, as we have
seen above, there were a significant number of cases where Partition
violence was also motivated by material ambitions, especially a cutthroat
competition for property, in many parts of the subcontinent. (It is worth-
while to note that apart from immoveable property, looting of moveable
goods from minority communities also acted as a significant motive for
 Property, Violence, and Displacement 139

Partition violence, such as that inflicted on caravans of refugees crossing

from one dominion to the other on foot.)
Communal violence to gain minority-owned property was perpetrat-
ed by both the local majority as well as incoming refugees. This proved to
be a vicious circle as this violence created a new set of displaced refugees
and successive waves of displacement.
It is impossible to estimate how many Partition refugees were created
by local majorities and incoming refugees seeking to take over minority
property. Yet, this phenomenon was clearly widespread across the north-
ern subcontinent—from Karachi to Delhi to Dhaka, from Mumbai to
Godhra to Dharampur—and sometimes in cities which were relatively
free of violence until the arrival of refugees. This gives us cause to ponder
that, if it had been possible for local governments in both dominions to
properly accommodate and successfully rehabilitate the earliest batches
of refugees, perhaps the numbers of Partition casualties and refugees
would not have been as astronomically high as they ultimately were.
After the emigration of local minorities, this tussle over property often
degenerated into a contest between the local majority and the incoming
refugees and, on occasion, with the local government as well. As else-
where, this contest prevailed in Sindh as well, between Sindhi Muslims
and muhajirs, who also clashed over other issues. The Sindhi-muhajir con-
flict has only mushroomed over the decades and has contributed greatly
to creating the polarized and violence-ridden Sindh of today.

The sections entitled “Pre-Partition Sindhi Society” and “Property as a Motive

for Partition Violence” are based on my book, The Making of Exile: Sindhi
Hindus and the Partition of India (New Delhi: Westland Tranquebar, 2014).

NOTES

1. Meghna Guhathakurta, “Families, Displacement,” in Divided Countries, Separated

Cities: The Modern Legacy of Partition, ed. Ghislaine Glasson Deschaumes and Rada
Ivekovic (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003), 96–97.
2. E. H. Aitken, Gazetteer of the Province of Sind (Karachi: Government of India,
1907), 338.
3. Sarah Ansari, Sufi Saints and State Power: The Pirs of Sind, 1843–1947 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992), 109, note 29.
4. David Cheesman, Landlord Power and Rural Indebtedness in Colonial Sind, 1886-
1901 (Richmond: Curzon Press, 1997), 185.
5. This instance would prove to be an uncanny precedent for the Bharatiya Janata
Party, and its mobilization of the Babri Masjid issue in order to establish itself on the
Indian political landscape in the 1980s.
6. G. M. Syed, possibly the most popular and significant grassroots leader in Sindh
in the twentieth century, is considered to be the father of the Jiye Sindh movement for
autonomy for Sindh.
7. Suhail Zaheer Lari, An Illustrated History of Sindh (Karachi: Heritage Foundation,
2002), 260.
140 Nandita Bhavnani

8. Nuruddin Sarki, “Anpoori Atamkatha,” in Aadarshi Insaan Nooruddin Sarki, ed.

Sattar Pirzada (Karachi: Sindhi Adabi Academy, 2007), 40–41. My translation.
9. As recalled by several Sindhi Hindus of that era and as quoted in G. D. Khosla,
Stern Reckoning: A Survey of the Events Leading Up to and Following the Partition of India
(New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1989), 244.
10. Set up in 1930, the Sind Hari Committee had also not achieved any radical
socioeconomic transformation in rural Sindh by the time of Partition.
11. M. Masud, as quoted in David Cheesman, Landlord Power and Rural Indebtedness
in Colonial Sind, 1865–1901 (Richmond: Curzon Press, 1997), 72.
12. Present-day Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.
13. In the summer of 1947, the Sindh Congress had also sent a group of about one
hundred Sindhi Hindu teenage boys to Rajasthan for military training for the same
purpose.
14. Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern
South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (New Delhi: Viking, 2007), 64.
15. Sobho Gianchandani, “Karachi-a Vaaro Qatl-e-Aam,” in Tarikh ja Visarial Warq
(Hyderabad, Sindh: Sindhi Sahit Ghar, 1992), 37. My translation.
16. This theme has also been alluded to in Partition literature, for instance, in Ra-
kesh Mohan’s well-known short story, “Malbe ka Malik.” See Rakesh Mohan, “Malbe
ka Malik,” in Hindi Kahani Sangrah, ed. Bhisham Sahni (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi,
1994), 34–43.
17. Shail Mayaram, Resisting Regimes: Myth, Memory, and the Shaping of a Muslim
Identity (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), 174.
18. Tai Yong Tan and Gyanesh Kudaisya, The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia
(London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 199.
19. Ibid., 168–69.
20. Khushdeva Singh, “Love Is Stronger Than Hate,”in India Partitioned: The Other
Face of Freedom, Vol. II, ed. Mushirul Hasan (New Delhi: Roli Books, 1997), 87–112.
21. See Zainab Banu, “Two Sides of a Coin: A Comparative Study of the Riots at
Godhra and Udaipur,” in Communal Riots in Post Independence India, ed. Asghar Ali
Engineer (Hyderabad: Sangam Books, 1984), 232–33, and Asghar Ali Engineer, “Case
Studies of Five Major Riots,” in Communal Riots in Post Independence India, 248–49.
22. Ganda Singh, “A Diary of Partition Days,” in India Partitioned: The Other Face of
Freedom, ed. Mushirul Hasan (New Delhi, Roli Books, 1997), 55–56.
23. Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern
South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (New Delhi: Viking, 2007), 29.
24. See K. R. Sipe, “Karachi’s Refugee Crisis: The Political, Economic and Social
Consequences of Partition-Related Migration,” unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Duke Uni-
versity, 1976, quoted in Ian Talbot and Gurharpal Singh, The Partition of India (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 120.
25. S. Sathananthan, “Sindhi Nationalism and Islamic Revolution in Paki-
stan,”International Studies, 37, 3 (2000): 233.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aitken, E. H. Gazetteer of the Province of Sind. Karachi: Government of India, 1907.

Ansari, Sarah. Sufi Saints and State Power: The Pirs of Sind, 1843–1947. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Banu, Zainab. “Two Sides of a Coin: A Comparative Study of the Riots at Godhra and
Udaipur.” Communal Riots in Post-Independence India, ed. Asghar Ali Engineer. Hy-
derabad: Sangam Books, 1984. 228–37.
Bhavnani, Nandita. The Making of Exile: Sindhi Hindus and the Partition of India. New
Delhi: Westland Tranquebar, 2014.
Cheesman, David. Landlord Power and Rural Indebtedness in Colonial Sind, 1865–1901.
Richmond: Curzon Press, 1997.
 Property, Violence, and Displacement 141

Engineer, Asghar Ali. “Case Studies of Five Major Riots.” Communal Riots in Post-
Independence India, ed. Asghar Ali Engineer. Hyderabad: Sangam Books, 1984.
238–70.
Gianchandani, Sobho. “Karachi-a Vaaro Qatl-e-Aam.” Tarikhja Visarial Warq, by Sobho
Gianchandani. Hyderabad (Sindh): Sindhi Sahit Ghar, 1992.
Guhathakurta, Meghna. “Families, Displacement.” Divided Countries, Separated Cities:
The Modern Legacy of Partition, ed. Ghislaine Glasson Deschaumes and Rada
Iveković, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003. 96–105
Khosla, G. D. Stern Reckoning: A Survey of the Events Leading Up to and Following the
Partition of India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1949, reprint 1989.
Lari, Suhail Zaheer. An Illustrated History of Sindh. Karachi: Heritage Foundation, 2002.
Mayaram, Shail. Resisting Regimes: Myth, Memory and the Shaping of a Muslim Identity.
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Rakesh, Mohan. “Malbe ka Malik.” In Hindi Kahani Sangrah, ed. Bhisham Sahni. New
Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1994.
Sarki, Nuruddin. “Anpoori Atamkatha.” Aadarshi Insaan Nooruddin Sarki, ed. Sattar
Pirzada. Karachi: Sindhi Adabi Academy, 2007.
Sathananthan, S. “Sindhi Nationalism and Islamic Revolution in Pakistan.” Interna-
tional Studies, 37, 3 (2000): 227–42.
Singh, Ganda. “A Diary of Partition Days.” In India Partitioned: The Other Face of Free-
dom, Vol. II, ed. Mushirul Hasan. New Delhi: Roli Books, 1997. 27–86.
Singh, Khushdeva. “Love Is Stronger Than Hate.” In India Partitioned: The Other Face of
Freedom, Vol. II , ed. Mushirul Hasan. New Delhi: Roli Books, 1997. 87–112.
Talbot, Ian, and Gurharpal Singh. The Partition of India. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2009.
Tan, Tai Yong, and Gyanesh Kudaisya. The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia. London
and New York: Routledge, 2000.
Zamindar, Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali. The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South
Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories. New Delhi: Viking, 2007.
 NINE
The Long Shadow of 1947
Partition, Violence, and Displacement in
Jammu & Kashmir

Ilyas Chattha

In 1947 South Asia witnessed one of the largest displacements of people

in the twentieth century with the Partition of the subcontinent. The lega-
cies of Partition have cast a long shadow on the people’s lives in South
Asia. At this point, the refugee movements also began in Jammu & Kash-
mir as the shadow of Partition fell over the territory. This essay aims to
move beyond high politics of “unfinished business” of the Kashmir con-
flict to uncover the human aspect of the British exit from the subconti-
nent. It argues that India’s partition in 1947, which is critical to under-
standing the Kashmir conflict, needs to be understood in the broader
context of the nation-building process for both India and Pakistan, and
for the persistence of suspicion and mistrust between the two nations. It
reflects specifically on the circumstances that led to the experience of
mass violence and forced migration that Muslims in the Jammu area
faced between September and November 1947. It draws on original
sources to explain the scope, motivation, and purpose of the localized
acts of violence and ethnic cleansing that was part of the immediate
waves of violence in the months leading up to India’s partition in August
1947. The essay underscores how communal violence led to the produc-
tion of refugee populations, which have played a central role in defining
the ongoing crisis in Jammu & Kashmir (hereafter referred to simply as J
& K) as well as in the state-formation processes in both India and Paki-
stan.

143
144 Ilyas Chattha

Jammu’s experience of the Partition reveals that imperial collapse not

only led to the production of violence and the breakup of populations,
but the dark legacies of 1947 continue to resonate today in the fractured
lives of individuals and communities and the ongoing conflict over con-
tested sites in India and Pakistan. Partition was the most critical event in
the subcontinent’s modern history, an event marked by the largest migra-
tions in the twentieth century. Some one million people—Hindus, Sikhs,
and Muslims—are estimated to have been killed in the Partition-related
violence. 1 Partition’s legacy is now seen as far more complex and far-
reaching than historians had previously recognized. As political scientist
Gurharpal Singh has argued, the “unintended consequences of the Parti-
tion’s mass political violence” still continue to haunt nation- and state-
building in both India and Pakistan. 2 The lingering consequences of the
1947 Partition—signaled by Vazira Zamindar’s idea of the “Long Parti-
tion”—represent a serious threat to the nation-building processes in the
region and have given rise to aggressive and narrow-minded nationalist
ideologies in both India and Pakistan. Zamindar sees Partition as a long
process “of dividing, categorizing, and regulating people, places, and
institutions for bounding two distinct nations.” The events of 1947 repre-
sent only the beginning of serial mass displacements caused not only by
physical civic and state violence, but also by a bureaucratic form of state
violence. 3
Indeed, the historiography of India’s partition has moved from a dis-
cussion of high politics to an analysis of its human dimension in relation
to one locality or another. 4 More recently, Partition historians have begun
to question the relationship between the state and violence. 5 Despite the
growing concerns evoked by the “new history” of the people’s experi-
ences of the Partition, the 1947 experience of populations in J & K has
largely been overlooked because of the tendency of historians to concen-
trate on violence in Punjab and Bengal and on the long-term legacies of
Partition with respect to the causes of “the unfinished business” of Parti-
tion in the Kashmir conflict. 6 A study of Jammu’s experience of violence
in 1947, attempted in this essay, is long overdue, as it continues to inform
the politics of the region and shape the lives of people in palpable ways.
Yet, there is remarkably little written about the forced migration and
mass violence of the Partition in the case of Jammu. And this despite the
fact the people of this erstwhile princely state experienced mass violence
and displacement not just in 1947, but also throughout the course of the
post-colonial period as India and Pakistan fought over the control of
region. 7
In India, RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak/Seva Sangh) and others have
in recent years been complaining about the tragic and forced departure
since 1990 of Hindu Pandits from the Kashmir Valley, 8 but they have
been silent for decades on the complicity of the state in the violence and
production of refugee populations in the formerly princely state of Jam-
 The Long Shadow of 1947 145

mu since 1947. Although Kashmiri Pandits are victims of the post-1988

violence in the Valley, like their Muslim compatriots in Jammu faced
mass violence in 1947. However, much of the mass violence in Jammu
was not broadly reported despite the fact this was not only more exten-
sive and worse than in the Valley in the 1990s, but it was linked to
political objectives with the singular objective of clearing out the Muslim
population from the areas. As Alexander Evans rightly points out, “earli-
er migrations lie forgotten. In 1947, large numbers of Muslims left Jammu
region for Pakistan, significantly altering the demographics of J & K as a
whole.” 9 The Jammu violence still haunts the region and individuals who
lived through the brutality in 1947. Therefore, it is much more significant
now to explore the Partition-era violence in J & K and its long-term im-
prints, and the repeated cycles of violence and disorder. While it has
often been argued that the Kashmir conflicts are deeply embedded in the
state formation in both India and Pakistan in the construction of the post-
1947 nationalist ideal and state policies, 10 it has also been suggested that
the memories of suffering from these conflicts have become an important
obstacle to improving India-Pakistan relations. 11
This analysis reflects on the circumstances which led to the mass kill-
ings and the forced migration of J & K’s minorities in the area at Partition
of the subcontinent. It highlights the level of organization and chief char-
acteristics of violence and draws attention to agents and victims of the
violence that arose in the Jammu region in 1947. In particular, the analy-
sis will focus on the relationship of the state to the development of vio-
lence and the production and expulsion of refugees. Ian Copland worked
extensively on princely states and recognized that there was considerable
violence in the Punjabi princely states in 1947, some of which was insti-
gated by the rulers themselves. 12 The events in Jammu are parallel to
what happened in the Punjab. As this account of Jammu unfolds, it will
relate Partition-related violence that swept through the Punjab’s towns
and cities from March 1947 onwards to the subsequent development of
Jammu violence in September–November that year. This resulted in mass
violence and forced migration.
As the shadow of Partition fell over J & K, over one million Muslims
were uprooted and an estimated 250,000–300,000 were massacred in Jam-
mu province alone between September and November 1947. 13 While the
violence had elements of spontaneity in response to the Partition violence
that took place elsewhere in India, there were clear signs of “ethnic
cleansing” elements too. Jammu’s experience of violence is worthy of
detailed consideration not only because it sheds light on wider theories of
collective violence, but it represents an important contribution to a hu-
manistic study of “Long Partition” and its dark legacies.
Before proceeding to examine the state’s role in patronizing violence
against Jammu’s Muslim population and the applicability of the concept
146 Ilyas Chattha

of “ethnic cleasing” in any detail, it is important to discuss briefly the

background of the violence and mass migration.

BACKGROUND OF THE J & K VIOLENCE

The territory of J & K has been the source of tension and conflict between
India and Pakistan ever since the British decolonization of the subconti-
nent in 1947. The J & K region is today divided between India and Paki-
stan. This partition came about in 1947–1948 as both countries fought
over the control of this territory at the northern end of the subcontinent.
At least two wars have been fought between India and Pakistan over the
future of Kashmir. The tragedy of Partition created the worst possible
starting point. Within months of the Partition of the subcontinent in 1947,
the conflict arose out of exceptional circumstances. J & K was one of the
largest princely states ruled by Hindu Dogra, Maharaja Hari Singh, with
a largely Muslim population. Apparently, the Maharaja united with In-
dia, without consulting with his own constituents and also ignoring Paki-
stan’s claim based on religion, cultural affinity, geographical setting, and
commercial importance. Thus within weeks of the British pull-out, the
violence sparked a mass migration. 14 As a matter of fact, a rounded
understating of the violence requires an analysis of the events in both J &
K in September–November 1947 and of the first outbreak in March that
saw the Rawalpindi Division massacres of Hindus and Sikhs in the Brit-
ish-administered Punjab province.
“A large flock” of the Hindus and Sikhs from Rawalpindi, within a
week of the killings, started migrating to neighboring J & K. 15 The embit-
tered Sikh and Hindu refugees’ tales of violence raised animosities
wherever they settled. In Jammu city alone, by mid-September, they
numbered 65,000. Their arrival threatened Jammu’s stability and brought
the communal tension to a “breaking point.” They planned revenge and
served as an occasion to launch a reign of terror on Jammu’s Muslim
population. Violence sparked an exodus, and a large number of Kashmiri
Muslim families from J & K started pouring into the border districts of
Punjab, namely, Rawalpindi, Jhelum, Gujrat, and Sialkot. The refugees
related harrowing tales of massacres by the state Dogra troopers. Images
of such violence in Kashmir inflamed some Punjabi Muslims and, in
particular, stirred up the movement of Pathan tribes in the North-West
Frontier Areas.

THE MASSACRES IN “AZAD” KASHMIR

Whitehead has explored the causes and mechanics of the tribal invasion
in 1947 and argues the mobilizing of the lashkar (raiders) that entered
Kashmir, and the nature of its actions there, were shaped by Partition—
 The Long Shadow of 1947 147

not simply by the desire to forestall Kashmir’s accession to India, but by

religious or communal grievance about a Hindu prince ruling a largely
Muslim populace, and a desire for vengeance against the Sikh commu-
nities in Muzaffarabad and Baramulla in response to anti-Muslim po-
groms in East Punjab. 16 By October 1947, a large number of Pathan
“tribesmen” declared a “jihad” against the Hindu Dogra rule. These Mus-
lim raiders who numbered about 20,000 crossed the border and smug-
gled arms into Kashmir. They, along with the Muslim army deserters
from the state forces and retired army men, came to help the Muslims of
Poonch. There were also rumors of the Pakistan Army’s assisting the
“Provisional Government” of North-West Frontier Province in such
raids. 17 Their actions grew into a full-scale revolt against the Hindu Do-
gra rule and culminated in the form of a “liberation” of an area in west-
ern Jammu and Kashmir and proclaimed the independent “Azad” Kash-
mir on 24 October 1947. Two days later, on 26 October, the Maharaja fled
from Srinagar to Jammu as the threat of “liberation” armed activists
poised to capture the city. In the backdrop of the revolt, the raiders be-
sieged the towns of Kotli and Poonch for half a month, killing hundreds
of Hindus and Sikhs ruthlessly and looting their properties. 18
The raiders specifically targeted the non-Muslim state officials in or-
der to drive them out of the areas. Krishna Mehta provides a rambling
account of her days in and around Muzaffarabad, where her husband
was a member of the Kashmir civil service, at the time of the tribes’ raids
in the Kashmir province. She writes about how her husband was escorted
by the tribesmen, who “drew their guns at him and shouted, You kafir
[infidel], go on your knees and prostrate before us, we represent Paki-
stan. He stood motionless. Tell us if you are a Hindu or a Musalman?
they demanded. When he said he was a Hindu, they all fired at him one
after the other.” 19 In less than two months, a large stream of Hindus and
Sikhs was forced to migrate to the “other” part of Kashmir. While the
violence was dying down in Punjab at times, it was only beginning in J &
K, which eventually unfolded into a full-scale war between India and
Pakistan that led to the partition of the princely state.

THE JAMMU MASSACRES AND STATE COMPLICITY

In the Jammu province just as in neighboring western Kashmir, there was

official complicity in the “ethnic cleansing” of religious minorities. In this
case the Muslims were the victims, as Hindus and Sikhs were in the
towns of Mirpur, Bimber, Kotli, Poonch, and Muzaffarabad. It was be-
lieved that Hindu and Sikh refugees pouring in from Azad Kashmir and
West Punjab were responsible for the violence in Jammu in which Mus-
lims became the primary target. As already noted, in April 1947 the first
trickle of refugees had already arrived in Jammu following the March
148 Ilyas Chattha

1947 violence in the West Punjab areas of Rawalpindi. The daily flood
peaked in late 1947 when an estimated 160,000 Hindus and Sikhs migrat-
ed from the western districts of Pakistan. 20
Jammu’s Muslims were to pay a heavy price in September–November
1947 for the organized killings and forced migration of Hindus and Sikhs
in West Punjab earlier that year. The fearful stories by the refugees of
murder and looting at the hands of the Muslims in Punjab and Azad
Kashmir intensified the violence against Muslims in Jammu. Many dis-
gruntled Dogra refugees backed by their relatives from Jammu started a
general clearing of the Muslim population. Some Sikh deserters of the
Sialkot Unit, who migrated to Jammu and also had taken away with
themselves rifles and ammunition, now utilized them. 21 The violent at-
tacks on the Muslims were not just prompted by revenge, but formed
part of ethnic cleansing. The political motivation of the violence comes
out clearly in the report of the Daily Telegraph on 12 January 1948:
Yet another element in the situation is provided by Sikh refugees from
the West Punjab who have seized Muslim lands in Jammu. . . . [T]hey
originated the massacres there last October [1947] to clear for them-
selves new Sikh territory to compensate for their losses in Pakistan and
to provide part of the nucleus of a future Sikhistan. 22
As elsewhere in 1947, the violence in J & K was locked into an all-
India pattern, as killings of one community in one part of the country
were justified as retribution for violence in another part. As a matter of
fact, the Jammu Muslims suffered intensely from their proximity to the
Punjab, and above all by the actions of the Dogra Hindu Maharajah Hari
Singh of J & K. The firsthand accounts of violence in Jammu show that
the Hindu Dogra state troops were at the forefront of attacks on Muslims.
G. K. Reddy, a Hindu editor of the Srinagar English weekly Kashmir
Times, published the following observation in the daily Nawa-i-Waqt:
The mad orgy of Dogra violence against unarmed Muslims should put
any self-respecting human being to shame. I saw armed bands of ruf-
fians and soldiers shooting down and hacking to pieces helpless Mus-
lim refuges heading towards Pakistan. My pain and agony was height-
ened by what I saw at the village of Rajpura where the state officials
and military officers were directing a huge armed mob against a Mus-
lim refugee convoy and got it hacked to pieces. I saw en route state
officials freely distributing arms and ammunition among the Dogra. I
saw the armed mob with the complicity of Dogra troops was killing the
Muslims ruthlessly. The state officials were openly giving out weapons
to the mob. 23
There were also reports that the Maharaja of Patiala princely state was
not only supplying weapons to the forces of Maharaja Hari Singh, but
that a Sikh Brigade of the Punjab troops was also operating in J & K. 24
The available source material reveals the Dogra troopers and Sikh Bri-
 The Long Shadow of 1947 149

gade carried out regular attacks on the border areas to expel the sectors of
Muslim population. For example, one raid on 28 November 1947 ejected
the entire population of Muslims from a place called Dulat Chak. 25 The
state authorities intended to ease a Hindu majority in the Jammu region
by driving out the Muslims. Members of the Rastriya Sewak Sangh (RSS)
also actively took part in the ethnic cleansing of the Muslims in Jammu.
In one case, on 18 November 1947, a Special Correspondent of the Man-
chester Guardian in Srinagar reported: “It is reliably learned that members
of the Rashtriya Sewak Sangh, a militant Hindu organisation, are killing
Moslems and destroying their property.” 26
In November 1947, the prime minister of Pakistan, Liaquat Ali Khan,
expressed his concerns over the situation in Jammu in an interview to
Reuters:
After the massacre of Moslems in East Punjab and the Punjab states the
forces of annihilation turned to Jammu and Kashmir. . . . Towards the
end of September the Indian National Army and the RSS shifted their
headquarters from Amritsar to Jammu . . . they were provided modern
weapons by the state authorities. They set about the formal business in
Jammu and Pooch of repeating the horrible drama they had enacted in
East Punjab. 27
By late October 1947, tensions in the city of Jammu had become dan-
gerously high. In the first week of November 1947, Pakistan dispatched
many buses to Jammu to transport the refugees into Sialkot, after the
closure of Sialkot-Jammu railway line. The Muslims started concentrating
in a camp from isolated pockets to the large enclaves within the Jammu
Police Lines. A convoy of twenty-four buses left Jammu on 6 November.
When the convoy arrived at Jammu-Sialkot road, Dogra troopers, acti-
vists of Rastriya Sewak Sangh, and many armed Sikhs attacked the cara-
van and killed most of the passengers and abducted their women. The
fortunate ones managed to escape to reach Sialkot, or returned to the
Jammu Police Lines Camp. A survivor of the convoy provides below a
graphic eyewitness account of what happened to some members of the
convoy:
The attacks had been planned and assailants had been divided into six
or seven groups. . . . Those who had surrounded us were armed with
rifles, spears, swords and birches. Those who snatched away orna-
ments, money, beddings and other property, consisted mostly of Ach-
huts (Untouchables), a third group was taking possession of women
and in overall charge were officers who issued orders. . . . (The assai-
lants) were so trained which left no doubt that they had been trained
over a considerable period of time. The victims were then removed to
the butchery in a group of six persons each. I put off my shoes and ran
away and though fired at, was able to save my life but my old parents,
brothers, sons and daughters who had boarded the trucks with myself,
I have not heard of them since. 28
150 Ilyas Chattha

According to a statement of another well-educated Muslim refugee

who had escaped from Jammu to Sialkot, “Thirty lorries carrying Muslim
evacuees out of Kashmir State were attacked by Dogra troops at Satwari
in Jammu. Most of the male members were massacred, while the women
were abducted.” He concluded that the official proclaimed there that
“there was no place for Muslims in Kashmir State and that they should
all clear out.” 29 A couple of years later, the 1949 United Nations Commis-
sion for India and Pakistan (UNCIP) issued a report of the sub-committee
on western Kashmir which stated that “Many of the Muslim refugees
have lively recollections of the Jammu massacres of November 1947.” 30
The firsthand accounts of those who lived through the violence in Jammu
in 1947 collected from Sialkot provide clear evidence of the complicity of
the state troopers and authorities in the ethnic cleansing of Jammu’s Mus-
lims. 31
The available evidence reveals that the Hindu Dogra state authorities’
aim was to change the demographic composition of the region by expel-
ling the Muslim population. They sought to carve out a non-Muslim
majority area in Jammu province. The depopulation of the Muslim popu-
lation in the Jammu region is evidenced clearly in the 1961 Census of
India (there was no 1951 census of J & K due to continuing disturbances).
In Jammu province, for example, about 123 villages were “completely
depopulated,” while the decrease in the number of Muslims in Jammu
district alone was over 100,000. Here Muslims numbered 158,630 and
comprised 37 percent of the total population of 428,719 in the year 1941,
and in the year 1961, they numbered only 51,690 and comprised only 10
percent of the total population of 516,932. Kathua district “lost” almost 50
percent of its Muslim population. 32 The majority of Muslims had to es-
cape from violence. Indeed Jammu province had become a Hindu major-
ity province. The killings and dispersal of the Muslims from Jammu were
a clear example of the ethnic cleansing of a locality. Out of a total of one
million who tried to migrate, more than “237,000 Muslims were system-
atically exterminated by all the forces of the Dogra State, headed by the
Maharaja in person and aided by Hindus and Sikhs.” 33
It is possible here to suggest the 1947 Jammu violence could be con-
ceptualized in broader accounts of ethnic cleansing. 34 Indeed it points to
the fact that the violence in Jammu had a political purpose and meaning.
Like other large-scale episodes of mass violence in the twentieth century,
the 1947 Jammu violence in terms of making claims for territory displays
evidence of the full force of administrative complicity and participation.
There is growing awareness of the use of the concept “ethnic cleansing”
with respect to the 1947 Partition violence; the use of the term genocide,
nevertheless, remains both controversial and sensitive. 35 Until recently,
the story of Jammu Muslims’ killings and emptying them out of the re-
gion was either overshadowed by the communal killings in neighboring
Punjab around the same time or incorporated with the Kashmir wars
 The Long Shadow of 1947 151

between Pakistan and India. Indeed violence in the Punjab in 1947, and
more recently in the Valley in 1990s, had a parallel with Jammu in terms
of a cycle of revenge killings and assaults on the minorities to driving
them out of the region and occupying their properties. Nevertheless, the
Jammu violence overwhelmingly operated at the state level. State offi-
cials and the army contributed significantly to the violence, not because
of revenge but because they acted upon the state ruler’s intent to drive
out the Muslims to create a Hindu majority in the Jammu region. Similar
chilling conclusions emerged from Copland’s analysis of the state-led
violence in the Sikh Punjabi princely states in 1947. 36 The Jammu experi-
ence of violence reveals that episodes of sustained violence required the
state’s complicity and involvement.
To conclude, a focus on the Partition in relation to J & K reminds us
that violence and displacement have not only characterized the lives of
people of the formerly princely state since 1947, but also have shaped
state formation in India and Pakistan. The available evidence suggests
the communal violence that occurred in the areas against the backdrop of
the Partition of India and its aftermath, including a possible ethnic
cleansing of Jammu’s Muslims in September–November 1947. The erst-
while princely state ruler abetted attacks on the Muslims with the singu-
lar objective of clearing them out from the areas.
Although most of the massacres that took place in Jammu were used
instrumentally and had clear political ends, worryingly they were at-
tended by more unsettling developments that were to endure as dark
legacies. For Pakistan, the mass violence and its accompanied forced mi-
gration of Hindus and Sikhs from Azad Kashmir was only partially suc-
cessful, as it failed to deliver the state to the country. However, the organ-
ised ethnic cleansing of non-Muslim minorities in both Punjab and Azad
Kashmir led to a retaliatory response from the force of the Hindu ruler of
the princely state (and by the Indian state), which not only led the parti-
tion of J & K, but unleashed ethnic cleansing of the Muslim population on
a more systematic scale in Jammu province.
The ongoing nature of the violence and production of refugee popula-
tions that began in 1947 continued during wars between India and Paki-
stan in 1947, 1949, 1965, the uprising in 1989–1990, and the undeclared
“Kargil War” of 1999, frequent border skirmishes, and a continuing in-
surgency in the region. These security situations have produced displace-
ments of about 350,000 Kashmiris. 37 Since 1990, some 160,000 Kashmiri
Pandits have left the Valley and about 35,000 Muslim refugees from In-
dian Kashmir have crossed into Azad Kashmir. 38 These displacements
have not only impacted notions of identity, but also have given rise to
humanitarian matters. “Memories of violence,” writes Urvashi Butalia,
“clearly do not go away easily.” 39 Kashmiri refugees have shaped the
organization of violence in the region, as in many ways the ideology to
free and unify J & K is built on the memory of displacement and violence.
152 Ilyas Chattha

Many individuals still bear the physical and psychological scars of the
Long Partition. Many others still wait not only for the adjudication of
their national status but also their right to permanent ownership of the
properties they were allotted from 1947 onwards. 40 Indeed, for Kashmiris
the end of colonial rule upon the Partition of the subcontinent was a long
process rather than an event confined to 1947.
The catalog of grievances would serve the goals of the state on both
sides of the border to manipulate the sufferings and collective memory.
While the hybrid idea of being a Kashmiri (Hindu or Muslim or Sikh) has
particularly been challenged and left in tatters by communal divides
since the early 1990s, in terms of human rights both Kashmiri Pandits and
Muslims have been victims of militancy and state-directed violence. Yet,
unlike the majority of the subcontinent’s other distinctive culture and
language heritage (ethno-nationalism), the migration of Kashmiris (Hin-
du, Muslim, or Sikh) to India and/or Pakistan means that there exists a
constituency of support for Kashmiri nationalist sentiment outside Kash-
mir. The presence of the displaced Kashmiri population also acts as a
reminder to India and Pakistan of the overall situation of national dislo-
cation arising from the unfinished business of Partition. The worldwide
diasporic Kashmiri community also plays its part in keeping attention
focused on the Kashmiri nationalist rhetoric. The unifying experience of
forced displacement, suffering, and injustice remains the dominant factor
that not only unifies Kashmiris across the borders, but also heightens
their consciousness of being Kashmiri.

NOTES

1. Estimates of the killings arising from the partition violence have varied consid-
erably, from 200,000 to three million. For a discussion on this, see Gyanendra Pandey,
Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2001).
2. Gurharpal Singh, “Violence and State Formation in Pakistan,” in State and Na-
tion-building in Pakistan: Beyond Islam and Security, ed. Roger Long, Yunas Samad,
Gurharpal Singh, and Ian Talbot (New York: Routledge, 2015), 203.
3. Vazira Fazila-Yaccobali Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern
South Asia (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2008), 226.
4. Ian Talbot, Divided Cities: Partition and Its Aftermath in Lahore and Amritsar (Kara-
chi: Oxford University Press, 2006); Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition: The Making of
India and Pakistan (London: Yale University Press, 2007); Joya Chatterji, The Spoils of
Partition: Bengal and India 1947–1967 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
5. Ian Copland, “The Master and the Maharajas: The Sikh Princes and the East
Punjab Massacres of 1947,” Modern Asian Studies 36 (2002): 657–704; Shail Mayaram,
“Speech, Silence and the Making of Partition Violence in Mewat,” Subaltern Studies 9
(New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), 126–61.
6. Prem Shankar Jha, The Origins of a Dispute: Kashmir 1947 (New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2003); Victoria Schofield, Kashmir in Conflict: India, Pakistan and the
Unfinished War (London: I. B. Tauris, 2000); Ira Pande, A Tangled Web: Jammu and
Kashmir (New Delhi: HarperCollins, 2011).
 The Long Shadow of 1947 153

7. Sanjay Kak, ed., Until My Freedom Has Come: The New Intifada in Kashmir (New
Delhi: Penguin, 2011); Arundhati Roy, “Kashmir Azadi,” Outlook, September 1, 2008;
Basharat Peer, Curfewed Nights: One Kashmiri Journalist’s Frontline Account Life, Love and
War in His Homeland (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010). Kwasi Kwarteng, Ghosts
of Empire: Britain’s Legacies in the Modern World (London: Bloomsbury, 2011); Tej Nath
Dhar, Under the Shadow of Militancy: The Diary of an Unknown Kashmiri (New Delhi:
Rupa and Co., 2002); Mirza Waheed, The Collaborator (New Delhi: Viking Penguin,
2011); and also see the film by Ajay Raina, Tell Them the Tree They Had Planted Has Now
Grown (2002), [Link] (Accessed
October 22, 2015).
8. For the migration of Kashmiri Pandits from the Valley, see M. K. Sarkaria,
“Powerful Pawns of the Kashmir Conflict: Kashmiri Pandit Migrants,” Asian and Pacif-
ic Migration Journal, 18, 2 (2009): 197–230; Henny Sender, The Kashmiri Pandits: A Study
of Cultural Choice in North India (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Sumatra
Bose, Kashmir: Roots of Conflict, Paths to Peace (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2005); Gh. Rasool Bhat, “The Exodus of Kashmiri Pandits and Its Impacts,
1989–2002,” International Journal of Research in Social Science and Humanities, 2, 2 (2012):
102–16.
9. Alexander Evans, “A Departure from History: Kashmiri Pandits, 1990–2001,”
Contemporary South Asia, 11, 1 (2002): 33.
10. Ian Talbot and Gurharpal Singh, The Partition of India (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2009); Suvir Kaul, “Indian Empire and the Case of Kashmir,” Eco-
nomic and Political Weekly, xlvi, 13 (March 26, 2011).
11. Urvashi Butalia (ed.), Partition: The Long Shadow (New Delhi: Penguin, 2015).
12. Ian Copland, “The Integration of the Princely States: A ‘Bloodless’ Revolution?”
South Asia, 18 (1995): 42. In 1947, there were over 500 “Native Princely States of India,”
which comprised about 45 percent of the territory and a quarter of the population of
British India. The inhabitants of princely states were “state subjects” who were not
technically British colonial subjects.
13. The Times, London, in its issue of 10 August 1948, put the death figure at “more
than 237,000.” Jamwal estimates the number of casualties between 200,000 and
300,000. Anuradha Bhasin Jamwal, “Prejudice in Paradise,” Communalism Combat, 11,
104 (2004). Khurshid claims that “as many as 200,000 Jammu Muslims lost their lives
in 1947 and most of them died around the first week of November” in 1947. Sorayya
Khurshid, “My Jammu Memories,” in Rehmatullah Rad and Khalid Hasan, eds., Mem-
ory Lane to Jammu (Lahore: Sange-e-Meel Publications, 2004), 179–80.
14. For additional details of the background to this violence, see my essay Ilyas
Chattha, “Escape from Violence: The 1947 Partition of India and the Migration of
Kashmiri Muslim Refugees,” in Refugees and the End of Empire Imperial Collapse and
Forced Migration in the Twentieth Century, eds. Panikos Panayi and Pippa Virdee (Ba-
singstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 196–218.
15. “Refugees Flock into Kashmir,” The Times, London, 14 March 1947, 3.
16. A. Whitehead, A Mission in Kashmir (New Delhi: Viking, 2007), 123–24.
17. “Kashmir Rebels Attacked by Aircrafts,” The Times, 31 October 1947, 4.
18. “Reinforcement for State Troops: City Panic,” The Times, 28 October 1947, 4.
19. Her husband Duni Chand Mehta was posted as deputy commissioner of the
western Kashmir district Muzaffarabad in 1947. Krishna Mehta, Kashmir 1947: A Survi-
vor’s Story (New Delhi: 2005).
20. “Tribal Hazards in the Border Territory,” The Times, 26 January 1948, 5.
21. The Punjab Police Abstract of Intelligence for the Week Ending August, 1947,
612, NIHCR.
22. Daily Telegraph, January 12, 1948
23. Nawa-i-Waqt, October 29, 1947, 2.
24. M. Y. Saraf, “The Jammu Massacres,” in Rehmatullah Rad and Khalid Hasan,
eds., Memory Lane to Jammu (Lahore: Sange-e-Meel Publications, 2004), 163.
154 Ilyas Chattha

25. Sialkot District Police Record, Police station (thana) Shakargarh, FIR no. 179, 28
November 1947.
26. Manchester Guardian, 18 November 1947, 5.
27. Manchester Guardian, 5 November 1947, 5.
28. M. Y. Saraf, “The Jammu Massacres,” in Rehmatullah Rad and Khalid Hasan,
eds., Memory Lane to Jammu (Lahore: Sange-e-Meel Publications, 2004), 170–71. Every
year November 6th commemorates the Jammu Martyrs Day in order to remember the
massacre of Muslims by the forces of Maharaja Hari Singh‚ Indian army, and Hindu
extremists in different parts of Jammu region while they were migrating to Pakistan in
1947.
29. The Journey to Pakistan: Documentation on Refugees of 1947 (Lahore: 1993), 298–99.
30. Christopher Snedden, The Untold Story of the People of Azad Kashmir (London:
Hurst, 2012).
31. For the firsthand experiences of the survival of Jammu violence, see a section
titled, “Massacres of Jammu’s Muslim Population and Arrival of Refugees in Sialkot,”
in Ilyas Chattha, Partition and Locality: Violence, Migration, and Development in Gujran-
wala and Sialkot 1947–1961 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2011), 161–69.
32. The Census of India, 1961, V1, in M. H. Kamili, ed., Census of India (Delhi: 1967),
42, 157, 359–60.
33. “Elimination of Muslims from Jammu,” II, The Times, 10 August 1948, 5.
34. Definitions of ethnic cleansing remain ambiguous and assume the role of the
state imperative to genocide. For the use and definition of both genocide and ethnic
cleansing, see H. R. Huttenbach, “Locating the Holocaust on the Genocide Spectrum:
Towards a Methodology of Definition and Categorization,” Holocaust and Genocide
Studies, 3 (1988): 289–303. R. M. Hayden, “Schindler’s Fate: Genocide, Ethnic Cleans-
ing, and Population Transfers,” Slavic Review, 55, 4 (1996): 732–34; M. Mazower, “Vio-
lence and the State in the Twentieth Century,” American Historical Review 107, 4 (Octo-
ber 2002): 1158–78.
35. Paul Brass terms the 1947 partition violence in Punjab as “retributive genocide”
and considers “the genocidal massacres” in the Punjab [as] organized and planned,
but their “special character is that they were not ordered by a state.” Paul Brass, “The
Partition of India and Retributive Genocide in the Punjab, 1946–1947: Means, Meth-
ods, and Purposes,” Journal of Genocide Research, 5, 1 (2003): 71–101.
36. Ian Copland, “The Master and the Maharajas: The Sikh Princes and the East
Punjab Massacres of 1947,” Modern Asian Studies 36 (2002): 657–704.
37. Patricia Ellis and Zafar Khan, “Kashmiri Displacement and the Impact on Kash-
miriyat,” Contemporary South Asia, 12, 4 (2003): 528.
38. Alexander Evans, “A Departure from History: Kashmiri Pandits, 1990–2001,”
Contemporary South Asia, 11, 1 (2002): 33.
39. Urvashi Butalia, “Partition’s Memory,” Seminar 497 (2001): 93. Also see her
seminal work, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (New Delhi:
Penguin, 1998).
40. C. D. Robinson, Body of Victim, Body of Warrior: Refugee Families and the Making of
Kashmiri Jihadists (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); Ilyas Chattha, “Es-
cape from Violence: The 1947 Partition of India and the Migration of Kashmiri Muslim
Refugees,” in Refugees and the End of Empire Imperial Collapse and Forced Migration in the
Twentieth Century, ed. Panikos Panayi and Pippa Virdee (Basingstoke: Palgrave Mac-
millan, 2011), 196–218.

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 TEN
From Frontiers to Borders
Partition and the Production of Marginal Spaces in
North East India

Babyrani Yumnam

In Siddhartha Deb’s Point of Return, as Babu and his parents often battled
with conflicting emotions of alienation and love for the very place they
called home, he found himself seeking answers to questions that many in
North East India, 1 “native” and “foreigner” alike, have lived with for
more than six decades:
“Where do they go?” I had asked my father when I was small. “Aizawl,
Kohima, Imphal,” my father would reply, naming the state capitals of
the Northeast without looking up from his files. At school, in the geog-
raphy classes, they told us nothing about these places. In the dots and
crosses I marked on the map of India during my term exams, I only had
to place the big industrial cities and political centers and trading ports
of the dusty plains to get full marks for that section of the exam. I
would sit in the car and mouth the geography names as they appeared
on the windscreen of the trucks going by—”All-India permit for Pun-
jab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal . . .” and I wonder why the
names my father mentioned never appeared on the trucks, as if there
was something about these destinations that could not be revealed to
the world at large. 2

Why does no one in Delhi know about what is happening here? Why
do the killings and lootings not appear in the Calcutta paper that now
gets here three days late? 3

157
158 Babyrani Yumnam

These were questions of identity and belonging, political and econom-

ic marginality, and of seldom reported cases of violence that stem from
issues far deeper and wide-reaching than either Babu or his father, Dr.
Dam, could fathom. Years after moving to New Delhi, he comes back to
visit, half-hoping to see some changes in the attitudes, politics, and the
turpitude of violence. Having realized that not much had changed except
for hurried strides towards modernity and economic development, he
acknowledges the futility of history in answering his questions. History,
dragged so far from the metropolitan centers, from the rustic main-
lands, will tell you nothing. In the North East, the way I remember it,
history lies defeated, muttering solipsistically from desultory plaques
put up to commemorate visiting politicians, the memorial stones fad-
ing against the brilliance of the colors in the streets. 4
Babu’s story captures the complexity of North East India’s socio-polit-
ical conditions that are but deeply mired in a past that seem to bear no
resonance beyond the region’s 5 territorial boundaries. But it is a past that
is equally contentious, rooted in specific historical formations and con-
junctures that produced and reproduced the kind of social and political
milieu within which the North East region (NER) is situated at present.
This chapter is a reexamination of those historical processes and events
that contributed in naturalizing the region as the loci of geographical,
political, and economic marginality. In particular, I direct attention to
nineteenth-century colonial interventions in the form of territorial demar-
cation and administration, and the impact of 1947 Partition on the socio-
political landscape of the NER.
In the subsequent sections, I look at how colonial administrative and
territorial control necessitated by external and internal circumstances,
both political and economic, transformed the NER into a frontier tract
that functioned as buffer zone against foreign incursions (from the Bur-
mese and Chinese) and domestic obstructions from hostile “hill tribes.” 6
As processes of territorial demarcation began to fix boundaries, pre-colo-
nial connections of trade and cultural exchanges between communities
inhabiting contiguous territories in India, Burma, 7 East Pakistan, and
southwest China were disrupted. These connections were severed com-
pletely when the British transferred power to a newly independent India
and the subsequent Partition in 1947 bisected across Bengal, Assam,
Meghalaya, Mizoram, thereby creating several small territories through
this ultimate act of territorialization. I argue that these historical conjunc-
tures introduced the idea of “fixed boundaries” for the first time to this
part of the world and transformed the NER from a colonial frontier to a
post-colonial border zone through disruptions in a larger connected his-
tory that spanned across national space(s) in South and Southeast Asia. I
also discuss how the NER could be seen as an imperial construct created
as the canvas of British imperialist expansion unfolded in the region and
 From Frontiers to Borders 159

became firmly established in the post-colonial years, thereby producing a

“directional category” 8 that identified the NER as a geographical locus of
complex historical formations and long-standing political instability.
This essay reviews North East India’s historiography that was trans-
formed through processes of colonial governmentality and post-colonial
nation-building. In doing so, I highlight the significance of historical for-
mations and events in shaping the current socio-temporal status of the
NER, and the discursive silence in India’s nationalist historical geogra-
phy which, through its primary focus on routes running east-west along
the Gangetic basin, is not attentive to the region’s peculiarities, thus ren-
dering it as an eastern frontier or border in perpetuity. 9 To that end, this
essay offers an alternative perspective about the 1947 Partition—a narra-
tive about and from spaces pushed to the margins as processes of colonial
map-making and post-colonial nation-building unfolded. I do not, how-
ever, claim to have outlined a comprehensive narrative of the multiple
social histories and political encounters that characterize the North East.
The sheer diversity of languages and social histories make it impossible
for me alone to explicate the nuances and complexities of each commu-
nity and their history. Nonetheless, it is indeed the intent of this study to
draw attention to the need for a discursive field that would bring togeth-
er these multiple histories for studying the social history of Partition at
the very edges of the boundaries it created.

THE FRONTIER: A COLONIAL LEGACY

Northeast India is a culturally diverse region that shares its international

boundaries with Burma, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Tibet, and China. It is con-
nected to the rest of India by a narrow strip of land 10 in North Bengal
called the “Siliguri corridor” or the “Chicken’s neck.” Often, this corridor
is seen as symbolic of the region’s isolation from national political and
social consciousness. In early colonial accounts, this exclusion is empha-
sized in the civilizational difference between the “barbaric hill tribes” and
the “advanced Indic civilizations,” the two having little or no cultural
and racial similarities. These differences would become a contentious
point when the transfer of power to independent India was negotiated on
the eve of Independence.
Early imperial policies of trade and progress did not have much to do
with this hilly northeastern tract, and the British sought to segregate
these areas from the rest of India by constructing political boundaries for
both commercial and administrative purposes. 11 After the first Anglo-
Burmese War of 1825, the British expelled the Burmese from the king-
doms of Manipur and Assam, conquered them and continued to incorpo-
rate the kingdoms of Cachar, Muttock (on the Arunachal-Assam border),
the Khasi and Jaintia Hills, and the Garo Hills (now in Meghalaya) into
160 Babyrani Yumnam

the Assam Province. The second half of the nineteenth century saw the
conquest of the Naga and Lushai Hills that later became separate districts
of Assam. The vast mountain ranges between these kingdoms came to be
accepted as the “frontier tract” 12 that separated Burma from Assam. As
the expansion continued, the British realized the accompanying ambigu-
ity about the political boundaries of the newly acquired territorial posses-
sions; there were no obvious physical boundaries except for the Himalay-
as in the north. Concrete territorial boundaries were difficult to delimit as
local populations used physical landmarks like the mountains, hills, riv-
ers, or meadows to mark territories. For the locals, fixed lines or boundar-
ies were confusing and inconvenient as these lines drew sharp divisive
lines across cultural and political systems. 13 For example, in one of his
letters to Lord Ripon, the Governor General and Viceroy of India, C. S.
Elliott, the Chief Commissioner, expressed uncertainty about restraining
the “Nagas with their wanderings and trading habits, within an imagi-
nary line which they have always been accustomed to cross.” 14 Drawing
a “fixed boundary” across the undefined area seemed like an impracti-
cable solution to Alexander Mackenzie too:
The Northeast Frontier is a term used sometimes to denote the boun-
dary line and sometimes more generally to describe a tract. In the latter
sense, it embraces the whole of the hill ranges of North East and south
of Assam valley as well as the western slopes of the great mountain
system lying between Bengal and independent Burma, with its outly-
ing spurs and ridges. It will be convenient to proceed in regular order,
first traversing from west to east the sub-Himalayan ranges north of
Brahmaputra, then turning westward along the course of the ranges
that found the Assam valley in the south, and finally, exploring the
highlands interposed between Cachar and Chittagong and the hills that
separate the maritime district of Chittagong from the Empire of Ava. 15
Despite the cumbersome and equivocal project of mapping and defining
the vast broad frontier, the British began to demarcate territories for ad-
ministrative control, often arbitrarily deploying “scientific techniques” of
drawing maps and conducting surveys. European concepts of belonging
and territoriality were imported to outline and define the “unscientific
frontier” 16 and to control the “confused or hostile border areas.” 17 The
concept of space and scale began to acquire a new meaning in the North-
eastern frontier as cartographic knowledge reinforced imperial power
and authority in the mapping of the NER’s “geobody.” 18 In fact, Nicholas
Dirks could not have expressed it better when he stated that “colonial
knowledge both enabled conquest and was produced by it.” 19 The spread
of map literacy and the use of “scientific techniques” such as topographi-
cal surveys, demographic information, and anthropological descriptions
produced huge volumes of information about colonial India that was
instrumental in facilitating territorial expansion and imperial power.
 From Frontiers to Borders 161

Most of the boundary lines, until this point of time, were drawn with
the purpose of protecting territorial possessions from external incursions.
The Pemberton Line drawn between Manipur and Burma in 1833 sought
to restrain the powerful Burmese army from advancing towards the colo-
nial stronghold in Calcutta. In 1837, another boundary between Assam
and Burma was delimited without a treaty, which delineated the North
East Frontier Agency or NEFA 20 as the outermost fringe of the empire.
These boundaries were however not rigid and were frequently breached
as commercial interests often took the colonial rulers over and beyond
these imagined lines of control. This reshuffling of administrative boun-
daries did not go well with the local populations and they resisted
against such policies. Nonetheless, this administrative exercise produced
a definitional and directional category—the North East—which is still
used today, often singularly, to refer to the region and its people. Such a
category has been criticized as having a homogenizing tendency that
blurred the boundaries of social realities in the region. But for the British,
it served the purpose of creating an administrable political unit that pro-
tected territorial possessions and advanced commercial pursuits on the
eastern fringe of the empire.

TERRITORIAL ENCLAVES—OF COMMERCE AND POLITICS

In their attempts to establish fixed territorial enclaves, the colonial rulers

were concerned with not just the interstate boundaries. A number of
maps and lines were also drawn within the “broad frontier” to distin-
guish between directly administered and “protected” areas. 21 The 1873
Inner Line Regulation 22 was one such border control strategy that not
only divided physical terrains but also sought to demarcate British juris-
dictional limits and identify those who would be treated as British sub-
jects. The Line required all British subjects and foreign residents to ac-
quire a license before entering the frontier tract. It sought to prevent land
acquisition by foreign residents, control commercial relations with the
tribes, and to restrain the spread of tea gardens outside the colonial fiscal
limits. 23 The Line practically divided the hills from the plains, the marshy
jungles from the productive, arable lands, and the settled populations
from the nomadic hill tribes, thereby producing a spatio-temporal space
where the theater of capital played out.
It is to be noted here that Assam and its surrounding “tribal” areas, at
least until 1820, had no commercial value for the British. The discovery of
tea in the upland plains of Assam in 1821 changed that. Other sources of
economic interests included the “discovery” of huge limestone deposits
in Pandua in Meghalaya, timber in the Dooars, 24 and rich forest resources
in the Khasi hills east of Sylhet. 25 Consequently, lands were cleared and
tea gardens mushroomed in the Dooars and Darjeeling. 26 Europeans
162 Babyrani Yumnam

were encouraged to set up tea plantations with labor brought in from

East Bengal, and communication and transport networks such as tram-
ways were constructed in the Goalpara, Lakhimpur, and Sibsagar dis-
tricts to transport both labor and timber. The British introduced a flexible
migration policy of settling the vast “wastelands” and to make up for the
shortage of labor on the tea plantations. 27 Later, such waves of migration
that continued well after the Partition and the 1971 Indo-Pakistan War
would become the contentious issue that triggered violent anti-immigra-
tion protests in Assam and Tripura. 28 Meanwhile the discovery of oil and
mineral deposits in Assam prompted the British to control and protect its
commercial interests in the region from close foreign presence, i.e., Bur-
ma and the Manchu empire’s 29 southern region, which is now Tibet. 30
Besides, domestic disturbances in the form of attacks on officials and the
tea plantation by hill tribes who resisted colonial land encroachments
became an administrative obstacle. Establishing the Inner Line separated
and isolated the “headhunting, nomadic tribal groups” who were left to
manage their own affairs as long as they paid tributes to the empire or
when the need to trade or acquire lands arose. In the process, binary
categories of productive and non-productive territories, modern and
primitive social worlds, and of “contending worlds of capital and pre-
capital” were carved out. 31 Thus the Line not only represented a “territo-
rial exterior of the theatre of capital” but also “a temporal outside of the
historical pace of development and progress that represented the transi-
tion from the time of ‘no law’ to the time of law.” 32 Additionally, paterna-
listic economic intervention in the form of land and labor regulations
facilitated the gradual integration of the traditional subsistence economy
into a larger cash-based capitalist economy.
The Inner Line was however not a fixed, rigidly enforced boundary.
Rather it was made flexible and often altered to suit the needs of the
British to establish ownership over the “fruit side of the garden wall.” 33
Until the late 1920s, it was repeatedly redrawn to accommodate the ex-
panding tea plantations and subsequent revisions of survey maps. If new
tea or coal tracts and valuable forest areas were found beyond the exist-
ing Line, the Government Gazette extended it to include those areas, in
what Kar calls an “expansion of the legal theatre of capital.” 34 This re-
source-dependent flexibility therefore meant that the gradual incorpora-
tion of this remote corner of Zomia highlands into the larger extractive
capitalist order also peripheralized it simultaneously, albeit unevenly.
The Inner Line thus produced a marginal space—a frontier within a fron-
tier that led to the seclusion and severing of the cultural, economic, and
political ties between the hills and the plains.
Colonial exclusionary politics acquired a sharper expression through
the 1935 Government Act which identified certain tribal belts to be “Ex-
cluded” and “Partially Excluded” from Indian juridical control and di-
rectly administered by the British instead. 35 The creation of these en-
 From Frontiers to Borders 163

claves stemmed from Verrier Elwin’s concern that the culturally and ra-
cially different aboriginal tribes “might not be wholly or fairly represent-
ed in the once hegemonic ideology of Indian nationalism.” 36 In the long
run, this protectionist move isolated the hill tracts and fixed their popula-
tions to a physical space suited to their “primitive” and “backward” habi-
tats. This contributed in further marginalizing, geographically and politi-
cally, the space to which the hill tribes and eventually the rest of NER
were assigned. Another implication of the Act was the deepening of a
“space-centric identity consciousness” among the local populations in the
region, particularly Assam, which became the cornerstone of ethnic as-
sertion and the secessionist demands in the wake of continuing immigra-
tion after 1947 and 1971. 37
Another key mapping exercise that transformed the fluid northeastern
frontier into a fixed international boundary was the drawing of the
McMahon Line in 1914. In 1905, an expedition led by Francis Younghus-
band attacked and gained control of Tibet. In 1914, after the Manchu
empire collapsed and Tibet declared its Independence, the British nego-
tiated an agreement with Tibet that drew the McMahon Line as the offi-
cial political boundary. This meant that Tibetan-speaking people on the
foothills of the Himalayas came under British India. China refused to
accept this Line as the official boundary but there was nothing much it
could do against the powerful British. Decades later, the McMahon Line
became the disputed border over which the 1962 Indo-China war broke
out. To this day, competing Indian and Chinese claims over what is now
Arunachal Pradesh stirs up political unrest within both federal and state
policy circles. 38
As cartographic practices advanced imperial interests in this part of
“Inner Asian Frontier” 39 or “Asian space,” 40 the northeastern borderland
emerged as a static location on fixed coordinates inside firm territorial
boundaries. The colonial rulers’ idea of a bounded, inland civilization in
close proximity to East and Southeast Asia was thus realized. This pro-
cess of calcifying boundaries led to the emergence of a discourse of geo-
graphical, political, and economic marginality that marred post-colonial
imaginations of a new nation.

PRODUCTION OF A MARGINAL SPACE

In a delicate but detailed portrayal of the historical formations that swept

through the Asian space stretching beyond the NER’s physical boundar-
ies into Burma, Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace brings to life the realities
of interconnected lives, spaces, and shared memories of history and cul-
ture as experiences of colonization, India’s anti-colonial struggle, and
World War II transformed the history of the region. 41 Narrating how
commoners and the Burmese royal family get caught in the crosshairs of
164 Babyrani Yumnam

British invasion and the subsequent implications in the late 1880s, his
story interweaves the dynamics of socio-spatial relations across Burma,
India, and Malaya. Most importantly, Ghosh draws attention to the fluid
cultural and economic exchanges that spanned across national boundar-
ies, imagined and real. These linkages were not merely a fictional recrea-
tion of the author’s imagination but concrete historical realities that were
ruptured when colonial cartographical surgeries transformed the NER
from a broad frontier tract to a narrow frontier of rule.
Accounts of the long-established network of economic and cultural
links between what is now South, East, and Southeast Asia can be seen in
the works of Laichen Sun, David Ludden, S. N. Baruah, Thant Myint-U,
and Sanghamitra Misra. 42 People living in these geographically and cul-
turally contiguous areas have used both land and water (sea and inland
waterways) routes for movement of goods and people. The sea route was
frequently used, operating from Rangoon to Chittagong on the coasts of
Bengal and through the inland waterways on the Brahmaputra, Surma,
and Barak. The overland routes were more tedious as they spanned
across difficult hill terrains and were mostly used by the hill tribes inhab-
iting the interiors of the region. Some of these routes were the Tangup
Pass in Burma’s Arakan Hills, Sikkim’s Chumbi valley-Tibet road to Chi-
na, Manipur-Burma road via Kabow valley (now in Burma), and the
Kalewa-Tamu route. 43 One of the most important roads was the Patkai-
Pangchau Pass that originated from Upper Assam (Ledo), passed
through Arunachal and reached Mytkina in the Hukoong Valley in Bur-
ma. 44 This route was crucial during World War II when the retreating
Allied Forces had to check the Japanese army from advancing further
inland into British India. Known as the Stilwell Road, this road connected
Yunnan to Upper Assam through the Upper Irrawady and Chindwin
regions in Burma, and was considered a part of the southern Old Silk
Route. 45
After the 1826 Anglo-Burmese War and the British conquest of Upper
Burma in 1885, these routes were no longer used and cross-border link-
ages were disconnected. In 1937, the British government formally separ-
ated Burma from the rest of India, 46 closing off its frontiers and creating
the NER with little or no connections with its old ties in the Bay of
Bengal, Tibet, Burma, or Yunnan. When the McMahon Line was estab-
lished, it closed the Chumbi valley-Tibet road to China. Connections and
linkages were finally severed when undivided India was partitioned ac-
cording to the two-nation theory. In 1947, Calcutta became part of West
Bengal while a large part of the remaining countryside dependent on
Calcutta’s ports and industries was made East Pakistan with Dacca, or
Dhaka, as its capital. Chittagong was no longer accessible to the NER,
and the major cities of Sylhet and Dacca with which it traded were also
cut off. If imperial politics distanced the Northeast from its neighbors in
the east, the Partition cut off the remaining ties, not only separating it
 From Frontiers to Borders 165

from “mainland” India but also producing an isolated, landlocked terri-

torial space that came to be defined as India’s border zone on the cusp of
South and Southeast Asia.

PARTITION, INDEPENDENCE, AND NATION-BUILDING

In eastern India, the 1947 Partition did not mean a simple territorial bisec-
tion of Bengal into Muslim-dominated East Bengal and Hindu-dominat-
ed West Bengal; Hindu and Muslim settlements were not easily divisible
by a line, imaginary or not. The Bengal Boundary Commission, tasked
with deciding the new border between India and Pakistan, faced ambigu-
ities and indecisiveness about the demarcation of territories. 47 Chaired by
Cyril Radcliffe, the Commission authorized the Radcliffe Line that carved
out a patchwork of four geographically non-contiguous pieces—East
Bengal at the center surrounded by Tripura in the east, Cooch Behar on
the north, and West Bengal comprising twelve districts on the west sur-
rounded East Bengal or East Pakistan. 48 Willem van Schendel, using a
series of maps and figures illustrating how the Partition created the com-
munal dynamics of the eastern border, explains how the Bengal border
was not exclusively a Hindu-Muslim divide:
For almost three-fifths of its length, the border was not a Muslim/non-
Muslim divide. Only 26 percent of the border separated a Muslim-
majority area in East Pakistan from a Hindu-dominated area in India,
and an additional 15 percent separated a Muslim-majority area in East
Pakistan from a Christian- or Buddhist-majority in India. 49
In the other sections of the border located along the Garo Hills/Khasi and
Jaintia Hills in what is now Meghalaya, the Muslim-dominated areas
faced the Christian or Buddhist-dominated areas. This shows that the
idea of a Hindu-Muslim divide along the Bengal border only served to
reproduce dominant Partition narratives as a narrow regional history of
only the Bengalis and marginalized the histories of other communities
that were separated by the Radcliffe Line along the border segments of
Assam, Tripura, Burma (settled by Hindus but not Bengalis), and the
Chittagong Hill Tracts/Assam or Mizoram where neither Islam nor Hin-
duism had significant importance.
Van Schendel’s argument not only exposes the faulty assumption that
Hindu-Muslim dichotomy characterizes the Partition’s legacy, particular-
ly in eastern India, but also highlights the fissures in the nation-building
project that emerged from the margins of dominant nationalist historiog-
raphy after 1947. In fact, the reality of the Partition was imposed upon a
region that had very little political stake, before or during the drawing of
the Radcliffe Line. The spatial and temporal configurations that emerged
in the immediate aftermath of the postcolonial years remained a gray
166 Babyrani Yumnam

area for much of the dominant Partition scholarship. As local residents

and refugees struggled to cope with the irreversible social and political
reality on both sides of the border and in the borderland beyond, a storm
that would challenge independent India’s nation-building project was
brewing in many parts of the NER.
India’s nation-building project remains a contentious issue for North
East India. During the colonial period, the “tribal” belts were ruled as
part of Assam but indirectly through their local chiefs. These included
the Naga Hills to the north of Imphal and Lushai Hills to the south,
which had been heavily militarized following the 1942 Japan-Allied
Forces War. As the transfer of power was being worked out, the impend-
ing Partition was a cause of concern for the ethnic groups and small
kingdoms in the region. The Naga National Council formed in 1946
wanted complete independence and urged the colonial authorities to ex-
clude them from the yet-to-be-formed India. Post-Independence, the new
Indian government 50 was not willing to negotiate actual independence
for the Naga territories; subsequently, the Nagas refused to recognize
New Delhi’s authority. The Naga secessionist movement that emerged
out of this crisis demanded a separate homeland that would include
Naga-inhabited territories in Assam, Manipur, and Arunachal Pradesh.
By the 1950s the Naga insurgency was already at its peak and till today, it
continues to press its demands.
The Merger Agreement 51 became the primary cause of disagreement
for most of the princely states pressured to join the Indian Union; it
influenced many of the nationalist movements that sprung in the NER
post-Independence. 52 These movements also pressed secessionist de-
mands, often arguing that the NER was autonomous before colonization
and never a part of the larger Indian polity. In addition, postcolonial
political indifference and “neglect” towards people of the region spurred
nationalist sentiments to adopt an anti-India stand. 53 During the late
1960s, the upsurge in Naxalite threats in the Bengal corridor along with
violent separatist movements in Nagaland, Assam, Mizoram, and Mani-
pur marked a turning point in the Indian government’s statecraft. The
federal state conferred autonomous statuses and statehoods 54 to prov-
inces like the NEFA as part of a political move to pacify dissenting voices.
For example, the state of Nagaland was separated from Assam Province
in 1963, Meghalaya and Mizoram in 1971, and Arunachal Pradesh in
1987. Manipur and Tripura became full-fledged states in 1972. However,
such political moves did not do much to pacify the fragmented points of
resistance which stymied all efforts to maintain India’s nation-building
project. Instead, the NER became heavily militarized to quell the militant
uprisings, thereby becoming locked in a cycle of violent separatism,
deepening poverty, 55 and political instability. In addition to the dissent-
ing voices against Indian federalism, the NER is also beset with inter-
group conflicts along ethnic lines and competing claims over certain terri-
 From Frontiers to Borders 167

tories. The National Socialist Council of Nagaland (Isak-Muivah faction),

for instance, has been demanding the merging of contiguous territories in
Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, and Manipur for the formation of Greater
Nagaland. Such demands have been met with violent protests, particu-
larly in Manipur where violent protests and unrest crippled the state for
more than two months in 2001.
In Assam, post-Partition immigration set the ground for violent resis-
tance against the Indian government’s citizenship laws concerning the
East Pakistani immigrants. Population exchange on the eastern side of
the border after Partition started much later, continued throughout much
of the 1960s and 1970s, and even into the present day. As “illegal” immi-
gration from Bangladesh continued, the homecoming thesis was substi-
tuted with infiltration thesis and border control measures were taken up
to prevent further immigration. Between 1979 and 1985, the Assam
Movement gathered momentum in their efforts to address the contested
issue of legalizing “foreigners” through voter registration. The Assam
Accord signed after the tumultuous 1983 elections put an end to the
Assam movement as the citizenship laws stipulated that anyone entering
Assam after 1966 would be deemed illegal. 56 However, with Bangla-
desh’s constant denial of the presence of illegal immigrants in India and
the Indian government’s reported lack of commitment to prevent further
influx of immigrants, violent clashes became frequent especially in the
1980s. Subsequently, insurgent groups such as the United Liberation
Front of Assam emerged as an offshoot of these developments.
In the decades that followed, the NER became more of a policy head-
ache for New Delhi as political instability and violence thwarted any
attempts towards realizing the “imagined community” 57 of a unified In-
dia. Federal initiatives to usher peace through development in the NER
have been criticized as “cosmetic federalism” 58 or a “mere glint in the
eye” 59 without addressing these multilayered voices of conflict. Resolv-
ing these conflicts is, however, easier said than done as colonial and
postcolonial state-making practices over a period of more than a century
produced some irreversible patterns of political and social turmoil. What
emerges from the these discussions is that the creation of the NER as a
residual and marginal territorial space is, by no means, an accident.

CONCLUSION

The NER, decades after colonialism, continues to be a contested space

where questions of national and ethnic identities, belongingness, and al-
ienation are actively played out. These questions have to be located with-
in the loci of colonial expansion, anticolonial struggles, and postcolonial
national historiography experienced by the region and its peoples. Thus,
a rethinking of the historical specificities of the region and its relation to
168 Babyrani Yumnam

the restructuring of wider processes of state formation and capitalist ex-

pansion during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries allows a better
understanding of the northeastern borderlands. This chapter has high-
lighted how the creation of the NER as a denigrated space distant from
the Indian political heartland must be anchored in the historical turn of
events that produced territorial and political fault lines in the form of
national boundaries. In what van Schendel refers to as the transformation
from a “notional to a national border,” 60 a social space of marginality and
isolation was produced through successive phases of state practices such
as colonial intervention, anticolonial struggles, Partition, and postcoloni-
al experiences. This transformation reproduced new definitions of iden-
tities and cross-border relations in its wake.
In exploring the historiography of the NER, I have also drawn atten-
tion to the discursive silence about the Partition’s implications on the
very borderlands it created in the east. Dominant Partition narratives are
mainly confined to the study of Punjab or Bengal and contain little or no
accounts of other areas directly affected by the drawing of boundaries
such as Bihar, Assam, Rajasthan, or Sindh. 61 In the East, Bengal-centric
perspectives of the impact of the Partition obscure and marginalize the
histories of other areas and communities affected by the 1947 crisis. For
instance, there is no study on how the Partition created the borders be-
tween Meghalaya, Mizoram, Tripura, Cooch Behar, and Assam; how As-
sam was partitioned; and how creation of East Pakistan also carved out
an isolated, landlocked NER. In addition, existing research and historical
accounts explored the politics of those processes that led to the crisis but
not about what happened thereafter. Perhaps Salman Rushdie’s Mid-
night’s Children 62 and Amitav Ghosh’s Shadow Lines 63 come closest to
starting a much-needed avenue for analyzing people’s life experiences
and the far-reaching consequences of the 1947 Partition as they struggled
to understand and cope with new developments in the nascent democra-
cies of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.
Both Ghosh’s and Rushdie’s works highlight an intersecting terrain of
borderland studies and Partition scholarship that has seen little academic
attention. This terrain holds an exciting promise of a discursive field that
would not only engage with border realities (such as population move-
ments, border disputes and control, and dissenting voices) but would
also allow a study of the social history of Partition. This, I believe, would
open up the grounds for deciphering the uneven distribution of the pains
of Partition, 64 and how borderlands influence and shape post-Partition
societies, economies, and centers of state power.
My arguments in this chapter are not an oversimplification or general-
ization of the complex social realities and diverse set of problems that all
communities in the northeastern borderlands face and live with. In fact
the diversity of social experiences and narratives is what I am calling
attention to—a move beyond partisan positions and engagement with the
 From Frontiers to Borders 169

borderland in order to tease out the rich social histories of the borderef-
fect on state formation. Finally, this chapter has highlighted that the com-
plex historical formations in the NER do not fit straightforward political
or social binaries; rather it is the intricate interweaving of multiple narra-
tives that holds the answer to the questions of Babu, Dr. Dam, and a
million others living in India’s northeastern borderlands.

NOTES

1. North East India comprises seven states: Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur,
Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, and Tripura; Sikkim became the eighth state in 2002.
The term “North East India” is often used as a homogenizing category to refer to the
region, its cultures, and people. My usage of the term in the chapter does not conform
to this meaning; rather I use it to refer to the geographical category created by colonial
accounts and the Partition thereafter.
2. Siddhartha Deb, Point of Return (New York: Harper Collins, 2003),196.
3. Ibid., 151.
4. Ibid., 211.
5. For want of a better term, I use the word “region” in the contextual meaning of a
physical, geographical space, but this usage is not an attempt to characterize it as a
homogeneous space of cultural and physical characteristics. Neither is it to fit into the
domain of production of specialized knowledge, i.e., area studies.
6. The term “tribes,” or “hill tribes,” has been used in the colonial civilizational
matrix of the primitive versus civilized. Initially used for administrative purposes, it
has come to define tribal populations all over India. For discussions on the concept,
see Virginius Xaxa, “Tribes as Indigenous People of India,” Economic and Political
Weekly 34, 51 (December 18–24, 1999): 3589–95, and Andre Beteille, “The Concept of
Tribe with Special Reference to India,” European Journal of Sociology 27, 2 (November
1986): 296–318.
7. I use “Burma” instead of Myanmar to keep in line with the historical references.
8. Sanjoy Barbora, “Under the Invisibility Cloak—Re-imagining the ‘Northeast.’”
Biblio XIII, 5 and 6 (May–June 2008): 15.
9. David Ludden, “Where Is Assam?” Himal Southasian 18.3 (2005).
10. It measures just twenty miles on the eastern side and thirteen miles on the west.
11. See Alexander Mackenzie, The North-East Frontier of India (Delhi: Mittal Publica-
tions, 1979); R. Boileau Pemberton, Report on The Eastern Frontier Region of British India
(Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press, 1835); J. P. Mills, “The Assam-Burma Frontier,” The
Geographical Journal, 67.4 (1926), 289–99; L. W. Shakespear, History of Upper Assam,
Upper Burmah and North Eastern Frontier (London: Macmillan and Co. Ltd., 1914); and
Verrier Elwin, India’s North-East Frontier in the Nineteenth Century (Madras, India: Ox-
ford University Press 1959) for further details.
12. The concept of “frontiers” was loosely applied to land tracts that lay in the
outlying areas of “natural frontiers” like mountains, rivers, or deserts. See Curzon,
Frontiers—The Romanes Lecture (London: Oxford at the Clarendon Press 1907).
13. Edmund Leach, “The Frontiers of Burma.” Comparative Studies in Society and
History, 3 no.1 (1960), 49–68.
14. Correspondence from Elliott to Ripon, June 26, 1881. Cited in Peter Robb, “The
Colonial State and Constructions of Indian Identity: An Example of the Northeast
frontier in the 1880s,” Modern Asian Studies 31 (1997): 252–53.
15. Alexander Mackenzie, The North-East Frontier of India (Delhi: Mittal Publications,
1979), Ch.1.
170 Babyrani Yumnam

16. Curzon used the term “unscientific frontiers” to refer to the undefined geo-
graphical markers that used natural topography such as lakes, mountains, and forests
as boundaries.
17. Robert L. Solomon, “Boundary Concepts and Practices in Southeast Asia,”
World Politics 23.1 (1970): 5–7.
18. Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation (Hon-
olulu: University of Hawai’i Press 1993).
19. Nicholas Dirks, Foreword to Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, by Bernard
Cohen (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 81.
20. The NEFA or present-day Arunachal Pradesh was carved out of “Naga coun-
try.” This administrative imposition laid the grounds for present-day territorial dis-
putes between the states of Nagaland, Assam, Manipur, and Arunachal Pradesh as the
Naga demand for an exclusive homeland is focused on this contentious point.
21. Peter Robb, “The Colonial State and Constructions of Indian Identity: An Exam-
ple of the Northeast Frontier in the 1880s,” Modern Asian Studies 31 (1997): 258.
22. The Inner Line is still in operation today in the tribal areas within the states of
Manipur, Nagaland, Mizoram, and Arunachal Pradesh. Visitors, both Indians and
foreigners, are required to obtain a permit to enter the restricted areas.
23. Alexander Mackenzie, The North-East Frontier of India (Delhi: Mittal Publications,
1979), 56.
24. The Dooars were the foothill tracts between Assam and Bhutan which supplied
timber for railway expansion in the region.
25. David Ludden, “Presidential Address: Maps in the Mind and Mobility of Asia,”
Journal of Asian Studies 62, 4 (2003): 1057–78.
26. Sanghamitra Misra, Becoming a Borderland: The Politics of Space and Identity in
Colonial Northeastern India (New Delhi: Routledge, 2011); Jayeeta Sharma, Empire’s Gar-
den: Assam and the Making of India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).
27. Particularly Muslims from East Bengal, the Oraons, Santhals, and Mundas from
famine-stricken areas of Bihar, and Nepalese cattle-herders were encouraged to settle.
28. Sanjib Baruah (ed.), Beyond Counter-Insurgency: Breaking the Impasse in Northeast
India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009).
29. Also commonly known as the Qing dynasty.
30. Thant Myint-U, Where China Meets India (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux,
2011), 226–27.
31. These pre-capital territories included the princely kingdoms of Tripura and
Manipur where a British political resident was stationed to maintain suzerainty and
check any dissident political activity. The Assam plains were the only part of the
Northeast frontier where the British invested in infrastructure and sought large re-
turns. See Bodhistava Kar, “When Was the Postcolonial? A History of Policing Impos-
sible Lines,” in Sanjib Baruah (ed.), Beyond Counter-Insurgency: Breaking the Impasse in
Northeast India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009), 52–60.
32. Ibid.
33. Reference in communication sent from the agent to the Governor-General (of
NEFA and Commissioner of Assam) to the Secretary (to the Government of Bengal in
the Political Department) titled Demarcation of British Frontier between Assam and Bhoo-
tan No 114, Dated 17 April 1872. See Bodhisatva Kar, “When Was the Postcolonial? A
History of Policing Impossible Lines” for details.
34. Ibid., 72.
35. The Excluded areas were the Balipara Frontier Tract and Sadiya Frontier tract
on Assam’s northern boundary, the Naga Hills District, Manipur State, and Lushai
Hills on the eastern side. The “Partially Excluded Areas” were North Cachar Hills, the
Khasi and Jaintia Hills, the Garo Hills, and the Mikir Hills. See Robert Reid, “The
Excluded Areas of Assam,” The Geographical Journal 3.1/2 (Jan–Feb 1944): 18.
36. Ramachandra Guha, “Savaging the Civilized: Verrier Elwin and the Tribal
Question in Late Colonial India,” Special Issue of Economic and Political Weekly
31.35–37 (Sept. 1996): 2385.
 From Frontiers to Borders 171

37. Sanjib Baruah, “Assam: Confronting a Failed Partition,” Seminar 591 (Nov 2008).
38. Alistair Lamb, The McMahon Line: A Study in the Relations between India, China,
and Tibet, 1904–1914 (London: Routledge, 1966); Karunakar Gupta, “The McMahon
Line 1911–45: The British Legacy,” China Quarterly 47 (1971): 521–45; Parshotam Meh-
ra, “A Forgotten Chapter in History of the Northeast Frontier: 1914–36,” Journal of
Asian Studies 3, 1 (1972): 299–308; and Arthur H. Steiner, “India Looks to Her Northern
Frontiers,” Far Eastern Survey 28.11 (1959): 167–73.
39. W. Kirk, “The Inner Asian Frontier of India,” Transactions and Papers (Institute of
British Geographers), 31 (1962): 131–68.
40. David Ludden, “Presidential Address: Maps in the Mind and Mobility of Asia,”
Journal of Asian Studies, 62, 4 (2003): 1057–78.
41. Amitav Ghosh, The Glass Palace (New York: Random House, 2002).
42. Laichen Sun’s Ming-Southeast Asian Overland Interactions 1368–1644, PhD disser-
tation, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan (2000); David Ludden, “Presidential Ad-
dress: Maps in the Mind and Mobility of Asia; Journal of Asian Studies 62, 4 (2003):
1057–78; D. Nath (ed.), Re-opening of the Stilwell Road: Prospects and Problems. (New
Delhi: Anamika Publishers and Distributors 2004); B. G. Verghese, India’s Northeast
Resurgent: Ethnicity, Insurgency, Governance and Development (New Delhi: Konark,
1996); S. N. Baruah, Tribes of Indo-Burma Border (A Socio-Cultural History of the Inhabi-
tants of the Patkie Range) (Columbia, Missouri: South Asia Books,1991); T. Myint-U,
Where India meets China (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2011); S. Misra, Becom-
ing a Borderland, Changing Frontiers and Spaces, (New Delhi: Routledge, 2011); G. E.
Gerini’s, Researches on Ptolemy’s Geography of Eastern India (Further India and Indo-Malay
Archipelago) (New Delhi: Oriental Books Reprint Corporation, 1974) on Ptolemy’s
Geography of Further India; and Naorem Sanajaoba’s Manipur: Past and Present, Vol. I.
(New Delhi: Mittal Publications, 1988) also touches upon such linkages. Though the
terms/categories used in Ptolemy’s work to describe the region, its people, and topog-
raphy are spelled differently from commonly used terms or categories today, Gerini’s
interpretations of the book describes the “Further India” territory as inclusive of mod-
ern-day North East India.
43. See D. Nath (ed.), Re-opening of the Stilwell Road: Prospects and Problems. (New
Delhi: Manohar, 2002).
44. It was known as the “Old Opium Track” to the British and was used mainly by
the local Shans, Singphos, Nagas, and other hill tribes for small trade, and smuggling
of opium too. It was known as the Hukwang/Old Bisa Route among the Assamese and
Namrup/Bisa among the Burmese.
45. During the War, thousands of refugees took this road to cross into India from
the Burmese side. See Liu Xinru’s Ancient India and Ancient China: Trade and Religious
Exchanges, AD 1–600 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Tan Yun-Shan’s Cul-
tural Interchange between India and China (Shantiniketan: Sino-Indian Cultural Society,
1995); William Robinson’s Hill Tracts between India and Burma, (New Delhi: Vivek
Publishing Co., 1978); and B. N. Mukherjee’s External Trade of Early North-Eastern India
(Stosius Inc/Advent Books Division, 1992) for documentations of this route. Also see
Laichen Sun’s Ming-Southeast Asian Overland Interactions 1368–1644 (Ph.D. Disserta-
tion. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2000). Commonly traded items included
Chinese silk, padded jackets, colored cloth, dried fruits, brick, tea, jade, silver, gold,
lacquered items, etc., but the volume of trade was not high.
46. Though the formal separation was announced in April 1937, actual withdrawal
of the Indian army did not come into effect until early 1941.
47. Willem van Schendel’s The Bengal Borderland Beyond State and Nation in South
Asia (New York: Anthem Press, 2005) discusses the political stalemate that hung over
the Boundary Commission’s tasks and the consequent arbitrary decisions resulting
from it.
48. Ibid., 43.
49. Ibid., 43–54.
172 Babyrani Yumnam

50. Under Nehru’s Prime Ministership and political advice of Sardar Patel and V. P.
Menon, there were many non-transparent moves by the new Indian government
which led to further discontent among the Nagas. For a detailed analysis see Sajal
Nag, Contesting Marginality; Ethnicity, Insurgency and Subnationalism in North-East India
(New Delhi: Manohar, 2002).
51. Merger of the Northeastern states into the Indian Dominion followed different
timelines between 1947 and 1949.
52. S. Nag, Contesting Marginality: Ethnicity, Insurgency and Subnationalism in North-
East India (New Delhi: Manohar, 2002); N. Sanajaoba, Manipur: Past and Present, Vol. I
(New Delhi: Mittal Publications, 1988); Sumit Sarkar, Modern India (New Delhi: Mac-
millan 1983).
53. The anti-India stand is not confined to the political realm, in fact it extends to
social and cultural differentiation between the “Indians” or “mainland” vis-à-vis the
“North East people” or “tribes.”
54. States here refer to the provincial territories within the Indian Union.
55. For a population of 38.5 million (2001 Census data), unemployment rate was 12
percent and an industrial productivity of 2.16 percent of the GDP as compared to the
national average of 27 percent. By 2009–10, poverty rates had increased in Assam,
Manipur, Meghalaya, and Mizoram.
56. See the controversial Illegal Migrants Determination by Tribunals (or IMDT)
passed in 1983 and the subsequent amendment to the Assam Accord Act in 1985 in
van Schendel’s The Bengal Borderland: Beyond State and Nation in South Asia (New York:
Anthem, 2005), and S. Baruah (ed.), Beyond Counter-Insurgency: Breaking the Impasse in
Northeast India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009).
57. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism (New York: Verso, 2006).
58. Sanjib Baruah, “Cosmetic Federalism and the Politics of Development in North-
east India,” Development and Change 34, 5 (Nov. 2003): 915–39.
59. James Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland South-
east Asia (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009).
60. Van Schendel, The Bengal Borderland: Beyond State and Nation in South Asia (New
York: Anthem Press, 2005), 48.
61. On Bihar, see Papiya Ghosh, “Partition’s Biharis,” Comparative Studies of South
Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 17.2 (1997): 21–34, on Assam see S. Baruah, India
Against Itself: Assam and Politics of Nationality, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylva-
nia Press and New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), on Sindh see Sarah Ansari,
“The Movement of Indian Muslims to West Pakistan after 1847: Partition Related
Migration and Its Consequences for the Pakistani Province of Sind,” in Judith Brown
and Rosemary Foot (eds.), Migration the Asian Experience (Oxford: St. Martin’s Press
1994), and on Rajasthan see Ian Copland, “The Further shores of Partition: Ethnic
Cleansing in Rajasthan, 1947,” Past and Present 160 (1998): 203-39.
62. Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children (New York: Penguin, 1980).
63. Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines: A Novel (New York: First Mariner Books,
2005).
64. David Ludden, India and South Asia: (Oxford: One World, 2002), 226.

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 ELEVEN
Looking East
Melodramatic Narrative, Ecotheater, and the
“Forgotten Long March” in Jangam

Amit R. Baishya

In his 2004 book, Willem van Schendel writes: “1947 stands between the
creation of a separate colonial state of British Burma in 1937 and the
collapse of the state of Pakistan (and the emergence of Bangladesh) in
1971.” He adds, “In their eagerness to present the Partition of 1947 as a
unique event . . . writers have tended to ignore its embeddedness in this
longer-term process, thereby marginalizing the relevance of the first (Bur-
ma) and the third (Bangladesh) partitions.” 1
I am skeptical whether 1971 is a “partition,” although it is definitely
related to the violent legacies of 1947. My focus here is on one of the
major events that occurred just after the much less studied “first parti-
tion”: the “forgotten long march,” 2 where an estimated 450,000–500,000
Burmese Indians walked to British India fleeing from the Japanese ad-
vance and also from escalating ethnic violence in Burma. The forgotten
long march was a culmination of a series of anti-Indian riots that had
been raging since the 1930s. Burma was finally incorporated into the
British Indian state in 1885 after a prolonged spell of wars between the
British and the Burmese. Although contact between the Burmese king-
doms and the Indian subcontinent existed during the precolonial period,
a lot of Indians migrated to Burma during the colonial era. The Indian
migrants, some of whom went voluntarily and others coercively taken as
indentured laborers, were of mixed socio-economic status. While the
Chettiar moneylenders from Tamil Nadu were despised by the Burmese

177
178 Amit R. Baishya

for gaining control of “over 3 million acres of paddy fields in the low-
lands of Irrawaddy delta,” 3 a lot of Indian settlers were poor farmers,
laborers or petty traders. However, “Indian migrants and settlers were
the most visible faces of the colonial domination of Burma.” 4 While many
Indians stayed behind in Burma after the Japanese attack, the spectacular
fall of the colonial state impelled others to flee towards India in panic. An
estimated 10,000–50,000 people died during the journey.
After a few refugees managed to escape via air and sea, the rest took
three successive overland routes: via the Arakan to Chittagong, via the
Chindwin valley into Manipur, and finally, through the hilly passes of
the Hukawng valley into Lido in Assam. While the long march was a
comparable humanitarian crisis like 1947, very few works have dealt
with it. Amitav Ghosh’s observation in a 2001 interview that there is a
great “silence” about this catastrophe from the Indian side still holds
largely true. 5 Consideration of Indian voices will help initiate the “per-
spectival shift” where “no longer are we looking at devastated humanity
through the horrified yet fascinated eyes of the imperial traveler, bureau-
crat or novelist . . . we are now inside the minds and bodies of the dying
millions who were the subjects of British empire’s palliative attention.” 6
Furthermore, such shifts will also facilitate an engagement with the expe-
riences that colonized subjects had with the policies of care, or lack of it,
of the colonial state, and also with the fraught processes through which
former subjects of the colonial empire were gradually produced as citi-
zens of the postcolonies.
Since the publication of Ghosh’s The Glass Palace, there has been a slow
but steady trickle of memoirs in English about this harrowing trek. 7 To
my knowledge, the 1982 Sahitya Academi Award–winning Assamese
novel Jangam (Movement) by the deceased Assamese author Debendra-
nath Acharya is the only sustained fictional treatment of the long march. 8
While The Glass Palace focuses largely on the Indian and Burmese bour-
geoisie in urban centers like Rangoon, Jangam zooms in on the travails of
a group of impoverished Indian farmers as they trek through treacherous
jungle terrain from the fictional village of Manku near Mandalay through
the Hukawng valley. My reading of Jangam has two major aims. First, I
place Jangam’s melodramatic family saga within relatively established
narrative paradigms in Partition studies, elaborating both its similarities
and differences from “mainland” Indian narratives. I also discuss how
the melodramatic codes of the text project an idea of a common “human”
essence that leads readers to interpret it as an allegory of a “universal”
human condition.
In the second section of the essay, I argue that a far more contingent
and precarious idea of the “human” emerges in Jangam’s “ecotheater”
(my coinage). In other words, the vision of the undifferentiated human
advanced by the melodramatic narrative is repeatedly undercut by the
ambivalent figurations of non-human otherness. I will explore Jangam’s
 Looking East 179

representation of this ecotheater where the “human” and its “natural”/

”mechanical” others interact with each other in complex ways, also com-
ing into severe conflict. Adopting an ecocritical approach, I will demon-
strate that the environment emerges as a complex, dynamic subject that
functions ambivalently as a source of menace for the “human” and also a
model for emulation. Central here are the ambivalent significations of the
references to machines, insects, and plants. Furthermore, an ecocritical
approach illustrates that colonialism, mass displacement, and war results
in the “murder, displacement and impoverishment of people, animals,
and their environments.” 9 This emphasis on mutual “impoverishment” is
central for my reading of Jangam. I contrast this to standard allegorical
interpretations of Jangam where the “human” and “nature” are opposed
to each other. For instance, Sailen Bharali writes that: “The journey con-
ducted with unimaginable physical and mental agony seems to be a sym-
bol for the endless, forward-moving journey of human life.” 10 Prafulla
Kotoky says: “It is as if . . . (Jangam) is a priceless history of humankind
that, in every age, conquers thousands of unsurmountable obstacles and
emerges victorious over nature.” 11 However, close attention to the con-
tingent process of the construction of the “human,” I argue, reveals very
different figurations of “nature.” “Nature” is not shown to exist separate
from the “human”; neither is it an entity to be conquered. Instead, the
text illustrates that: 1) at an ontological level, forms of nonhuman other-
ness provide models for survival that the contingent “human” can emu-
late, and 2) at a materialist level, while phenomena like war impoverish
both humans and the environment, “nature” itself is never a passive
agent. It displays forms of agency that we need to read differently. Parti-
tion studies need to pay closer attention to such representations that
engage with the fluid interactions between “nature” and the “human.”
This, I believe, will shift focus from the anthropocentric norm in this field
of study.

ALL IN THE FAMILY: MELODRAMATIC CODES IN JANGAM

Unlike The Glass Palace where a certain version of the good life ends
suddenly with terror arriving from the air, catastrophe reaches Manku in
slow waves. Manku is populated primarily by poverty-stricken Indian
farmers whom the narrator characterizes as “guhi poruwa” (“tiny ants”), 12
and former Burmese landowners who are reduced to conditions of penu-
ry after mortgaging their property to the Indian Chettiars. In the absence
of reliable information about the war, the main source of news in the
village is rumor. The circulation of rumors terrifies the villagers. Even
though the Indians and Burmese are shown to coexist as a “poriyal” (fam-
ily) with differing degrees of interaction and obligation, the panic-induc-
ing quality of rumor forces the two communities to part ways—the In-
180 Amit R. Baishya

dians of Manku head out for British India with only a few possessions on
their backs. From this point onwards, the troubles besetting the family of
a Burmese-Indian farmer named Ramgobinda and his companions be-
come one of the central foci of the plot.
The family and the travails that beset it are basic elements of melodra-
matic narratives. Recent work on South Asian cinematic melodrama sug-
gests that this genre should be considered open-ended where its “wist-
ful . . . longing for utopian change points to a social-critical function.” 13 It
is important to consider the “play of desire(s)” that melodrama initiates
or intervenes in. 14 Ashutosh Vasudevan says that melodrama “invite(s)
us at least temporarily to disengage from a relationship to history as
something grounded in materially defined socio-political existence.”
Such forms of temporary disengagement render history “manipulable, as
open to the play of desire which is in the active process of constitution.” 15
In Jangam, the separation and partial reunification of Ramgobinda’s
family becomes a metonymic device that facilitates a temporary disen-
gagement from material history and initiates a play of desire seeking to
resolve the traumas of separation and mass death. In his study of post-
independence Assamese cinema, Anirben Baishya says that:
the theme of the separated family . . . harks back to a cultural memory
of a different kind . . . not to the memory of . . . (1947) . . . but to the
traumatic memory of the Second World War. Mandalay in Burma was
home to a large Assamese population during that period. When the
Japanese invaded Burma . . . a . . . chunk of this population returned to
Assam on foot. 16
Baishya further says that there is at least one film in Assam that talks
directly about the march—Phani Sarma’s Dhumuha (1957)—which is
about the family of Biseswar Chowdhury. Chowdhury’s youngest child
is lost during the journey and is reunited with his biological parents years
later when they come to work as servants in his house.
My point is not that Jangam was directly influenced by narratives like
Dhumuha; instead, I want to insert Acharya’s novel within a pre-existing
melodramatic narrative framework of familial separation/reunification
that is common to many partition narratives. A relatively unique spin
occurs in Jangam to this common narrative. Through the portrayal of the
destinies of a particular family we see a pre-existing “national” family
being destroyed, and a “universal-human” family coming into being. In
the novel, the symbolic panacea for particularistic nationalist sentiment is
an undifferentiated vision of the “human” where ethnic and national
differences are subsumed. Consider how the text opens—Ramgobinda
tells his Burmese compatriots that the Burmese and Indians had lived in
Manku like “older and younger brothers” (kokai-bhai). 17 His Burmese
friends agree. Interestingly, the plague of inter-ethnic divisions is shown
as not “native” to Manku, but arrives from elsewhere: from Burmese
 Looking East 181

nationalists who do not belong to the village. These “external” visitations

destroy the idyllic representation of inter-community amity in Manku.
The only Burmese nationalist from Manku who is given extended voice—
the youthful Nungnao—occupies a peculiar inside-outside position with
respect to this representation of “foreignness” destroying an idyllic com-
munity. In the earlier sections of the text, his nationalist convictions clash
with the humanist outlook of the village elders. In a conversation with
the village elders and the petrified Indians, Nungnao accuses the earlier
generation of pusillanimity and inaction which has led Burma to its cur-
rent state. 18 Although Nungnao feels for his Indian “brothers,” he is not
willing to compromise on the fact that they have to leave.
Nungnao, however, aids the Indians of Manku to flee. For this “trans-
gression,” he is murdered by the shadowy band of Burmese nationalists,
and his mangled body is thrown in the courtyard of his father, Jayanao.
One trajectory of the family narrative comes to a close in chapter 15—the
only chapter in the middle that returns to Manku after the expulsion of
the Indians. After the death of Nungnao, we come across an exchange
between Jayanao and Ba-Mao, a prominent village elder of Manku. Jaya-
nao says that “poison” (bih) has entered people’s minds and that this bih
will soon spread across all of Burma. In response Jayanao laments and
asks why everyone in the country cannot stay united like elder and
younger brothers. 19 This exchange is predicated on the idea that a settled
national “family” existed prior to the infiltration of the poison spread by
the plague of particularistic nationalism. Jayanao’s pathos-filled query as
to why people in Burma cannot stay together like “elder” and “younger”
brothers in a “family” (poriyal) once again gestures to the topoi of the
break-up of the idyllic national family.
If the national family is irretrievably broken with the expulsion of the
Indians, the narrative engineers the formation of a universal-human fam-
ily. After their expulsion, Ramgobinda’s aged mother dies on the way
while Lachhmi, his wife, disappears with their newly born second son
when she is taken away by British military officials for emergency medi-
cal treatment. Ramgobinda is left behind with his first-born, the seven-
year-old Thanu. After Ramgobinda reaches Assam, he searches desper-
ately for Lachhmi and the infant in the relief camps. The trauma of the
journey and the despair Ramgobinda feels results in him losing his rea-
son. Miraculously, Lachhmi and the infant son are eventually found in
the relief camp after Ramgobinda goes mad. By this time, Lachhmi too
has succumbed to madness. There is no scene of recognition—we are
unclear about what eventually happens to the couple.
A surrogate family, however, is formed on the way. The group from
Manku meets a British pastor named Father Berry. Later, they come
across an Anglo-Burmese girl named Ma-Pu (also known by the Chris-
tian name Mary) in the deserted town of Unthaw. One of the leaders of
the Indian group, a young man named Chinti, develops a romantic at-
182 Amit R. Baishya

tachment for Ma-Pu. In the last chapter, Ma-Pu stays back in the relief
camp as a nurse and decides to take care of Ramgobinda’s children. Chin-
ti decides to stay with her as well. On the last page, Ma-Pu says that she
considers Father Berry to be like her father: a role the pastor accepts. 20 A
surrogate “universal” family is formed that is comprised of a British sub-
ject, an Anglo-Burmese girl, a young Indian-Burmese peasant, and the
children of Ramgobinda. The novel closes with a scene of the infant smil-
ing in his sleep, one that heralded a “new age” replete with “new
hope.” 21
If the closure of the text is definitely predicated on the melodramatic
codes of familial reunification, further overdeterminations are also evi-
dent in the characterizations. Consider, for instance, Ma-Pu’s English
name: Mary. To push the allegorical resonances with this invocation of
universal motherhood further, Ma-Pu/Mary also stays behind in the
camp as a nurse to tend to the needy. Father Berry’s character, too, is
quite “flat”—he exists as the primary mouthpiece for the text’s humanist
outlook. Come what may, he discharges his human “responsibilities”
(kortobyo)—for instance, giving people, British or Indian, a decent burial
in the forest. I don’t use the term “flat” in a pejorative sense here; rather, I
suggest that Father Berry and Mary/Ma-Pu’s flatness are not in conflict
with Jangam’s realist elements. Instead, flatness, in this case, “simultane-
ously renders subordinate characters allegorical and, in its compelling
distortions, calls attention to the subordination that underlies allegory.” 22
Therefore, I suggest that within the distributional matrix of Jangam, “flat”
characters like Father Berry and Ma-Pu play important organizational
functions, merging realist descriptions with allegorical figurations. As a
result of such characterizations, extensive realist descriptions of the set-
ting constantly seem to gesture towards a signifying chain beyond the
surface of the text, thus facilitating standard allegorical interpretations of
Jangam as a “cosmic” drama between the “human” and “nature.”
Jangam’s triple whammy of realistic mise-en-scene, melodrama, and al-
legory excludes something significant. The question of the colonial state’s
lack of care for its colonized subjects is sidelined in the text’s move to
work through the trauma of being ejected from a national family via the
compensation formation of an undifferentiated “human” family. Ghosh
mentions the presence of “white” and “black” lines maintained during
the march in his interviews. Numerous testimonies by Indian survivors
and historical documentations attest to the fact that the colonial state’s
differential policies of care played a major role in the way British and
Asian refugees were treated during the march. Even allowing for the fact
that acts of kindness occurred among races—a fact many British accounts
emphasize—and that the British airdropped food and set up refugee
camps in Assam, it seems odd that Jangam does not refer at all to the
denial of care by the colonial state apparatus to the fleeing Asian refu-
gees.
 Looking East 183

Similarly, while it is undeniable that the Indians had to face tremen-

dous atrocities at the hands of the Burmese, Jangam does not treat Bur-
mese anticolonialism as an autonomous historical entity. Instead, Bur-
mese nationalism is viewed as a dispute within a familial framework
conducted by the wayward younger generation who pay no heed to the
humanitarian outlook of the older generation. Although the youthful
Nungnao’s presentation is complex, on a whole the band of shadowy
Burmese nationalists is represented as bestial or cruel. I wager that this
benign representation of British colonialism and the associated portrayal
of Burmese nationalism draws from a longer history of the negative rep-
resentation of “Maanor Dex” (Burma) in Assamese cultural production.
The complex versions of relationships between the Assamese and local
populations in Burma are portrayed in travelogues like those by Purna-
kanta Buragohain. The devastating Burmese invasions of Assam between
1817–1826, which sounded the death knell for the nearly 600-year Ahom
dynasty, have been memorialized as a traumatic primal scene for the
modern Assamese “nationality” in the pioneering early twentieth centu-
ry historical novelist Rajanikanta Bordoloi’s quartet of novels: Rangili,
Rohdoi Ligiri, Manomati, and Nirmal Bhakat. 23 In Bordoloi’s novels, the
Burmese are frequently described as “paxondo/paxobik” (bestial) and “nris-
rinxho” (cruel). Lurid descriptions of their cruelty abound. While Bordo-
loi’s novels are double-voiced, enjoining the Assamese “nationality” to
remember its “glorious” past, the British colonists are often represented
as saviors of the Assamese in novels like Rohdoi Ligiri and Tamreswarir
Mandir. While the depictions of British colonialism vary in later Assa-
mese works, Bordoloi’s novels institutionalize an image of the “barbaric”
Burmese that reveals its impress in Jangam. I argue that Jangam’s repre-
sentations of the cyclical nature of greatness, cruelty and decadence in
Burmese history, as evidenced in the initial “Background” (Patbhumi)
section, and its inability to engage adequately with the historical reasons
for the rise of Burmese anticolonialism, including the concomitant repre-
sentation of Burmese nationalism as a generational struggle and the be-
nign presentation of British colonialism, emerge out of this strand in
Assamese cultural production.
While texts like Jangam do not offer us “easily decipherable critiques
of the colonial enterprise,” they may show us that “a writer might have
other concerns, or . . . seek to figure colonialism in ways that we have yet
to learn how to read.” 24 I wager that the counternarrative of the contin-
gent “human” revealed in Jangam when read via an ecocritical lens can
assist us in thinking about the figuration of the vicissitudes of power in
the colonial scene and the situation of a global war in a different way.
184 Amit R. Baishya

ECOTHEATER AND THE CONTINGENT “HUMAN”:

NEGOTIATING THE CHAKRABEHU

We can track the precarious sense of the “human” in Jangam through the
way in which this category is compared and opposed to various nonhu-
man figurations of otherness. Jangam opens with a “Background” section
recounting the monumental histories of the neighboring city of Mandalay
and of precolonial Burma before reducing the scale and zooming in on
the “tiny” hamlet of Manku. The denizens of Manku are described as
forms of the living dead and compared to forms of “animal”/”mechani-
cal” existence in this section. For example, in the first chapter, the Indian
farmers are described thus:
Every morning a procession of cattle, their emaciated frames glittering,
would wind their way. . . . Moving alongside them were the herds-
men . . . skeletal, emaciated. . . . The cattle and the herdsmen combined
were a group of hungry, quiet souls— . . . their desire and will to
survive had ceased a long time ago. 25
This image of the farmers as forms of the living dead is repeated in a
key statement that occurs towards the end of the second chapter—“A
group of people compelled to work incessantly for . . . survival—like
some wound-up mechanical dolls; tiny ants (guhi poruwa) working by
force of habit.” 26 What is important here are the comparisons to forms of
machinism and insects. At this point, the analogies seem quite reductive,
as if the farmers of Manku are being viewed as forms that are not-so-
human. However, these reductive analogies to non-human forms of “oth-
erness” undergo a curious metamorphosis especially when the farmers
cross the “norokdwar” (gates of hell) into the necro-world of the Hukawng
valley in chapter 19. 27 The reductive metaphors then flip around and are
shown as resources for survival.
Ontological figurations of the machine provide
us with an image of the repetition of the same operations. Regularity
issues from the setting in motion of an artificially constructed group of
mechanical parts. The repeatability can be understood in terms of how
the parts hold together. Mechanical science was based on the decom-
posability of things, not their indivisibility or individuality. 28
Three basic factors where the “machine” differs from the “human” are
“regularity,” “repeatability,” and the lack of “indivisibility or individual-
ity.” Consider the description of the villagers of Manku in the first chap-
ter. Before the descriptions culminate in “wound-up mechanical dolls,”
the prose constantly gestures towards images of regularity, repeatability,
and lack of individuality— their “desire and will to survive had ceased a
long time ago,” it was “as if the still environment allied with the lazy
flow of the. . . . currents of the Irrawaddy close by, brought the ceaseless
 Looking East 185

flow of time to a halt.” 29 In other words, the mechanical listlessness pro-

duced by conditions of penury and precariousness froze the denizens of
Manku in moments of the pure present—as if time itself had suspended
its flow in this locale. These zombie-like descriptions of the Manku resi-
dents reduce their human persons to “a persona ficta, an automaton.” 30
Therefore, instead of being presented as previously “human” figures
who reconfigure their “humanity” by crossing a “norokdwar”—a mythic
paradigm where the journey across a necro-world marks the break be-
tween one epoch of “humanness” and the dawn of another—the deni-
zens of Manku are portrayed as existing in a condition already resembling
the living dead.
Similar considerations are also extendable to depictions of insects and
plant life. Along with the comparison to “mechanical dolls,” the other
analogy is that of the “guhi poruwa.” Although ontological figurations
differ across cultures, primary reasons for which the “insect” appears as
other to the “human” include their radical multiplicity and seeming herd
mentality, their vastly different ecological survival strategies, their associ-
ation with mindlessness and absence of feeling, and their radical autono-
my from human will and control. 31 We can also add the relative insignifi-
cance of the “size” of the insect vis-à-vis the scale of the “human” to this
list. To be sure, insects can also paradoxically appear as images of abjec-
tion, of incandescent beauty, or of even of the sublime. However, com-
mensurate with Jangam’s tendency to reduce scale, the depiction of the
farmers as “guhi poruwa” could signify the invisibility of modes of survi-
val that a panoramic narratorial gaze cannot quite grasp at the beginning.
These strategies of survival are too “microscopic” to be enunciated clear-
ly—hence, the initial resort to reductive metaphors.
Although the comparison to plants is not directly made in the sen-
tence on “mechanical dolls” above, Jangam’s herbiary also takes pride of
place in the descriptions of the setting. Like the “machine” and the “in-
sect,” various figurations of the “plant” too function as ambivalent meta-
phors of otherness. Since notions of life are usually endowed with mo-
tion: “. . . . the plant’s immobility consigned it to an inferior status. . . . at
the same time, plants appeared to represent life in excess, since their
growth was understood as unlimited by morphology.” 32 Like insects,
plants can also, among other things, paradoxically signify both an “ex-
cess” of “life” and an absolute lack of agency. Considered together, repre-
sentations of “natural” elements like insects and plants, thus, reveal both
the predilection to contest nature and of coming under the domination of
nature.
This paradoxical motif of contesting and being-dominated by “natu-
ral” categories is clearly enunciated when the other key spatial metaphor
in Jangam, besides “norokdwar”/”norokpuri” (kingdom of hell), is men-
tioned for the first time. This metaphor is that of the “chakrabehu.” Chakra-
behu refers to the battle-formation in the Mahabharata that Abhimanyu,
186 Amit R. Baishya

the Pandav prince Arjun’s son, can pierce through but cannot escape.
Abhimanyu learned the way into the chakrabehu when he was in his
mother’s, Subhadra, womb. Unfortunately, he doesn’t learn the way out
because his mother fell asleep during the latter part of the narration. The
impossibly young Abhimanyu smashes his way into the chakrabehu.
However, he is trapped and isolated inside and killed brutally by the
rival Kauravs.
The metaphor of the chakrabehu appears at two strategic points in the
text. It occurs first during the beginning of the journey. After describing
the inhospitable nature of the terrain, the attack on the body by insects,
and the alienating quality of the dense foliage, the narrator says: “these
winding paths were a unique chakrabehu forged by nature to keep hu-
mans, who prided themselves on their conquest of nature, from it.” 33
Later as they cross the Tawang river and are about to enter the death-
world of the Hukawng valley—“They had only negotiated . . . a minute
segment of this immense natural chakrabehu.” 34 Notice that in the first
statement, “nature” is presented as an agential subject that keeps the
“human” at bay. Forms of non-human subjectivity are shown as actively
resisting human incursion. By the time we reach the second reference, the
valence of the metaphor has shifted from representations of non-human
agency to the phenomenological dimension of experiencing the death-
march.
As a spatial metaphor, chakrabehu refers to a form of enclosure, but one
where an exit is nowhere in sight. It is an expanse of sheer limitlessness
as opposed to a delimited spatial metaphor like “durgo” (fortress). I bring
up “durgo” as a point of contrast because this spatial metaphor plays a big
role in a recent Assamese novel by Anurag Mahanta titled Aulingar Zui
(Harvest of Fire). 35 This novel, written by a former member of the separ-
atist militant organization ULFA (United Liberation Front of Assam), is
based on stateless Naga villagers entrapped in the no-man’s zones lying
in-between India and Myanmar. These zones are close to the routes used
by the refugees during the long march. The stateless subjects in Mahan-
ta’s novel are attacked on both sides by the armies of the two nation-
states and also have to obey the diktat of the numerous separatist groups
fighting against both countries that have their camps in these zones. The
image that captures this sense of enclosure experienced by stateless sub-
jects is that of the “durgo” (fortress). As the people of the no-man’s zones
prepare for another attack by the Myanmarese army, they are advised to
move within the parameters of the durgo. 36 They are also advised strong-
ly not to venture into Burmese or Indian territory—stepping on these
zones would mean instant death. The chances of survival for the people
in this durgo, especially during times of crisis, depended on how well
they knew the dimensions of their open-air prison.
In contrast to the enclosed space of the durgo, one gets in and travels a
fair distance in a chakrabehu. But this distance traversed is a mirage: the
 Looking East 187

subject experiences that she has traveled only a minute distance even
when a lot has been traversed. The end is nowhere in sight—they seem to
be entrapped in a cage of limitless greenery of which boundaries are not
visible. Earlier in the narrative, this mirage-like quality of the chakrabehu
is captured through a repetition of the mechanical image—“At a fune-
real . . . pace, the group continued . . . its journey as if they were machines
that had been wound up—no one knew where, how, why.” 37 The experi-
ence of time’s passing and the absence of a destination in this chakrabehu
is captured by Navaro-Yashin’s term: “stunted temporality.” In such
chakrabehus, the experience is that of “being spatially enclosed and tempo-
rally in a limbo status for an indefinite period.” 38 The subjects here are in
a limbo-like zone, which in its seemingly indefinite expanse renders the
passage of time mechanical, repetitive, and aimless. One gets in with no
inkling of the exit route. The only way to survive is to walk relentlessly
like machines that had been wound up.
The polyvalence of the plant, insect, and the mechanical images begin
to reveal themselves at the points where the phenomenological dimen-
sions of journeying through the chakrabehu are described. At these points,
these analogies cease being reductive; instead, they begin to function as
resources for survival. For instance, just prior to the statement about the
“winding paths” being a “unique chakrabehu forged by nature,” the narra-
tor writes:
Clusters of leeches stuck in the long and slender leaves of grass that
wrapped themselves around their legs; at the slightest indication, a
group of chameleons chased them determinedly and speedily with
long strides, their fans raised. What irrepressible will to survive these
tiny creatures have—what a magnificent inspiration for survival! 39
In this complex passage, the “plant,” the “insect,” and the “animal” in-
itially figure as hostile “natural” presences. Keeping up with a continuing
series of representations of plants in Jangam as “life in excess,” the prolife-
rating “long and slender leaves of grass” are an impediment to move-
ment. They also are home to bloodsucking leeches. Finally, there are the
chameleons that band together and attack interlopers at the slightest indi-
cation. However, notice how these “hostile” figurations also contain its
obverse. The group of chameleons could easily be a substitute for the
group of refugees who band together to survive. Similarly, the last sen-
tence exposes how “tiny” creatures have an “irrepressible will to sur-
vive”—isn’t this reference an echo of the “guhi poruwas” and their own
stubborn will to survive?
The polyvalence of these metaphors reaches its climax when we get to
chapter 19. In this chapter, the group reaches Shingbwiyang and begins
their harrowing journey across the “the death valley—the gates of hell
that is Hukawng.” 40 A contemporary account by a British official de-
scribes this route—30,000 refugees were supposed to have gone through
188 Amit R. Baishya

it—as a “track of red, sticky clay (that) ran through miles of dark, green
tunnel.” As the monsoon increased in strength, the surface deteriorated
“until people sank into it to thigh depth, and strong men might make
seven miles in the day.” 41 Leech bites, dysentery, and malaria increased
the suffering of the refugees. People just laid down and died. Corpses lay
everywhere, and “there were no jackals and vultures to pick them
clean.” 42
As the characters walk through the Hukawng in the stultifying heat of
the monsoon season, they encounter numerous “grinning” corpses, skele-
tons, and decaying, bug-infested cadavers of dead refugees, and most
poignantly, commingled remains of a mother and an infant frozen in the
act of sucking her breast. All other forms of animal life seem to have
“abjured” (porityag) this pathway, save for scores of beautiful butterflies
that cover the bodies in a sea of color. 43 These butterflies are mentioned
in historical accounts of the march as well as in survivor testimonies.
Bayly and Harper write that the “butterflies in Assam that year were the
most beautiful on record” adding to the sense of the “macabre as they
flitted among corpses.” 44 A Goanese survivor recounts her brother’s ex-
periences: “One day he saw hundreds of beautiful butterflies in a certain
spot. He looked around expecting to see a lot of flowers in this area but
what he saw horrified him. The butterflies were covering a bloated
corpse and they must have been feasting off the juices that oozed from
the decaying body.” 45 Mbembe’s Bataillean formulation of death as si-
multaneously “the putrefaction of life” (the decaying corpses) and also
the “most luxurious form of life” (the beautiful butterflies) is germane for
an analysis of such sequences. 46 Painting such terrifying images of death
and decrepitude, Jangam’s narrator says that these butterflies had exclu-
sive “sovereignty” (xamrajyo) in this realm of death. 47 They were unafraid
of the travelers—used only to dead bodies, living ones were ignored by
them.
Besides this horrifying encounter with the luxurious and proliferating
power of death, the survivors also see jewels and valuables strewn about.
But neither the humans nor the butterflies even come close to these jew-
els—it is as if every “worldly” object has lost its value in this necro-
world. These objects “mock” the travelers with their sheer meaningless-
ness. The refugees travel silently, mechanically onwards. At this point,
the narrator says: “This was just a grotesque carnival of movement, to
stop meant certain death and meaningless silence. . . . There was no
conversation or contemplation on the faces of these people—they were
like some wound-up mechanical dolls that progressed forward at their
own pace.” 48 To stop means to die, to be “swallowed (grax) by nature.” 49
The only resource of survival in this necro-world is to proceed slowly like
“wound-up” mechanical dolls. Thus, the animal and mechanical meta-
phors that signify a separation from the “human” for the residents of
 Looking East 189

Manku earlier twist around and become descriptors for a stubborn will to
survive in this chakrabehu, this terrifying “green tunnel” of death.
The struggle between humans and the environment is only one part of
the story. Jangam’s ontological explorations can also be pushed in a mate-
rialist direction. The other important aspect of Jangam is the degradation
of the environment, and also its reconfiguration as a response to this
deterioration. A note of critique of the anthropocentric desire to dominate
the “nature” is already evident in the statement about the futility of the
“pride” experienced by humans. As the travelers move ahead, the will-
to-dominate shows its deleterious face in the numerous scenes of the
devastation of lived and natural environments. The abandoned and dev-
astated town of Unthaw is compared to a “pretpuri” (ghost town) 50 whose
only inhabitants are emaciated stray dogs who eat their own kind to
satiate their hunger. While the “horrifying” scene of the pack of dogs
cannibalizing its own kind becomes another moment where forms of
non-human otherness expose the “unquenchable desire . . . to survive,” 51
it also points to the degradation of conditions of life during wartime that
impact both humans and animals.
The refugees witness numerous scenes of such degradation during
their journey. Once again, chapter 19 is the culmination of this trajectory.
Recall that standard allegorical interpretations of the text are predicated
on a sharp division between the “human” and the “natural”—it is as if
human beings are pitchforked into a virtually untouched natural envi-
ronment during their journey. Closer attention to the text reveals that
such a separation of spheres is untenable. Here’s an example from the
butterfly segment:
An uncountable number of corpses lay prone in various positions in
the spaces between the pathway and the edges of the hills ringing it. . . .
Almost all the corpses were swollen, and scores of brightly-colored
butterflies illuminated them further, covering them like a shroud.
There was no other sign of life in those virtually unsurmountable
hills. . . . In fact, birds too were absent. 52
Rather than adopting a purely humanist approach that emphasizes the
separation between “humans” and “nature” or an opposing anthropo-
genic one that focuses on the way humans reshape nature (this approach
would focus on the reference to jhum—a form of swidden cultivation), it
would be fruitful here to adopt a “post-humanist” approach that empha-
sizes the symbiosis of the human and the non-human. 53 First, the refu-
gees are not traveling through untouched “nature”—although the pas-
sage emphasizes that there are “no signs” of human habitation, this re-
gion already has the prior imprint of the “human.” Second, this passage
gestures to the fact that living beings, including birds, probably avoid
this region because of prior human activity (swidden cultivation) and the
relative lack of food, and not any mystical reason like the sudden prolife-
190 Amit R. Baishya

ration of corpses. Third, the profusion of the butterflies also helps us

understand the position of “any given organism in relation to the shifting
networks of objects and other organisms that define it.” 54 In other words,
although the profusion of butterflies definitely contributes to the sense of
the macabre, could it also not be viewed as an agential response of the
non-human environment to this terrible situation created by displace-
ment and mass death? Would the butterflies have proliferated otherwise,
horrible as it may sound, if they hadn’t been battened on the “juices”
oozing out from the dead bodies? Is the rotting presence of innumerable
human corpses not a reconfiguration of the “network of objects and other
organisms” in this ecosystem? In passages like these, we see a complex
portrayal of both the degradation of lived and natural environments and
the response of non-human agents to such cataclysmic changes. Al-
though reading texts like Jangam in an allegorical fashion is relatively
common, closer attention to the shifting relationships between the fluid
boundaries of the “human” and “nature” can present more nuanced
readings of survival and the reconfiguration of environments during and
after catastrophic events. Such efforts that interrogate anthropocentrism
can open up new modes of inquiry in Partition studies writ large.

NOTES

1. Willem van Schendel, The Bengal Borderlands: Beyond State and Nation in South
Asia (London: Anthem 2004), 27.
2. Hugh Tinker, “A Forgotten Long March: the Indian Exodus from Burma, 1942,”
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 6, 1 (March 1975): 1–15.
3. Anand Pandian, Ayya’s Accounts: a Ledger of Hope in Modern India (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press 2014), 182.
4. Ibid., 182.
5. Amitav Ghosh, “Coming under Burmese Fire was Surreal.” Outlook Magazine
(India), July 7, 2000. [Link]/article/coming-under-burmese-fire-was-
surreal/209696. Accessed January 26, 2016.
6. Upamanyu P. Chatterjee, Natural Disasters and Victorian Empire: Famines, Fevers
and the Literary Cultures of South Asia (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2013), 199–200.
7. See Yvonne Ezdani (ed.), Songs of the Survivors (Panjim: Goa 1556, 2007) and
Bilal Raschid, The Invisible Patriot: Reminiscences of Burma’s Freedom Movement (Bethse-
da: Createspace Independent Publishing, 2015). Ghosh collects memoirs by survivors
on his blog. There are memoirs in other Indian languages—in Assamese, see Purna-
kanta Buragohain, Patkair Xipare Na Basar (Dhemaji: Purbanchal Tai Xahitya Xabha,
1993).
8. Debendranath Acharya, Jangam, 1982 Reprint (Guwahati: Axom Prokaxon Po-
rixod, 2008). Acharya (1937–1981) is a renowned historical novelist in Assamese. Like
many other Assamese novels, Jangam was serialized in a magazine named Prokax. It
was posthumously published in 1982.
9. Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin, Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals,
Environment (London, New York: Routledge, 2010), 136–37.
10. Sailen Bharali, “Axomiya Oitihaxik Uponyax,” in Exo Bosoror Axomiya Uponyax,
30–39. Ed. Nagen Thakur (Guwahati: Jyoti Prokaxon 2000), 39. All translations from
Assamese are mine.
 Looking East 191

11. Prafulla Kotoky, “Aagkotha,” Debendranath Acharya Rosona Xomogro, vii–x. Ed.
Mahasweta Acharya (Guwahati: Jyoti Prokaxon 2011), viii.
12. Debendranath Acharya, Jangam (Guwahati: Axom Prokaxon Porixod, 2008), 7.
13. Bhaskar Sarkar, Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition (Dur-
ham: Duke University Press 2009), 68.
14. Ravi Vasudevan, “Another History Rises to the Surface: ‘Hey Ram’—Melodra-
ma in the Age of Digital Simulation,” Economic and Political Weekly, 37.28 (2002): 2918.
15. Ibid., 2918.
16. Anirban Baishya, “Imagining Assamese Cinema: Genres, Themes and Regional
Identity,” (Diss. Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, 2013), 59–60.
17. Debendranath Acharya, Jangam (Guwahati: Axom Prokaxon Porixod, 2008), 26.
18. Ibid., 31–36.
19. Ibid., 120.
20. Ibid., 187.
21. Ibid., 187.
22. Alex Woloch, The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protago-
nist in the Novel (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press), 20.
23. The British controlled Assam from 1826 after their victory in the first Anglo-
Burmese war.
24. Shital Pravinchandra, “Not Just Prose: The Calcutta Chromosome, the South Asian
Short Story and the Limitations of Postcolonial Studies,” Interventions 16, 3 (2014): 435.
25. Debendranath Acharya, Jangam (Guwahati: Axom Prokaxon Porixod, 2008), 6–7.
26. Ibid., 7.
27. Ibid., 166.
28. Donna Jones, The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Negritude, Vitalism and Mod-
ernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 28–29.
29. Debendranath Acharya, Jangam (Guwahati: Axom Prokaxon Porixod, 2008), 7.
30. Donna Jones, The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Negritude, Vitalism and Mod-
ernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 36.
31. Eric Brown, “Reading the Insect,” Insect Poetics. Ed. Eric C. Brown (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2006), xi.
32. Meeker and Szabari, “From the Century of the Pods to the Century of the Plants:
Plant Horror, Politics and Vegetal Ontology,” Discourse, 34, 1 (Winter 2012): 34.
33. Debendranath Acharya Jangam (Guwahati: Axom Prokaxon Porixod, 2008), 68.
34. Ibid., 162
35. Anurag Mahanta, Aulingar Jui (Sivasagar: Basu Prokaxon), 2007.
36. Ibid., 168.
37. Debendranath Acharya, Jangam (Guwahati: Axom Prokaxon Porixod, 2008), 140.
38. Yael Navaro-Yashin, “Life Is Dead Here: Sensing the Political in No-Man’s
Land,” Anthropological Theory 3 (2003): 7.
39. Debendranath Acharya, Jangam (Guwahati: Axom Prokaxon Porixod, 2008), 65.
40. Ibid., 166.
41. Dysart Whitworth, “The Evacuation of Refugees and the Chinese Fifth Army
from the Hukawng Valley into Assam, Summer 1942.” Journal of the Royal Central Asian
Society 30, 3 (1943): 316.
42. Ibid., 320.
43. Debendranath Acharya, Jangam (Guwahati: Axom Prokaxon Porixod, 2008), 170.
44. Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia,
1941–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2004), 183.
45. Yvonne Vaz Ezdani, ed., Songs of the Survivors (Panjim: Goa 1556, 2007), 74.
46. Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15, 1
(2003): 15.
47. Debendranath Acharya, Jangam (Guwahati: Axom Prokaxon Porixod, 2008), 70.
48. Ibid., 170–71.
49. Ibid., 172.
50. Ibid., 103.
192 Amit R. Baishya

51. Ibid., 107.

52. Ibid., 170.
53. Adrian Franklin, “A Choreography of Fire: A Posthumanist Account of Austra-
lians and Eucalypts,” The Mangle in Practice: Science, Society and Becoming, in ed. An-
drew Pickering and Keith Pickering (Durham: Duke University Press), 2009.
54. Ibid., 25–26.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Acharya, Debendranath. Jangam. 1982, Reprint. Guwahati: Axom Prokaxon Porixod,

2008.
Baishya, Anirban K. “Imagining Assamese Cinema: Genres, Themes and Regional
Identity.” Ph.D. diss. Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, 2013.
Bayly, Christopher, and Tim Harper. Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia,
1941–1945. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005.
Bharali, Sailen. “Axomiya Oitihaxik Uponyax.” In Exo Bosoror Axomiya Uponyax. Ed.
Nagen Thakur. Guwahati: Jyoti Prokaxon, 2000. 30–39.
Bordoloi, Rajanikanta. Manomati. 1900. Reprint, Guwahati: Xahitya Prokax, 2011.
———. Nirmal Bhakat. 1927. Reprint, Guwahati: Xahiyta Prokax, 2011.
———. Rangili. 1925. Reprint, Guwahati: Xahitya Prokax, 1987.
———. Rohdoi Ligiri. 1930. Reprint, Guwahati: Xahitya Prokax, 2011.
———. Tamreswarir Mandir. 1926, Reprint. Guwahati: Xahitya Prokax, 1987.
Brown, Eric C. “Reading the Insect.” Insect Poetics. Ed. Eric C. Brown. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2006. ix–xviii.
Buragohain, Purnakanta. Patkair Xipare Na Basar. Dhemaji: Purbanchal Tai Xahitya
Xabha, 1993.
Chatterjee, Upamanyu P. Natural Disasters and Victorian Empire: Famines, Fevers and the
Literary Cultures of South Asia. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Dhumuha. Directed by Phani Sarma. Sonitpur Pictures Private Ltd., 1957.
Ezdani, Yvonne Vaz, ed. Songs of the Survivors. Panjim: Goa 1556, 2007.
Franklin, Adrian. “A Choreography of Fire: A Posthumanist Account of Australians
and Eucalypts.” The Mangle in Practice: Science, Society and Becoming. Ed. Andrew
Pickering and Keith Pickering. Durham: Duke University Press, 2009. 17–45.
Ghosh, Amitav. [Link]
———. “Coming under Burmese Fire was Surreal.” The Outlook. http://
[Link]/article/coming-under-burmese-fire-was-surreal/209696.
———. The Glass Palace. New York: Random House, 2001.
Huggan, Graham, and Helen Tiffin. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Envi-
ronment. London, New York: Routledge, 2010.
Jones, Donna. The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Negritude, Vitalism and Modernity.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.
Kotoky, Prafulla. “Aagkotha.” Debendranath Acharya Rosona Xomogro. Ed. Mahasweta
Acharya. Guwahati: Jyoti Prokaxon, 2011. vii–x.
Mahanta, Anurag. Aulingar Jui. Sivasagar: Basu Prokaxon, 2007.
Mbembe, Achille.”Necropolitics.” Trans. Libby Meintjes. Public Culture 15 no.1 (2003):
11–40.
Meeker, Natania, and Antonia Szabari. “From the Century of the Pods to the Century
of the Plants: Plant Horror, Politics and Vegetal Ontology.” Discourse 34, 1 (Winter
2012): 32–58.
Navaro-Yashin, Yael. “Life Is Dead Here: Sensing the Political in No-Man’s Land,”
Anthropological Theory 3 (2003): 107–25.
Pandian, Anand, and M. P. Mariappan. Ayya’s Accounts: A Ledger of Hope in Modern
India. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014.
Pravinchandra, Shital. “Not Just Prose: The Calcutta Chromosome, the South Asian Short
Story and the Limitations of Postcolonial Studies.” Interventions 16, 3 (2014): 424–44.
 Looking East 193

Raschid, Bilal M. The Invisible Patriot: Reminiscences of Burma’s Freedom Movement. Beth-
seda: Createspace Independent Publishing, 2015.
Sarkar, Bhaskar. Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition. Durham:
Duke University Press, 2009.
Tinker, Hugh. “A Forgotten Long March: The Indian Exodus from Burma, 1942.”
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 6, 1 (Mar. 1975): 1–15.
van Schendel, Willem. The Bengal Borderlands: Beyond State and Nation in South Asia.
London: Anthem, 2004.
Vasudevan, Ravi. “Another History Rises to the Surface: ‘Hey Ram’—Melodrama in
the Age of Digital Simulation.” Economic and Political Weekly, 37.28 (2002): 2917–25.
Whitworth, Dysart. “The Evacuation of Refugees and the Chinese Fifth Army from the
Hukawng Valley into Assam, Summer 1942.” Journal of the Royal Central Asian Soci-
ety 30, 3 (1943): 311–21.
Woloch, Alex. The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in
the Novel. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003.
 Part IV

From Pakistan to Bangladesh

 TWELVE
The Never-Ending Partition
Pakistan’s Self-Identification Dilemma

Amber Fatima Riaz

Decolonization of British India resulted in both the Independence of In-

dia from British colonial rule and the creation of East and West Paki-
stan—now Bangladesh and Pakistan—in August 1947, which resulted in
a massive exchange of populations across borders between countries
predicated on difference of religious and cultural identities. The ex-
change of populations and the resulting violence has been well-docu-
mented by historians, and significant attention has been paid in academic
discourses to the impact of that violence and displacement on multiple
identities. On the eve of the seventieth anniversary of Independence,
what is needed is a sustained analysis of the narrative that led to the
creation of Pakistan as a nation for British India’s Muslims, which ulti-
mately resulted in a nation (Pakistan) constantly struggling with its own
conceptualization of legitimate nationhood. Drawing on works by Vazira
Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, Ayesha Jalal, Ashutosh Varshney, and Yas-
min Khan (among others), this chapter examines Quaid-e-Azam Moham-
mad Ali Jinnah’s conceptualization of a united Pakistan (the nation) to
interrogate why (and how) the secularist—but Muslim—nation-state en-
visioned by the country’s founder could not gain currency after General
Ayub Khan’s reign, and after General Zia-ul-Haq’s Islamization of the
country’s laws and systems. Using the Muslim League’s narrative (the
idea that Muslims were a nation separate and distinct from Hindus,
called the two-nation theory) as its starting point, the essay traces the
different ways Pakistan’s governing elite tried to unify what appeared to

197
198 Amber Fatima Riaz

be disparate interests and identities in the first two decades of Pakistan’s

existence, by presenting a brief overview of Governor General Ghulam
Muhammad’s implementation of One Unit for West Pakistan (first an-
nounced in 1955) and General Ayub Khan’s military rule, which ushered
in Pakistan’s first major investment in infrastructure and industrializa-
tion. I then move on to examine the “new” (Wahhabi-influenced) narra-
tive proposed, then imposed, by General Zia-ul-Haq in the 1980s which
redefined Pakistan as an Islamic country. 1 I contend that policies like the
One Unit, as well as Zia’s Islamization have been symptomatic of the
state’s struggle to find a monolithic national identity that needs to be at
once cohesive and distinctive but that has resulted in continued fragmen-
tation of the national identity due to regional and international pressures
on the center. Thus, whereas Muhammad Ali Jinnah (The Quaid) under-
stood that India’s Muslims were a diverse group, but feared the same
diversity (for its potential to create rifts rather than unify), the ruling elite
of post-Independence Pakistan refused to even acknowledge that diver-
sity, enforcing a state-defined idea of “National Unity” that has, since
Independence, resulted in a fragmented, regionalized Pakistani identity
that continues to place tremendous pressure on the center.
Popular accounts of the Pakistani State, in fact, continue to see it as a
state ready to implode based on economic, political, and social strife,
contributing to a narrative that sees South Asian Muslim identity as uni-
fied pre-Partition only to become fragmented in the decades following
Independence. It is far more productive, however, to acknowledge the
weaknesses of Jinnah’s two-nation theory itself, in order to contextualize
the regionalisms currently dominating the Pakistani political and cultural
imagination.
Jinnah’s two-nation theory imagined 2 a nation of Muslims unified by
a shared sense of cultural identity among India’s Muslims, but failed to
account for regionalism and loyalty to blood and soil (as my discussion of
Faisal Devji’s text will show), a failure that seems to be illustrated by the
increasing fragmentation of Pakistani identity. The 2013 Federal Elec-
tions’ results, for example, show a voter trend that favors ethnic and
regional identity: PTI’s Imran Khan, who identifies himself as an ethnic
Pathan, won all the seats for KPK (Khayber Pakhtoon Khwa) province,
while the Punjabi leader of PML(N) Nawaz Sharif won majority in the
Punjab which led to his Prime Ministership. Are these results indicative
of a fragmented national identity, or a symptom of a new kind of region-
alism not accounted for in Jinnah’s vision for a Muslim “utopia”? Is a
national, unified, identity even possible in the current political and socio-
economic climate? Did Pakistan begin with a coherent sense of itself
which was subsequently distorted? I propose that there were significant
oversights in Jinnah’s Two-Nation Theory, oversights that are only now
beginning to manifest themselves seventy years after the vision became a
reality. If we accept that Pakistan was, indeed, a half-baked idea set up
 The Never-Ending Partition 199

for failure long before it became a nation-state with well-defined borders,

then the task at hand becomes monumental: Is it possible to find a unify-
ing idea that would allow Pakistan to establish a distinct identity for
itself, one that admits its Indian roots, but at the same time, branches out
on its own? Are regional identities, differing religiosities, and a weak
education system making it impossible for Pakistan to become a “Na-
tion”? What is Pakistan’s national identity, seventy years after the Parti-
tion and Independence?

PAKISTAN’S BEGINNINGS

Around the fiftieth anniversary of Pakistan’s Independence, Akbar Ah-

med and Aamir Muneer (artist) published a graphic novel entitled The
Quaid: Jinnah and the Story of Pakistan “aimed specifically at a young audi-
ence” made up “not just [by] young Pakistanis, but . . . an informed
readership throughout the world.” 3 It portrays the Pakistan Movement
and presents the Quaid in a heroic light, tracing the idea of Pakistan to
the 1857 struggle and the British anti-Muslim pogrom. Constructed as a
frame narrative, the novel is set in twentieth-century London. The action
is launched by a dialogue between two friends traveling on a London
bus. After a discussion of the “ills” besetting the Muslim world in the
twentieth century, the conversation turns to an account of the “glory
days” of the Mughals in India. The narrative asserts that “in 1857–58
when the uprisings in Delhi against the British failed we [India’s Mus-
lims] lost an emperor, an empire and a capital,” to be rescued by the
modern-day “Salahuddin . . . the Quaid-e-Azam . . . Muhammad Ali
Jinnah.” 4 This graphic novel parrots the official historical narrative which
traces the idea of Pakistan to the period following the 1857 War of Inde-
pendence (the Mutiny, according to British historians), and credits the
creation of Pakistan to Jinnah. The novel creates an image of a lone, but
heroic, political figure, who galvanized a floundering Muslim polity
around the two-nation theory, a polity whose identity was, according to
Pakistani political historians, invented by and established because of Sir
Syed Ahmed Khan’s Aligarh Muslim College (called the Anglo-Moham-
maden Oriental College). Agha Ashraf’s 1985 Tehreek-e-Pakistan (The Paki-
stan Movement), in fact, asserts that Sir Syed Ahmed Khan took it upon
himself to help India’s Muslims recover from the political, social, and
economic privation imposed by the British after the 1857 war and
launched the Aligarh Movement 5 because he believed that the road to
emancipation for India’s Muslims was through the acquisition of British
(English) education. 6
Both the historical and literary narratives about the creation of Paki-
stan present a vision of a coherent Muslim polity in the early part of the
twentieth century. Muslims had separated themselves as a distinct politi-
200 Amber Fatima Riaz

cal group 7 represented by the newly formed All-India Muslim League

(which was officially declared a political party following a meeting in
Dhaka in 1906). The demand for a separate nation, however, did not
emerge until after the 1937 All India Elections in which the Muslim
League got only 4.4 percent of the total Muslim votes cast, 8 the reason for
which, according to Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, is that the Muslim
League was not seen as a unifying force, nor was it perceived to be the
true representative of India’s Muslims 9 by the voting public. The idea of
an actual territory for Muslims that would be called Pakistan was formu-
lated in a March 1940 resolution passed at Lahore, which “formally de-
manded independent Muslim states in the north-west and the north-east
of India on the grounds that Indian Muslims were a nation.” 10 It is impor-
tant to note here that the idea for a separate “homeland” for the Muslims
of India had been informally discussed among the League’s leadership,
but historians have shown that there was little consensus about what that
homeland would look like, and how the borders were to be drawn. The
1940 Pakistan Resolution, then, became the historical turning point as far
as Muslim political identity in India was concerned. Based on a map
envisioned by Chaudhary Rahmat Ali, who envisioned a Pak Common-
wealth of Nations, 11 the 1940 Pakistan Resolution refused to accept any
transfer of power from the British to the Indians without specific ac-
knowledgments of, and protections afforded to, the Muslims of India, in
the form of a nation-state. What that national identity would look like,
however, remained undefined, even in 1940–47. 12 Mohammad Ali Jin-
nah, the leader of the All-India Muslim League, in his speech outlining
the Pakistan Resolution, argued that India had at least two identifiable
and separate nations (Muslims and Hindus) and that any transfer of
power by the British to the Indians would “have to involve the dissolu-
tion of the unitary centre which was an artefact of British colonialism.” 13
According to Jinnah,
The Hindus and Muslims belong to two different religious philoso-
phies, social customs, and literature[s]. They neither intermarry nor
interdine together, and indeed they belong to two different civilisations
which are based mainly on conflicting ideas and conceptions. Their
aspects [=perspectives?] on life, and of life, are different. It is quite clear
that Hindus and Mussalmans derive their inspiration from different
sources of history. They have different epics, their heroes are different,
and different episode[s]. Very often the hero of one is a foe of the other,
and likewise their victories and defeats overlap. To yoke together two
such nations under a single state, one as a numerical minority and the
other as a majority, must lead to growing discontent, and final destruc-
tion of any fabric that may be so built up for the government of such a
state. 14
Jinnah goes on to contextualize his claim by comparing the Hindus and
Muslims in India to other “nations” (geographically unified/contained
 The Never-Ending Partition 201

regions) that are divided along state lines and cites the examples of the
Iberian Peninsula (divided into Portuguese and Spanish states according
to nationhood) and the Balkan Peninsula, making the argument that a
unified geographical region does not have to have a unified, central
government and can, instead, be reimagined as multiple states. For Jin-
nah, “The present artificial unity of India dates back only to the British
conquest and is maintained by the British bayonet, but the termination of
the British regime, which is implicit in the recent declaration of His Ma-
jesty’s Government, will be the herald of the entire break-up, with worse
disaster than has ever taken place during the last one thousand years
under the Muslims.” 15 This particular articulation of India as constituent
of two separate nations was, however, posited on a unified Muslim iden-
tity, one that did not necessarily exist, even in 1940 on the heels of signifi-
cant unifying efforts on the part of the All-India Muslim League. The
task, as envisioned by Jinnah, was the disentanglement of two “nations”
who had become entwined historically and culturally, but the specific
identities of which two nations remained undefined, and the question of
who belonged in which “nation” remained unaddressed. Muslims asked
for a “homeland” without knowing where that homeland was to be, and
without defining who could “belong” to that “nation/ homeland.” Ulti-
mately, the claims for a separate nation succeeded, but the vision (such as
it was) did not.
British colonization of India officially ended on the midnight of Au-
gust 15, 1947, with power transferred to two separate nation-states: Paki-
stan and India. Thus, Pakistan was founded in the midst of one of the
greatest migrations and dislocation of populations in the twentieth centu-
ry. 16 As I have indicated already, one of the major problems consistently
plaguing Pakistan’s political and social identity since the Partition, both
nationally and internationally, remains a lack of consensus about what
actually constitutes Pakistan’s identity, a fact that has often been attrib-
uted to the weakness of the two-nation theory.
Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal show, in their book Modern South Asia,
that “[o]fficial histories of Pakistan have . . . subscribed to the ‘two nation’
theory, according to which Indian Muslims were always a distinctive and
separate community that had resisted assimilation into their Indian envi-
ronment.” 17 They go on to show that Indian historians, on the other
hand, have “blame[d] imperialism for tearing asunder two communities
which history and tradition had joined.” 18 Both historical narratives pro-
ject the image of unified, monolithic communities—Hindus and Mus-
lims. Even the political struggles for emancipation from the British have
been reframed in official historical discourse. Agha Ashraf’s text, for ex-
ample—used as a history textbook in Pakistani schools in the late 1980s
and 1990s—creates a narrative of the Pakistan Movement in which the
Muslims of India faced discrimination at the hands of the British rulers
after the 1857 War/Mutiny, based on, according to Ashraf, “political and
202 Amber Fatima Riaz

national differences.” 19 Ashraf refers to the Hindu objection to the use of

the Urdu language (a language associated with the Muslims of India 20 )
in 1867 as further “proof” of Indian Muslims’ disenfranchisement. 21 This
narrative thread—one that highlights the religious, political, and cultural
differences among the British, the Muslims, and the Hindus—has been
used consistently to justify the demand for a separate nation/land for the
Muslims of India, and continues to have resonance in Pakistani political
and popular discourses. What this narrative fails to account for is a dis-
tinct vision or description of what the “Muslim nation” actually looks
like, or even what unifies the Muslims of India beyond the fact that all of
them are followers of the same faith. What the narrative also ignores are
the numerous differences that more often than not divided Muslims in
pre-Partition India, forcibly creating, instead, the myth of a united nation
of Muslims that is only disintegrating post-Partition. This forces most
Pakistanis to consistently ask themselves: Where did we go wrong?
The image of a united Muslim front, however, is one that is not histor-
ically accurate. In fact, historians like Yasmin Khan and Vazira Zamindar
have shown that Partition was viewed as far from being inevitable, high-
lighting the differences in opinions about what postcolonial India would
actually look like. According to Yasmin Khan, in 1946–47, what “people
most wanted was freedom and sovereignty over their own commu-
nities. . . . The idea of partitioning ancient homelands was barely contem-
plated or understood . . . [and that] with the euphoria of an imperial
ending surged the hope for self-rule and the will to power among
princes, caste leaders, spiritual pirs and clusters of ethnic minorities.” 22
The demand for Pakistan, for the Partition, then, was not a unified one as
the official historical account would have it. As Yasmin Khan notes, Jin-
nah was asking himself in 1947: “what role will Islam play in the new
state? Immediately Pakistan was declared a reality, the convenient ambi-
guities which had been used to glue the League together—hazy idealism
and imaginative aspiration towards Islamic statehood—started to haunt
the new country’s leadership.” 23 As Rafia Hasan puts it,
The Muslim state of Pakistan was carved out of the Indian subconti-
nent on the basis of its Islamic ideology. However, this does not imply
that the nation is only secular or theocratic in its basis. Pakistan is both
and neither, for it aspires to be theistic without being theocratic and
aims to improve life in this world within the framework of a supraindi-
vidual and supraphysical verity without being secular. 24
It is, thus, important to note that there is very little consensus about
the validity of Jinnah’s two-nation theory. He may have subscribed to it,
and he may even have successfully led an entire generation to demand a
separate state because of his belief in its validity, but its weaknesses
became evident quite soon after the theory was proposed. Akbar Ah-
med’s graphic novel, for example, includes an episode from Jinnah’s pre-
 The Never-Ending Partition 203

1940 political career, during which he was asked by a young Muslim to

justify his own religious beliefs before speaking on behalf of all Muslims.
The young activist demands, “What do you know about us Muslims?
You do not dress like a Muslim. You do not speak Urdu?,” to which
Jinnah replies: “I am proud to be a Muslim. I speak as a politician not as a
religious leader. I speak to you in English because it is the political lan-
guage of India. In our temples and our Mosques let us talk about God.
But let’s keep religion out of politics.” 25 Jinnah, thus, is portrayed as
having begun his political career by maintaining a distinction between
religion and politics, one which he tried to maintain even after he
switched from wearing three-piece suits to the (now famous) sherwani 26
and Jinnah cap, a switch in dress which he saw as “confidence in the
future [balanced by] pride in the past.” 27 Ahmed’s text, thus, represents
Jinnah as a calm, logical man, who, when challenged, adapts his dress,
even his language, to become an accessible leader for a diverse populace
in an attempt to unify it, which, in turn, suggests that the unity envi-
sioned by Jinnah and encapsulated in the two-nation theory was a super-
imposed one. The fact that his two-nation theory refuses to acknowledge
the diversity of the Muslim populace, symbolized by his adoption of the
sherwani (over other forms of Indian dress) is problematic. A productive
discussion of Pakistani National Identity, then, also becomes problemat-
ic, since the post-Partition claims of regional, cultural, and linguistic
bonds seem to have proven to be stronger than those used by Jinnah to
unify the Muslim nation in the 1940s.
Faisal Devji’s conceptualization of the “Muslim Zion” can be seen as
one way of reimagining the two-nation theory. In his book Muslim Zion,
Devji compares Muslim nationalism (that resulted in the formation of
Pakistan) to the Zionist movement and proposes that the concept of Zion
(or the specific Muslim nationalism under discussion here) “serves to
name a political form in which nationality is defined by the rejection of
an old land for a new, thus attenuating the historical role that blood and
soil play in the language of Old World nationalism.” 28 This suggests,
then, that the ideology that shaped the Pakistan movement in the 1940s
was rooted in the imagination: India’s Muslims were asked to imagine an
ideal homeland that united its citizens based on shared religious beliefs
while precluding other (and as it turned out, more unifying) forms of
citizenship and unity, i.e., blood relations and an attachment to the soil/
land. As Devji, among others, points out, Jinnah “made it clear that his
new nation would have to repudiate not simply its colonial and more
generally Indian past, but even the regional identities of its own Muslim
majority, which he fearfully compared to nations in waiting.” 29 The two-
nation theory, thus, attempted to imagine a Muslim Nation within India,
attempted to rewrite the discourse on nationhood, and succeeded in uni-
fying a large segment of the Muslim population by simply imagining a
204 Amber Fatima Riaz

homeland that may or may not have specific geographical, or even cultu-
ral, borders or contours.
This unifying principle (shared religion and culture) sought by the
Muslim Nationalist movement of the 1940s, however, lost its legitimacy
almost immediately after Independence from the British. Regional and
ethnic identities placed tremendous pressure on the center within months
of the formation of the Pakistani state. That the Pakistani state has consis-
tently found itself embattled by regional identities demanding suprema-
cy at the state’s center since Pakistan’s inception is well known. In fact,
political historians have compared India’s success at unifying the nation
post-Independence to Pakistan’s inability to do the same, which is a prob-
lem to which I now turn.

POST-PARTITION PAKISTAN: THE 1940S AND 1950S

It is generally acknowledged that Pakistan lacked a national identity dur-

ing the early years of its existence. Pakistani political and historical dis-
course consistently cites lack of resources, the influx of refugees, and a
relatively poorly defined state identity as the reasons for Pakistan’s early
struggles. According to Yasmin Khan, the “League was handed a scarcely
viable, ‘moth-eaten’ state to run, the Punjab and Bengal (ironically per-
haps the two Indian provinces with the most distinctive regional cultures
and interwoven populations) would be wrenched apart,” 30 which was a
decision that ultimately cost millions of lives and exerted tremendous
pressure on Pakistan’s economy and statehood even before the official
transfer of power. Vazira Zamindar’s study of the post-Partition period,
The Long Partition, for example, examines the exchange of goods and
personnel, as well as populations (that she categorizes as refugees) in the
late 1940s and 1950s, and shows that the exchange of people, goods, and
resources “was by no means a straightforward process; it was a debated,
contested, and fraught historical process of negotiation between two
states, in which ultimately there was no consensus.” 31 The new states
faced an influx of refugees, fought multiple wars with each other, and
tried to manage state machinery with limited resources. As Sarah Ansari
points out, in her essay “Everyday Expectations of the State during Paki-
stan’s Early Years,” unlike India, “it took far longer to work out the . . .
basic political coordinates for Pakistan. It was not until 1956 that Paki-
stan’s first constitution appeared, and even then it barely survived two
years before the ‘rules of engagement’ were redrawn by the military.” 32
Thus, Partition may have resulted in the establishment of a physically
well-defined nation-state, with clear borders and geographical contours,
but the bureaucrats and politicians debated the basic contents of the con-
stitution well into the 1950s, while dealing with an influx of refugees and
a struggling economy which had not “recovered from the disruptions
 The Never-Ending Partition 205

triggered by partition,” 33 highlighting the impossibility of separating

“nations” as inter-mixed as the Muslims and Hindus of India/Pakistan.
Ian Talbot and Gurharpal Singh show, in their book The Partition of India,
that the late 1940s were characterized by “disputes over assets and terri-
tory” 34 including the division of financial assets. These disputes “bur-
nished the myth that India attempted to strangle Pakistan at birth.” 35
Since Pakistan “was faced with the prospect of setting up an administra-
tion over territories that were devoid of any major industries or other
sources of revenue generation. . . . Muslim League members of the Parti-
tion Committee fought hard to maximise their claims to the resources of
united India,” 36 most of which were successfully thwarted or whittled
down by members of the Congress, which cemented the impression that
India was, and would remain, a threat to Pakistan’s statehood. The dis-
pute over territory, specifically over that of Kashmir, allowed Pakistan
“to divert scarce resources to the ‘political economy of defence’ that rap-
idly expanded the Pakistan army from its modest beginnings, but at the
cost of dependency on foreign aid and economic and social develop-
ment,” 37 which resulted in a “perilous economy and insecure borders
threatened by a hostile neighbor. In this context, the military and the
bureaucracy emerged as the premier institutions that set the permanent
template for the Pakistan polity in which democratic governance would
always play second fiddle.” 38 Thus, Pakistan’s “instability” seems to
have been guaranteed from its inception, and then cemented by the coun-
try’s inability, or unwillingness, to separate military jurisdiction from
that of the civilian, leaving little room for an analysis of, or establishment
of, a Pakistan beyond the idea that Pakistanis are distinguishable as Paki-
stanis only because they are not Indians, as Ashutosh Varshney points
out. 39
Ashutosh Varshney shows, in fact, that one of the main reasons be-
hind Pakistan’s instability as a state is the country’s inability to “lay out
the respective spheres of civilian and military jurisdiction . . . [and that]
none of the multiple constitutions of independent Pakistan has endured
as a basic architecture for power arrangements.” 40 He then compares
Pakistan’s reliance on the military to not only maintain order but to also
act as politicians to India’s ability to separate civilian and military juris-
dictions, 41 suggesting that Pakistan’s “low-level equilibrium” 42 is due to
the co-mingling of the civilian and military power arrangements. In its
seventy-year life span, Pakistan has had three major military dictator-
ships, each a result of strategic coup d’états by the Army’s Chief of Army
Staff, ostensibly to stabilize crumbling civilian governments. The first
“dictator” 43 was General Ayub Khan, who was then followed by General
Zia-ul-Haq. The third dictatorship was led by General Pervez Musharraf,
ensuring that Pakistan’s political “reins [remain] . . . effectively in the
hands of the army for more than thirty-eight years since its indepen-
dence.” 44 Each “dictator” gained incredible popularity among the Paki-
206 Amber Fatima Riaz

stani people, however, and each has been hailed as a unifying force in
Pakistan’s national identity, which disputes the suggestion that military
rule is the root cause of Pakistan’s identity crisis. The causes of the cur-
rent identity crisis are far more complex as, even though “the soldiers [of
Pakistan] may not be favored by Pakistanis as political rulers, they con-
tinue to be trusted by a vast majority of people as the nation’s armed
forces,” 45 which, I contend, is a direct consequence of the events sur-
rounding the Partition. An influx of refugees, a lack of adequate re-
sources, and an unstable civilian government created the perfect atmos-
phere for the army to establish itself as the only institution capable of
providing stability to the floundering nation. This left it up to the military
leaders to decide what Pakistani identity would look like both nationally
and internationally, which, in turn, was one defined as distinctly “anti-
Indianism,” 46 bearing within it echoes of Jinnah’s desire to disentangle
the “two nations” of India.
The early years of Pakistan’s independence were also plagued by re-
gionalism fueled by mistrust between the Eastern (now Bangladesh) and
Western parts of Pakistan. As Christophe Jaffrelot shows, the first decade
of independence was characterized by friction over which language was
to become the official language of the country—West Pakistan (and the
political center) imposed Urdu, but Bengal (then East Pakistan) resisted it
in favor of Bengali. 47 Other grievances dividing East from West Pakistan
included disputes over fair division of political power, investment in
infrastructure and economic exploitation of the East by West Pakistan.
Ghulam Muhammad’s dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in 1955
and the imposition of One Unit which united all four provinces into West
Pakistan, and renamed East Bengal as East Pakistan, 48 further exacerbat-
ed these tensions, as the One Unit scheme was perceived by most Bengal-
is as West Pakistan’s attempt to maintain its hegemony, placing tremen-
dous regional pressure on the center, effectively undermining the two-
nation theory almost immediately after the Partition. If the two-nation
theory could not unify East and West Pakistan, then what was the basis
of the Partition? This is, however, a question that the Pakistani state
apparatus and the general populace have refused to confront. In fact, the
co-mingling of the military and state machinery has ensured silence
about crucial events like the 1971 war that, in turn, led to the sense of
insecurity every Pakistani seems to feel in the twenty-first century and
that has been highlighted by the question that launches the action in
Akbar Ahmed’s graphic novel: “What is our future? Are we as worthless
as our critics say?” 49
As suggested already, specific events of the late 1950s and most of the
1960s led to the 1971 war and separation of East Pakistan (as Bangladesh).
Parliamentary government broke down within a decade of indepen-
dence, and the failure of democracy in Pakistan was resolved, as Antho-
ny Hyman and coauthors show, by the imposition of Martial Law in
 The Never-Ending Partition 207

1958. General Ayub Khan was appointed the Martial Law Administrator,
who then, very quickly, took over the Presidency and effectively ran the
country under Army rule from 1958 to 1969. 50 Relying heavily on US and
Foreign Aid, Ayub Khan invested in infrastructure and industrialization,
which further cemented the impression that the Army alone could pro-
vide stability to the nation. The 1965 war with India, however, marked
the beginning of Ayub Khan’s decline in popularity, resulting in his abdi-
cation to General Yahya in 1969. Even though Ayub Khan’s reign is gen-
erally hailed as the Golden Era of Pakistan’s history, leading the country
through rapid industrialization, the decade also alienated East Pakistan
significantly. The general elections of 1970 highlighted the political differ-
ences between East and West Pakistan, with Mujibur Rahman gaining
majority in East Pakistan, and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in West Pakistan. East
Pakistan became Bangladesh in December 1971, after India’s military
intervention in Bengal resulted in Pakistan Army’s humiliating defeat.
The 1971 separation of Bengal from Pakistan highlights the regional
and ethnic tensions that have consistently plagued Pakistanis’ sense of
national identity. Regionalism and an attachment to blood and soil that
were overridden by the Muslim League’s utopic vision of a “Muslim
homeland” seem to have taken precedence over nationalism. Recogniz-
ing the regionalism dominating Pakistani politics, and fearing it, General
Zia launched an Islamization campaign that, he hoped, would unite the
country, details of which follow.

THE TURNING POINT: GENERAL ZIA-UL-HAQ’S DICTATORSHIP

Where General Ayub Khan’s dictatorship led Pakistan through a decade

of investment in infrastructure and industrialization (coupled as it was
with attempts at unifying a disparate populace), the next military-led
government, beginning in 1977, is characterized as the era of Islamiza-
tion. The secularism espoused by the Quaid during the Pakistan move-
ment of the 1930s and then promoted by Ayub Khan and Zulfikar Ali
Bhutto was deliberately abandoned by General Zia’s Islamization cam-
paign, which sought to create an Islamic State instead of a State for Mus-
lims which had been the initial goal of the Pakistan movement. This
Islamization campaign, however, only highlighted the differences among
regions, rather than acting as the unifying force Zia had envisioned, exac-
erbating a national anxiety about Pakistani identity which, in turn,
underlines the oversights in Jinnah’s two-nation theory.
General Zia-ul-Haq led a coup d’état against Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s
government in 1977 and declared himself president in 1978, after promis-
ing and then canceling elections twice. 51 According to Shahid Javed Bur-
ki, Zia forced Bhutto from the office of Prime Minister in “September
1977 on the charge that he had ordered the murder of a political oppo-
208 Amber Fatima Riaz

nent. Bhutto was tried by the Lahore High Court, convicted, sentenced to
death, and allowed by General Zia-ul-Haq to be executed in Rawalpindi
on April 4, 1979, after the Supreme Court upheld the verdict.” 52 Having
established himself as the president of Pakistan in 1978, “ostensibly on
the expiration of Chaudhary’s five-year term as there was no National
Assembly and Senate in existence to elect a new president,” 53 Zia pro-
ceeded to implement numerous changes in laws and the constitution of
Pakistan, under the banner of “Islamization of Pakistan.” His claim: Paki-
stan was founded as a country for all Muslims of India/South Asia and
must be brought in line with Islamic laws in order to make it a truly
Islamic State. As Craig Baxter shows, however, how one defines Islam
has a significant impact on the type of “Islamic State” created, an exam-
ple of why Zia’s Islamization campaign failed to gain currency or to unite
the nation. Baxter shows that Pakistan’s Muslims are divided along sec-
tarian and religious lines, as well as differences in regional identities. 54
Thus, a monolithic view of Islamic jurisprudence is almost impossible,
unless one chooses a singular school of thought at the cost of other, pos-
sibly contradictory, ones. In his article “Politics of Islamisation: Pakistan’s
Dilemma (1947–1988)” Sukhwant S. Bindra shows that, as a religion and
as a system of rules about spirituality as well as one’s role in “life,” Islam
“aims at striking a balance between the units and the whole, between the
individual and the community” 55 but that there is little to no consensus
in religious scholarship on what constitutes a truly “Islamic state.” Schol-
ars, instead, have offered their own descriptions and definitions, most of
which have historically contradicted one another. Thus, General Zia’s
definition of, and attempt at, establishing an ideal “Islamic” state met
with resistance and protests in Pakistan, with no real consensus as to
what was meant by “Islamic,” prompting debates about Pakistani nation-
al identity among political analysts and highlighting the diversity of the
Muslim population in Pakistan.
In their article “Islamicisation and Social Policy in Pakistan” J. Henry
Korson and Michelle Maskiell discuss the legal changes brought about by
Zia’s Islamization campaign and show that even though Zia ruled as a
dictator, his Islamization program was far from a lone man’s version of
an ideal Islamic state. He took pains to ensure that the process itself
followed Islamic guidelines for forming laws in a Muslim country. He
announced, for example, the establishment of the majlis-e-shoora (assem-
bly or parliament), an appointed advisory body that effectively replaced
the elected National Assembly 56 in 1981, soon after declaring himself
President. The appointment of the majlis, with an intended membership
of 300 advisors, was meant to accelerate the process of Islamization of
Pakistan’s constitution as well as social system, but actual power to make
new laws or to amend the constitution remained with the military
government, so the role of the majlis remained an advisory one. 57 Any
amendments made by the majlis were reviewed, in turn, by the Federal
 The Never-Ending Partition 209

Shariah Court to ensure that they were not contrary to Islamic laws and
met with the dictates of the Quran and Sunnah, as interpreted by the
Council of Islamic Ideology. 58
It is important to note, here, that General Zia’s Islamization campaign
was resisted and questioned consistently by the civilian elite, and was
characterized by significant disagreements over which school of Islamic
thought was to become the dominant one, showing clearly that while the
insistence on secularism embedded in Jinnah’s two-nation theory had
currency in some Pakistani circles, Zia’s unification attempt on religious
grounds failed significantly, drawing attention to the fissures in Pakistani
national identity. In her essay “The Past as Present,” Ayesha Jalal dis-
cusses the impact of Zia’s Islamization campaign and asserts that “Gener-
al Zia-ul-Haq (1977–1988) synchronized his so-called Islamisation poli-
cies with American-backed support for the Afghan resistance movement
in the 1980s.” 59 Thus, Zia used the Islamization campaign, according to
Jalal, to cement his own claim to power in Pakistan. He launched a “state-
sponsored ‘jihad’ industry” 60 which funded madrasahs 61 in the northwest
“that shared a common Pakhtun culture with over three million Afghan
refugees who had poured into Pakistan.” 62 The problem arose when the
madrassahs adopted ideologies different from those practiced by most
Muslims in Pakistan. As Jalal puts it, “Long before the Taliban reared
their heads in the tribal northwest of Pakistan, local rivalries dressed up
as disagreements over Islam erupted in pitched battles between the mili-
tant bands of Sunnis and Shi’as as well as Deobandis, Barelvis and the
Ahl-i-Hadith.” 63 Thus, instead of unifying the country, Zia’s Wahhabi-
influenced Islamization campaign only succeeded in highlighting and
exacerbating preexisting regional, ethnic, and religious differences.

PAKISTAN’S FUTURE: IS A COHESIVE

NATIONAL IDENTITY POSSIBLE?

I began this chapter by asking whether Pakistan’s founding ideology has

“failed” its citizens and have shown that the two-nation theory imagined
a unified Muslim Nation even as this redefinition of nationhood failed to
acknowledge the (competing) claims of soil, blood-relations and cultural
practices. I suggested that the most recent Federal Elections (held in
2013) 64 highlight a (perceived) growing regionalism in Pakistan that re-
sists any attempts at national unity. I contend, however, that the All-India
Muslim League’s initial claims of a unified Muslim polity in colonial
India were grossly exaggerated. In as much as the Muslim League (and to
an extent, the Congress Party) relied on the two-nation theory which
presented a vision of a unified Muslim majority, that unity did not actual-
ly exist.
210 Amber Fatima Riaz

Once the territorial boundaries were determined, Pakistan became “a

prisoner of its geography and history,” 65 forcing the nation to define and
recast itself continuously while simultaneously trying to negotiate inter-
nal and external stresses, given its strategic geographical location, and its
historical wars with India. As Ayesha Jalal points out, “curbs on freedom
of speech during extended periods of military authoritarianism, declin-
ing educational standards, and an obsessive fear of Indian hegemonic
designs has stunted the development of a critical intellectual tradition” 66
in Pakistan. That, however, does not mean that a unified Pakistani iden-
tity is not possible. What is needed is a sustained analysis of both the
Pakistan Movement of the early twentieth century and Pakistan’s own
political and social history, one that uncovers a credible history of the
founding of the nation. That “Pakistan has found it difficult to project a
national identity that can strike a sympathetic chord with its heterogene-
ous people” 67 is clear. What is less clear is how Pakistan can now build a
national identity without continuously resorting to the myth of its ori-
gins—that the “country emerged from a religiously inspired separatist
movement against Hindu domination in an Independent India.” 68 As my
analysis has shown already, this myth has presented a particularly dis-
torted vision of Pakistan’s origins, and has created tremendous anxiety
around regionalism. An acknowledgment of the multiple voices that con-
sistently debated the idea of Pakistan in the 1930s and 1940s does not
negate the (perceived) need for Pakistan, but, instead, allows a space for
dialogue about the multiple claims of the regional identities that now
constitute the nation—both geographically and ideologically—so that
those regional identities can begin to identify common goals for the coun-
try instead of focusing all their energies on gaining footholds at the cen-
ter.
In his essay “Why Pakistan Will Survive” Mohsin Hamid outlines the
incredible diversity that makes up the Pakistani identity. He points out
that Pakistan is “the sixth most populous country in the world [and that
one] in every forty human beings is Pakistani.” 69 The population itself,
thus, is incredibly diverse. Given the country’s large population, it
should come as no surprise that Pakistanis speak multiple languages,
have more “non-Muslims than there are people in Toronto or Miami . . .
have transvestite talk-show hosts, advocates for ‘eunuch rights’, burqa-
wearers, turbaned men with beards . . . the Communist Mazdoor Kis-
san 70 Party and . . . Porsche dealerships. [Pakistanis] are nobody’s stereo-
type.” 71 Given the diversity of the population, Pakistan’s insistence on a
monolithic view of its identity—one country, one religion, one voice—
has failed to find any traction, a statement underlined by the constant
(and rather circular) debates about what Pakistani identity actually is.
Once Pakistani politicians and historians open themselves to an accep-
tance of Pakistan’s diversity, and to the multiple claims of the diverse
regional identities that constitute the nation of Pakistan, meaningful di-
 The Never-Ending Partition 211

alogue can begin to take place about how the country can make a name
for itself. Pakistan must open itself up to a critical examination of both the
Pakistan movement and its own tumultuous history in order to come to
terms with its own diversity, and to accept the fact that there is not one
Pakistani identity, but many different ones, each equally valid, each
shaping Pakistan’s trajectory in its own way.

NOTES

1. It is important to note here that Pakistan’s definition changed from a country for
Muslims to Islamic State very soon after the Partition and the Quaid’s death. General
Zia, however, imposed a much stricter interpretation of Islam (often seen as having
roots in Wahhabism, favored by the Saudis), which is often seen as the turning point
in Pakistan’s redefinition as Islamic State, details of which are presented in the essay.
2. I use “imagined” deliberately to signal Benedict Anderson’s delineation of “im-
agined nations” in his text Imagined Communities Reflections on the Origins and Spread of
Nationalism, Rev. Ed. (New York: Verso, 1991) in which he defines nation as an “ima-
gined political community—and imagined as both limited and sovereign” (6). Jinnah
became a proponent of the two-nation theory which utilized this very concept to
mobilize a diverse group of people unified under one label, but which, seventy years
after Partition, seems to be failing as a concept.
3. Akbar Ahmed, The Quaid: Jinnah and the Story of Pakistan (Karachi: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1997). Book Jacket.
4. Ibid., 6–7; original ellipses.
5. Agha Ashraf, Tehreek-e-Pakistan [The Pakistan Movement] (Lahore: Zahid Print-
ers, 1985), 17–18; my translation.
6. Ibid., 18; my translation.
7. The British Government granted separate electorates to Muslims in 1909 as
noted by Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political
Economy (New York: Routledge, 1997), 138.
8. Ibid., 141.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid., 144.
11. The map drawn by Ali has been reprinted in Akbar Ahmed’s text.
12. The Pakistan Resolution and the demand for a “homeland” for India’s Muslims,
as well as the two-nation theory proposed and espoused by the Muslim League were
hotly contested political ideas, details of which debates cannot be recounted here in
the interests of space. For an account of the interactions between Jinnah, Gandhi,
Nehru, and British political representatives, see Jaswant Singh’s Jinnah: India—Parti-
tion Independence (New Delhi: Rupa and Co., 2009).
13. Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal, Modern South Asia: History, Culture, and Political
Economy (New York: Routledge, 1997), 145.
14. Frances W. Pritchett, “Text of Address by Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah
at Lahore Session of Muslim League, March, 1940,” (Islamabad: Directorate of Films
and Publishing, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of Pakistan,
1983). All editorial emendations in square brackets are by Frances W. Pritchett.
15. Ibid.
16. For relevant statistics and analyses, see Jill Didur, Unsettling Partition: Literature,
Gender, Memory (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), or Ritu Menon and Kam-
la Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition (New Brunswick: Rutgers
University Press, 1998).
17. Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal. Modern South Asia: History, Culture, and Political
Economy (New York: Routledge, 1997), 135.
212 Amber Fatima Riaz

18. Ibid.
19. Agha Ashraf, Tehreek-e-Pakistan (Lahore: Zahid Printers, 1985), 21; my transla-
tion.
20. During the struggle for Independence from the British in the early part of the
twentieth century, Hindi was associated with Hindus of India, while Urdu became
associated with Muslim culture. A conscious effort has been made to separate the two
languages; Hindi, for example, traces its roots back to Sanskrit, while Urdu script
draws from Arabic and Persian. The vocabulary of both languages, as well as the
contemporary vernacular is similar enough to enable Hindi and Urdu speakers to
communicate quite effectively, making the distinction between the languages difficult
to detect.
21. Agha Ashraf, Tehreek-e-Pakistan (Lahore: Zahid Printers, 1985), 18–21.
22. Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (London and
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 86. Original italics.
23. Ibid., 93.
24. Rafia Hasan, “The Role of Women as Agents of Change and Development in
Pakistan” Human Rights Quarterly 3, 3 (Aug. 1981): 68
25. Akbar Ahmed, The Quai: Jinnah and the Story of Pakistan (Karachi: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1997), 24–25.
26. The sherwani is a long coat-like garment worn over “tang pajama” or cotton
tights-like pants. It was favored by the nobles of Mughal India as a court dress and
became a symbol of Muslim nobility in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The
symbol continues to have resonance in contemporary South Asian society, in part due
to the Muslim League’s leaders’ adoption of the sherwani as their primary dress in the
1940s.
27. Akbar Ahmed, The Quaid: Jinnah and the Story of Pakistan (Karachi: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1997), 75.
28. Faisal Devji, Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2013), 3.
29. Ibid., 10.
30. Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (London and
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 88.
31. Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern
South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 7.
32. Sarah Ansari, “Everyday Expectations of the State during Pakistan’s Early
Years: Letters to the Editor, Dawn (Karachi), 1950–1953.” From Subjects to Citizens:
Society and the Everyday State in India and Pakistan, 1947–1970, ed. Taylor C. Sherman,
William Gould, and Sara Ansari (Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 173.
33. Ibid., 175.
34. Ian Talbot and Gurharpal Singh, The Partition of India (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2009), 156.
35. Ibid., 157.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid., 159.
38. Ibid., 162.
39. Varshney, Ashutosh. “The Idea of Pakistan,” The Great Divide, spec. issue of
India International Centre Quarterly, ed. Ira Pande 35, 3 & 4 (Winter 2008, Spring 2009):
4.
40. Ibid., 3.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid.
43. Military rule in Pakistan is inevitably greeted by the populace as a time of
stability and, often, as one of prosperity for the masses. The suspension of legal consti-
tutions and Martial Law are technically termed dictatorships, but are not viewed as
such in popular Pakistani discourse. Ayub Khan’s presidency, for example, is often
 The Never-Ending Partition 213

hailed as Pakistan’s Golden Era, and Musharraf’s presidency is seen to have brought
economic prosperity and international acclaim for Pakistan.
44. Shuja Nawaz, “Army and Politics,” Pakistan: Beyond the “Crisis State,” ed. Malee-
ha Lodhi (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2011), 79.
45. Ashutosh Varshney, “The Idea of Pakistan,” in The Great Divide, spec. issue of
India International Centre Quarterly, edited by Ira Pande 35, 3 & 4 (Winter 2008, Spring
2009): 4
46. Ibid.
47. Christophe Jaffrelot, A History of Pakistan and its Origins (London: Anthem Press,
2004), 21.
48. Ibid.
49. Akbar Ahmed, The Quaid: Jinnah and the Story of Pakistan (Karachi: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1997), 2.
50. Anthony Hyman, Muhammed Ghayur, Naresh Kaushik, Pakistan: Zia and After
(New Delhi: Abhinav Publications, 1989), 12.
51. Craig Baxter, “Restructuring the Pakistan Political System,” Pakistan Under the
Military: Eleven Years of Zia-ul-Haq, eds. Shahid Javed Burki and Craig Baxter (San
Francisco: Westview Press, 1991), 32.
52. Shahid Javed Burki, “Zia’s Eleven Years,” Pakistan Under the Military: Eleven
Years of Zia-ul-Haq, ed. Shahid Javed Burki and Craig Baxter (San Francisco: Westview
Press, 1991), 1.
53. Craig Baxter, “Restructuring the Pakistan Political System,” Pakistan Under the
Military: Eleven Years of Zia-ul-Haq, eds. Shahid Javed Burki and Craig Baxter (San
Francisco: Westview Press, 1991), 32.
54. Ibid., 36.
55. Sukhwant S. Bindra, “Politics of Islamisation: Pakistan’s Dilemma (1947–1988),”
Punjab Journal of Politics 27, 2 (2003): 124.
56. J. Henry Korson and Michelle Maskiell, “Islamicisation and Social Policy in
Pakistan,” Asian Survey 25, 6 (1985): 589.
57. Ibid., 590.
58. Ibid.
59. Ayesha Jalal, “The Past as Present,” Pakistan: Beyond the “Crisis State,” ed. Malee-
ha Lodhi (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2011), 15.
60. Ibid.
61. Independent religious schools ostensibly devoted to Islamic instruction and the
study of the Quran, but generally understood to be “breeding grounds” for extremist
and fundamentalist ideologies.
62. Ayesha Jalal, “The Past as Present,” Pakistan: Beyond the “Crisis State,” ed. Malee-
ha Lodhi (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2011), 15.
63. Ibid.
64. The Punjabi dominated PML (N) led by Nawaz Sharif won 214 of a total of 297
seats in the Punjab, while the Sindhi-led PPP won majority in Sindh, and the Pakhtun-
led PTI won majority in KPK, with a Balochi party maintaining majority in Balochi-
stan. The results allowed Nawaz Sharif’s party to gain majority at the Federal level on
the basis of sheer numbers, as the Federal seats are allocated according to a province’s
population, giving Punjab the maximum number of Federal seats. Given these election
results, it is easy to claim that regionalism has finally begun to dominate the political
scene.
65. Shuja Nawaz, “Army and Politics,” in Pakistan: Beyond the “Crisis State,” edited
by Maleeha Lodhi (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2011), 79.
66. Ayesha Jalal, “The Past as Present,” Pakistan: Beyond the “Crisis State,” ed. Malee-
ha Lodhi (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2011), 9–10.
67. Ibid., 11.
68. Ibid.
69. Mohsin Hamid, “Why Pakistan Will Survive,” Pakistan: Beyond the “Crisis State,”
ed. Maleeha Lodhi (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2011), 35.
214 Amber Fatima Riaz

70. Mazdoor: Laborer; Kissan: farm-worker, i.e., The Communist Farm Laborer Par-
ty.
71. Mohnsin Hamid, “Why Pakistan Will Survive,” Pakistan: Beyond the “Crisis
State,” ed. Maleeha Lodhi (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2011), 36.

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Ahmed, Akbar. The Quaid: Jinnah and the Story of Pakistan. Karachi: Oxford University
Press, 1997.
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Na-
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Ansari, Sarah. “Everyday Expectations of the State during Pakistan’s Early Years:
Letters to the Editor, Dawn (Karachi), 1950–1953.” In From Subjects to Citizens: Society
and the Everyday State in India and Pakistan, 1947–1970. Edited by Taylor C. Sherman,
William Gould, and Sarah Ansari. Delhi: Cambridge University Press, 2014. 172–92.
Ashraf, Agha. Tehreek-e-Pakistan [The Pakistan Movement]. Lahore: Zahid Printers, 1985.
Baxter, Craig. “Restructuring the Pakistan Political System.” In Pakistan Under the Mili-
tary: Eleven Years of Zia-ul-Haq. Edited by Shahid Javed Burki and Craig Baxter. San
Francisco: Westview Press, 1991. 27–48.
Bindra, Sukhwant S. “Politics of Islamisation: Pakistan’s Dilemma (1947–1988).” Pun-
jab Journal of Politics 27, 2 (2003): 123–38.
Bose, Sugata, and Ayesha Jalal. Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy.
New York: Routledge, 1997.
Burki, Shahid Javed. “Zia’s Eleven Years.” In Pakistan Under the Military: Eleven Years of
Zia-ul-Haq. Edited by Shahid Javed Burki and Craig Baxter. San Francisco: West-
view Press, 1991. 1–26.
Devji, Faisal. Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 2013.
Didur, Jill. Unsettling Partition: Literature, Gender, Memory. Toronto: University of To-
ronto Press, 2006.
Hamid, Mohsin. “Why Pakistan Will Survive.” In Pakistan: Beyond the “Crisis State.”
Edited by Maleeha Lodhi. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2011. 35–43.
Hasan, Rafia. “The Role of Women as Agents of Change and Development in Paki-
stan.” Human Rights Quarterly 3, 3 (Aug. 1981): 68–75.
Hyman, Anthony, Muhammed Ghayur, Naresh Kaushik. Pakistan: Zia and After. New
Delhi: Abhinav Publications, 1989.
Jaffrelot, Christophe. A History of Pakistan and its Origins. London: Anthem Press, 2004.
Print.
Jalal, Ayesha. “The Past as Present.” In Pakistan: Beyond the “Crisis State.” Edited by
Maleeha Lodhi. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2011. 7–20.
Khan, Yasmin. The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan. London: Yale Uni-
versity Press, 2008.
Korson, J. Henry, and Michelle Maskiell. “Islamicisation and Social Policy in Paki-
stan.” Asian Survey 25, 6 (1985): 589–612.
Menon, Ritu, and Kamla Bhasin. Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition.
New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998.
Nawaz, Shuja. “Army and Politics.” In Pakistan: Beyond the “Crisis State.” Edited by
Maleeha Lodhi. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2011. 79–94.
Pritchett, Frances W. Text of Address by Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah at Lahore
Session of Muslim League, March, 1940. Islamabad: Directorate of Films and Publish-
ing, Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of Pakistan, 1983. 5–23.
Singh, Jaswant. Jinnah: India—Partition Independence. New Delhi: Rupa and Co., 2009.
Talbot, Ian, and Gurharpal Singh. The Partition of India. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2009.
 The Never-Ending Partition 215

Varshney, Ashutosh. “The Idea of Pakistan.” In The Great Divide, spec. issue of India
International Centre Quarterly, edited by Ira Pande 35, 3 & 4 (Winter 2008, Spring
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Zamindar, Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali. The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South
Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.
 THIRTEEN
Partition and the Bangladeshi
Literary Response
Kaiser Haq

The Partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 and the attendant blood-
bath have become indissolubly linked to several horrific images. Armed
gangs or mobs attacking helpless groups of men, women, and children
trying to cross the border that had just been scratched on the map; trains
carrying refugees attacked and arriving at their destination on the other
side of the border with only dead bodies; women ambushed and raped
and then killed. Muslim pitted against Hindu and Sikh and vice versa.
And when the frenzy abates, a dead count of a million. A few years later,
Partition literature becomes a tragic sub-genre. However, it does not have
a uniform character throughout the region. Much of the massacre was
centered on the Punjab and Northwestern India. South India was spared,
and writers there, lacking firsthand experience of the violence, could not
be expected to deal with it with the same raw power. In the eastern part,
the pattern of violence was quite distinct, and produced a different dem-
ographic fallout. There was not the same degree of raw violence. The
holocaust in the west led to ethnic cleansing and population transfers on
a massive scale. Such wholesale demographic changes did not occur in
Bengal.
Bangladesh is unique in that it has undergone partition three times,
and each time it has been different from the other two. The result is a
strange sense of historical disorientation that is largely repressed. As
Ananya Jahanara Kabir, in her recent study of Partition’s Post-Amnesias,
puts it, “Thrice-partitioned Bengal, together with the partition of the ad-
joining province of Assam, has given rise to a most peculiar kind of

217
218 Kaiser Haq

cartographic irresolution, caused by the repeated creation, dissolution,

and transformation of the boundary demarcating its eastern and western
regions.” 1 The first time was in 1905, when the colonial administration
decided to partition Bengal into two provinces, one comprising West
Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa and with a Hindu majority; the other East Ben-
gal and Assam and with a Muslim majority. The move was welcomed by
the Muslims of East Bengal and violently opposed by Hindus; in the end
the colonial authorities gave in and repealed the partition in 1911. Politics
then became increasingly tinctured by religion.
As British withdrawal loomed, the task of splitting the subcontinent to
create one or more Muslim-majority territories alongside Hindu-majority
India became a contentious issue. Punjab, it was decided, would have to
be split up. In Bengal, Muslims wanted an undivided province to go to
Pakistan, while Hindus favored partition. A futile last-minute attempt
was made to keep it intact as an independent state separate from both
India and Pakistan. In the end East Bengal, along with the Muslim-major-
ity district of Assam, was carved out as Pakistan’s eastern province; it
would be renamed East Pakistan, while the four Muslim provinces at the
subcontinent’s western end—(West) Punjab, Sindh, Baluchistan, and the
North-West Frontier Province—would be amalgamated into West Paki-
stan.
But Pakistan soon began to strain at the seams, first over the choice of
state language, then over economic disparity between the two wings.
Mohammed Ali Jinnah, addressing a meeting at Dhaka University, fool-
ishly declared that Urdu, understood by few Bengali Muslims, would be
Pakistan’s state language and was heckled by students. In 1952, students
demanding that Bengali be made a state language alongside Urdu were
fired upon by the police; at least five died. The movement spread and the
government was forced to accede to the demand. The language martyrs
are now Bangladesh’s national heroes, and their death anniversary, Feb-
ruary 21, has been declared International Mother Language Day by the
UNO.
Two years later, in the elections to the provincial legislative assembly
of East Pakistan, a newly formed United Front, comprising Fazlul Huq’s
Krishak Sramik Party (the Party of Peasants and Workers), the Awami
League (formed by breakaway sections of the Muslim League led by
Husain Shaheed Suhrawardy and Maulana Abdul Hamid Khan Bhasha-
ni), wiped out the Muslim League and formed the provincial govern-
ment. It was a short-lived administration, soon thrown out of office by
the diktat of an unfriendly central government dominated by the West
Pakistani elite. The Front articulated a twenty-one-point political pro-
gram that demanded provincial autonomy, both political and economic,
and thus struck at the foundation of the federalist system then taking
shape. This program, though it could not be implemented, presages the
 Partition and the Bangladeshi Literary Response 219

later six-point movement of the Awami League that eventually led to the
independence of Bangladesh.
Independence came at the price of the most harrowing bloodshed ever
seen in the country. When the Awami League, led by Sheikh Mujibur
Rahman, won the majority of seats in the Pakistan National Assembly in
1970, on the basis of the six-point program that demanded provincial
autonomy, the ruling military junta, with the connivance of Zulfiqar Ali
Bhutto and his Pakistan People’s Party, refused to hand over power;
when protests intensified, a ruthless military crackdown tried to smother
dissent. The independence war erupted and nine months later the rebels,
aided by the Indian armed forces, assumed control of a newborn country.
Often missing in this narrative is the attempt by the Pakistan Army to
replay the Partition massacres of 1947. It is generally accepted that the
Pakistan Army committed genocide in Bangladesh. The nature of the
genocide is usually left unexamined. The Pakistani onslaught prompted
nine million Bangladeshis to trek across the border to refugee camps in
India, of whom 90 percent were Hindu; obviously the genocide was pri-
marily aimed at the Hindus. The Pakistan Army wanted an ethnic cleans-
ing of East Pakistan, something West Pakistan had completed in 1947.
From 1947 to 1971, Pakistan lived with a disaffected eastern province.
West Pakistan’s ruling elite blamed the disaffection on its large Hindu
population and their influence on Muslim Bengalis, whom they consid-
ered insufficiently Islamized. What the latter had failed to do in 1947,
because they were “bad”—Hinduized—Muslims, the Pakistan Army at-
tempted in 1971. This is not to minimize in any way the communal vio-
lence that has taken place in Bengal even without the participation of the
Pakistan Army. The Bengal Partition of 1905 and its repeal in 1911 proved
to be a watershed in Hindu-Muslim relations in Bengal. Henceforth, the
two communities went their separate ways in pursuing an anticolonial
agenda.
The Muslim peasantry identified a dual antagonist comprising the
Hindu zamindars and British colonizers. The upper-caste Hindu gentry
were unabashedly contemptuous of the Muslim peasantry. This opposi-
tion was further complicated by a class dichotomy among Bengali Mus-
lims, with Muslim zamindars and their upper-class coreligionists label-
ing themselves superior (ashraf) as opposed to the inferior Muslim com-
mon people (atraf). Consequently, two kinds of Muslim political forma-
tions emerged, Fazlul Huq’s Krishak Praja Party (Party of Peasants and
the Tenantry) claiming to represent the peasantry, and the Muslim
League, dominated by ashraf politicians, many from the zamindar class.
The internal dialectic of Muslim politics had the two groups vying for the
support of the Muslim masses, with the upper-class leaders happily fall-
ing back on the universalist message of Islam to paper over class differ-
ences. Similarly, there was a caste divide within the Hindu community,
with some low-caste politicians demanding—unsuccessfully—a separate
220 Kaiser Haq

electorate. However, communal violence overrode these complications of

class and caste, and riots became endemic in many parts of Bengal from
the thirties onwards; Dhaka was a particularly volatile city.
The most devastating riot in Bengal was the so-called Great Calcutta
Killing, the three-day mayhem in August 1946 that seemed to make the
political divorce between the Hindus and Muslims irrevocable. Estimates
of casualties vary, and a blame game went on, but it would seem reason-
able to go with Joya Chatterji’s assessment: “The rioting, in which at least
5,000 died, was not a spontaneous and inexplicable outburst of aggres-
sion by faceless mobs. Both sides in the confrontation came well-pre-
pared for it.” 2 The knock-on effect was immediate. In Noakhali, now a
district of Bangladesh, a Congress member turned Muslim League politi-
cian called Golam Sarwar delivered an inflammatory speech that trig-
gered riots in which Hindu houses were burned, women raped, several
thousand killed. Mahatma Gandhi went on one of his most famous peace
missions to bring back a semblance of normalcy. In Bihar there was a
more widespread communal conflagration with mainly Muslim victims;
this was the preliminary act of terrorizing that brought about an exodus
of Bihari Muslims in 1947, mostly to Bangladesh, where they eventually
ran into fresh troubles: they collaborated with the Pakistan Army in 1971
and became victims of reprisals before being interned in Red Cross
camps. They maintained their allegiance to Pakistan, which however has
refused to take them. Some trekked to India and right across to Pakistan
(subject of the Bollywood film Refugee in 2000), and the rest have willy-
nilly adopted Bangladesh as their home.
True, the riots in eastern India and Bengal did not result in anything
like the massacre in the west, but it is worth remembering, as Harun-or-
Rashid points out, that “the Calcutta massacre triggered off prolonged
communal warfare in different parts of India.” 3 Calcutta, to put it meta-
phorically, sowed the wind that was reaped as a whirlwind in western
India. Partition was followed by riots in Kolkata in 1947, and periodically
in the ensuing decades. In Bangladesh itself, a number of riots took place
after Partition, in 1950, 1964, and 1992. Most harrowing for the Banglade-
shi Hindus has been the genocide of 1971. The resulting psychological
trauma and general sense of insecurity have been a lasting legacy. Merci-
fully, the 1971 genocide did not produce the ethnic cleansing that the
Pakistan Army aimed at, though the proportion of Hindus in the popula-
tion of Bangladesh has come down to 9 percent, from around 29 percent
at the time of the Partition. Ananya Kabir aptly notes that “this region did
not experience the surgical cut of a clean transfer of populations,” 4 in-
stead, there has been a “continuing trickle of refugees across the porous
border.” 5 It would be more accurate to say, though, that there has been
migration of Hindus from East Pakistan and Bangladesh in periodic
“quanta” and in trickles. As Nitish Sengupta puts it, “There was no ex-
change of population as between the two Punjabs. West Bengal always
 Partition and the Bangladeshi Literary Response 221

had to face migration, sometimes in trickles, and sometimes like tidal

waves.” 6 The migration by “quanta” has been precipitated each time by a
cataclysmic event, whether a riot or war. The trickle is the outcome of the
continuing pressure exerted on the Hindu minority by local honchos
from the Muslim majority. The motivation for such heinous behavior is
usually greed. Those who trickle across into India do so after parting
with their property at throwaway prices.
The Partition has cast a shadow from which the subcontinent has not
emerged. Geopolitically, the militancy and unrest in many areas of South
Asia are a direct consequence of Partition: Kashmir, the northeastern
states of India, Baluchistan, the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh,
where even after the signing of a peace agreement (as yet unimplement-
ed) there are occasional outbursts of violence between Bengali settlers
and members of indigenous communities. The origin of the conflict in-
volved both demography and ideology. The influx of settlers from the
plains was a direct threat to the traditional way of life of the indigenes;
while the claim iterated by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman that after the inde-
pendence of Bangladesh the indigenous communities of the Hills too
were Bengalis, was seen as a threat to their distinctive identity.
An issue like the subcontinent’s Partition ought not to be dealt with in
a purely academic manner, or in a third-person style. Let me bring in my
personal experience. It goes without saying that those who have directly
experienced dislocation as a result of Partition can provide the most valu-
able, not to say moving, testimony. Neither my family nor I can personal-
ly claim such experience. And yet, like everyone in the region, we have
not been spared the fallout of Partition. We all heard things, saw things,
read things. The gradual diminishment of the Hindu population was
something one could not but be aware of. I was born in 1950, and conse-
quently had no direct knowledge of the initial exodus, precipitated by a
mood of panic and uncertainty. In 1948 the zamindari system was abol-
ished, and in itself it was no doubt a very good thing. But it also made the
Hindus of the zamindar class who were in East Bengal realize that they
would no longer have a sure source of income there, and that it was
better to migrate to India and explore fresh avenues of economic activity.
In 1950 anti-Hindu riots broke out in East Bengal and led to another
exodus; that these riots were engineered by the Pakistan government
through non-Bengali, West Pakistani, officials. 7 In reaction there were
anti-Muslim riots in West Bengal, which led to an influx of Muslim refu-
gees, mainly but not entirely non-Bengalis, into East Bengal. I was just a
few weeks old at the time. An aunt stood with me in her arms to expose
me to the beneficial rays of the winter morning sunlight in the courtyard
of our home in Dhaka. Suddenly she heard aggressive voices outside,
and then the crack of a rifle shot. A sauve qui peut followed; a few men
carrying lethal cleavers barged in through the front gate and with reas-
suring words to my panic-stricken aunt ran right through the house and
222 Kaiser Haq

disappeared out the back. The attackers had besieged the house in front
of ours, an imposing building owned by a Bengali Hindu family. They
had telephoned the police, who mercifully responded promptly, and on
seeing the clutch of attackers fired over their heads to disperse them.
Soon afterwards, the Hindu family left for Kolkata, having successfully
negotiated a property exchange with an Ismaili family. The latter were
our neighbors until 1971, when they left for Pakistan after selling the
house to a distant relation of ours.
It is worth noting that the 1950 riots in East Bengal were confined to
Dhaka and a few other towns. The villages were unscathed. As I was
growing up my holidays were all spent in the village, either my ancestral
village, which was about five miles as the crow flies from Dhaka’s city
center, or—more often—in my mother’s ancestral village, which was a
further six miles away. My memories of the rural communities in both
areas till I entered my teens are still vivid, and show an organic society
made up of Muslims and various Hindu castes, each in their ancestral
hamlets, living in a state of mutual economic dependence, without any
apparent tension. We knew that some members of the Hindu community
had migrated to India, but the multi-communal social fabric still held. In
one Hindu family, one branch might have left for India, but those remain-
ing could carry on with their caste occupation in peace. On Durga Puja
holidays, our chief pleasure was visiting the Puja altars and devouring
sweets offered by our hosts. In retrospect, I can elegiacally reflect that my
generation was lucky to have seen the traditional bi-religious, bi-commu-
nal society of rural Bangladesh in its final phase.
The next round of buffeting suffered by the Hindus of East Pakistan
took place in 1964, following the Hazratbal incident. This was the disap-
pearance of the “Prophet’s hair” preserved in a mosque in Kashmir, for
which the blame game led to riots. The incidents in Dhaka have been
fictionally memorialized in Amitav Ghosh’s classic novel Shadow Lines
(1988). 8 I was away at a boarding school at the time and later heard that
this time the area around my mother’s ancestral village hadn’t been
spared. An enterprising local entrepreneur had set up a cotton mill with-
in a few miles of the village, but the mill hands he had to hire came from
various districts of the country. They lived in makeshift quarters and
lacked any organic connection with the surrounding villages, so that
when news and rumors about the communal disturbances elsewhere
reached them, they felt no compunction about going on a rampage, at-
tacking Hindu villages. All attempts to talk sense into the mob were
futile. My mejo mama, second of the brothers of my mother, lived in the
village, looking after the family property and practicing as a physician.
He was well liked by all in the area and would later play a significant role
in local politics. Among the people who came to him for treatment were
many Hindus. Faced with murderous mobs they came to him for succor.
Without any hesitation he hid them in the lofts of the cottages at his
 Partition and the Bangladeshi Literary Response 223

home, feeding them and taking care of the wounded till the danger
passed and some sort of normalcy returned. One of the wounded had
been slashed across the throat with a knife. Luckily, the wound was not
fatal but would have been if my uncle hadn’t promptly stitched him up,
without anesthesia, needless to add, and administered antibiotics and
painkillers. The riot survivor and his family were among those who left
for India in the exodus that followed. In his new country he did well,
became prosperous, but retained fond links with the old country. He kept
track of events there, and when long after the birth of Bangladesh he got
news that Uncle was seriously ill, he sent word that “Doctor Sahib”
should go to India for better treatment; he had set aside 100,000 rupees
for that. But it was too late; the illness was too far-gone.
In my father’s ancestral village there was a Hindu hamlet whose in-
habitants were a large extended family with which we had close ties. My
father’s parents being both dead, whenever he visited the village he
stayed with the Hindu family. He helped a smart young man of the
family make a career in publishing; Robi-da, as the young man came to
be known to me and my siblings, was a frequent visitor to our home in
Dhaka and was like one of the family. After the 1965 Indo-Pakistan war
he decided to move to Kolkata, followed by most of his family; many
made the choice to migrate in 1971. Only a handful of his relations re-
main in Bangladesh. The last “tidal wave” of emigration was prompted
by the communal tension created by the destruction of the Babri Mosque.
Taslima Nasreen’s Lajja (Shame) 9 gives a disturbing account of the plight
of the Hindu minority at the time and cogently frames the narrative in
relation to to the Partition and subsequent political developments.
In comparison to Hindu emigration from Bangladesh, immigration of
Bengali Muslims from India has been far less extensive. Only rough fig-
ures are available: if there were six million Hindu migrants from East
Bengal to India, Muslims from West to East Bengal were a million and a
half. This asymmetry is clearly reflected in the cultural impact of Parti-
tion. Far more books and films dealing with Partition have come out of
West Bengal than Bangladesh. The sense of loss of one’s home (desh) is a
poignant theme that dominates Partition literature in West Bengal; East
Bengal is romanticized as an idyllic land that had to be abandoned under
unfortunate political circumstances.
It has been suggested that there is an asymmetry in the socio-econom-
ic and political destinies of the two Bengals. Ananya Kabir thinks that in
contrast to “moribund” West Bengal, East Bengal’s history through Parti-
tion seems like a fairy story of teleological progress: first emancipated
from the shackles of the Bengali Hindu bhadrolok by becoming Pakistan’s
eastern wing; as East Pakistan, suffering blows of cultural imperialism
yet again, albeit from a different quarter; and finally, emerging trium-
phant as the independent nation of Bangladesh, self-proclaimed guardian
of Bengali culture and language. 10
224 Kaiser Haq

This teleological sketch, foregrounding the official ideology of Bangla-

desh as a secular democracy, perhaps minimizes an inherent tension be-
tween the secular nationalist ethos and political forces that draw inspira-
tion from religion. A similar tension exists across the border between
Hindutva and secular nationalism. In Bangladesh it is not simply a ques-
tion of dealing with collaborators of the Pakistani Army who have been
put on trial for crimes against humanity. There is also a long history of
Muslim anticolonial activism that antedates the nationalist movement
inspired by political theories of western provenance. It is a fitting irony
that Ananya Kabir’s study of “Partition’s Post-Amnesias” should forget
to make any mention of the Muslim reformist movements that often in-
volved armed uprisings; some of these were first described in English by
W. W. Hunter in The Indian Musalmans (1872). 11
First, there was what came to be known as the fakir movement, which
had its Hindu counterpart in the sannyasi movement. These religious
mendicants, used to receiving tribute from peasants, organized rebellions
against the Company, which had brought in a new revenue system that
interfered with their traditional rights. The sannyasi movement inspired a
classic Bengali novel, Bankimchandra Chattopadhyaya’s Anandamoth
(The Abbey of Bliss, 1882), which became a powerful ideological influence
on the Indian nationalist movement. Peasants led by fakirs occupied the
Company’s warehouse in Dhaka in 1793. Subsequently three movements
had a more lasting impact: the Faraizi movement led by Haji Shariatullah
and by his son Dadu Mian; the jihadist Tariqah-e-Muhammadiya, in-
spired by Shah Sayyid Ahmed of Rae Barelli; and the breakaway Taiyuni
movement of Maulana Keramat Ali. The first two described British India
as Dar-ul-Harb, a land of strife, because infidels ruled it; the Taiyuni took
a revisionist line by accepting British India as Dar-us-salam, a land of
peace, thereby reconciling its followers to the alien order. It would be
easy to dismiss these movements as fundamentalist if it weren’t for their
lasting impact on nationalist movements, even when they eventually
took a secular turn. Laurence Ziring in his study of Bangladeshi politics
argues that the organizational setup introduced by Dadu Mian in rural
Bengal “later inspired Bengali nationalism and produced leaders like
Fazlul Huq of Barisal and Maulana Bhashani in Mymensingh. Sheikh
Mujibur Rahman, a disciple but contemporary of these older personal-
ities, was also a product of the later Faraizi movement.” 12 Making the
same point in a more general manner, James J. Novak asserts that Hunt-
er’s study “marks the beginning of modern Bangladesh. For the conspira-
cy it reveals pinpoints the moment when the Muslims forsook hope of
returning to their past glory and began attempting to reassert them-
selves.” 13
But this attempt at reassertion led first to Pakistan and then to Bangla-
desh. Why this zigzag trajectory? The answer to the question will per-
haps be grasped best if we compare two firsthand accounts, one by an
 Partition and the Bangladeshi Literary Response 225

academic who refused to relinquish the idea of Pakistan, the other by the
man honored in Bangladesh as the Father of the Nation. Professor Syed
Sajjad Husain collaborated with the Pakistan Army in 1971, leading a
delegation to the United Nations to argue that the Army was not violat-
ing the human rights of the Bengalis. After the surrender of the Pakistan
Army he was picked up by a group of Bangladeshi guerillas, stabbed and
left for dead. He survived and spent a couple of years in prison before
being released through a general amnesty. He used his time inside to fill
notebooks with a political memoir titled The Wastes of Time: Reflections on
the Decline and Fall of East Pakistan. 14 Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, jailed by
the Pakistan government in the 1960s on a sedition charge similarly used
his time in captivity to write a political memoir. Translated from the
original Bengali by Fakrul Alam, it was published as The Unfinished Me-
moirs. 15 Making allowances for differences in style, tone, and personal
predilections, both accounts evince firm commitment to the Pakistan
movement until Partition. Then the accounts diverge. To Husain Pakistan
was the Promised Land; it had to be preserved at all costs; any criticism
of its polity was reprehensible, even treasonable. Mujibur Rahman, on
the other hand, evolved politically, responding critically to the treatment
of East Pakistan by the West Pakistan–dominated central government.
He became the ultimate leader of the movement for autonomy and even-
tually the freedom struggle of Bangladesh.

THE BANGLADESHI LITERARY RESPONSE

Perhaps the earliest fictional treatment of Partition by a Bangladeshi writ-

er was the short story “The Escape,” written in English by Syed Waliullah
(1922–1971) and included in the Pakistan PEN Miscellany (1950). 16 The
locale is unspecified but can be taken to be North India, though it could
be on either side of the newly drawn border, and the action takes place on
a train, an iconic emblem of hope and horror in that region. Except for the
detail of a skull cap on someone’s head there is nothing to indicate the
religious affiliation of the passengers, thus lending the story greater uni-
versality. An anonymous corpse lying on a station platform produces the
same effect. A moving piece, it uses expressionistic devices to evoke the
horror of what was happening: a character described as a madman by
another, who leaps off the running train; a story that the narrator’s inter-
locutor is not interested in listening to and remains unfinished.
The short story is peculiarly equipped to render the powerful impact
of a tragedy like the Partition. Manto is the first writer that comes to mind
when one thinks of Partition stories. He produced his heart-wrenching
pieces out of the crucible of firsthand experience. Waliullah too had di-
rect knowledge of Partition horrors in Kolkata, where he lived in his
youth and as an up and coming writer. He moved back after Partition to
226 Kaiser Haq

East Bengal, where his family came from. Another story of his subtly
captures the inner turmoil wrought by Partition on those who had be-
come uprooted. “Ekti Tulsi Gacher Kahini” (“The Tale of a Tulsi Plant”),
originally written in Bengali, was later translated by the author himself as
well as by Tutun Mukherjee, whose version was included in Stories About
the Partition of India. 17 It is clearly located in what was East Pakistan and
features a group of refugees from India who break into and occupy an
abandoned Hindu home. One of them finds a tulsi plant in a bedraggled
state on the grounds of the house and wants to pull it out, as it is sacred
to Hindus. Another refugee, who has caught a cold, points out its medici-
nal value in treating coughs and colds, and the plant is spared. Someone
quietly tends the plant so that it begins to thrive again. One member of
the group invokes the railway train, the iconic symbol of the deracination
caused by Partition, as he imagines the housewife who used to look after
the plant traveling to another country. Through the mediation of the
plant the dispossessed owners of the house and its illegal occupants come
to realize their common fate. It unites them even though the squatters are
voluble in castigating Hindus for the wrongs they have done to Muslims.
Niaz Zaman in The Divided Legacy, the only book-length study of Partition
literature by a Bangladeshi critic, aptly comments: “Both the groups are
homeless refugees, both forced to vacate their homes for an uncertain
future in an unknown place. . . . Despite religious and political differ-
ences, Waliullah suggests, the human bond remains somewhere under-
neath.” 18 The story ends with officials evicting the squatters from the
house, which has been requisitioned by the government. The tulsi plant
begins to wither again. The implication is clear: the suffering brought on
by Partition is to be blamed on the impersonal decisions of officials.
One of the earliest Bangladeshi novels dealing with Partition is Ranga
Prabhat (Radiant Dawn) by Abul Fazl (1903–1983). 19 Set in Chittagong, the
novel features two families—one Hindu and the other Muslim—who
have been linked by bonds of friendship. While communal hatred exacer-
bates all around, they remain an isle of humanist values. Two novels,
both Marxist in inspiration, focus on the anxieties and social tensions in
the decades leading up to the Partition. Alauddin Al Azad’s Kshudha O
Asha (Hunger and Hope, 1964) 20 deals on the one hand with the struggle of
the downtrodden for sheer survival, and on the other with the Hindu-
Muslim conflict seen from a middle-class perspective. The characters are
left at the end in a state of uncertainty as they wait for Partition. Sardar
Jainuddin’s Anek Suryer Asha (Hoping for Sunrise, 1966), goes back to the
thirties to portray colonialism as capitalist exploitation and forward to
the tensions that would beset Pakistan.
More ambitious is Shahidullah Kaiser’s Shangshaptak (The Indomitable
Soldiers, 1965), 21 made into a highly successful television serial. Shahidul-
lah Kaiser (1927–1971) was not only Marxist-inspired; he was a card-
carrying Party member. The Communist Party of undivided India,
 Partition and the Bangladeshi Literary Response 227

though opposed to the dismemberment of the subcontinent, advised

members to accept it as an inexorable historical reality and to carry on
party activities in whichever country they happened to have their domi-
cile. Kaiser therefore views Partition as a historical accident within the
broad dialectical play of social forces. His protagonist Zahed starts off as
a committed Muslim League activist but turns later into a Communist.
The conflicts that led to Partition give way to other conflicts, while the
inherent class conflicts continue to impact on people’s lives. The novel
begins in a village in East Bengal, and then moves on to the region’s two
major cities. Niaz Zaman comments that it was “perhaps the first Bengali
novel that told the tale of two cities, Calcutta and Dhaka.” 22 Abu Rushd’s
Nongor (Anchor, 1967) 23 is the work of a West Bengali Muslim who chose
to move to East Pakistan. It may be described as bourgeois realist fiction
depicting the existential choices of a protagonist, Kamal, who is in many
ways the author’s persona. As Partition looms, he feels alienated from his
native Calcutta and announces his decision to migrate to Pakistan. His
father approves but refuses to accompany him as he considers himself
too old to adapt to a new situation. His brother is firm in his decision to
stay on, like millions of other Indian Muslims. The novel avoids depict-
ing communal violence, though everyone in it must be aware of its occur-
rence. Kamal’s budding romance with a Hindu girl in Calcutta is aborted.
He comes to Dhaka, which is a provincial backwater, and finds it uncon-
genial, but there is no going back. The novel goes on to register the new
conflicts and contradictions emerging in the new country.
Nostalgia is a powerful theme in Partition-related fiction from West
Bengal, but not in Bangladeshi works. And so, when Taslima Nasreen
forays into this theme in 1993 it is with a Hindu migrant to India who
visits her old home in Phera (The Return). 24 Her protagonist Kalyani
comes back to Mymensingh only to be dismayed at the changes that have
overtaken the place and the society.
Akhteruzzaman Elias (1943–1995) has produced a novel of epic pro-
portions in Khoabnama (The Interpretations of Dreams), 25 published posthu-
mously in 1997. Supriya Chaudhuri in her essay “The Bengali Novel”
describes it, with good reason, as “possibly the greatest modern Bengali
novel,” a prose epic spanning a vast and diverse timeline and creating a
distinctive kind of magic realism drawing on “indigenous traditions of
folk narrative, memory and legend, as on subaltern history.” 26 The narra-
tive opens with a mention of the fakir rebellion of the late eighteenth
century and follows the lives of later generations steeped in legends de-
rived from that age. Munshi Baitullah Shah, one of the Fakir leaders, was
killed by an East India Company officer called Taylor. Shah is regarded
as a martyr, and for nearly a couple of centuries has been a potent spiritu-
al presence, a sort of guardian angel, in the wetlands where fisherfolk live
side by side with agriculturalists. The novel’s intertextual link with Ban-
kimchandra’s Anandamath is obvious. The difference in the ideological
228 Kaiser Haq

import of the two novels is also noteworthy. Whether it is an intended

consequence or not, Bankimchandra’s novel has come to be associated
specifically with Hindu nationalism, especially in the Muslim mind.
Elias’s novel, set in the forties of the last century, is infused with a more
inclusive vision. A Hindu singer becomes a celebrated performer of a
Muslim saint’s compositions. Villagers do bring up questions of sectarian
differences, but these are not congruent with the simplistic Hindu-Mus-
lim divide that was becoming the dominant theme of all-India politics.
Indeed these are differences of which the urban middle classes are hardly
aware. Some characters affirm their identity as Muhammadi (that is, ad-
herents of the Tariqa-e-Muhammadi, the Wahhabi-inspired sect men-
tioned above). The ideological effort of the pro-Pakistan activists to paper
over such crucial local differences is exposed as a ploy to ensure that
leadership of the Muslims stays with a certain class. The problems in the
tenancy system led to the Communist-led tebhaga movement around the
time of Partition; this unsuccessful venture aimed to obtain two-thirds of
the produce for the tenant farmers instead of the customary half.
Khoabnama received the Ananda Prize, the most prestigious literary
award given in Kolkata, as did Agunpakhi (The Phoenix) by Hasan Azizul
Huq (2006). Unlike Elias, Huq hails from West Bengal. He migrated to
Pakistan in a most lackadaisical manner, as a brief interview, antholo-
gized in The Bangladesh Reader, reveals. In Burdwan, where his family
came from, “the Muslims of that area did not experience any real trou-
ble,” 27 he says. His sister’s husband was an English teacher in a college in
what had become East Pakistan. They asked him to live with them and
study, so he went. After completing an MA at Rajshahi University he
returned to Burdwan (he had an Indian passport) and took a job as a
schoolteacher. After three months a visiting school inspector questioned
his bona fide as an Indian, even though he had an Indian passport, so he
came back to Rajshahi and settled there. He persuaded his parents to join
him and his brother there, but his uncles and cousins stayed on in India
even though they had supported the Pakistan movement. 28 Agunpakhi is
a first-person account in the dialect of Burdwan of the life of a middle-
class Muslim woman who sees the calm and peaceful community into
which she had been born shatter under the impact of communal politics.
The delineation of the older, organic community comprising people of
different faiths and castes is rendered convincingly. The narrator, on her
marriage, is received by the leading Hindu land-owning family of her
husband’s village and plied with gifts. This is a custom that effectively
affirms a social bond between the two communities. Gradually, commu-
nal passions corrode the social fabric and violence becomes a palpable
threat. Partition looms and migration becomes the obvious choice for
many. But in the end she takes a stand and refuses to accompany her
family to Pakistan.
 Partition and the Bangladeshi Literary Response 229

I will end with a cursory look at the presence of Partition in the work
of writers born after the event. A short story in English, Khademul Is-
lam’s “An Ilish Story,” 29 published in a Bangladeshi journal called Six
Seasons Review, presents a scene in a middle-class Bengali home in Dhaka
in the aftermath of the independence war of 1971. The narrator has es-
caped with his siblings and parents from Pakistan, where they would
have been treated like prisoners. He watches his grandmother cut and
dress a hilsa fish (ilish in Bengali). As she does so she narrates what she
has seen and heard during the war. “‘1971 was 1947 all over again,’ she
says, as she holds both ends of the fish with her hands and vigorously
saws it back and forth across the blade.” 30 The description of the cutting
becomes more and more gory as she narrates how in her native district a
maulvi led an attack on a Hindu family in the neighborhood and slaugh-
tered every member (the word used, jobai, is the one used for the slaugh-
ter of animals at Eid). When the cooked fish is served, the narrator cannot
bring himself to eat it: the title contains an apt pun, ilish=illish=sick, hence
sickening.
Mahmud Rahman’s short story collection, Killing the Water (2010), 31
includes a few pieces that sketch in the Partition as an unavoidable back-
drop. Tahmima Anam’s debut novel, A Golden Age (2007), links up parti-
tion with the 1971 war through the family of “Rehana Ali of Calcutta.” 32
It is an interesting facet of our current cultural climate that the younger
generation is drawn to a critical examination of the trauma of Partition in
order to see their historical situation in perspective. An anthology of
graphic narratives issued in 2013, This Side That Side: Restorying Parti-
tion, 33 curated by Vishwajyoti Ghosh, brings together the attempts of
writers and artists from Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh to deal with the
existential spin-off of the event. When the book was launched at the
Dhaka Hay Festival in November 2013, all seventy copies brought over
sold out in record time, and so would have three times that number. Six
of the twenty-eight stories are by Bangladeshis. Mahmud Rahman’s
“Profit and Loss” is an autobiographical sketch moving from the Parti-
tion and the problems that came in its train to the 1971 war. Khademul
Islam’s “The Exit Plan” narrates the adventure of escaping from would-
be incarcerated as undesirable aliens. M. Hasan’s “Making of a Poet,”
Syeda Farhana’s “Little Women,” and Sanjoy Chakraborty’s “An After-
life” delve into facets of the identity crisis in our fractured subcontinent.
My own contribution, “Border,” is a poem that tries to expose the
existential consequences of having a shadow line scoring the region’s
map. It is based on an overland trip I made to India years back. In the
poem the journey is prompted by desire, for where there is a boundary
there is fascination with the other side: “Let us say you dream of a wom-
an/ and because she isn’t anywhere around, imagine her across the bor-
der.” After a mildly nightmarish journey to the border, the speaker “in-
stead of crossing over” lies “dreaming / of the woman, and the border:
230 Kaiser Haq

perfect knife that slices through the earth / without the earth’s knowing, /
severs and joins at the same instant.” The speaker cannot cross over
because his desire, being based on fantasy, cannot be fulfilled. The border
“runs inconspicuously through modest households, / creating wry hu-
mour—whole families / eat under one flag, shit under another, / hum-
ming a different national tune.” Refusing to accept one side or another,
the speaker embraces the border itself:
You lie down on the fateful line
under a livid moon. You
and your desire and the border are now one.

you raise the universal flag

of flaglessness. Amidst bird anthems
dawn explodes in a lusty salute. 34
Bangladesh’s Partition literature deserves to be considered alongside
similar works from other parts of the subcontinent. But more important
than literary criticism is the task of transcending the conflicts that have
given rise to the literature. Perhaps the most deleterious outcome of Par-
tition has been the partitioning of the subcontinental mind. We have not
only become an extended family of squabbling nations, we have grown
to deny our civilizational unity. A single language used in two countries
is split into two or more literary entities. Punjabi is written in three
scripts, so without making the special effort of learning all three scripts a
speaker of the language cannot read everything written in it. Bengali
literature is produced in Bangladesh and India today, but they are cate-
gorized in two different national pockets. A writer who has migrated as a
result of Partition is automatically disowned by the country of his origin.
There is no common critical framework within which the literature of the
entire subcontinent can be considered. And yet, there are other regions of
the world where such partitioning is unknown. Caribbean writers,
whether from Trinidad or Jamaica or Guyana or St. Lucia, are considered
within a common framework, as are African writers. It is imperative that
we make efforts to rediscover our commonality. This is true in every
realm of experience, the cultural as well as the socio-economic and politi-
cal. We cannot go back to the status quo ante, we cannot undo a tragedy,
but we can try to go beyond, towards a better order of things. Dealing
critically with the cultural fallout of Partition is a necessary first step in
that endeavor.

NOTES

1. Ananya Jahanara Kabir, Partition’s Post-Amnesias (Dhaka: University Press Ltd.,

2013), 173.
 Partition and the Bangladeshi Literary Response 231

2. Joya Chatterji, Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism and the Partition of Bengal
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 231.
3. Harun-or-Rashid, The Foreshadowing of Bangladesh: Bengal Muslim League and
Muslim Politics 1936–1947 (Dhaka: Asiatic Society of Bangladesh, 1987), 261.
4. Ananya Jahanara Kabir, Partition’s Post-Amnesias (Dhaka: University Press Ltd.,
2013),174
5. Ibid., 195
6. Nitish Sengupta, Bengal Divided: The Unmaking of a Nation (1905–1971) (New
Delhi: Viking, Penguin, 2007), 232.
7. Ibid., 174
8. Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines (New Delhi: Ravi Dayal, 1988).
9. Taslima Nasreen, Lajja, trans. Tutul Gupta (New Delhi: Penguin, 1994).
10. Ananya Jahanara Kabir, Partition’s Post-Amnesias (Dhaka: University Press Ltd.,
2013), 195.
11. W. W. Hunter, The Indian Musalmans (London: Trubner and Co., 1872).
12. Lawrence Ziring, Bangladesh from Mujib to Ershad: An Interpretive Study (Karachi:
Oxford University Press, 1992), 9.
13. James J. Novak, Bangladesh; Reflections on the Water (Dhaka: University Press
Ltd., 1994), 87.
14. Syed Sajjad Hussain, The Wastes of Time: Reflections on the Decline and Fall of East
Pakistan (Dhaka: Notun Safar Proksashoni, 1995).
15. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Unfinished Memoirs, trans. Fakrul Alam (Dhaka: Uni-
versity Press, Ltd., 2012).
16. Syed Waliullah, “The Escape,” in Ahmed Ali, ed., PEN Miscellany (Karachi:
Pakistan, PEN, 1950.)
17. “Ekti Tulsi Gacher Kahini,” (“The Tale of a Tulsi Plant”) in Galpo Samagra (Col-
lected Stories) (Dhaka: Protik, 2011).
18. Niaz Zaman, The Divided Legacy: The Partition in Selected Novels from India, Paki-
stan and Bangladesh (Dhaka: University Press, Ltd., 1999), 133.
19. Abul Fazl, Ranga Prabhat (Radiant Dawn) (Chittagong: Boi Ghar, 1957).
20. Alauddin Al Azad, Kshuddha O Asha (Hunger and Hope) (Dhaka: Muktadhara,
1964).
21. Shahidulla Kaiser, Shangshaptak (The Indomitable Soldiers) (Dhaka: Gyankosh,
1993).
22. Niaz Zaman, The Divided Legacy: The Partition in Selected Novels from India, Paki-
stan,and Bangladesh (Dhaka: University Press, Ltd.,1999), 170.
23. Abu Rushd, Nongor (The Anchor) (Chittagong: Boi Ghar, 1967).
24. Taslima Nasreen, Phera (The Return) (Dhaka: Gyankosh, 1993).
25. Akhtaruzzaman Elias, Khoabnama (Interpretations of Dreams) (Kolkatta: Naya Ud-
yog, 1998).
26. Supriya Chaudhuri, “The Bengali Novel,” in Vasudha Dalmia, ed., The Cam-
bridge Companion to Modern Indian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2012), 122.
27. Hasan Azizul Huq, “Teenage Migrant,” in The Bangladesh Reader: History, Cul-
ture, Politics, ed. Meghna Guhathakurta and Willem van Schendel (Durham and Lon-
don: Duke University Press, 2013), 168.
28. Ibid.
29. Khademul Islam, “An Ilish Story,” Six Seasons Review 1, 2 (2001).
30. Ibid., 116.
31. Mahmud Rahman, Killing the Water (New Delhi: Penguin, 2010).
32. Tahmima Anam, A Golden Age (Dhaka: Sahitya Prakash, 2007), 6
33. Vishwajyoti Ghosh, This Side That Side: Restorying Partition [an anthology of graph-
ic narratives] (New Delhi: Yoda, 2013).
34. Kaiser Haq, “Border,” in Vishwajyoti Ghosh, This Side That Side: Restorying Parti-
tion [an anthology of graphic narratives] (New Delhi: Yoda, 2013).
232 Kaiser Haq

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 FOURTEEN
Cosmopolitan Aesthetics in Shakeel
Adil Zada’s Baazigar
Masood A. Raja

Published intermittently over the last thirty years, as a serialized novel in

Sab Rang, the most celebrated Urdu pulp magazine in Pakistan, Baazigar
offers a historical aesthetic and politics that foregrounds, albeit in a ro-
mantic vein, the cosmopolitan narrative of colonized India in opposition
to the official foundational narrative of Pakistan that emphasizes irrecon-
cilable differences between Hindus and Muslims as the main cause of
Partition.
In this chapter, relying on a general understanding of nationalism and
cosmopolitanism, I will discuss this epic novel with an eye toward its
usefulness in articulating and retrieving a more nuanced and more inclu-
sive national narrative for Pakistani readers. I will also try, as best as
possible, to offer my reasons for the need for such exercise. I understand
cosmopolitanism as a general tendency to think against the normalized
terrain of nationalistic and foundational histories and narratives. In that
sense, I find Bruce Robbins 1 work aptly useful, especially his insistence
that, besides other things, cosmopolitanism could also be a mode of
thinking and feeling in which “we value the move away from ethnocen-
trism.” 2 The nationalist-cosmopolitanism debate is nothing new, but is
extremely important in the case of Pakistani national perception. While I
have already touched upon my preferred theorization of cosmopolitan-
ism above, it would be apt to discuss briefly my specific understanding of
nationalism and cosmopolitanism. In most metropolitan works, cosmo-
politanism is proffered as a more progressive concept that can, under the
right circumstances, undo the pernicious effects of stringent nationalism.

233
234 Masood A. Raja

Most theorists of cosmopolitanism have a sort of pseudo-agreement on

this Universalist, egalitarian aspect of cosmopolitanism. Part of the rea-
son for this philosophical view is because most theorists of cosmopolitan-
ism either rely on early Greek philosophers to theorize the concept or, in
most cases, Immanuel Kant’s one specific work: Perpetual Peace. 3 Most
pertinent to theorization of cosmopolitanism as a way of life is Kant’s
“Third Definitive Article” about hospitality and rights of strangers:
And in this sphere hospitality signifies the claim of a stranger entering
foreign territory to be treated by its owner without hostility. The latter
may send him away again, if this can be done without causing his
death; but, so long as he conducts himself peaceably, he must not be
treated as an enemy. 4
Note that so much of the rhetorical scaffolding of the current debates of
cosmopolitanism are built around the above cited and other passages of
Kant’s treatise on perpetual peace. It is also important to remember that
even for Kant, republican nation-states were a necessity to creating such a
cosmopolitan world. Thus, it is absolutely necessary for all nation-states
to also be a part of the larger global partnerships in order to work toward
global peace. However, an elimination of nationalist identities is not nec-
essarily a panacea for global peace. In the case of Pakistan, as I discuss
later, one kind of existing cosmopolitanism needs to be replaced with a
sort of neighborly and immediate cosmopolitan spirit.
In my opinion, for Pakistan a certain kind of existing Islamic cosmo-
politanism and Pan-Islamism has replaced the local and regional histori-
cal originary narrative, and it is crucial for Pakistan to reclaim its imme-
diate sub-continental past in order to ease tensions with India but also to
safeguard against the pernicious effects of Islamist and fundamentalist
cosmopolitanism. I will explain this further in the ensuing pages.
While I rely on Ernest Gellner’s explanation of a certain aspect of the
nation below, my discussion is also informed by the theorizations of
nationalism vis-a-vis imaginative literature, and in this sense of the term,
two theorists stand out: Timothy Brennan and Benedict Anderson. It
would be highly useful, I think, to discuss their explanation of the role of
imaginative fiction in the creation of a national imaginary. It is easier to
discuss Anderson’s explanation of “imagined communities” as his work
has been quite prominent within the field of nationalism studies, but
Timothy Brennan’s early and later work is also crucial in understanding
nationalism. For Anderson, the nation is an “imagined political commu-
nity” 5 and for him this imagined community comes to be, besides other
things, through the rise of print capitalism. While discussing the role of
novelistic imagination, he discusses a novel and then provides us the
following useful insight: “Here again we see the ‘national imagination’ at
work in the movement of a solitary hero through a sociological landscape
of a fixity that fuses the world inside the novel with the world outside.” 6
 Cosmopolitan Aesthetics in Shakeel Adil Zada’s Baazigar 235

I believe this is an important aspect of Anderson’s argument and also

crucial to my own argument in this essay. The novels and newspapers, as
I understand Anderson, do not “generate” or create a certain specific
national imagination, but, rather, help the reader see many others as
cotravelers within the linear temporality of a particular nation. Thus, the
nation becomes an imagined community of readers who read and experi-
ence a certain kind of national identity as offered in a novel or in the
national newspapers. What is included in these novels as “national” thus
becomes extremely crucial in aligning our national imagination and na-
tional self-perception.
Similarly, Timothy Brennan also suggests that the rise of nationalism
“in Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is insepa-
rable from the forms and subjects of imaginative literature.” 7 Similarly,
Brennan asserts, in the case of the former colonies “in Third World fiction
after the Second World War . . . the fictional use of ‘nation’ and ‘national-
ism’ are most pronounced.” 8 On the whole, for both these theorists, na-
tion, in one way or the other, is imagined, and literature, fiction, and
other forms of writings play a crucial role in creating a certain kind of
national consciousness. Now, this brief discussion of the nation as an
imagined community is quite pertinent to my discussion of Pakistani
national identity and its articulation.
In the official narrative of the creation of Pakistan, a certain view of
history is normalized through the official and popular texts and a certain
specific mobilization of history becomes the underlining scaffolding of
this narrative. Thus, Pakistan was created because of the two-nation theo-
ry, according to which the Muslims of India, despite their thousand-year
history of living with Hindus, could, somehow, not live together as part
of one nation. Furthermore, the narrative suggests, since the Hindus and
Muslims were two separate nations, the Muslims, thus, needed a separate
nation of their own. This official narrative is further complicated through
an ideological alignment with the Arab world: in order to create a Mus-
lim history that might connect Pakistan to a non-Hindu past, the histori-
cal novel in Urdu and Pakistani nationalistic poetry, to some extent, has
sought to connect the Pakistani national identity to a pan-Islamic Arab
past. As a result, while existing local history of cross-cultural tolerance is
elided, it is replaced with a romanticized past in which the Muslims of
India, somehow, remain in touch with the Muslims of Hijaz. Needless to
say, this pan-Islamic narrative of the nation has now come back to men-
ace the national imaginary with full force, as the global narrative of pan-
Islamism has now become the exclusive domain of Jihadist and salafi
groups who, in their zeal to fight apostate Muslim states—of which Paki-
stan is considered one—have brought the Muslim national project in Pa-
kistan to a crisis.
Furthermore, the official narrative of the creation of Pakistan, by now,
has transmogrified much beyond the early conceptions of it by its
236 Masood A. Raja

founder and his allies. Since the mid-1980s, it seems, the Pakistani nation-
al imagination and conception of Pakistan has been increasingly Islam-
ized and often at the cost of its pluralistic or cosmopolitan possibilities.
As a result, contemporary Pakistan finds itself at the mercy and power of
the most reactionary violent forces that claim to shape Pakistan into an
Islamist state by acts of extreme physical and epistemic violence to the
very idea of Pakistan. In an earlier work, I had charted the construction of
Pakistani exceptionalism from the 1857 rebellion till 1947. I had finished
that work emphasizing the constructedness of this narrative in opposi-
tion to the claims that offer Pakistan as natural and non-discursive. 9 This
chapter, therefore, is an amplification of the originary narrative, its ap-
propriations by various elements in Pakistan, and the need for reconnect-
ing with a more inclusive and less exclusivist past.
The concept or ideology of Pakistan is perpetuated through varied
media: the textbooks, history books, TV shows, and of course literary
texts. The official historiography relies on an extremely exclusive and
virulent explanation of what is termed the “two-nation theory.” Accord-
ing to this theory, explained under various registers, Hindus and Mus-
lims were two naturally irreconcilable entities and that is why the Mus-
lims of India needed a new nation. Of course, such arguments were high-
ly prevalent during the late 1940s, but are still taught as the main reason
for the creation of Pakistan. For example, one scholar offers his essential-
ist explanation of the Hindu-Muslim separateness in the following
words:
The political and cultural history of the subcontinent testifies that the
prejudices of the Hindu society against Muslims are inveterate. Hence,
whenever the Hindus got a chance to wield authority, their treatment
of Muslims was most shabby. . . . About one hundred million non-
Aryan Hindus and Sudras, who are co-religionists of the Hindus, are
untouchables. . . . If that be the plight of low-caste Hindus—whose
religion is Hinduism—then what could the Muslims expect from them
against whom their prejudices were manifold. 10
This narrative of irreconcilability is the main crux of the foundational and
official narrative of the Pakistani nation. Furthermore, during the last ten
years of the Pakistan movement, which is always offered in opposition to
the Indian National Movement for freedom, quite a few other scholars
also used the narrative of irreconcilability to argue for Pakistan, some
seeing it as a cause for the separation and others positing it as a solution
to the long-held and naturalized differences between the two commu-
nities. This trend continues even in the works that are offered as objective
and unmotivated. A. Punjabi, for example, in a book published in 1939,
suggests that if Muslims cannot claim a separate homeland, then for the
Hindus “nationalism denotes the revival of Hindu culture, Hindu supre-
macy in India and the replacement of the White bureaucracy by their
 Cosmopolitan Aesthetics in Shakeel Adil Zada’s Baazigar 237

own brown one.” 11 Similarly, F. K. Khan Durrani also concludes, in a

book published in 1944, with the following statement: “Being a member
of the Muslim nation, naturally I contend that Muslims should strive to
reconquer India for Islam and make that their political goal. . . . But this is
a long range ideal, whereas we are here concerned with the present and
the immediate future.” 12 In this case, then, not only is Islam “superior” to
Hinduism with the ultimate goal of reconquering and Islamizing India,
the creation of Pakistan is offered as just one step toward this larger goal.
In these randomly selected works about the nature of the future state of
Pakistan, the idea of past, present, or future reconcilability of Hindus and
Muslims as two political entities under one nation is proven to be im-
plausible. Of course, in this kind of argument any history of mutual
coexistence and the possibilities of any future political coexistence are
foreclosed and deemed impossible. Thus, the overall narrative about the
creation of Pakistan in Pakistani foundational histories is built around a
sort of all-inclusive myth of irreconcilability between the Muslims and
Hindus. This irreconcilability thus becomes the cornerstone for the con-
struction of the Pakistani high culture to which, it is hoped, all citizens of
the state of Pakistan aspire, which ultimately becomes an exclusive narra-
tive about Muslimhood. This extreme focus on Muslim identity, thus, has
now come to haunt Pakistan, as due to the sectarian divide within Islam,
the universal Muslimhood as a passport to Pakistani citizenship is no
longer a simple and cohesive narrative.
While I have the liberty to pick and choose from a vast majority of
works on nationalism, I will rely here, for practical reasons and even
though I do not fully agree with him on all points, on the work of Ernest
Gellner, especially the all important concept of “high culture” that he
theorizes and that I find useful for my discussion. After discussing the
nature of nationalistic dynamics under various phases of mode of pro-
duction, Gellner provides the following tentative definition of national-
ism and its relation to a national high culture:
Nationalism is about entry to, participation in, identification with, a
literate high culture which is co-extensive with an entire political unit
and its total population, and which must be of this kind if it is to be
compatible with the kind of division of labour, the type of mode of
production, on which this society is based. 13
What I take from Gellner’s long discussion on various stages of national-
ism, relevant to their particular mode of production, is that whether recy-
cled or discursively constructed, a nation-state must have something that
can be understood and transmitted as the national high culture so that
people, despite maintaining their strong ethnic and regional identities,
find it in their best interest to become part of the national project. Under
ideal conditions, this is accomplished by a universal system of education.
Now, the Pakistani national narrative of high culture is built on exclud-
238 Masood A. Raja

ing all non-Muslim parts of Pakistani history as irrelevant and resultantly

Pakistan and Pakistanis have increasingly highlighted their Muslim iden-
tity. 14 And it is this extreme focus on a certain kind of Muslim identity
that has now brought the very basis of Pakistani national narrative to a
crisis. There is, therefore, an urgent need to rearticulate and enunciate the
very silences that had enabled the construction of an exclusionist narra-
tive in the first place. In other words, Pakistan is in dire need of revamp-
ing and expanding the historical aspects of its national narrative. Shakeel
Aadil Zada’s novel, I suggest, enables us to do just that: to recover the
silenced history of a pre-Partition life that involved a high degree of
mutual respect, comradeship, and solidarity among a cross-cultural
group of Indians. Furthermore, the novel and its imaginative content can
also impact the readers’ consciousness in the same vein as Benedict An-
derson and Timothy Brennan, discussed above, suggest.
On the surface, the novel is a love story involving a quest motif, but in
the process, in the words of one reviewer, it is an “intense love story that
revolves around a young man of 17, who lost track of his sweetheart just
before partition and is wandering in search of her from village to village
and town to town in undivided India, struggling and facing unusual
happenings that keep the readers glued to the pages till the finish.” 15 In
my opinion, it is in these wanderings and the companions who sustain
and support Babar Zaman Khan, our hero, that one encounters the kind
of cosmopolitan India that might not have existed but is imaginatively
rendered in the novel that one can offer a more complex useable past for
the Pakistani readers, who otherwise rely on a more restrictive view of
the past and even in their cosmopolitan leanings opt for an imaginative
connection to the Arab world rather than their collective past in India.
The novel, that spans over 2,500 pages at this point and would, ac-
cording to the author, be about four thousand pages when finished, is the
longest ever-Urdu novel. Though published in a pulp magazine, the nov-
el is considered by all major Urdu critics to be one of the finest examples
of modern Urdu writing, which, because of its publishing medium, has
also garnered a loyal popular support over the years. This is why the
narrative imaginary of the novel and its poetics and aesthetics is so cru-
cial in reshaping the cultural and political imaginary of the Pakistani
readers about their own pre-Partition, sub-continental past or, at least, its
imaginative possibilities.
The story begins in Gaya, Bihar, where our hero Babar Zaman Khan,
an Indian Muslim, and Kaura, a Buddhist woman, fall in love in their late
teens and elope to Calcutta. Just the opening lines and the brief descrip-
tion of the city itself introduce the reader to the kind of multiplicity and
inherent cosmopolitanism of pre-Partition India that is often elided in the
official historiography of Pakistan:
 Cosmopolitan Aesthetics in Shakeel Adil Zada’s Baazigar 239

I am talking about Gaya, a small city in Bihar, one of the most beautiful
states of India. With a population of about two hundred thousand, the
city is surrounded by hills on three sides and a stream on the fourth.
The city is also considered the birthplace of Buddha, and even though
most of its population is Hindu and Muslim, every year, for one month,
the city receives thousands of yatris for the celebration of Buddha’s
month. 16
Even before we have delved deeper into the story, we are offered, as
something natural, a multicultural city and a multi-ethnic and cross-relig-
ious romance as the beginning point of our story. In other words, a kind
of India in which two young people from two different ethnicities and
religions could meet at a religious festival and fall in love. This already
breaches the very walls of ethnic and religious identity edifice that was
and is offered as the ultimate reason for the irreconcilability of Muslims
and Hindus in the official narrative of the Pakistan Movement. Then as
they struggle to settle down, tragedy hits and Babar, while trying to
protect Kaura from would be abductors, ends up killing two of the assai-
lants and, accidentally, one police officer. Kaura, meanwhile, is presumed
to have either been abducted or, in the best-case scenario, escaped with
Maulvi Muhammad Shafiq who had taken the young lovers under his
protection. Also important to note is that since Kaura, whose caretaker
and teacher had already been murdered, belongs to an important family
of Tibet, a group of Tibetans is also looking for her. So, when Babar and
Kaura elope, the pursuing Tibetans are also a group that they need to
avoid. The rest of the narrative, in simplistic terms, is a quest involving
Babar’s search for Kaura all over India, and it is this search and the group
of friends and well-wishers who support him in the process that is crucial
to rearticulating the kind of India that has been completely elided in the
Pakistani foundational and official narratives. And it is in this aspect of
the novel that the reader, imperceptibly, internalizes and feels the loss of
that kind of cross-cultural past.
When Babar is arrested and tried, he keeps his connection to Kaura a
secret for fear that the Tibetan seekers might find her, and thus, he ends
up taking responsibility for the murders without providing the whole
story that would have augmented his case of self-defense. While the nov-
el is about Babar’s quest, the most important aspect of the novel happens
to be the deep relations that he develops with a diverse group of people,
but especially with Bhattal, leader of a Delhi gang of cultural outcasts.
While the court is deciding upon his trial, he is transferred to the jail and
placed in a cell with another prisoner. This encounter, for Babar, becomes
the encounter that provides him passport and passage to the powerful
constituency of Calcutta’s organized crime. But there is more to this first
encounter than just this passage. Here is how Babar, the narrator, shares
this first encounter with the readers:
240 Masood A. Raja

There was someone else already in the cell. He smiled and his eyes lit
up on seeing me.

He walked up to me, lifted my chin with his manacled hand and

asked me: “You have done wonders at such a young age. Who did
you kill?”

“Myself,” I said.

“One, or two?” he asked.

“Three,” I said.

“Three!” he jumped up. “What great luck,” he said. “I was worried I

would be housed with someone unworthy!”

“Who are you?” I asked.

“You don’t know us, deary?” he asked. “I am the same as you; we

have the same caste, same religion, and the same fate,” he said. 17

This is the first encounter between the protagonist and Ustad Bhattal: a
Muslim and a Hindu, respectively, who come together in jail. This rela-
tionship also introduces the readers to a part of Indian sub-culture about
which, to my knowledge, no one else has written anything. Within the
diegetic world of the novel, all major urban areas have places for those
involved in petty and larger crimes. Called “para,” these are places that
are run by an ustad who is supposed to be worldly wise and deft at the
art of knife fighting. Each para has its own roll of members and they owe
their allegiance, and a part of their income, to the para. The para, in turn,
offers, extra-juridical protection to the local community and businesses in
return for specified contributions. To keep his hold on the members, the
ustad has to be generous and fair and also best at his trade, for he can be
challenged for leadership at any time by anyone who deems himself fit to
take him on in a knife fight. It is in the jail that Babar meets Bhattal, a
Hindu, who immediately takes a liking to this passionate young man
who has been sentenced to fourteen years of hard labor for murdering
two of his assailants. Thus, Babar, a young Muslim, becomes accepted by
the most diverse group of shady but honorable characters who all train
him in different forms of native martial arts including staff fighting and
knife-wielding. Alongside of that, Babar also decides to study and even-
tually takes the private exams for a master’s degree. By the time he fin-
ishes his sentence, which is commuted due to good conduct, he is adept
at knife fighting and also a graduate with a master’s degree in human-
ities.
 Cosmopolitan Aesthetics in Shakeel Adil Zada’s Baazigar 241

During his incarceration, Bhattal and his followers protect Babar with-
in the jail and adopt him as an honorary member of their exclusive gang.
It is after he leaves the jail that his quest begins in earnest. While looking
for Kaura, Babar, Bhattal, and others traverse pretty much the entire In-
dian sub-continent. It is while reading about this quest, the places they
visit, and the people that they encounter that one learns, imperceptibly,
of the richness of pre-Partition Indian culture, and for the Pakistani read-
ers, especially readers of popular fiction, this is quite a rewarding and
unique experience, for not many official Pakistani texts offer such a com-
plex and encouraging view of the cosmopolitan culture that existed all
over India before the Partition. Yes, there were always communal differ-
ences and strife, but the novel focuses primarily on the relations between
these men and women who exist outside the gambit of imperial law, but
live in solidarity, especially when it comes to helping and aiding Babar.
So, why does this matter and how can one hope this aspect of the
novel will have an impact on how Pakistanis think and imagine the na-
tion. Naturally, I am not suggesting that one novel, no matter how popu-
lar, can alter normalized and naturalized belligerent views that Indians
and Pakistanis hold about each other. But the novel, in the case of Paki-
stan, does create an affective space that if perpetuated and normalized
could help in rearticulating the self-perception of average Pakistanis and
may even enable Pakistanis to think about the state of minorities within
the nation differently. And to really explain this, I will have to delve,
briefly, into one important aspect of individual and collective identity
formation as discussed and elaborated by Mark Bracher.
According to Bracher, whose work relies on empirical studies of the
brain and neuroscience, we all stabilize our identities under “three differ-
ent registers . . . the affective-physiological, the imagistic, and the linguis-
tic.” 18 Out of all these, the linguistic register is the most complex and
crucial as it provides us “the identity-bearing master signifiers” 19 of
which having one’s national identity, as a master signifier, is crucial to
our sense of national identity. We all also rely on what Bracher terms the
“identity-bearing scripts and narratives.” 20 These identity-bearing scripts
and narratives have the following vital role in identity formation:
The narratives are produced by unconscious self-narrative schemas
(SNS) that direct the individual’s attention, expectations, assumptions,
and interpretations in the given domain and thus predispose the indi-
vidual to find particular kinds of people having specific kinds of inten-
tions, and to expect particular kinds of issues and conflicts, leading to
particular resolutions and conclusions. 21
It is important to note that these narrative schemas so vital to our identity
stabilizations are a product of the unconscious, and when our self-serv-
ing narratives are threated, we close off the contaminating influences and
either react violently to the shifting narratives or attempt to dismiss them.
242 Masood A. Raja

Thus, to change individual and national approachs to the questions of

one’s individual and collective worldviews, it is necessary to change and
shift the self-serving narratives. Now, if the national self-serving narra-
tive for most Pakistanis is based in an exclusionary history, which in-
volves excising and expelling the Hindu aspects of their cultural and
political history, then any attempt at offering empirical knowledge to the
contrary is not likely to have much impact. But when the same knowl-
edge is offered, without announcing itself as such, in a story that offers
characters that we fall in love with, imperceptibly the individual’s reper-
toire of accepting others suddenly shifts, and it is this aspect of the aes-
thetics of the novel that is absolutely crucial for the long-term health of
Pakistani national consciousness.
Thus, as one reads about the adventures of Babar and his group, one
also learns about the nature of cross-cultural and trans-religious relation-
ships that the novel stages for the reader: our characters travel across
India overcoming problems but also sampling the kind of regional hospi-
tality, regardless of religious differences, that is never really represented
within the official historiography of the Pakistan movement. The group
itself is a microcosm of regional, cultural, and different religious iden-
tities: Babar is a Muslim; Bhattal a Hindu; Jamu, from Mumbai, is also a
Hindu; and Kante, who becomes like a brother to Babar, is presumably a
Christian. As the group travels, following clues about Kaura, the people
that they encounter and those who aid and assist them also provide a
checkered mosaic of Indian culture all brought together by their respec-
tive tradition of hospitality and their material identity as Indians. Read
attentively, this knowledge, and the feelings invoked by it are most cer-
tainly likely to impact the perceptions of the reader about his or her own
cultural past. And it is only, à la Bracher, after our self-serving narratives
are altered that we can alter our politics and our worldviews. Thus, the
novel does that for the reader, and since the narrative is written as an epic
adventure and spans some twenty years, and 2,550 pages, the narrative
acts accentuating the collective past become the norm and normative for
the reader.
The complex national identity staged in the novel spans both the pub-
lic and private sphere: As a group, as Babar and his friends continue to
travel, the people they help and rescue settle in Faizabad, at a haveli that
belongs to a Muslim woman rescued by Bhattal and adopted as a daugh-
ter, where people of all Indian religions and ethnicities live as one large
family. On the road, the group itself stages the multiethnic composition
of national identity, and when the imperial law intrudes into their public
sphere actions, the group becomes a formidable cohesive unit in opposi-
tion to the imperial imperatives and often remains immune to deep intru-
sions of the imperial system. Thus, in a way, the novel suggests, contra
Partha Chatterjee, 22 that when together the natives can sometime also
foreclose certain aspects of the public sphere to the imperial masters.
 Cosmopolitan Aesthetics in Shakeel Adil Zada’s Baazigar 243

Overall, the novel offers to the general Pakistani readers a romantic

tale that foregrounds, in a subtle way, the kind of complexity that had to
be elided to create a purist and restrictive idea of the nation. Further-
more, in terms of novelistic imagination and its impact on creation of a
national imagination, à la Anderson, works like Baazigar are extremely
important, for while reading the novel, one would imagine oneself as
part of a collective history before the Partition. This may still not break
through the barriers created by a conflictual Hindu-Muslim past, but it
may at least offer an alternative engagement and investment—both sym-
bolic and emotional—in a less contested past. Of course, as I said earlier,
one novel cannot alter the general perspective of a whole nation, but
stories such as Baazigar can at least provide us a path out of the pit of
exclusivity and may lead us to rethink the Pakistani nation as more inclu-
sive and cosmopolitan!

NOTES

1. Bruce Robbins, “Comparative Cosmopolitanisms,” Cosmopolitics, ed. Pheng

Chea and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 246–64.
There are, of course, other theorists of cosmopolitanism as well and some of the
prominent works have been produced by Anthony Appiah, Daniel Archibugi, Pheng
Chea, Homi Bhabha, James Clifford, etc. I am here relying on just one such work by
Bruce Robbins, whose approach to cosmopolitanism I find more nuanced and useful
for this chapter.
2. Ibid., 260.
3. Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Essay, 1795, trans. M. Campbell
Smith (London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd, 1903). This brief pamphlet by Kant is
composed in the style of a world constitution.
4. Ibid., 137.
5. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983):6.
6. Ibid., 30.
7. Timothy Brennan, “The National Longing for Form,” Nation and Narration, ed.
Homi Bhabha (London: Routledge, 1990), 44–70.
8. Ibid., 46.
9. For details, see Masood Raja, Constructing Pakistan (Karachi and London: Oxford
University Press, 2010).
10. Muhammad Munawwar, Dimensions of Pakistan Movement (Lahore: Services
Book Club, 1993), 31.
11. A. Punjabi, Confederacy of India (Lahore: [Private Publisher] Nawwab Sir Muha-
mamd Shah Nawaz Khan, 1939), 19.
12. F. K. Khan Durrani, The Meaning of Pakistan (Lahore: Muhammd Ashraf Publish-
ers, 1944), 146.
13. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983),
95.
14. I have written on this extensively, and for further details on my take on the rise
of fundamentalism in Pakistan, please read “Neoliberal Dispositif and the Rise of
Fundamentalism: The Case of Pakistan,” Journal of International and Global Studies, 3, 1
(2011), 21–31.
15. Naseer Ahmed, “Urdu is a ‘Poor’ Language,” The Dawn Daily, March 6, 2008,
[Link]
244 Masood A. Raja

16. Shakeel Adil Zada. Baazigar, Vol. I (Karachi: Sab Rang Publications, 1987), 1. All
citations from the novel are provided in my translation from Urdu.
17. Ibid., 40.
18. Mark Bracher, Radical Pedagogy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 13.
19. Ibid., 17.
20. Ibid., 28.
21. Ibid., 29.
22. I am referring to one of the main assertions in Partha Chatterjee’s Nation and Its
Fragments (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994) and his point that in most
cases the private sphere was closed to the colonizers and hence that is the locus of the
rise of native nationalism. This emphasis on culture enables Chatterjee to dispel the
“downward filtration” theory, according to which nationalism rose in the colonies as
an extension of Western education.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Adil Zada, Shakeel. Baazigar, Vol. I. Karachi: Sab Rang Publications, 1987. All transla-
tions from Urdu are mine.
Ahmad, Naseer. “Urdu is a ‘Poor’ Language.” The Dawn Daily. March 6, 2008. Link:
[Link] Accessed:
February 2, 2015.
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 1983.
Bracher, Mark. Radical Pedagogy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Brennan, Timothy. “The National Longing for Form.” Nation and Narration. Ed. Homi
Bhabha. London: Routledge, 1990. 44–70.
Chatterjee, Partha. Nation and Its Fragments. Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1994.
Durrani, F. K. Khan. The Meaning of Pakistan. Lahore: Muhammd Ashraf Publishers,
1944.
Gellner, Ernest. Nations and Nationalism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983.
Kant, Immanuel. Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Essay. 1795. Trans. M. Campbell
Smith. London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd, 1903.
Munawwar, Muhammad. Dimensions of Pakistan Movement. Lahore: Services Book
Club, 1993.
Punjabi, A. Confederacy of India. Lahore: (Private Publisher) Nawwab Sir Muhamamd
Shah Nawaz Khan, 1939.
Raja, Masood Ashraf. Constructing Pakistan. Karachi/ London: Oxford University
Press, 2010.
———. “Neoliberal Dispositif and the Rise of Fundamentalism: The Case of Pakistan.”
Journal of International and Global Studies, 3, 1 (2011): 21–31.
Robbins, Bruce. “Comparative Cosmopolitanisms.” Cosmopoltics. Ed. Pheng Chea and
Bruce Robbins. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998. 246–64.
 FIFTEEN
The Nexus of Class, Identity, and
Politics in the Representational
Economy of Partition
The Case of Hasan Azizul Huq

Md. Rezaul Haque

The division of the Indian subcontinent into India and Pakistan in 1947 is
by now an extensively investigated subject. In fact, discourse on Partition
is so rich and wide-ranging that revisiting it from a completely fresh
perspective might appear to be almost impossible. Yet there are silences.
The present essay 1 aims at addressing one such silence and thus contrib-
uting to the ever expanding Partition literature by adding a new voice to
it: there is a conspicuous lack of critical discussion in English of Bengali
writings on Partition produced by Bengali Muslims who chose or were
compelled to leave India/West Bengal and settle in the newly created
(East) Pakistan. 2 How do Bengali Muslim authors, in most cases English-
educated, middle-class, and urban-based, look back at Partition? Part of
an answer lies in the fact that they are simultaneously Bengalis and Mus-
lims, a kind of double/split identity that works to generate some of the
ambivalence in the way they come to terms with that brutal event of 1947.
It is, however, the (self-)contradictions that derive from the intersection
of the class they come from and the sort of humanistic-progressive poli-
tics the majority of them subscribe to that appear to complicate represen-
tations of Partition in the works they have so far authored on the subject.
Discourse on Partition by Bengali Muslims is thus Janus-faced, torn be-
tween “[m]emory and desire,” between nostalgia and new beginnings. 3

245
246 Md. Rezaul Haque

In this essay, I take up the case of Hasan Azizul Huq, one of the leading
fictionists in Bangladesh today, as a paradigmatic one, for the tensions
informing representation of Partition in some of his early short stories, I
argue, open up a site that can prove immensely useful for understanding
Bengali Muslim psyche vis-à-vis Partition.
I begin with a brief overview of the historical-literary discourse on
Partition in order to delineate the changing contours of that discourse
and thus offer a broad discursive context for the analysis that follows. In
the history of South Asia, the degree of brutality that accompanied the
division of India has not, to date, been matched; the trauma of what
transpired in 1947 remains unique. 4 However, such a deep and lasting
trauma that is Partition—“a holocaust unprecedented even in the blood-
stained annals of India’s past”—has not drawn the amount and kind of
creative and scholarly attention it deserves, though there has never been
any shortage of attempts to manufacture consent to the “official,” sani-
tized narratives of that horrifying incident. 5 One reason for such a state of
affairs is the temporal proximity of the occurrence to its early narrativiza-
tion. Busy in nation-building, India and Pakistan (and later on Bangla-
desh also) had little time left for self-appraisal. Consequently, whatever
came to be written on the topic amounted to little more than state propa-
ganda. It is only in recent times that, challenging “the often hostile and
justificatory rhetoric about Partition,” a positive change appears to have
taken place. 6 The turning point is the assassination of Prime Minister
Indira Gandhi in October 1984 by her Sikh security guards, when several
North Indian cities became theaters where the communal furies of Parti-
tion were reenacted. “For days afterwards,” writes Urvashi Butalia,
“Sikhs all over India were attacked in an orgy of violence and revenge.
Many homes were destroyed and thousands died.” 7 The “[g]hosts of Mrs
Gandhi,” to borrow from Amitav Ghosh, brought back the violent memo-
ries of Partition to the fore and thus prompted a reassessment of that
thought-to-be unrepeatable event. 8
The violent splitting of the subcontinent is now revisited much more
critically and openly than has been the case during the regime of Mrs.
Gandhi, for example. From the early 1990s on, discourse on Partition has
gradually become much more nuanced; the already existing one has been
problematized by inflecting it with voices not heard before. Studies by
Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin (1998) and Urvashi Butalia (1998) have not
only enriched the discourse but have also, more importantly, humanized
it, by adding “human dimensions” to it. 9 In Pakistan, too, a similar ten-
dency is visible. Ayesha Jalal in her brilliant work on Saadat Hasan Man-
to (1912–1955), one of the most talented chroniclers of Partition in Urdu,
for instance, has convincingly argued for “a new historical methodology”
that strives “to connect the micro history of an individual and a family
with the macro history of communities and states during India’s parti-
tion.” 10 Most recent artistic-literary depictions of Partition from India and
 Nexus of Class, Identity, and Politics 247

Pakistan also try to go beyond the conventional binaries that have long
been the staples of the discourse on that terrible incident.
Contemporary Bangladesh presents a somewhat different picture.
Historical-scholarly discourses do not evince much interest in the divi-
sion of the subcontinent. Nor do the creative ones. In fact, as Niaz Zaman
notes, “Bengali [creative] writing seems to have elided the issue of Parti-
tion.” 11 Even when Partition is revisited by Bangladeshi historians and
scholars, it is not as a human tragedy. The tendency rather is to examine
the de/merits of the two-nation theory that Mohammad Ali Jinnah,
backed by the All-India Muslim League, so artfully exploited to mobilize
Indian Muslims in favor of the separatist demand for an independent
Muslim state to be called Pakistan. 12
Artists and creative writers of present-day Bangladesh also appear to
be largely apathetic to Partition. Yet at the end of the day one has to turn
to whatever little they occasionally produce, to appreciate Partition in its
human dimensions. While the indifference of Bangladeshi authors to Par-
tition definitely deserves close scrutiny, I do not intend to go into it
here. 13 I am rather concerned with the way one of them, namely, Hasan
Azizul Huq, has engaged with Partition in some of his early short sto-
ries. 14
Hasan was born in 1939 in a village in Burdwan district in (now West)
Bengal, (then British) India. In 1954 at the age of fifteen, he left India and
settled in the district of Khulna, (then East) Pakistan. The family Hasan
was born into can be characterized as one belonging to landed gentry.
The father, Doa Bakhsh, knew Persian, Sanskrit, and also a little English.
A disciplined and honest man, he presents a distinct contrast to his ex-
travagant father, Wajir Molla, son of Munshi (later Molla) Tajuddin. The
ancestral village ultimately came to be populated by the progeny of Mol-
la Tajuddin. 15 Given the solid economic base and spread of the family, it
appears unlikely that Hasan left India under pressure. A personal essay
titled “Je Bhitore Ashe” (He Who Comes Inside) opens with Hasan get-
ting down at Khulna railway station one evening. Hasan reminisces:
“That was my first coming to Khulna. In the month of September of the
year 1954. The purpose was to attain higher education.” 16 Hasan was
(deliberately) out for a better future.
Significantly, “Je Bhitore Ashe” also relates how Hasan becomes an
“insider,” “one of us” in the newly created Pakistan (hence the title). The
piece ends on a clear note of ambivalence that seems to originate from the
angst of being displaced, uprooted: “I cannot offer a full account of Khul-
na—do not even try that. How much do I really know about this varied
land? He who comes inside from outside; he who is born anew; he whom
a new country adopts; he who gets entangled in the intricate web of life-
spider; my condition is like his. I am an insider now.” 17
“Je Bhitore Ashe,” however, maintains absolute silence about the most
essential requirement for ideologically becoming an “insider” in Pakistan
248 Md. Rezaul Haque

in the early 1960s—the Islamic/Muslim identity of the citizen subject. As

far as self-fashioning is concerned, the essay envisions a (Bengali) self,
defined not in terms of (Muslim) community or (Islamic) religion but
(Bengali) culture—an early sign of the need for the Bengalis to reimagine
the Pakistani nation along democratic-progressive-secular lines.
What does it entail to be reborn, as Hasan defines the fact of his
migration metaphorically? As is frequently the case, in the case of Hasan,
too, the experience is both depressing and enriching, one of loss and gain
(hence the ambivalence in his representation of Partition). The Khulna
years made and remade Hasan. It is here that he came to look upon
himself as one solidly belonging to the middle class, simultaneously
graduating from rusticity to refinement. In Khulna, Hasan came in close
contact with a number of multitalented and progressive-minded individ-
uals such as Abubakar Siddique (poet, fictionist, and critic), Nazim Mah-
mud (theater artist and cultural organizer), Sadhan Sarkar (musical ar-
tiste and composer), and Khaled Rashid (a man “made of pure steel”). 18
Together they formed a socio-cultural organization called Sandipan (Kin-
dling) in the early 1960s.
Initially, a vague humanitarian ideal was at the heart of the activities
of Sandipan. In the early years most of its members were engaged in
literary-cultural endeavors. But the 1960s were also as volatile a decade
for the Bengalis as the 1950s. 19 In the context of the movements that
spread like fire all over East Pakistan in the late 1960s, Sandipan could
not but become radicalized. By 1969, the year of Mass Uprising in East
Pakistan, it was no longer possible, Hasan notes, “to watch the struggle
from a distance.” 20 The rhetoric of Pakistan had lost all validity by then in
the face of the palpable discriminations and exploitations Bengalis were
routinely subjected to. The East Pakistanis needed to realign the hierar-
chy of selves, to reverse the one that had obtained at the political birth of
Pakistan in 1947: history dictated that they became Bengalis first and then
Muslims. Even Islam was not strong enough to hold the two wings of
Pakistan together. Hasan recalls with pleasure that with all its limitations
Sandipan did participate in the intense struggle that accompanied the re-
conceptualization of the Bengali cultural/national identity in the form of a
nine-month-long Liberation War (from March to December 1971).
Another element also went into the making of cultural-political acti-
vists like Hasan. Both in culture and politics Hasan and his ilk cham-
pioned the cause of the working classes. In a moving tribute to Khaled
Rashid who was captured and then killed by the Pakistani army in the
early months of the Liberation War, Hasan hints at the kind of politics he
was involved in, in the 1960s. He was (most probably) a member of a
secret Communist party, for he used to receive its papers which he some-
times showed to Khaled Rashid. 21 If commitment to Communist politics
seeks to bring about a classless society free from class-based inequities, its
literary-cultural counterpart is to be found (in Hasan) in the total (Marx-
 Nexus of Class, Identity, and Politics 249

ist) rejection of the aesthetics of “art for art’s sake” on the one hand and a
faithful depiction of the day-to-day life experiences and struggles of the
subalterns on the other. No wonder Maxim Gorky (1868–1936) and Ma-
nik Bandopadhyay (1908–1956)—writers famous for socialist realism—
are two formidable influences on Hasan.
The reason why I have discussed at some length some of the major
factors that have influenced Hasan both as an author and a person is to
provide a framework for exploring the way(s) he engages with Partition
in several of his early short stories. The earliest one is titled “Uttar Ba-
shonte” (1964). 22 The title (After Spring) suggests the kind of life the
characters in the story are living as a consequence of migration following
Partition: life now presents a stark contrast to life then. Before Partition
the two sisters—Lipi and Bani—went to college and school, respectively.
Maddeningly in love with Kabir, Lipi would confide to Bani: “Without
Kabir I won’t be able to live. This very year he’d pass BA with Honours.
After that just two more years.” 23 But before those two years could be
over, there came the Partition. Through the exchange program, Lipi and
her family came over to (East) Pakistan. But there was no news of Kabir.
Weary of waiting and also perhaps to save herself from disgrace, Lipi one
day committed suicide. 24 The small room she killed herself in has never
been opened since.
To some extent the family comes round to accept the small existence
life has been so brutally reduced to. The mother goes about doing house-
hold chores, talking to herself all the time: “Can man live in such a jungle,
fie!” 25 Even at daytime the father does not come out of bed, sitting all
along inside the mosquito net. 26 The two younger brothers—Rantu and
Tuku—are listless. The deep shadows of Partition continue to haunt the
house and its inhabitants. Once in a while Bani remembers “the red sun-
light” of the old district town they have left: “That sunlight Bani would
never see.” 27 But Bani cannot afford to indulge in nostalgia for long. In
the manner of a typical (lower) middle-class girl, she assures her mother
of the new beginnings her education is going to open up for them: “One
more year. I’d pass BA with Honours. Then we won’t have hardships
anymore.” 28
“Uttar Bashonte” is thus structured around the conflict between
“[m]emory and desire” in the psyche of its female protagonist. The crisis
comes to a head with the reappearance of Kabir on the scene. One day
Bani finds to her utter surprise that the new lecturer in History at her
college is none other than Kabir. A few days later when Kabir comes to
visit the family, Bani opens for him the room in which Lipi took her life,
despite her mother insisting not to do so. At the time of leaving, Kabir
(shamelessly?) tries to win Bani over: “You could never understand me,
Bani; you never tried to.” 29 What Kabir implies here is that it is Bani who
has always been the queen of his heart, not Lipi. Bani declines the offer:
“No, don’t tempt me. We all are sick. We shouldn’t be tempted. We don’t
250 Md. Rezaul Haque

have any right on life.” 30 Paradoxically, by refusing to accommodate Ka-

bir in her life, Bani is not surrendering to what Partition has turned life
into; rather she is adamant to carry on, in the face of all odds. The same
resolve is reflected in her opening the locked-up rooms in the house. To
move on, Bani must come to terms with memory, outgrow nostalgia, and
reconcile herself with the past, even if it is no less than a nightmare, much
like her creator who permanently left India in 1963. 31
A story like “Uttar Bashonte,” I contend, can be authored only by a
writer who is in deep sympathy with middle-class aspirations and ideals.
Not only is the economic background of the major characters (lower)
middle class, they all speak formal Bengali. The middle-class sensibility
of the focalizer/narrator/writer is also reflected even in the way charac-
ters from different classes are (physically) described. Gani, who annoys
Bani by sending her love chits, is an “ugly camel-faced” youngster,
whereas Kabir has a “slender child-like face.” 32 But the surest sign of the
middle-class position of the author of “Uttar Bashonte” is the centrality
he and his creations (characters, focalizers, and narrator) assign to formal
education in the scheme of things. 33 Bani, Kabir, and Lipi all have abso-
lute confidence in the efficacy of institutional education. For Bani, a BA
certificate is the magic lamp of Aladdin that can solve all the problems
she and her family are beset with. In addition to easing financial difficul-
ty, it would protect her from sliding down into the vulgar (from her
perspective) world of the Ganis and so empower her that she would be in
a position to decide whether or not to give Kabir a second chance. And in
the absence of any distancing device such as irony, sarcasm, or “a sardon-
ic little twist” (authorial or narratorial), one can safely assume that Hasan
endorses the ultimate choices of his characters/creations. 34
Both structurally and thematically, “Khancha” (The Cage, 1973) re-
sembles “Uttar Bashonte.” 35 At its narrative center, “Khancha” has a
(lower) middle-class, upper-caste Hindu family, torn between attachment
and desire. Both husband (Ambujaksha) and wife (Sarojini) look forward
to and at the same time dread the prospect of migration to India, though
Sarojini is perhaps a little more insistent on leaving (East) Pakistan. Two
events in the family—a young son’s death by snake bite and a paralytic
stroke that Ambujaksha’s father suffers, thus becoming bedridden—
work to foil all the planning of husband and wife.
On two important scores, however, “Khancha” and “Uttar Bashonte”
differ too. Although from the same class as the Muslim characters in
“Uttar Bashonte,” both Ambujaksha and Sarojini feel so strongly attached
to home(land) that they can never fully reconcile themselves to the pros-
pect of leaving (East) Bengal/Pakistan: Ambujaksha keeps deferring the
question of migration resorting to one excuse or another, while Sarojini
keeps asking her husband to ensure that in exchanging property they do
not lose much. The paralysis of his father finally provides Ambujaksha, if
not Sarojini, with a good excuse to abandon the idea of migration. The
 Nexus of Class, Identity, and Politics 251

deep love Ambujaksha shows for home(land) appears as nostalgia in the

essays of those Hindus who for some reason or other had to leave (East)
Pakistan in reality. “The Hindu Bengali refugees who wrote these es-
says,” writes the subaltern historian Dipesh Chakrabarty in his insightful
discussion of the essays, had set themselves the task “of creating in print
something of the sentimental and the nostalgic about the lost home in the
villages of East Bengal.” 36 Unlike “many if not most of the Muslims of
East Pakistan,” the Hindus of East Bengal/Pakistan who had to leave
home(land) saw the Partition of India not as an achievement of “free-
dom” and the things it implies, but as an act of expulsion “from the
familiar worlds of their childhood. 37 Thus to spare himself the shock of
rootlessness, Ambujaksha ultimately decides not to leave home(land)
and puts on hold the most distinct part of his (lower) middle-class
dream—the education of his children. 38
In depicting Kabir—the only beneficiary of Partition in “Uttar Ba-
shonte”—as callous and irresponsible, Hasan seems to suggest the kind
of (ideological) shift he would enact in representing Partition in some of
his later stories. The story I examine next—“Atmoja O Ekti Karobi
Gachh” (A Daughter and an Oleander Plant, 1967; “Atmoja” hence-
forth)—contains the seeds of that shift. 39 Although “Atmoja” too is about
the unspeakable sufferings of a migrated (lower) middle-class family,
unlike “Uttar Bashonte,” it is neither narrated by nor focalized through
any member of that family. As a result of being narrated by a third-
person omniscient narrator (who is solidly middle-class in taste and tem-
perament), the center of narrative gravity in “Atmoja” shifts from the
tension between nostalgia and hope that structures “Uttar Bashonte” to a
vague kind of class conflict. 40
There is little narrative action in “Atmoja.” Three teenagers—Feku,
Inam and Suhas—come to the house of the migrated family in the middle
of the night. The old asthmatic father admits the three and, like a typical
middle-class host, asks them how they are doing, if they would like to
have a cup of tea etc. Feku and Suhas then give him money to have sex
with his eldest daughter, Ruku. 41 With no money in his pocket with
which to satisfy his desire, Inam sits with the old man and listens to his
asthma-hindered, phlegm-smeared tale of migration: “When I came here,
when I came here.” 42
The story is simple. Immediately after they had come over to (East)
Pakistan, the old man planted a karobi (oleander) plant, not for its flowers
but for its seeds, a rich source of poison. Most commentators have read
the act in symbolic terms. Abu Zafor, for example, notes a plain symbolic
association between the two acts: the sowing of the karobi plant and the
prostituting of the daughter; both yield poison. 43 The reading Sarifa Saloa
Dina offers is hardly any different from that by Zafor; in regarding the
division of India as the original and real source of poison(ing), Dina is,
however, able to situate her reading in the broader socio-economic and
252 Md. Rezaul Haque

political context of Partition. 44 The symbolic meaning Sanjida Akhter in-

vests the plant with, does not seem to take into account the (explicitly
stated) reason why the father had planted it in the first instance. The
plant, in her view, stands for a means of deliverance from the hellish life
the old man has been forced to live in his newly adopted motherland. 45
Two points emerge from these readings. First, the plant with its poison-
ous seeds embodies the poisoned existence of the father. Despite the fact
that (the latter) two of the three scholars are women, the question of what
the daughter goes through every time she has to prostitute herself has not
been raised at all. 46 Second, the symbolic decoding of the plant along the
lines above serves to highlight the sad plight of the old man and thus
absolve him from all guilt. The accusing finger that embittered Inam
points at the father in the form of a repeated question at the end of the
story—“Now you’re crying? Now you’re crying? You’re crying now?”—
plainly contradicts the latter end to which the karobi plant has been de-
coded. 47
In his preface to Deshbhager Galpo (Stories of Partition, 2011), a collec-
tion of six previously published short stories on the division of India,
Hasan lays bare what he goes through in writing about Partition: “Each
of these stories came to be written in moments of intense pain, such pain
as one might feel if the heart were to be cut with a saw.” 48 Clearly, Hasan
suffers intensely every time he writes about Partition. One visible source
of suffering is his empathy with the (represented) victims of Partition.
But Hasan is also aware that he must resist total identification with those
characters lest he mar the artistry of his work by flouting the distinction
between life and representation. In an interview with Shahaduzzaman,
Hasan reveals the other side of the picture:
[W]on’t I write the very way I had suffered? For example, I wrote the
two stories, “Mari” and “Parobashi,” having keenly felt the meaning-
lessness of riots. . . . My “Uttar Bashonte” is almost full of family mem-
ories. All these are personal experiences. But I’ve been careful that
these [stories?] do not remain entirely confined to personal experi-
ences. 49
So Hasan, himself a casualty of Partition, empathizes with the characters
he represents as such; at the same time, Hasan, the creative writer, needs
to stand apart from his representation to ensure that too much involve-
ment does not impair artistic integrity.
Interestingly, Hasan uses his detachment as a space for criticizing the
very character(s) he has so much consideration for. This tension, I hold,
marks the characterization of the father in “Atmoja,” a point glossed over
by the commentators cited above. But the more interesting point about
the way Hasan relates to the old man is his differential use of narrator
and focalizer in the story. It is through his middle-class narrator that
Hasan appears to empathize with the father, though the narrator too
 Nexus of Class, Identity, and Politics 253

would often seem to treat the old man a little critically. Such narratorial
details as the face of the father lined with cracks, his two “thin” legs, the
frequent attacks of asthma, his “vein-swollen fingers,” the “dirty” nails
not pared for long, and so on are clearly meant to evoke pity for him. 50
Yet one can hardly miss the irony when the narrator calls the old man a
“bhadralok,” that is, a gentleman. 51 The irony gains in sharpness in the
light of the middle-class pretension of the father that he is borrowing the
money Feku and Suhas pay him for having sex with his daughter. 52 Even
the middle-class narrator remains ambivalent towards the old man.
In its most crucial concluding part, “Atmoja” dramatizes an encounter
between middle and working classes over the selling and buying of the
body of a girl for sex. No less crucially, as the story advances to its end,
Hasan gradually withdraws his middle-class narrator, leaving the narra-
tive to be unfolded through three working-class focalizers, mostly
through Inam. The shift is (ideologically) deliberate, for it provides Ha-
san with the space he needs to go beyond the limits of his own middle-
class sensibility and thus be able to present the old man in a critical light.
Hence despite the overflow of tears drowning the face of the father, Inam
is unwilling to let him off. Because the old man planted the karobi plant
for its poisonous seeds, as Inam sees it, he should not hesitate to accept
them now. Similarly, since the father himself is responsible for the prosti-
tuting of the daughter, he is not morally justified to shed tears at her
disgrace: as one sows, so one reaps. Focalization through Inam enables
Hasan to be critical of the old man. “Atmoja” thus marks a subtle ideo-
logical shift in the representation of Partition. Moving away from his
evident middle-class outlook, which takes education to be the panacea of
all middle-class difficulties in “Uttar Bashonte,” Hasan in the latter story,
as I hope to have been able to demonstrate, aligns himself with a different
point of view to add the issue of class to his engagement with the division
of India and its aftermath, especially the migrant-refugee question.
The tension between middle- and working-class sympathies is also
manifest in the portrayal of Partition in another 1967 story titled “Mari”
(The Plague). 53 A group of about four hundred refugees have taken shel-
ter in a schoolhouse. The story revolves around how they are received
and treated by the local community. “Mari” thus depicts the other side of
the migrant-refugee question: unlike “Uttar Bashonte” and “Atmoja,” it
looks at the issue not from the perspective of those rendered homeless in
the wake of communal riots but from the point of view of those belong-
ing to the host community. The reaction is as diverse as is the motivation
to help. A brief opening exchange between Moulavi Saheb, the school
clerk, and farmer Rakib dramatizes the tension: Rakib is upset that so
many refugees have come to stay with them for no one knows how long;
looking after them means straining the limited resources of the commu-
nity. 54 But Moulavi Saheb is sympathetic, even though he does nothing
for the unwelcome guests. Inspired by piety, others like Motleb, Nafar,
254 Md. Rezaul Haque

and Reazaddi (mostly from the lower social strata) come forward and do
whatever little they can to alleviate the sufferings of the refugees. Still
others such as Moti, Jafar, Raham, and Habib just go about spreading the
news, doing nothing meaningful. 55 Yet the odd man out is Kabir Saheb
whom the narrator introduces as a “respectable bhadralok.” 56 Initially, it is
not clear why Kabir Saheb joins Motleb, Nafar, and Reazaddi as the three
carry a pitcher of milk to the schoolhouse to be distributed among the
refugees. A little later the third-person omniscient narrator discloses
what the gentleman is thinking about: with his “tapah-fish-like face,” Ka-
bir Saheb walks along with the milk bearers but is engrossed in thinking
“how well people are doing business.” 57 The question of refugees is not a
burning one for gentlemen like Kabir Saheb.
On two more occasions the narrator exposes how out of touch with
existing reality Kabir Saheb is. Standing in front of the schoolhouse,
where the refugees are temporarily housed, Kabir Saheb strains his ears
to hear the “sound of silence”; instead, a “terrible screech” issues out
from the schoolhouse to catch him unawares. 58 And at the end of the
story when Motleb, Nafar, and Reazaddi have left after giving away the
milk, Kabir Saheb suddenly hears the “odd sound of vomiting.” 59 He
then sees “a half-lying man is vomiting, his eyes sparkling in darkness.” 60
Only then Kabir Saheb comes to see that countless men and women in all
the nooks and corners of the schoolhouse are vomiting and gasping, star-
ing at him with sparkling eyes. 61 An epidemic is about to set in (hence the
title).
Is Kabir Saheb suffering from what Ian Watt defines as “delayed de-
coding”? 62 Perhaps not, for in “delayed decoding” the mind at least at-
tempts to make sense of the impressions it receives but is only able to do
so at a much slower pace (hence “delayed”). There is a (temporal) dis-
juncture in “delayed decoding” between experience and interpretation,
but Kabir Saheb does not even try to take in what is going on around him.
Rather reality appears to force itself into his consciousness to become
meaningful. Nor is Kabir Saheb overwhelmed by what he comes across.
Preoccupied with something else, he is physically there among the refu-
gees, but in his thought he is somewhere else.
What engrosses Kabir Saheb so completely is not precisely spelled
out. But his very first appearance in the story speaks volumes for the kind
of aloofness, if not indifference, he ultimately shows to the helpless,
homeless population. At the time when Motleb, Nafar, and Reazaddi
were taking the pitcher of milk to the schoolhouse, Kabir Saheb was
having a haircut in a saloon in the bazaar. The grooming detail is signifi-
cant: the narrator seems to suggest “Nero fiddled while Rome burned.”
In plain words, gentlemen like Kabir Saheb have eyes for physical ap-
pearance but not really for human tragedy. Such details as his being “a
respectable bhadralok,” the consistent use of the (colonial) honorific saheb
along with his (first) name, and the simile comparing his face with that of
 Nexus of Class, Identity, and Politics 255

a tapah fish also point to the irony and sarcasm the narrator (as well as his
creator) treats him with. In comparison to Motleb, Nafar, and Reazaddi,
who are not “gentlemen” like him but who at least initiate relief work for
the refugees, Kabir Saheb is at best “a silent observer.” 63
Hasan has given the reader two Kabirs. The one in “Uttar Bashonte”
impregnates a girl out of wedlock and, after the girl has committed sui-
cide, shifts his attention to the younger sister, thus proving himself to be
an extremely selfish young man. Kabir Saheb in “Mari” is possibly just a
shade better: he is self-centered, if not outright selfish. Compared to
them, Motleb, Nafar, and Reazaddi in “Mari” are definitely far better
human beings. Put together, the two Kabirs (and through them Hasan)
make it abundantly clear (against the backdrop of Partition and its after-
effects) that self-interest is what regulates middle-class Bengali Muslim
life both in quiet and turbulent times. So the hint of criticism that was
there in the depiction of “bhadralok” Kabir becomes too substantial a com-
ponent in the portrayal of the “respectable bhadralok” Kabir Saheb (for the
reader) to miss how Hasan sees the question of class in relation to (the
representation of) Partition in his short stories. 64
If Hasan criticizes and thus distances himself from middle-class aims
(or aimlessness) and aspirations in his representation of Partition in “At-
moja” and “Mari,” his left-leaning sympathies bring to the fore the trials
and tribulations working-class men and women had to live through dur-
ing and after Partition in “Parobashi” (The Outsider, 1967). 65 The story is
a simple one told simply. Bachir, a small Muslim farmer-laborer, has just
lost his young son and wife in a communal attack by Hindus on his
village. By the time the story opens he has already been walking for
nights and days to get as far away from the scene of communal violence
as possible. Now lying in a dried-up canal, Bachir relives all he is flying
away from: one scene after another passes through his mind. The last
scene projecting the speared dead body of his son and the burned one of
his wife shakes him up. At that very moment Bachir sees a man in a dirty,
coarse dhuti (indicative of his being a Hindu) going over to the country he
has been forced to leave. 66 In a maddening rage, he strikes the man with
an axe. The dead body of the victim rolls down into the canal.
The uniqueness of “Parobashi” among the Partition stories by Hasan
is worth some elaboration. The most conspicuous point is that it clearly
articulates why its male protagonist Bachir had to leave his home(land).
Unlike the protagonists in the other stories, Bachir left India, not because
he wanted to, but because he had been forced to. For him it is not a matter
of choice but of compulsion. Unlike his middle-class counterparts, Bachir
is not on the move in pursuit of a better fortune/future.
The second point is a related one. It has been repeatedly claimed that
Bengali writers (both Hindu and Muslim) tend to avoid violence in por-
traying Partition. 67 Several theories are in circulation as to why such is
the case. Even when violence appears, it serves as a background against
256 Md. Rezaul Haque

which the story unfolds. Hasan has a particular reason for using violence
as the determinant of narrative action in “Parobashi,” and the reason has
to do with class. 68 In a critical essay on the early Bangladeshi novel,
Hasan notes how ideology affects different classes differently. 69 Interest-
ingly, the discursive context is communalism in pre-Partition Bengal.
Even the strong wine of communalist ideology, Hasan confidently
argues, could not generate any extraordinary reaction among the harm-
less Hindu and Muslim cultivators who have been (and still are) engaged
in a relentless struggle to survive. 70 Working classes, especially those
directly dependent on agriculture, do not respond to change, according
to Hasan, unless they are able to perceive it realistically. 71 It is only a
clear perception of the need for change, not ideology, that regulates the
behavior of working-class men and women. Hence to be true to his own
sociological hypothesis, Hasan can only accommodate a working-class
protagonist like Bachir in a Partition narrative that incarnates that painful
occurrence in some form or other. By incorporating communal violence
in “Parobashi,” Hasan is able to associate the action/agency of his subal-
tern protagonist with the first term in the classic Marxist binary: base/
superstructure or mode-of-production/ideology. 72
So far Hasan has written a total of six short stories on the division of
India. 73 Each depicts Partition from a fresh perspective, thus narrating a
range of effects and experiences resulting from that unique event. Given
the variety of ways Partition (has) affected individuals and families, it
comes as no surprise that it should mean different things to different
classes and communities of people. Each portrayal of Partition is, there-
fore, an ideological/political endeavor. In representing Partition, Hasan
too has been conditioned by his hyphenated identity, class location, and
humanistic-progressive politics. It is the intersection of these socio-cultu-
ral and political determinants in the stories that accounts for how Parti-
tion is depicted in each of them. “Uttar Bashonte,” for example, portrays
Partition in terms of a conflict between nostalgia and hope, a conflict felt
by most Bengali Muslim writers like Hasan who had to migrate from
India for some reason or other. The tensions informing representations of
Partition in the other stories mostly derive, as I hope to have been able to
show above, from a different category of (self-)contradictions in which
Hasan cannot help being caught up: the dichotomy of his solid middle-
class sympathies and progressive-socialist politics is too real to be ex-
plained away. Overall, from whatever point of view Hasan revisits Parti-
tion, each revisiting is informed by the class he belongs to, the kind of
politics he aligns himself with, and the sort of self-fashioning he sub-
scribes to. And given the incongruity of the shaping influences, it is per-
fectly understandable why ambivalence should be the keynote of his rep-
resentation of Partition.
 Nexus of Class, Identity, and Politics 257

NOTES

1. In writing this chapter, I received generous help from Syed Manzoorul Islam,
Mohammad A. Quayum, Habib Rahman, Sarwar Murshed, Tapon Kumar Roy, and
Sajib Kumar Ghosh. I thank them all.
2. A notable exception is Niaz Zaman, A Divided Legacy: The Partition in Selected
Novels of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh (Dhaka: The University Press Limited, 1999).
3. T. S. Eliot, T. S. Eliot: Selected Poems (Calcutta: Rupa and Co., 1992), 51.
4. See endnote 13 below.
5. Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for
Pakistan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 1.
6. Yasmin Khan, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 2008), 4.
7. Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (Dur-
ham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 4.
8. Amitav Ghosh, The Imam and the Indian (Delhi: Ravi Dayal and Permanent Black,
2002), 46.
9. Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (Dur-
ham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 6; Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin, Borders and
Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
1998).
10. Ayesha Jalal, The Pity of Partition: Manto’s Life, Times, and Work across the India-
Pakistan Divide (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013), xii.
11. Niaz Zaman, A Divided Legacy: The Partition in Selected Novels of India, Pakistan,
and Bangladesh (Dhaka: The University Press Limited, 1999), 331.
12. See, for example, Ahmed Sharif, “1947 Soner Rajnitir Punormulyayan” [A Re-
evaluation of the Politics of 1947], in Kichhu Biswaser Bajjhik Punorbibechana [A Superfi-
cial Reconsideration of Some Articles of Faith] (Dhaka: Agamee Prakashani, 2000),
23–27; and Ahmad Rafique, Deshbibhag: Fire Dekha [Revisiting Partition] (Dhaka: Anin-
dya Prokash, 2014).
13. Two possible reasons for this indifference can be put forward: first, in both scale
and scope the Partition of Bengal was far less traumatic than that of Punjab; second,
being much closer in time, the violent memory of Bangladesh Liberation War (1971)
seems to have far outweighed that of Partition in the Bengali psyche.
14. Researchers spell the surname in several ways. For the sake of consistency, I
have spelled it “Huq” throughout.
15. Hasan Azizul Huq, quoted in Mahibul Aziz, Hasan Azizul Huq: Rarhabanger
Uttaradhikar [Hasan Azizul Huq: The Legacy of Rarhabanga] (Chittagong: Achira,
1989), 3–4.
16. Hasan Azizul Huq, Rachanasangraha [Collected Works], vol. 3 (Dhaka: Jatiya
Grontha Prakashan, 2002), 47. Unless stated otherwise, translations are mine.
17. Ibid., 61.
18. Ibid., 60.
19. The two most remarkable socio-cultural and political movements of the 1950s
include the Language Movement of 1952 and the formation in 1954 of the United
Front, a five-party coalition, that eventually demolished the hegemony of the Muslim
League in East Pakistan.
20. Hasan Azizul Huq, Rachanasangraha [Collected Works], vol. 3 (Dhaka: Jatiya
Grontha Prakashan, 2002), 61.
21. Ibid., 468.
22. Hasan Azizul Huq, Rachanasangraha [Collected Works], vol. 1 (Dhaka: Jatiya
Grontha Prakashan, 2001), 44–55. The year given parenthetically is the year of first
publication in a book of short stories. So far Hasan has published eight such books.
23. Ibid., 51.
24. The suggestion is that Lipi was illicitly pregnant at that time. Ibid., 52.
25. Ibid., 44.
258 Md. Rezaul Haque

26. The image is reminiscent of Miss Havisham in Great Expectations. After Partition
the father no longer appears (to Bani) to be “a creature of light.” Ibid., 45.
27. Ibid., 50.
28. Ibid., 46.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid.
31. Hasan Azizul Huq, interview by Kaes Ahmed, in Unmochito Hasan [Hasan Azi-
zul Huq as Revealed in Interviews], ed. Hayat Mamud (Dhaka: Ittadi Grantha Pro-
kash, 2011), 62.
32. Hasan Azizul Huq, Rachanasangraha [Collected Works], vol. 1 (Dhaka: Jatiya
Grontha Prakashan, 2001), 47, 50.
33. On the role of education in the life of the emerging Bengali Muslim middle class
in post-Partition period, see Serajul Islam Choudhury, “Pakistaner Pore” [After Paki-
stan], in Britter Bhanga-Gara [Constructing and Deconstructing the Circle]. (Dhaka:
Ahmad Publishing House, 1989), 101–12.
34. Amitav Ghosh, The Shadow Lines (New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1995), 4.
35. Hasan Azizul Huq, Rachanasangraha [Collected Works], vol. 1 (Dhaka: Jatiya
Grontha Prakashan, 2001), 234–47.
36. Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Remembered Villages: Representation of Hindu-Bengali
Memories in the Aftermath of the Partition,” accessed June 14, 2014, [Link]
edu/~sj6/[Link], 319.
37. Ibid., 319, 320.
38. At one point in the story, Ambujaksha tells Sarojini that once in India they
would put the children into school. Hasan Azizul Huq, Rachanasangraha [Collected
Works], vol. 1 (Dhaka: Jatiya Grontha Prakashan, 2001), 242–43.
39. Ibid., 129–36.
40. If consistent use of standard Bengali is one clear indication of the middle-class
background of the narrator, his/her reluctance to put the “unprintable” things that
Inam says into words, is another. Ibid., 132.
41. In an interview with Kaes Ahmed, Hasan tells Ahmed that “Atmoja” differs
from the incident it is based on in one important respect: the girl was forced into
prostitution by her (maternal) uncle, not by her father. Hasan Azizul Huq, interview
by Ahmed, in Unmochito Hasan [Hasan Azizul Huq as Revealed in Interviews], edited
by Hayat Mamud, 59-67 (Dhaka: Ittadi Grantha Prokash, 2011), 63.
42. Hasan Azizul Huq, Rachanasangraha [Collected Works], vol. 1 (Dhaka: Jatiya
Grontha Prakashan, 2001), 136.
43. Abu Zafor, Hasan Azizul Huqer Galper Samajbastobata [Hasan Azizul Huq: A
Critical Perspective] (Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 1996), 33–41.
44. Sarifa Saloa Dina, Hasan Azizul Haque O Akhtaruzzaman Eliaser Chotogalpo: Bishoy
O Prokaron [Short Stories of Hasan Azizul Huq and Akhtaruzzaman Elias: Form and
Content] (Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 2010), 112–16.
45. Sanjida Akhter, Bangla Chhoto Galpe Deshbibhag [Partition in Bengali Short Story]
(Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 2002), 180–86.
46. On the issue of gender in representing Partition, see Jill Didur, Unsettling Parti-
tion: Literature, Gender, Memory (Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto
Press, 2006).
47. Hasan Azizul Huq, Rachanasangraha [Collected Works], vol. 1 (Dhaka: Jatiya
Grontha Prakashan, 2001), 136.
48. Hasan Azizul Huq, quoted in Bikash Ray, “Deshbhager Galpo: Hasan Azizul
Huqer Srijoni Chaitanya” [Stories of Partition: The Creative Consciousness of Hasan
Azizul Huq], Galpokatha 2, 3 (2012): 149.
49. Ibid., 150.
50. Hasan Azizul Huq, Rachanasangraha [Collected Works], vol. 1 (Dhaka: Jatiya
Grontha Prakashan, 2001), 134, 135.
51. Ibid., 135.
52. Ibid., 136.
 Nexus of Class, Identity, and Politics 259

53. Ibid., 162–67.

54. Ibid., 163.
55. Ibid., 164.
56. Ibid.
57. Ibid.
58. Ibid., 165.
59. Ibid., 167.
60. Ibid.
61. Ibid.
62. Ian Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1981), 175. Watt defines “delayed decoding” as a “narrative device” that “com-
bines the forward temporal progression of the mind, as it receives messages from the
outside world, with the much slower reflexive process of making out their meaning.”
63. Sanjida Akhter, Bangla Chhoto Galpe Deshbibhag [Partition in Bengali Short Story]
(Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 2002), 184.
64. Hasan Azizul Huq, Rachanasangraha [Collected Works], vol. 1 (Dhaka: Jatiya
Grontha Prakashan, 2001), 49.
65. Ibid., 137–48.
66. Ibid., 147.
67. See Sanjida Akhter, Bangla Chhoto Galpe Deshbibhag [Partition in Bengali Short
Story] (Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 2002); Asrukumar Sikdar, Bhanga Bangla O Bangla
Sahitya [Divided Bengal and Bengali Literature] (Kolkata: Dey’s Publishing, 2005);
Niaz Zaman, A Divided Legacy: The Partition in Selected Novels of India, Pakistan, and
Bangladesh (Dhaka: The University Press Limited, 1999).
68. In Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2001), 4, Gyanendra Pandey looks at how “violence . . . constitutes –
and reconstitutes—the subject.”
69. Hasan Azizul Huq, Rachanasangraha [Collected Works], vol. 4 (Dhaka: Sahittika,
2003), 15.
70. Ibid.
71. Ibid.
72. See Terry Eagleton, Marxism and Literary Criticism (London and New York:
Routledge, 2002).
73. Taking length into account, I have left out the sixth story titled “Dibaswapno”
(Daydream; Hasan Azizul Huq, Rachanasangraha [Collected Works], vol. 2 [Dhaka:
Jatiya Grontha Prakashan, 2001], 299–303) in the present essay. Hasan has given Parti-
tion a fuller treatment in one of his novels Agunpakhi [The Phoenix]. In Upannashsomo-
gro [A Collection of Novels] (Dhaka: Mowla Brothers, 2014), 201–352.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Akhter, Sanjida. Bangla Chhoto Galpe Deshbibhag [Partition in Bengali Short Story]. Dha-
ka: Bangla Academy, 2002.
Aziz, Mahibul. Hasan Azizul Huq: Rarhabanger Uttaradhikar [Hasan Azizul Huq: The
Legacy of Rarhabanga]. Chittagong: Achira, 1989.
Butalia, Urvashi. The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2000.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. “Remembered Villages: Representation of Hindu-Bengali Mem-
ories in the Aftermath of the Partition,” 318–37. Accessed 14 Jun. 2014. [Link]
[Link]/~sj6/[Link].
Choudhury, Serajul Islam. “Pakistaner Pore” [After Pakistan]. In Britter Bhanga-Gara
[Constructing and Deconstructing the Circle]. Dhaka: Ahmad Publishing House,
1989. 101–12.
Didur, Jill. Unsettling Partition: Literature, Gender, Memory. Toronto, Buffalo, and Lon-
don: University of Toronto Press, 2006.
260 Md. Rezaul Haque

Dina, Sarifa Saloa. Hasan Azizul Haque O Akhtaruzzaman Eliaser Chotogalpo: Bishoy O
Prokaron [Short Stories of Hasan Azizul Huq and Akhtaruzzaman Elias: Form and
Content]. Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 2010.
Eagleton, Terry. Marxism and Literary Criticism. London and New York: Routledge,
2002.
Eliot, T. S. T. S. Eliot: Selected Poems. Calcutta: Rupa and Co., 1992.
Ghosh, Amitav. The Imam and the Indian. Delhi: Ravi Dayal and Permanent Black, 2002.
———. The Shadow Lines. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995.
Huq, Hasan Azizul. Agunpakhi [The Phoenix]. In Upannashsomogro [A Collection of
Novels]. Dhaka: Mowla Brothers, 2014. 201–352.
———. Interview. By Ahmed, Kaes. In Unmochito Hasan [Hasan Azizul Huq as Re-
vealed in Interviews], edited by Hayat Mamud, 59–67. Dhaka: Ittadi Grantha Pro-
kash, 2011.
———. Rachanasangraha [Collected Works]. 4 vols. Dhaka: Jatiya Grontha Prakashan/
Sahittika, 2001–2003.
Jalal, Ayesha. The Pity of Partition: Manto’s Life, Times, and Work across the India-Pakistan
Divide. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013.
———. The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Khan, Yasmin. The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan. New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 2008.
Menon, Ritu, and Kamla Bhasin. Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition.
New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998.
Pandey, Gyanendra. Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Rafique, Ahmad. Deshbibhag: Fire Dekha [Revisiting Partition]. Dhaka: Anindya Pro-
kash, 2014.
Ray, Bikash. “Deshbhager Galpo: Hasan Azizul Huqer Srijoni Chaitanya” [Stories of
Partition: The Creative Consciousness of Hasan Azizul Huq]. Galpokatha 2, 3 (2012):
145–53.
Sharif, Ahmed. “1947 Soner Rajnitir Punormulyayan” [A Re-evaluation of the Politics
of 1947]. In Kichhu Biswaser Bajjhik Punorbibechana [A Superficial Reconsideration of
Some Articles of Faith]. Dhaka: Agamee Prakashani, 2000. 23–27.
Sikdar, Asrukumar. Bhanga Bangla O Bangla Sahitya [Divided Bengal and Bengali Liter-
ature]. Kolkata: Dey’s Publishing, 2005.
Watt, Ian. Conrad in the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press,
1981.
Zafor, Abu. Hasan Azizul Huqer Galper Samajbastobata [Hasan Azizul Huq: A Critical
Perspective]. Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 1996.
Zaman, Niaz. A Divided Legacy: The Partition in Selected Novels of India, Pakistan, and
Bangladesh. Dhaka: The University Press Limited, 1999.
 SIXTEEN
Partition and Beyond
Intizar Husain’s Quest for Meaning and Vision

Tasneem Shahnaaz and Amritjit Singh

Walter Benjamin had sounded an admonitory note on storytelling in his

essay “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nicolai Leskov”
(1936). He states that “familiar though his name may be to us, the story-
teller in his living immediacy is by no means a present force” and “the art
of storytelling is coming to an end.” 1 Some thirty-eight years later, Intizar
Husain echoed a similar sentiment when he wrote in his essay “Vikram,
the Vampire and the Story” (1974) that “the future of the short story is
dark because trees keep diminishing in the world and men grow more
numerous. In a world of nothing but men, journalism can grow, but the
poem and the story cannot.” 2 Ironically, Husain has gone on to become
one of the best practitioners of short story as a genre and was one of the
finalists for the Man Booker Prize in 2013. Benjamin had identified two
kinds of storytellers—the one “who has stayed at home” or the “resident
tiller of the soil” and the one “who has come from afar” or the “trading
seaman.” 3 However, he goes on to add that the “actual extension of the
realm of storytelling in its full historical breadth is inconceivable without
the most intimate interpenetration of these two archaic types.” 4 The sto-
ryteller in Intizar Husain encompasses the qualities and breadth of vision
of both these types. Choosing to move to Pakistan, he can be regarded as
having “come from afar,” that is, from Dibai in India. 5 His sensibilities
combine the consciousness of a native who carries within himself the
presence of an earlier multicultural history and heritage. His stories and
novels contain oral elements of storytelling along with the “lore of far-

261
262 Tasneem Shahnaaz and Amritjit Singh

away places . . . with the lore of the past, as it best reveals itself to natives
of a place.” 6

DOUBLE VISION

Husain’s perspective as a writer appears to be that of both an insider and

an outsider. He was a resident of India who made Lahore his home after
the Partition in 1947. Though he chose to go there, he never thought he
would not be able to come back to his home in India. 7 In this sense,
Husain displays what Edward Said calls the “double-vision” of an exiled
secular intellectual. For Said, the dislocated migrant or exile “sees things
both in terms of what has been left behind and what is actual here and
now” and that is why he has “a double perspective that never sees things
in isolation.” 8 In his essay “Reflections on Exile,” Said goes on to explain
that “[m]ost people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one
home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives
rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an awareness that—to
borrow a phrase from music—is contrapuntal.” 9
Intizar Husain’s “double perspective” enables him to take charge of
his “tomorrows” which, in turn, are taken care of by “yesterdays.” He
can yoke the past and the present together with ease, the personal with
the impersonal, the similar with the dissimilar. In his novel Basti, linear
time is disrupted by flashbacks, references to myths, archetypal allusions,
as well as intimations of personal and historical consciousness. The writ-
er admits that “[t]he first Partition was in the Mahabharata, and then it
was me when I was exiled. Only the Pandavas and I knew the pain of
leaving one’s land. The Mahabharata is such a powerful narrative of that
pain.” 10 This “pain” of leaving “home” gains more significance in times
of crisis and loss. The title of the novel Basti (which means a dwelling
place or neighborhood), itself hints at the sufferings of those who are
exiled. The question is which basti is one’s home? Which basti does one
belong to and call one’s own? Husain explores the exiled intellectual’s
state of mind and being through the character of Zakir, whose name
means “one who remembers” and who is in search of a homeland, for the
“exile knows that in a secular and contingent world, homes are always
provisional.” 11 The protagonist can only pray and look inwards in times
of calamity when his adoptive hometown in Pakistan is “burning on all
four sides” 12 and why Rupnagar (his original basti in India) is an un-
achievable distant dream. The association of heterogeneous ideas is what
activates the creative process and gives rise to a dual perspective—dou-
ble vision that nudges the exile to accept the unattainability of different
bastis/homes in life, to understand what Said evokes as “the pathos of
summer and autumn as much as the potential of spring [that] are nearby
yet unobtainable.” 13
 Partition and Beyond 263

STORYTELLING AND THE EXILIC IMAGINATION

For Said, exile means a critical distance from all cultural identities and
resolutely opposing all forms of identity politics and orthodoxies at the
national or social level. For him, exile is more a condition of the mind that
withstands and confronts sectarian, regional loyalties when living in
one’s adopted country or even in the nation of one’s birth. Understood in
this way, Said believes that exile, though painful, is also a morally valu-
able condition, and he quotes approvingly, yet ironically, Theodor Ador-
no’s claim that “it is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home.” 14
Maybe Husain is not an exile in Said’s sense of the word, but his “critical
distance” from his original cultural roots in India creates a liminal space,
which he occupies as a secular intellectual exile in an increasingly Islamic
Pakistan, just as Salman Rushdie avers in the The Satanic Verses that exile
“is an endless paradox: looking forward by always looking back.” 15 Hu-
sain is prompted by an exilic anxiety and by the desire to define his
condition and location, to take imaginative leaps backwards in time and
history. But Husain, like Said, must know that in addressing the issues
that Pakistan confronted after 1971 from “the exile’s situation,” he must
show that “no return to the past is without irony, or without a sense that
a full return, or repatriation, is impossible.” 16 And yet as a writer, he
savors the ancient Hindu scriptures, mythology, folktales, and the vari-
ous other traditions of Indian storytelling. He draws freely from a variety
of sources and traditions—Islamic, Buddhist, Hindu—to write his stories.
Along with the Persian tradition of the qissa and the ornate Urdu
dastaan, he uses diverse archetypes, myths, and folktales like the Jataka
tales, the Panchatantra, the Puranas, Buddhist philosophies, and Sufi mys-
ticism. The qissa was an oral genre with a performative component. It was
supposed to be constituted of four elements—razm (battle), bazm (courtly
assemblies), husn o’ishq (love and beauty), and ayyari (trickery). Husain’s
stories may not strictly include all these elements, but his narratives deal
with battles within and outside the self as well as speak of authoritarian
policies and political decisions that adversely affect ordinary human be-
ings. They recount innumerable instances of love and ensnaring beauty,
even as they detail incidents of the duplicity of men and women. These
variable experiences, which Benjamin considers to be the primary materi-
al of a story, also lend certain benefits in Benjamin’s view: “[The story]
contains, openly or covertly, something useful. The usefulness may, in
one case, consist in a moral; in another, in some practical advice; in a
third, in a proverb or maxim. In every case the storyteller is a man who
has counsel for his readers.” 17
The Persian qissa tradition too has the same advantages of storytelling
with the addition of a linguistic function wherein the listener learns to
manipulate language by listening to language that is expressive (“fasih”),
developed or mature (“baligh”), and in current usage (“roz marra”). The
264 Tasneem Shahnaaz and Amritjit Singh

Jataka tales and the Panchatantra collection of stories function like Aesop’s
fables where each story offers a moral or practical precept. The Jatakas
expound Buddhist philosophy in stories about the previous births of the
Buddha in different forms, while the latter purports to teach how to
conduct life wisely. The Puranas contain stories about battles between
devas (gods) and asuras (demons), religious lore and practices, as well as
everyday customs, thereby providing a guide to dharmic (virtuous) living.
Husain’s stories and novels take shape when temporality is transcended
by surrealism or dreams or mythic allusions, when artistic autonomy is
maintained through fictionalization of events in order to explore human
potential, and/or when collective memory and state-sponsored history
are in perpetual conflict. It is his belief that stories may belong to different
traditions but the underlying foundational philosophies are analogous.
For example, in the short story “Boat” (Kishti), stories of Noah, Gilgamesh
and Utnapishtim, Manuji and the Fish avatar of God Vishnu, Markandeya
and Narayan, and Hatamtai are interwoven together to denote a similarity
in figurative and moral significance. At the Karachi Literature Festival
(2013), Husain went on record to uphold the importance of storytelling in
providing solace and “counsel” (to borrow Benjamin’s word) in violent
times. 18
At the same time, we cannot miss in Husain’s narratives the modern-
istic elements of surrealism, psychoanalytic imagery, as well as postmod-
ern techniques of plural narratives and perspectives. They combine ar-
chetypal consciousness with modern existentialism in order to make
sense of life after the senseless violence of Partition. Using materials such
as dream sequences (as in “The City of Sorrows” or Shahre-e Afsos), or
containing smaller narratives of stories within a story like the Chinese
box structure 19 or framed/embedded narratives (for example, “Tortoise”
or Kachhuwe), Husain tries to explore the psyche of human beings and
their relationship to history. The form resembles the psychoanalytical
process of unearthing the unconscious mind behind the different levels of
negative narratives gathered by the conscious mind. Like Conrad, Hu-
sain exploits the “undiscovered possibilities latent in one of the genre’s
most familiar forms, namely, the framed short story in which a first per-
son narrator (who is sometimes the member of a group) introduces, com-
ments on, and encloses another’s tale.” 20 His polyphonic technique in-
cludes the use of many voices that speak and listen to other voices. This is
somewhat similar to the discourse produced by the French postmodern-
ists in the 1970s where the univocal mode of speaking in the name of
others and presenting a monolithic understanding of a universal Truth is
deconstructed and decentered. In turn, this approach disrupts the notions
of homogeneity and essentialism that get attached to racialized commu-
nities. It creates an imaginative space in which assumptions of majoritar-
ianism and separatism can be negotiated and transformed into a more
composite, pluralistic space. Such a space would accommodate bhikshus
 Partition and Beyond 265

and ordinary individuals, as well as men and women belonging to di-

verse communities.
Husain’s stories do not reflect a conscious or overt serialization of
history and events. But the act of remembering, albeit indirectly, strate-
gizes the release of institutionalized history from official restrictions of
forgetting. At the same time, it grants probity and meaning to a history
that is characterized by division, violence, and loss. In engaging with
history as a storyteller, Husain is able to address and redress forgotten
and repressed experiences, give tongue to the silences of history, and
imagine an alternative vision of the past and the future. Basti demon-
strates his skillful use of subjective, personal memory in collaboration
with collective memory. 21 In adding to this mix, “non-linear cultural my-
thology” as well as “centuries old historical events,” 22 Husain reflects his
commitment as a writer to engage and transmute the brutal events of
history into new modes of feeling and thinking. Zakir, a Shia professor of
history, had moved to Lahore in 1947. Against this backdrop is the
present in 1971, when East Pakistan broke away to become Bangladesh, a
free nation. The exodus to Pakistan in 1947 was regarded by many as
hijrat, reminiscent of how Prophet Muhammad had left Mecca to escape
persecution and to form the first Muslim community in Medina. The
people of Pakistan felt a sense of achievement in forming a new nation.
They also felt a sense of responsibility for building this new Muslim state.
The sense of victory was a way of coming to terms with the new life as
well as the hardships they faced there. The second crisis in 1971 appears
to dislocate the protagonist who is unable to take any action except to
pray and to accept that “defeat too is a trust.” 23 He realizes that he is
responsible for the defeat, not merely as an individual but as an emblem
of all persons who have witnessed in silence the injustices and inhuman
treatment that had been meted out to the people of East Pakistan.
While interviewing Husain, Alok Bhalla comments that the writer’s
stories function at three levels. First of all, they appear to be based on
personal memories. At another level, they depict “the cultural and politi-
cal life of the subcontinent before 1947,” 24 which comes through the writ-
er’s powerful nostalgia. The third level engages with the creative and
imaginative reconstruction of subcontinental history using examples
from “the foundational stories of the Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists” 25
to define and understand it. Indeed, these stories articulate his angst, his
search for the self and its identity, his initial hopes and idealism in being
a part of a new nation-state, his waning optimism and increasing pessi-
mism in relation to the realities of politics and governance. Somewhat
like T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land, Husain constructs his own tradition
through pastiche and allusion, through a retelling of old myths and tales,
bringing together hints and directions, in Eliot’s phrase “[t]hese frag-
ments I have shored against my ruins.” 26 His narratives signal the hope
for reconciliation by reimagining a new world in which peacocks, royal
266 Tasneem Shahnaaz and Amritjit Singh

swans, and ducks live in harmony with humans. Such a reimagining

would include the Jataka tales, stories of Baital Pachchisee or the Panchatan-
tra, qissas and dastaans. Clearly for Husain, the writerly access to all these
forms in conjunction with the Western tradition of independent linear
stories is not the prerogative of one culture, literary tradition, or nation
only. He subscribes to “an all-encompassing pluralistic civilization, in-
cluding Mirabai, Kabir, Tulsi Das and Baba Farid.” 27

NEW WINE IN OLD/NEW BOTTLES

Husain’s aim in combining these diverse traditions of storytelling togeth-

er is also to “evolve a new mode of storytelling,” 28 to “create a new
fictional form” 29 in the history of Urdu literature. Hindi and Urdu writers
associated with the Progressive Writers Movement in the 1930s and 1940s
by and large used realism and linear form in their stories, as they ex-
plored local social and political issues. Their intention was possibly more
reformist or revolutionary than exploratory or experimental. In contrast,
Husain spins his narratives on a loom of myth and fantasy that weaves
threads from the Alif Laila, the Jataka tales, Panchatantra, into the patterns
experienced in stories by Anton Chekov, Franz Kafka, and others. His
narratives thus tend to be more suggestive than didactic. In claiming his
distinctive space in the South Asian literary tradition, Husain seems to
have pushed the potential of the short story and the novel to new limits.
The Chinese box/frame technique of his narratives also fulfills a thematic
function—of conjuring and accepting a common South Asian past.
The writer’s vision of a pre-Partition past is nostalgic, but there is an
air of unease and disquiet in this Garden of Eden. There is always the
danger of Satan entering it with the help of the beautiful and innocent
peacock, or a Cain who will murder his own brother and defile the land,
or rats that will swarm all over it making it impossible to live (as in
“Barium Carbonate”). In his retelling of the Jataka tales, Husain often
seems to reverse the moral of the Buddhist tales and privilege the beau-
ties and longings of the world of senses over the world of renunciation. 30
They address moral confrontations rather than function as moral impera-
tives. 31 At the end of the stories likes “Leaves” (Pattey), “Complete
Knowledge” (Poora Gyan), “Tortoise” (Kachuwe), and “The Brahmin
Goat,” the protagonists face a quandary and do not know how to recon-
cile the beautiful sensory world with the demands of renunciation, the
claims of humanity with the desire to escape this world of illusions. They
stand confused at “the border between forests, villages, rational knowl-
edge and uncontrolled passion, religious faith and despair,” 32 not know-
ing which way to go. They seem to prefigure the harassed passengers
who are stranded on a railway platform and know not what to do except
ask despairingly, “We are neither here nor there. Whose responsibility
 Partition and Beyond 267

are we?” 33 The stories, thus, have an unfinished air with no resolution
offered. Husain sees this as “a condition of possibility, a reason to contin-
ue.” 34
The search for a new form also translates into a “quest for an iden-
tity,” 35 which concerns itself with Husain’s position/location as a writer
who is a citizen of the newly formed Pakistan but was born in India and
grew up there. As a member of the Shia minority in a Sunni-dominated
state, he appears to derive synergy as a writer from the diverse history
and traditions of the subcontinent. In his interview with Bhalla, he re-
marks tellingly that he is a Muslim with a Hindu sitting inside him and
that he has one foot in Karbala and the other foot in Ayodhya. 36 He has
made the intellectual journey from thinking of the Partition as a hijrat to
being an inheritor of an Islamic tradition preceded in South Asia by a rich
history of other faith communities and cultural traditions. Instead of in-
sisting on the separateness and exceptionalism that led to the Partition,
Husain is acutely aware of his self as a “metaphysical and historical
entity.” 37 One wonders if Husain has been on a journey that has taken
him in a direction quite contrary to that of Pakistan’s journey as a na-
tion—a phenomenon that began to occur soon after Jinnah’s death and
had reached its peak during the regime of General Zia-ul-Haq in the late
1970s and early1980s with the introduction of Nizam-e-Mustafa (“Rule of
the Prophet” or Islamic System, i.e., sharia law) and by the replacement
in large part of Pakistan’s Penal Code by the Hudood Ordinance. Hu-
dood placed legal limits of acceptable behavior according to sharia, add-
ing criminal offenses of adultery and fornication and new punishments
of whipping, amputation, and stoning to death.

THE DISLOCATED INTELLECTUAL VERSUS

NATIONALISTIC URGES

After the Partition, Muslims in Pakistan began the process of redefining

their identities. The question confronting them was about which history
and culture to claim as their own. Many felt that the history that had
defined them previously had been left behind in India. What they consid-
ered to be their Islamic past included the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal
history, monuments like the Taj Mahal or the Red Fort, and poets like
Amir Khusrau, Mir Taqi Mir, or Ghalib, to name a few. These became a
part of India after the Partition. Some Pakistanis even questioned the
right to claim Urdu as their own language, as it had its origins in the
Indian milieu. Those who had migrated to Pakistan were mohajirs (de-
rived from the word hijrat) and their condition was unenviable. They had
left their homes in India and were struggling to survive in their adopted
country. They were trapped in the slogans of their leaders, in the hostile
environment around them, or on railway platforms because their train
268 Tasneem Shahnaaz and Amritjit Singh

had been cancelled (“Platform”). Bawa Jaan, in the story “The Jungle of
the Gonds,” whispers, “How funny! Pakistan hasn’t fought a war but has
lost . . . lost to itself.” 38 In Basti, the formation of Bangladesh signals
another internal loss.
What, then, was the history of Pakistan and when did it begin? The
fledgling nation and its Islamic statehood stood in opposition to a secu-
lar, multicultural, democratic, Hindu-majority Indian nation. Rooting for
Pakistan was part of the new nationalistic impulse and the rhetoric of its
governance. In this arrangement, India was construed and constructed as
the alienating “other,” even though Pakistan had at first viewed itself as
the “other,” in opposition to the Indian identity. The dialectical paradox
that Pakistan was once part of India made it extremely hard for the new
nation to invent itself as something different and distinctive, except for its
religious affiliation and/or for its “exceptionalism” and “separateness”
whose history could be traced to political and ideological developments
dating back to the nineteenth century. 39 Lured into a Pan-Islamic identity
that might displace its solidly South Asian texture, Pakistan as a nation
pushed itself under General Zia-ul-Haq into a monolithic mold of strict
orthodox Islamization or “Wahhabism,” distorting its hybrid, composite
cultural heritage. Notwithstanding geographical divisions, the Partition
could not nullify a rich and checkered past of shared Hindu and Muslim
achievements, nor could it obliterate memories of Hindus and Muslims
living together in peace and harmony. Sharing the same historical and
cultural ethos, people on either side of the border participated in the
same realities of everyday existence, using the same languages, enjoying
the same music, and loving the same recipes in the kitchen. By 1971,
many would begin asking the question: If being a Muslim was a way of
entering the nationalistic discourse of belonging and identity, then why
did East Pakistan break away from its parent country? Husain could only
try and answer the question himself. Believing that “it was as if 1947
revisited us three decades later,” he remarks that “in 1947 we had been
told that Muslims of the subcontinent were a single nation. But in 1971 it
was the same nation fighting amongst itself. The problem still re-
mains. . . . And that makes up our cultural identity.” 40
In wishing to delineate his multifaced self, Husain digs deeper be-
yond his Islamic past into the history of India before the advent of Islam.
He realizes that this specific historical ethos has given the history of Islam
in South Asia a distinctive character (quite different from that of Islam in
other parts of the world) and therefore he prefers to call it a “Hind-
Islamic history.” 41 He has to “find a way of acknowledging and appro-
priating the long history that lay prior” 42 to Muslim history in India. He
comes to the conclusion that “we should not only acknowledge the his-
torical and cultural past which we left behind in India, but that we should
also make it an important aspect of our present concerns.” 43 Structurally
and conceptually, his stories have been greatly influenced by his readings
 Partition and Beyond 269

of the Hindu epics Mahabharata and Ramayana, the Jataka tales, Panchatan-
tra, Katha Sarit Sagar, etc. Instead of writing stories independent of each
other, he tried to write stories from which emerged other stories “like
threads in a spider’s web.” 44 The Chinese box narrative structure that he
employs in many stories of his bolsters his worldview that everything in
this world is interrelated, suggested by layering of a narrative within
another narrative, sometimes continuing through multiple layers, sup-
porting the simultaneity of multiple viewpoints on the same event. Sto-
ries such as “Tortoise” (Kachhuwe), “Leaves” (Pattey), and “Complete
Knowledge” (Poora Gyan) may be read as independent tales, yet they are
linked to one another and to other stories. Husain aims at demonstrating
all of South Asian history and culture as an intricate Chinese box of
interrelated signs, symbols, and meanings. For example, in stories such as
“The One-eyed Dajjal,” “Hisaar,” and “The Staircase,” the reader moves
between a dream-like state and the quotidian, experiencing the “twilight
zone between fable and parable,” 45 as poet Keki Daruwalla observes in
his review of A Chronicle of the Peacocks.

LOCAL AND GLOBAL

The settings of Husain’s stories may be local but they become macrocos-
mic representations of many binaries: trauma/loss and creativity/hope,
exilic anxiety and the “resident tiller[’s]” imagination, disenchantment
and nostalgia, mythic archetypes and contemporary reality, historical
truth and the literature of witness and memory, moral delusions and the
failure of the power of reason. These binaries support the oppositions
they represent, but they also signal the complexities they hide and sup-
press. As with William Faulkner in relation to the American South, they
might provide an explanation for the apparent disconnect between the
creative and discursive selves of the writer. In the 1950s in his speeches
and interviews, Faulkner became quite defensive about the South and its
ways, even though he had created a powerful sense of Southern racial
injustice in fictional narratives such as “That Evening Sun,” Light in Au-
gust, and Intruder in the Dust. Similarly, while Husain often defended the
act of Partition in his prose, his stories and novels provide a richly nu-
anced reading of culture, politics, and humanity in all of South Asia. His
stories use the language of metaphor that traces the trajectory of celebra-
tory creativity he senses in the formation of Pakistan, and the subsequent
anxieties of dislocation and exile caused by the realities on the ground.
They translate the losses incurred in displacement and migration into a
discursive space in which the artist grapples with familiar global issues of
geographical, natural, and mental boundaries, the sense of living, as it
were, in an Eliotian wasteland, fear and distrust of other men and sys-
tems, violence and separatist politics. Stories such as “The Jungle of the
270 Tasneem Shahnaaz and Amritjit Singh

Gonds” (Gondon ka Jungle) and “The Chronicle of the Peacocks” (Mo-

renama) convey a range of responses to the sense of antagonism and
distrust between Hindus and Muslims, the desolation of cities, the evil
within man, and the US-Iraq war, against the backdrop of the archetypal
Mahabharata war. The trajectory of the archetypal to the local and the
global explains the connection between people sharing traditions and
cultures as well as the disjunction that occurs because of exile, loss, and
migration. For example, the story “The Platform” is propelled by the
metaphors of exile and rootlessness. The passengers who have no place
to stay in Lahore have to wait on the platform because their train has
been cancelled and there is no hope for the next train. Their situation is
aptly framed in the question posed by the old man: “All of us are trapped
on this platform. We are neither here nor there. Whose responsibility are
we?” 46
Like Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County, Husain’s world too has its
genesis in the real world. In his 1956 Paris Review interview with Jean
Stein, Faulkner suggested that “by sublimating the actual into the apocry-
phal I would have complete liberty to use whatever talent I might have to
its absolute top. It opened up a gold mine of other people; I created a
cosmos of my own.” 47 Post-Partition, Husain’s cosmos is one where hu-
man life is characterized by unease, violence, and desperation, where “[a]
Muslim is afraid of other Muslims” 48 and because “we are exiled from
our own courtyards,” all that the writer “can do is find something to sit
on . . . where he can find a foothold.” 49 His stories provide the foothold
by which he tries to reclaim the lost song of the peacocks so that he can
finally write his Morenama or the chronicle of the peacocks.
At the end of “Morenama,” the title story in the volume with that
name, Husain asks despairingly: “When will I be able to write my Moren-
ama, my chronicle of the peacocks?” 50 “Morenama” also gives voices to
his longing to see trees, humans, animals, and birds coexisting in an
environment of rare harmony. In the world around him, he desperately
tries to shake off Ashwatthama (“the most damned and accursed man” of
the Kurukshetra war), who is symbolized as Satan/Evil and whose use of
Brahmastra (a powerful, lethal weapon meant only to threaten and not
use), anticipates the political uses of modern-day nuclear weapons. The
frightened peacocks leave their natural haunts. In Husain’s oeuvre, the
war in the Mahabharata prefigures the 1947 Holocaust, the 1971 Partition,
and other global wars in recent decades. Husain is scathing in his con-
demnation of war, which annihilates everything good and beautiful:
“The last days of war are always the most fearful. They are dangerous
and unpredictable. . . . It doesn’t matter then if a city like Hiroshima
burns; at least the fighting comes to an end.” 51
His vision of a “battered and bruised” 52 lonely peacock is synony-
mous with the figure of a “forlorn duck covered with foul effluents,
watching the waves in disbelief.” 53 The latter is a “symbol of the horrors
 Partition and Beyond 271

of the war” 54 as the use of diabolical weapons has spared neither man nor
nature. The poor bird is in pain and cannot even fly as his wings are
“heavy with slime” 55 and poison courses through his veins. The birds
also evoke the poor and the weak, who “take upon themselves the bur-
den of suffering so as to redeem their times.” 56 Viewed from this perspec-
tive, the duck assumes a Christ-like figure and becomes “symbolic of
those prophets who, according to all religious texts, think of suffering as
a sacred duty.” 57 Like the duck, the narrator/writer has taken upon him-
self the onus and responsibility of suffering, to “bear the burden of our
times.” 58 At first he believes that crossing the border will get rid of Ash-
watthama. But the respite is temporary. The evil spirit follows him to his
new home and homeland. The old Arabic prayer ritual or hisaar to ward
off evil spirits fail to relieve him of his burden. The violence that sur-
rounds him has left him frustrated, helpless, and powerless. That is why
he feels that his epic about Pichhwa (“An Unwritten Epic”) and his Mo-
renama will remain unwritten.

READING/WRITING THE TEXT

Jasbir Jain points out that the act of writing raises questions both for the
reader and the writer. The reader wonders how to read such a text—“as a
mere recording, a witnessing, a sadomasochistic act, a warning or a re-
pulsion” 59 at the inhuman conduct of humans. For the writer, the ques-
tion is whether this writing is a means to self-knowledge, a way of recov-
ering from the loss experienced. Just as Bishan Singh in Saadat Hasan
Manto’s short story “Toba Tek Singh” defies the logic of Partition, Zakir
in Husain’s Basti too observes, “I can no longer imagine Rupnagar apart
from this city. Rupnagar [in India] and this city [in Pakistan] have
merged together inside me, and become one town.” 60 In a similar vein,
the story “Roots” (Jadein) by Ismat Chughtai, depicts a courageous moth-
er who is willing to stay behind in India and run the risk of becoming a
victim of communal violence because she doesn’t want to leave her
“roots”—her home and the memories of her life in that house after mar-
riage. Her conviction and courage as well as the neighbor Roopchand’s
kindness in bringing back her family redeem the violence of the time.
Partition writers since the 1940s have been perplexed by the challenge
of understanding the euphoria of independence on one hand and the
enormity of the barbaric acts on the other. The feelings of shock, denial,
anger, guilt, shame, and despair numbed many a writer’s psyche. How
should they speak/write about these events? Should they assign the
blame to someone, preferably belonging to the other community? Or
should they write regardless of religious or ethnic compulsions? How
should the story speak of one’s complicity and guilt? Is it possible to
write stories about what really occurred and at the same time project a
272 Tasneem Shahnaaz and Amritjit Singh

sense of hope for a better future? Understandably, writers such as Hu-

sain, Manto, Chughtai, and Bhisham Sahni have all developed their own
distinctive approaches to this painful topic. Noting the natural proclivity
of writers—such as Chughtai and Manto—to write about controversial
subjects, Husain observes, “Where Ismat moves away lightly after mak-
ing a passing reference to such a subject, Manto is like the naughty boy
who flings open the door, claps his hands and says, ‘Aha! I have seen
you!’” 61 Husain admires Manto for his starkly realistic stories about pros-
titutes, pimps, thieves, swindlers, liars, and gamblers—all those charac-
ters who inhabit the dark margins of society, and for Manto’s ability to
eschew the “sentimental approach” and “romantic flavor” 62 that his con-
temporaries brought to such difficult subjects. Husain finds it refreshing
that “Manto makes no such attempt. He is cruelly realistic in his ap-
proach, depicting objectively what he has observed. With no romantic
flavor or sentimentality, his are stark realistic portrayals. Realism finds
here its best expression.” 63 Clearly, as a critic and reader, Husain appre-
ciates literary strategies and modes of storytelling that are quite different
from his own. He does not practice Manto’s stark realism, nor do his
narratives dwell on the horrors of Partition violence—as do well-known
works such as Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan (1956) and Bhisham
Sahni’s Tamas (1973).
In fact, Husain’s stories and novels respond to the violence of 1947
and 1971 by critiquing the narrow identity politics of the present, its
insistence and bigotry and by nudging his readers to consider the beauty
and appeal of the hybrid and richly layered past shared by all South
Asians. His literary method is gentle and indirect, in line with the para-
digm evoked in Emily Dickinson’s well-known poem “Tell all the Truth
but tell it slant.” Husain does not address his anguish directly like Faiz
Ahmed Faiz. Maybe he resembles Qurratulain Hyder in writing stories
that are incomplete without any resolution offered, stories that are sug-
gestive and emblematic, not didactic or melodramatic. Violence is almost
always reported indirectly in Husain’s stories. The story “City of Sor-
rows” may be a partial exception where the three characters recount their
misdeeds from the two Partitions—the one in 1947 and the second one in
1971, when East Pakistan emerged as Bangladesh. Like Cain, they wan-
der around the city looking for a place to bury the corpses so that they
may find some relief and peace. Their bestial acts disfigure them; they are
no longer recognizable as human beings. Even their families do not rec-
ognize them. They are dead physically and morally. The stories of the
three men are so similar that each person lays claim to the same story.
The characters have no identity beyond their brutality, no place to belong
to outside the city of sorrows. Their punishment is comparable with Sisy-
phus’s—they have to carry forever the dead weight of their own bodies
and of those whom they have killed in the city of ruins and sorrows. Only
in “The City of Sorrows” does Husain directly visit the violence of parti-
 Partition and Beyond 273

tions and that too with no descriptive details of incidents. Rather, the
conversation among the three men reveals the degraded acts of inhuman-
ity they have indulged in and create an aura of paranoia and death. The
story is a strong indictment of all partitions, which invariably result in
unimaginable loss and grief. 64
The deleterious effects of the Partition on people are portrayed—more
indirectly but equally powerfully—in other short stories like “The Stairs”
(Seedhiyaan) and “An Unwritten Epic” (Ek Bin Likhi Razmiya). In “The
Stairs,” Syed arrives in Pakistan feeling robbed of a sense of identity and
a sense of the past. This is revealed in his inability to dream. In Husain,
dreams function as important bridges between the past and the present
and help in activating memory. Razi, Syed’s friend, recounts his own
dream and accidentally sets off Syed’s memories. By the time the story
ends, Syed is able to dream again and relive the past, signifying its regen-
erative aspect. The protagonist in “An Unwritten Epic,” Pichwa is a re-
spected fighter of Qadirpur and a subject worthy of an epic. After the
Partition, the writer migrates to Pakistan and loses contact with Qadirpur
and Pichwa. He begins his epic optimistically with this larger than life
character of Pichwa. As long as Pichwa is far off, the writer’s creativity
flows unhampered. Later on, when Pichwa moves to Pakistan and meets
the writer, reality intrudes and impedes the creative process. The struggle
for securing a livelihood reduces the stature of Pichwa, the heroic charac-
ter, to ordinariness. The writer too has lost interest in completing his epic.
He is more interested in getting a flourmill allotted to him. Pichwa re-
turns to India but fails to regain his lost stature. His beheading is re-
ported through a third person, even as Qadirpur has now become Jatuna-
gar. His story ends with a whimper and the epic remains unwritten.
Pichwa’s weakness and failure to get “some kind of work” 65 shows how
a person is undermined by circumstances beyond their control. “An Un-
written Epic” is as much about human suffering as about writing a story.
Pichwa’s falling stature is matched by the decline in the writer’s creativ-
ity when confronted by the tyrannical reality of taking care of ordinary
needs. The writer loses credibility but manages to immortalize the sim-
ple, courageous, vulnerable Pichwa.
Since Husain’s works do not project violence overtly, some readers
might feel that they do not deal with the hard issues surrounding the
Partition. But, as Tarun Saint notes, “they engage at a deeper level with
the differentiated historical trauma of the Partition, initiating a dialogic
negotiation with the past that was initially not possible, given the ideo-
logical demands of Pakistani nationalism.” 66 The challenge before Hu-
sain was to make his stories and storytelling a potential medium for
mediating the trauma of 1947, as well as for overcoming the sense of guilt
and responsibility for 1971. In Husain’s imagination, these two partitions
are inseparably linked. At the same time, he must feel the burden of
being a responsible citizen of the country, which was the destination of
274 Tasneem Shahnaaz and Amritjit Singh

his 1947 hijrat. The reimagined construct of a new Muslim nation as an-
other hijrat not only renewed contact with an archetypal experience, but
it also helped in negotiating the sense of loss and dislocation caused by
migration. The idea was to celebrate the birth of a new Muslim nation by
“turning that experience [of the Partition] into something creative.” 67 Hu-
sain admits that “as a writer of fiction, I was born with Pakistan. Partition
made me a fiction writer.” 68 But when he left for Pakistan, the “idea was
not to go away forever.” 69 He depicts a similar situation in Basti. Howev-
er, in a 1974 interview with Muhammad Umar Memon, he confessed:
“[T]he great expectation that we had of making something out of it [Parti-
tion] at a creative level and . . . in developing a new consciousness and
sensibility—that bright expectation has now faded and gone.” 70 Zakir,
the protagonist of Basti, internalizes the political and moral chaos, feeling
unbearably alienated and lonely like a migrant in a new country. He
accepts responsibility for defeat at the national and individual level: “I
thought that somebody ought to take up this trust.” 71 However, the silver
lining in this dark cloud is his capacity for introspection, which can “lead
to true self reckoning and even, hope.” 72 Husain offers this human dis-
course as an answer to the brutality of the two Partitions that have been
directly part of his own life experience.

CONCLUSION

In his essay “The Location of Brazil,” Salman Rushdie celebrates the mi-
grant sensibility by reminding us that the
effect of mass migrations has been the creation of radically new types
of human being: people who root themselves in ideas rather than
places, in memories as much as in material things; . . . The migrant
suspects reality: having experienced several ways of being, he under-
stands their illusory nature. To see things plainly, you have to cross a
frontier. 73
Obviously Husain has crossed such a “frontier” and his writings testify
to his ability to perceive things steadily and clearly, not merely as binary
oppositions but as discrete and disjointed, elusive and yet connected. His
writings exemplify Said’s notion that “exiles cross borders, break barriers
of thought and experience.” 74 As an exiled secular intellectual, Husain
uses local and historical materials to propose a new form of transnation-
alism. In the present world where communal strife, fundamentalism, pol-
itics of identity, and a divisive sense of “otherness” have reached destruc-
tive levels, it has become an exigent necessity to create an awareness and
understanding of interracial, interethnic, international relations. This
could be a strong reason why Husain uses the Chinese box narrative
strategy in his fiction to articulate not only the human fate, but also the
 Partition and Beyond 275

artist’s vision and his sense of the reader’s role and functions. According
to Frank Stewart and Sukrita Paul Kumar,
The best writers work in a more subtle realm, where the truth is re-
vealed in a nonpartisan narration of life experience, and where such
essential human values as social justice, compassion, and love are not
put aside. At the same time, these writers do not flinch from the reality
of combative feelings, criminality, vengefulness, and cruelty. Some
have rendered events with stark realism; others have created parabolic
stories; and still others have explored the psychic responses that give
rise to nostalgia, the wish to recall and value a lost connectedness that
transcends communal strife. 75
Having been subjected to the trauma of two Partitions, Husain has creat-
ed his “parabolic stories” to confront the realization of loss, disruption,
and dislocation, as well as the horror and repulsion of what a human
being could do to another human being. What Edward Said averred of
Eric Auerbach for writing Mimesis appears to be true for Husain, that he
“was not merely practising his profession despite adversity: he was per-
forming an act of cultural, even civilizational, survival of the highest
importance.” 76 Husain’s stories, novels, essays, and interviews collective-
ly explore trauma in sensitive and suggestive ways, even as they articu-
late the possibility of renewal and redemption, of reclaiming the values
of compassion, connection, and shared humanity that have been lost
through egregious violence and fragmentation.

NOTES

1. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,”

in The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1900–2000, ed. Dorothy J. Hale
(Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 362.
2. Intizar Husain, “Vikram, the Vampire and the Story,” translated by Frances W.
Pritchett, originally published in Journal of South Asian Literature 18.2 (1983): 149–52.
[Link]
txt_intizar_vikram.html.
3. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,”
in The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1900–2000, ed. Dorothy J. Hale,
(Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 363.
4. Ibid.
5. In his interview with Alok Bhalla in Intizar Husain, A Chronicle of the Peacocks:
Stories of Partition, Exile and Lost Memories, translated from Urdu by Alok Bhalla and
Vishwamitter Adil (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002), 226–27, Husain under-
scores that while he and his mentors believed that Muslims of Uttar Pradesh should
not migrate to Pakistan, they felt compelled, like millions of other Muslims in North
India, to migrate because of “deteriorating conditions” and fears of violence. Of
course, Husain also looked forward to being part of Lahore, which had a fine reputa-
tion as “a place of literary culture.” Bhalla reminds us a bit later in the same interview
of the unending trap of blame regarding the Partition that most South Asians are
caught in: “As post-colonialists we blame the British, as Pakistanis we blame the
Indians, as Hindus we assert that it is the Muslims who started it all, etc. But we never
look at ourselves and say that we—each of us—contributed to the nightmare that our
276 Tasneem Shahnaaz and Amritjit Singh

lives have become since 1947. Till we can do that [,] we shall never be able to bury the
dead—or find ways of living within a peaceful civilization” (234).
6. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,”
in The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1900–2000, ed. Dorothy J. Hale
(Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 363.
7. Bhisham Sahni left his family in Rawalpindi a few days before August 15, 1947,
hoping to return there after participating in the Independence Day celebrations in
Delhi, but that was not to be. See Alok Bhalla, Partition Dialogues: Memories of a Lost
Home (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), 127.
8. Edward Said, “Lecture 3: Intellectual Exiles,” Reith Lectures 1993: Representations
of an Intellectual, BBC Radio 4.7, July 1993.
9. Edward W. Said, “Reflections on Exile,” in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 148. Said describes contrapuntalism
as a way of connecting or considering together disparate social practices. In Culture
and Imperialism, he says: “That is, we must be able to think through and interpret
together experiences that are discrepant, each with its particular agenda and pace of
development, its own internal formations, its internal coherence and system of exter-
nal relationships, all of them co-existing and interacting with others.” See Edward W.
Said, Culture and Imperialism (NewYork: Vintage, 1994), 32.
10. Muhammad Umar Memon, “Requiem for Vanished Hopes: Intizar Husain’s
Early Fiction,” The Dawn, August 4, 2013, [Link]
umn-requiem-for-vanished-hopes-intizar-husains-early-fiction (Accessed August 20,
2014).
11. Edward W. Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2002), 147.
12. Intizar Husain, Basti, translated from Urdu by Frances Pritchett, introduction by
Muhammad Umar Memon (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007), 200.
13. Edward W. Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2002), 148–49.
14. Ibid., 147.
15. Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (London: Vintage, 1998), 205.
16. Edward W. Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2002), xxxv.
17. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov,”
in The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1900–2000, ed. Dorothy J. Hale
(Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 364.
18. M. Asaduddin, “Intizar Husain and His World: The Unreconciled Selves of the
Exalted Pakistani Writer,” The Caravan, June 1, 2013, [Link]
books/intizar-husain-and-his-world?page=0,1 (Accessed August 30, 2014).
19. Chinese nesting boxes are a series of boxes that fit one inside the other. Russian
matryoshka dolls, also known as babushka dolls, are a more modern interpretation of
the same idea. These boxes have been popular and used for almost hundreds of years
as toys for children and for storage purposes. Frame stories, like Chinese nesting
boxes, have been around for a long time, and this device is prominent in both Pancha-
tantra and The Arabian Nights. Examples in Western literature include two fourteenth-
century texts—Decameron and The Canterbury Tales—as well as more recent works such
as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Jostein Gaarder’s
The Solitaire Mystery.
20. Keith Carabine, “Introduction,” in Selected Short Stories: Joseph Conrad (Hertford-
shire: Wordsworth Editions Ltd., 1997),vii–xxiv.
21. In her translator’s note, appended to the New York Review of Books edition (1995,
2007), Pritchett notes how some Pakistanis believe Basti “offers a ‘negative impression
of their culture, a mood of ‘nostalgia.’” Here is part of Pritchett’s response: “Basti
[does] not represent a definitive, complete picture of modern Pakistan. . . . Self-critical
literature is one mark of an open and confident society. . . . Basti is not a perfect novel,
but it is a fine one, and thought-provoking, and unforgettably evocative at its best.” In
 Partition and Beyond 277

the introduction to the same edition, Asif Farrukhi urges us not to read Basti as “a
handmaid to ideology, whether political or aesthetic, but precisely as a novel, one that
mixes different narrative modes with extraordinary skill to describe a crisis that is as
spiritual and universal as it is national” (xiv). For parallel uses of memory in ethnic
American writing, see the introductions to Memory, Narrative and Identity (1994) and
Memory and Cultural Politics (1996)—both edited by Amritjit Singh, Joseph T. Skerrett,
and Robert E. Hogan (Boston: Northeastern UP).
22. Frank Stewart and Sukrita Paul Kumar, eds., Crossing Over in Manoa: A Pacific
Journal of International Writing, 19.1 (2007): x.
23. Intizar Husain, Basti, translated from Urdu by Frances Pritchett, introduction by
Muhammad Umar Memon (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007), 155.
24. Intizar Husain, A Chronicle of the Peacocks: Stories of Partition, Exile and Lost Memo-
ries, trans. from Urdu by Alok Bhalla and Vishwamitter Adil (New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2002), 210.
25. Ibid.
26. T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land in Selected Poems (London: Faber and Faber Limited,
1980), 67.
27. Gillian Wright, “Migratory Birds,” review of A Chronicle of the Peacocks: Stories of
Partition, Exile and Lost Memories by Intizar Husain, trans. from Urdu by Alok Bhalla
and Vishwamitter Adil (New Delhi: OUP, 2002), March 3, 2003, [Link]
[Link]/story/book-review-a-chronicle-of-the-peacocks-stories-of-partition
-exile-and-lost-memories/1/[Link] (Accessed August 20, 2014).
28. Intizar Husain, A Chronicle of the Peacocks: Stories of Partition, Exile and Lost Memo-
ries, trans. from Urdu by Alok Bhalla and Vishwamitter Adil (New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2002), 240.
29. Ibid., 242.
30. Aamer Hussein, review of Basti by Intizar Husain, translated by Frances Pritch-
ett, The Independent (UK), May 17, 2013, [Link]
ment/books/reviews/[Link] (Ac-
cessed August 30, 2014).
31. Jason Francisco, review of Leaves and Other Stories by Intizar Husain in the Annu-
al of Urdu Studies, 9 (1994): 190, [Link]
-review-essay (Accessed June 21, 2014).
32. Intizar Husain, A Chronicle of the Peacocks: Stories of Partition, Exile and Lost Memo-
ries, trans. from Urdu by Alok Bhalla and Vishwamitter Adil (New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2002), xvii.
33. Ibid., 140.
34. Jason Francisco, review of Leaves and Other Stories by Intizar Husain in the Annu-
al of Urdu Studies, 9 (1994): 190, [Link]
view-essay (Accessed June 21, 2014).
35. Intizar Husain, A Chronicle of the Peacocks: Stories of Partition, Exile and Lost Memo-
ries, trans. from Urdu by Alok Bhalla and Vishwamitter Adil (New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2002), 237.
36. Ibid., xi, 236.
37. Ibid., 236.
38. Ibid., 140.
39. Masood Raja, Constructing Pakistan: Foundational Texts and the Rise of Muslim
National Identity, 1857–1947 (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2010), xix.
40. Tehmina Qureshi, “The year was 1971, but it felt like 1947, says Intizar Hus-
sain,” The News (Karachi), Feb. 8, 2014, [Link]
231111-The-year-was-1971-but-it-felt-like-1947-says-Intizar-Hussain (Accessed Sep-
tember 19, 2014).
41. Intizar Husain, A Chronicle of the Peacocks: Stories of Partition, Exile and Lost Memo-
ries, trans. from Urdu by Alok Bhalla and Vishwamitter Adil (New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2002), 238.
42. Ibid., 239.
278 Tasneem Shahnaaz and Amritjit Singh

43. Ibid., 238.

44. Ibid., 240.
45. Keki Daruwala, “Narratives from an Oriental Loom,” review of A Chronicle of
the Peacocks: Stories of Partition, Exile and Lost Memories, translated from Urdu by Alok
Bhalla and Vishwamitter Adil, The Hindu, March 2, 2003, [Link]
thehindu/lr/2003/03/02/stories/[Link] (Accessed August 21, 2014).
46. Intizar Husain, A Chronicle of the Peacocks: Stories of Partition, Exile and Lost Memo-
ries, trans. from Urdu by Alok Bhalla and Vishwamitter Adil (New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2002), 140.
47. William Faulkner, “The Art of Fiction,” interviewed by Jean Stein, The Paris
Review, Spring 1956, 12, [Link]
tion-no-12-william-faulkner (Accessed March 5, 2015).
48. Intizar Husain, A Chronicle of the Peacocks: Stories of Partition, Exile and Lost Memo-
ries, trans. from Urdu by Alok Bhalla and Vishwamitter Adil (New Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2002), 190.
49. Ibid., 202.
50. Ibid., 208.
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid., 200.
53. Ibid., 201.
54. Ibid.
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid.
57. Ibid.
58. Ibid., 201.
59. Jasbir Jain, ed., Reading Partition/Living Partition (Jaipur: Rawat Publications,
2007), 318.
60. Intizar Husain, Basti, translated from Urdu by Frances Pritchett, introduction by
Muhammad Umar Memon (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007), 127.
61. Rakshanda Jalil, “The Crooked Line: 100 Years of Ismat Chughtai,”Kindle maga-
zine, August 5, 2015. [Link] (Accessed August 10,
2015).
62. “Literary Notes: Intizar Husain Discusses Realism in Manto,” Dawn, May 6,
2012, [Link] (Accessed
August 30, 2014).
63. Ibid.
64. For partitions left behind by British colonists around the world, see Christopher
Hitchens, “The Perils of Partition,” The Atlantic (March 2003), http://
[Link]/issues/2003/03/[Link] (Accessed June 21, 2014).
65. Muhammad Umar Memon, editor and translator, An Epic Unwritten: The Pen-
guin Book of Partition Stories from Urdu (New Delhi: Penguin Books India (P) Ltd., 1998),
167. Abbreviated as AEU.
66. Tarun K. Saint, Witnessing Partition: Memory, History, Fiction (New Delhi: Rout-
ledge, 2010), 92.
67. Muhammad Umar Memon, “Requiem for Vanished Hopes: Intizar Husain’s
Early Fiction,” The Dawn, August 4, 2013. [Link] (Ac-
cessed August 30, 2014).
68. Meena Menon, “Writing in Exile,” The Hindu July 5, 2014, http://
[Link]/books/literary-review/writing-in-exile/[Link] (Ac-
cessed August 30, 2014).
69. Ibid.
70. Muhammad Umar Memon, “Requiem for Vanished Hopes: Intizar Husain’s
Early Fiction,” The Dawn, August 4, 2013. [Link]
centenary-literary-notes (Accessed August 30, 2014.).
71. Intizar Husain, Basti, translated from Urdu by Frances Pritchett, introduction by
Muhammad Umar Memon (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007), 155.
 Partition and Beyond 279

72. Ibid., xiv.

73. Salman Rushdie, “The Location of Brazil,” in The Imaginary Homelands: Essays
and Criticism 1981–1991 (London: Granta, 1991), 124–25.
74. Edward W. Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2002), 147.
75. Frank Stewart and Sukrita Paul Kumar, editors, Crossing Over in Manoa: A Pacific
Journal of International Writing, 19.1 (2007): viii.
76. Said, “Introduction: Secular Criticism,” in The World, the Text and the Critic (Lon-
don: Faber and Faber, London, 1984), 6.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Asaduddin, M. “Intizar Husain and His World: The Unreconciled Selves of the
Exalted.” The Caravan. June 1, 2013. [Link]
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Benjamin, Walter. “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov.” Ed.
Dorothy J. Hale, The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1900–2000. Malden,
MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006.
Bhalla, Alok. Partition Dialogues: Memories of a Lost Home. New Delhi: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 2006.
Carabine, Keith. “Introduction.” In Selected Short Stories: Joseph Conrad. Hertfordshire:
Wordsworth Editions Ltd., 1997. vii–xxiv
Daruwalla, Keki, N. “Narratives from an Oriental Loom.” Review of A Chronicle of the
Peacocks: Stories of Partition, Exile and Lost Memories. Trans. from Urdu by Alok
Bhalla and Vishwamitter Adil. The Hindu, March 2, 2003. http://
[Link]/lr/2003/03/02/stories/[Link] (Accessed August
21, 2014).
Faulkner, William. The Art of Fiction. Interview by Jean Stein. The Paris Review, Spring
1956, 12. [Link]
-william-faulkner (Accessed March 5, 2015).
Francisco, Jason. Rev. of Leaves and Other Stories. Annual of Urdu Studies, 9 (1994):
188–91. [Link] Accessed
June 21, 2014.
Hitchens, Christopher. “The Perils of Partition.” The Atlantic, March 2003. http://
[Link]/magazine/archive/2003/03/the-perils-of-partition/302686/
(Accessed June 21, 2014).
Husain, Intizar. A Chronicle of the Peacocks: Stories of Partition, Exile and Lost Memories.
Trans. from Urdu by Alok Bhalla and Vishwamitter Adil. New Delhi: OUP, 2002.
———. Basti. Trans. from Urdu by Frances Pritchett. Introduction by Muhammad
Umar Memon. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007.
———. Basti. Trans. from Urdu by Frances Pritchett. Introduction by Asif Farrukhi.
New York: New York Review of Books, 2013.
———. “Vikram, the Vampire and the Story.” Translated by Frances W. Pritchett.
Originally published in Journal of South Asian Literature 18.2 (1983): 149–52. http://
[Link]/itc/mealac/pritchett/00fwp/published/txt_intizar_vikram.html.
Accessed October 24, 2014.
———. Stories. Trans. from Urdu by Moazzam Sheikh. New Delhi: Katha, 2004.
Hussein, Aamer. Review of Basti by Intizar Husain. Trans. Frances Pritchett. The Inde-
pendent (UK), May 17, 2013. [Link]
books/reviews/[Link] (Ac-
cessed August 30, 2014).
Jain, Jasbir. Ed. Reading Partition/Living Partition. Jaipur: Rawat Publications, 2007.
Jalil, Rakshanda. “The Crooked Line: 100 Years of Ismat Chughtai.” Kindle magazine,
August 5, 2015. [Link] (Accessed Aug 10, 2015).
280 Tasneem Shahnaaz and Amritjit Singh

“Literary Notes: Intizar Husain discusses Realism in Manto.” Dawn (Karachi), May 6,
2012. [Link] (Ac-
cessed August 30, 2014).
Memon, Muhammad Umar. Editor and Translator. An Epic Unwritten: The Penguin
Book of Partition Stories from Urdu. New Delhi: Penguin Books India (P) Ltd., 1998
(Abbreviated as AEU).
———. “Requiem for Vanished Hopes: Intizar Husain’s Early Fiction.” The Dawn
(Karachi), August 4, 2013. [Link]
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Menon, Meena. “Writing in Exile.” The Hindu July 5, 2014. [Link]
books/literary-review/writing-in-exile/[Link]. Accessed August 30,
2014.
Qureishi, Tehmina. “The year was 1971, but it felt like 1947, says Intizar Hussain.” The
News (Karachi), February 8, 2014. [Link]
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tember 19, 2014.
Raja, Masood A. Constructing Pakistan: Foundational Texts and the Rise of Muslim Nation-
al Identity, 1857–1947. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2010.
Rushdie, Salman. “The Location of Brazil.” In The Imaginary Homelands: Essays and
Criticism 1981–1991. London: Granta, 1991.
———. The Satanic Verses. New York: Vintage, 1998.
Said, Edward W. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage, 1994.
———. “Lecture 1: Representations of the Intellectual.” Reith Lectures 1993: Representa-
tions of an Intellectual. BBC Radio 4. July 7, 1993.
———. “Lecture 3: “Intellectual Exiles.” Reith Lectures 1993: Representations of an Intel-
lectual. BBC Radio 4. July 7, 1993.
———. “Introduction: Secular Criticism.” In The World, the Text and the Critic. London:
Faber and Faber, London, 1984, pp. 1–30.
———. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2002.
Saint, Tarun K. Witnessing Partition: Memory, History, Fiction. New Delhi: Routledge,
2010.
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of International Writing, 19.1 (2007).
Wright, Gillian. “Migratory Birds.” Review of A Chronicle of the Peacocks: Stories of
Partition, Exile and Lost Memories. March 3, 2003. [Link]
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ries/1/[Link]. Accessed August 20, 2014.
 Part V

Partitions Within
 SEVENTEEN
Buckle in the Hindu Belt
Contemporary Hindu-Muslim Violence and the
Legacy of Partition in Banaras

Jeremy A. Rinker

Modern Banaras is the seat of Hindu orthodoxy, a stronghold of tradi-

tional conservative Brahminical values, and an exemplar of humanistic
ideals of multiculturalism and religious pluralism. 1 Banaras has compo-
nent stories and one long story. That there are competing narratives that
justify each of these stories of Banaras—what will here be referred to as
metanarratives—should be no surprise given the city’s long history. Also
referred to as Kashi and Varanasi, Banaras is believed by Hindus to be
founded by Lord Shiva and, yet, is also the home to famous religious
syncretists like Kabir and Tulsidas. Despite the paradoxical conflagration
of such ancient and modern sentiments and religious sensibilities, com-
peting metanarratives of Banaras not only coexist, but interact in ways
that work to mask important interconnections between painful historical
memories and modern communal identities. That Banaras is a historical-
ly complicated place is not in question—as Pankaj Mishra says in describ-
ing the 1980s Banaras of his novel The Romantics, “the past does live on, in
people as well as, cities.” 2 But, how this past is remembered and spoken
about also impacts how the present is lived.
The many competing conceptions of Banaras expose real and hidden
unmet psychological needs and yet also conspire to make those needs
remain little noticed, obscure, and underaddressed. This essay argues
that understanding the historical legacy of the 1947 Partition of India-
Pakistan is critical to overcoming modern identity-based conflict in Bana-

283
284 Jeremy A. Rinker

ras. Such attention to past psychological trauma exposes the venal roots
of the modern Indian State’s approach to the marginal “other,” and, in
turn, leads to an understanding of the tangible social legacies of the fail-
ure to “learn” the harsh lessons of Partition violence. The proceeding
essay does not argue that Partition, or even colonialism, is the sole cause
of the present hegemonic control of elite state officials over marginalized
Indian bodies. Rather, I claim that failure to explore and acknowledge the
links that Partition violence, in all its many forms, has on current hier-
archies of power makes peace and reconciliation nearly impossible to
achieve.
For discourses of positive peace 3 to take root in the complexity of
modern Banaras, sinews of interdependence between ongoing communal
violence and historical “chosen trauma” 4 must be excavated and dis-
cussed. The connections between modern torture practices and Partition
represent varied expressions of the penultimate culmination of authori-
tarian colonial policy. Exploring the metanarratives of Partition in
present-day Banaras in tandem with a contemporary analysis of the so-
cial dynamics of the oppressed in the city unmasks the destructive legacy
of Partition and its displacement of trauma, communal identity, and heg-
emonic violence. In taking a “walk through history” 5 with local respon-
dents one can identify the unmet needs of past social and historical trau-
ma. This unmasking of trauma’s legacy reveals social spaces for greater
understanding of the ‘other’ and opens the possibility for future-going
reconciliation.
Since, at least, Mark Twain’s now famous description of Banaras as
“older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend,” 6 West-
ern images have marked Banaras as the center of orientalist wonder and
exotic mysticism. This essay paints a more complicated view of Banaras
as, paradoxically, seat of both communal identity formation and multi-
cultural peacebuilding, of violent communalism and peaceful religious
association. 7 That these two competing metanarratives coexist in one
place requires the careful attention to not only historical trauma, but also
the important connections between justice, identity, and memory. Keep-
ing in mind that “classification (identification) is unlikely to be disinter-
ested,” 8 one can begin to see the centrality of needs/interests as a root of
these seemingly paradoxical metanarratives and control/power as operat-
ing as the context for realizing these needs. Taking a needs-based ap-
proach to conflict and remembrance 9 opens the possibility of approach-
ing South Asia’s Long Partition as not only a discourse of historical suf-
fering, but also a means to empathetic listening and potential narrative
shift. 10
Through a focus on psychological needs, constructive futures can be
made of destructive pasts. By questioning and observing the social rela-
tions of present-day Banarsis (residents of Banaras), past social-psycho-
logical traumas can find more present-day pro-social homes. The histori-
 Buckle in the Hindu Belt 285

cal paradoxes and ambiguities that Banarsis continually, and often un-
wittingly, embrace are an important means of developing present-day
communal peace and reconciliation. Banaras, where “Brahmin priests
with little top-knots on their shaven heads form a mafia of sorts,” 11 may
hold important keys to unbuckling a sense of “memory justice” 12 about
Partition—one that is consonant with reaching nonviolent coexistence
and communal reconciliation across India.

PARTITION, BANARAS, AND UNMET NEEDS

Far from immune from communal violence, Banaras has historically been
less prone to communalism and violence than other similarly sized North
Indian cities. 13 In one sense then, Banaras might be considered a “zone of
peace” 14 relative to India and its specific brand of communalism. But,
such realities mask deep local divisions and important historical scars.
Even in relatively peaceful Banaras the ongoing reality and legacy of
communal violence not only exists, but also festers like an open wound.
With Muslims totaling roughly a quarter of the population, 15 Banaras has
seen many examples of communal rioting and violent outbreaks includ-
ing in 1809, 1952, 1972, 1977, and 1991, to name a few. Still, when commu-
nal violence does occur in the city, as it did more recently in 2006 and
2010, there is immediate realist recourse to political causes, as if such a
focus would provide the most direct avenue to maintaining harmony.
Yet, a concerted focus on root causes not only privileges elite political
forces, but also elides the need to look at outcomes and effects and, in the
process, the lasting social and psychological legacies of past violence as a
cause. The fact is that “those who look for causes of communal riots fail
to realize ‘that a fully satisfactory explanation will always remain elusive,
and further that the pursuit of causes is itself implicated in the political
process.” 16 While there has been only scant scholarly attention paid to
how communal violence has led to interreligious collaboration, 17 even
less work has explored the psychological scars and identity legacies of
communal violence in Banaras. To understand communal violence in
Banaras one has to look beyond causes and sources and integrate a focus
on dynamics and outcomes of traumatic historical legacies and memories
of unmet needs. Power is both source and outcomes of all communal
violence. We, therefore, must study the dynamic changes violence creates
as both source of future conflict and outcome of powerful motives.
Though some have realized the overattention to causes and instead
focused attention on outcomes, 18 few have attempted to explore the per-
sistent life cycle of trauma. In one historical example, instead of focusing
on causes, Pandey (1990) looks at the 1809 riots in Banaras aiming to
focus on these events as being purposefully retold by the colonial regime
as “native” in character. 19 Less concerned about causes of 1947 Partition
286 Jeremy A. Rinker

violence and more concerned with the effects of history’s retelling, I

choose to focus here on the legacy of Partition narratives in everyday life
of Banarsis. How is what happened in the past remaking the present and
conditioning the future social psychology of interaction between various
identity groups? Invoking Erik Erikson and following Gilmartin, “rather
than aim for a ‘master narrative’ of partition . . . we need to understand
the ways that tension between multiple constructions of identity and the
search for moral community itself defined the partition event.” 20 By de-
veloping an understanding of marginal communities’ quest for recogni-
tion in Banaras, one clearly sees that trauma requires an outlet and the
stories that victims of political violence tell, indeed, provide the seeds of
reconciliation and change. “Storytelling is the central part of the [recon-
ciliation] process, not only for the victim reconstructing the story, but also
for the persons representing the aggressor group.” 21 Stories aim at the
meaning of events, not just causes. Stories work to continually rethink
trauma, thereby, opening possibilities for creatively encountering unmet
needs.
As if identifying the current needs and power dynamics in Banaras
was not difficult enough from an outsiders’ perspective, critical analysis
of Partition’s role in Banarsi society also requires us to expand our notion
of dichotomous identities such as Hindu-Muslim. 22 Far from simple, the
interplay of Hindu-Muslim, high-caste and low-caste, rich and poor, cen-
ter and periphery, acts to simultaneously clarify and complicate our
understanding of Partition’s legacy and the important role these dichoto-
mies play in rewriting the schematic scripts of collective memory and
remembrance. While the complexity of religious identities make blanket
statements about psychological needs as suspect as blame statements
from one community towards another, the obvious lack of memorial
space and judicial recourse for past victims of Partition violence does
signal rampant unmet psychological needs. The absence of space 23 fol-
lowing traumatic violence for collective grieving, “performative memo-
ry,” 24 or mourning for loss of not just life, but also, of opportunities,
allows blame and dehumanization to take root, makes identity salient,
and perpetuates conflict. While important to be attentive to the symbolic
interactionism of binary identities, such dichotomies obfuscate the role
that stories can play in processes of both dehumanization and peace. In
complicating these dichotomies we can work to rewrite the possibilities
for peaceful change—this is the power of taking a “walk through histo-
ry.” 25
 Buckle in the Hindu Belt 287

STUDYING ONGOING PARTITION:

NARRATIVE METHOD AND FORM

Acknowledging the difficulties of linking past and present an interdisci-

plinary mixed-method approach of narrative reconstruction forms the
methodological core of this study. Respondents and interlocutors are
here seen to be narrators of past collective trauma, as well as of present
identity-defined injustices. In asking how these two are linked through
story, this narrative methodology “gives prominence to human agency
and imagination, it is well suited to studies of subjectivity and iden-
tity.” 26 My narrative-based action research agenda attempts to compli-
cate and challenge the “canonical storylines” 27 of historical Partition and
its modern legacy. While this need to confront and deconstruct the ongo-
ing historical narratives of Partition was clear to me as I began the study,
it should not have been surprising that my research assistant’s immediate
response to studying the historical legacy of Partition was to suggest a
trip to Delhi instead of a random sampling of her Banarsi neighbors.
Clearly unstructured open-ended random sample interviews were my
best means of capturing past trauma’s persistent legacy, yet a clear strug-
gle remains in articulating the fact that direct experience of Partition’s
many historical traumas is not necessary, or even desired, to prove the
impact of Partition’s present-day social-psychological bequest. The best
way to both collect modern narratives and push against the received
knowledge of the past is not to go to the “epicenter of violence,” 28 but
rather to look at the modern legacy of violence from a more peripheral
position. Though places like Delhi and Amritsar experienced a higher
level of direct violence during the time of Partition, the cultural and
structural legacies of Partition violence 29 can be just as felt in more pe-
ripheral places such as Banaras. Peripheral narrative spaces hold the keys
to unlocking the invisible hand of cultural and structural violence. Seeing
interlocutors as narrators moves one past an individualistic orientation
inherent in study of direct violence towards a more collective orientation
that explores structural and cultural amoralities.
Unlike Banaras, Delhi experienced the full brunt of Partition migra-
tion and the legacy of the shift of nearly twelve to fifteen million people
in the course of a few weeks’ time. Delhi, also unlike Banaras, experi-
enced more than protracted episodes of sporadic violence and looting—
Delhi’s shift was drastic. 30 Yet, while Banaras, and other Northern Indian
cities, are not perceived to be as important to the dominant epistemology
of storytelling about Partition, I argue that in such peripheral spaces the
socio-political impacts are just more masked. Assuming that what is
masked is likely more revealing of complex social relationships, I re-
mained adamant in seeing Banaras as more than a simple bystander of
the period of Partition; more than mere margin. Though not an essential
participant in Partition’s violent upheaval, Banarsis’ central role in the
288 Jeremy A. Rinker

religious nationalism, communalism, and resistance that both preceded

and followed Partition is clear, even though little defined. As Diana Eck
has argued during the course of her work with the Pluralism Project at
Harvard University: “Imperative as it is to see clearly the raw facts of
neighbor turning on neighbor in violence, is it not equally imperative to
understand the deep resistance and active response to this violence.” 31
Banaras’ relationship to Partition, and Partition’s persistent legacy, is,
though paradoxical, extremely important. Exhibiting a peripheral rela-
tionship to direct violence and both resistance and surrender to religious
nationalism, Banaras is simultaneously Brahma and Shiva—both the
creator and destroyer of communal ideology.
Hidden deep within the Banarsis’ paradoxical relationship with Parti-
tion are important questions about power and marginality. As Raman’s
(2007) writing on Banaras’ fabled sari industry makes clear, it is the mar-
ginalized that retain the narratives of past suffering, yet their histories
remain the most obscured. For example, she writes: “The Muslims of
Banaras, constituting one-quarter of the city’s population and forming
the core of the Banarsi sari industry find no place in standard accounts of
the city.” 32 Realizing that the erasure of marginal voice has been noticed
in recent Partition histories, 33 it is important to look towards local civil
society organizations working in marginalized communities to under-
stand the modern impacts of Partition. In Banaras, I found easy access to
these challenges to Partition’s canonical storylines in the work of a local
civil society organization called the People’s Vigilance Committee on Hu-
man Rights (PVCHR). Blending observation of their pragmatic testimoni-
al therapy work with unstructured interviews, my fieldwork in Banaras
developed. This fieldwork, which I will return to below, finds comple-
mentarity in much of the growing literature of Partition studies by un-
masking the uneven connections between stories of Partition and stories
of power.

PARTITION NARRATIVE: RESISTANCE AS GRAMMATICAL FORM

In comparatively examining the Partition motif modern academics are

only beginning to understand the interplay of identity, nation, and subju-
gation.
The diverse understandings of the [Palestinian] war in 1948 or the
[South Asian] partition in 1947, in turn, efface or erase traces of the
perspective of lower status groups within each society. The dialog be-
tween memory and community touches on questions of whose memo-
ries have been suppressed in shaping the mainstream “national” narra-
tive. 34
Unless you are from a non-dominant community, which, for example,
my Banaras Hindu University (BHU) student/research assistant simply
 Buckle in the Hindu Belt 289

was not, then your ties to (and therefore memory of) Partition in a place
like Banaras are minimal at best. Thus, to develop answers to how Parti-
tion effects the culture and sociology of present-day Banaras we need to
resource not just the historical discourses of the event, but the language
techniques, what Wittgenstein would call the “grammatical” 35 devices,
that residents use to describe the event and place it in present-day con-
text. While the meaning of any concept is determined by historical condi-
tions and context of its use, 36 meaning is also established in relation to
actors’ own particular needs and projective future desires. Pitkin adeptly
notices this theme when she writes: “Meaning is compounded out of
cases of a word’s use, and what characterizes those cases is often the
speech situation, not the presence of something being referred to.” 37 So
when Banarsis use the word “Partition,” the grammar of the individual
speaker and their context could mean vastly different things—a forced
political separation, a religiously ordained social order, an exemplar of
difference, or even a traumatic historical event that marks present-day
identity boundaries. Close attention to this grammar of meaning is criti-
cal to unmasking the tense mystique and local syntax of Partition.
Such attention to the grammar, or logic, of not only the powerful, but
also the marginalized, opens opportunities to challenge the canonical
storylines of dominant Partition histories. Undoubtedly, Partition did
have a political and social effect on Banaras, but to see it one must cap-
ture the narrative myths and metaphors of common people. For example,
Raman outlines the use of military metaphors such as the Line of Control
(LoC) to describe the social boundaries that cannot be crossed by Mus-
lims in Banaras. 38 Just as the “hidden transcripts” 39 of the weak and
marginalized present subtle resistance, the language of the strong also
constructs subtle borders. Thus, Raman unmasks local discussion of both
“mini Pakistans” and the “ghettoization” of the Muslims of Banaras. 40
Though little discussed in the back rooms of elite institutions like BHU,
the realization of a Partition effect, or legacy, still finds outlet in both
likely and unlikely places—marginalized basti and central university
backrooms. It is in reading the grammar of not only dominant voices that
we must turn to understand the meaning of Partition in a place like
Banaras; it is here we read the history of identity, nation, and subjuga-
tion.
Driving in his car, three-year-old son in his lap, a real estate agent cum
doctoral student at BHU contemplatively responded to my queries about
Partition’s legacy in Banaras: “It changed everything, of course! There is
not a single aspect of present-day life in Banaras that does not in some
way bear the marks of Partition history.” 41 But, when pressed how spe-
cifically social life had changed, the conversation became stalled and my
respondent became equivocal, as was true for many of my elite Hindu
interlocutors, when the specifics of Partition’s modern legacy were
breached. Here, I believe, lies the space where a shared experience can
290 Jeremy A. Rinker

play a keen role in the possibility of reconciliation, yet taboo construc-

tions of the “other,” as well as dominant storylines about Partition’s
memory, get in the way of such shared possibility. The need for authentic
dialogue between the powerful and the marginalized is glaring in a place
like Banaras and failure to read the “grammar” of Partition’s use stymies
dialogue and stops the potential of reconciliation. While the creation of
such dialogue space inevitably requires strong Hindu-Muslim associa-
tional bonds within civil society, 42 it also requires legitimate third-party
actors committed to dialogue and not unaware of the power of canonical
storylines. To understand present-day meanings of Partition there is a
need to develop the grammar of both tellers and listeners.
Though the Indian state’s failure to be an important third-party actor
in creating such dialogue has profound effect on Partition’s legacy, others
can, and must, step into this intervention role. Beyond the state, commu-
nities themselves have the capability to create opportunities for storytell-
ing and communal reconstruction of their local Partition narrative. Such
are the complexities that Badri Narayan brings out in his discussion of
the politics of communalism among Musahars, a large low-caste group in
abundance outside of Banaras. 43 Mythical and metaphorical narratives
are shared within communities and passed down in a process of “trans-
generational transmission.” 44 To break the transmission of the chosen
traumas the space and structure for a dialogue about unmet psychologi-
cal needs and historical wrongs is required—what Joseph Montville calls
“a walk through history.” 45 While such public outlet of Partition narra-
tives is critical for reconciliation, it is also necessary for addressing the
more recent history of political violence and state-sponsored torture that
perpetuates the forced separation of fixed communal identities. The ne-
cessity for public dialogue also underscores the need to interrogate our
assumptions about the motives of the powerful and the needs driving
protracted identity conflicts, thus, opening ourselves to the question: are
powerful interests in a place like Banaras really interested in stopping
communal violence?
Though it is clear that “the age of communalism was concurrent with
the age of nationalism; they were part of the same discourse,” 46 it is also
true that to understand these complex and interdependent discourses (or
grammars) one must attempt to understand the social, political, and cul-
tural overlay of competing elite and marginal interests. This multifaceted
endeavor requires us to lay aside our bifurcated view of Indian sociality
as simply Hindu versus Muslim and resist the tendency to “rarefy relig-
ions, removing them from the social milieu in which they develop.” 47
Still, one cannot deny the unsophisticated pull to latch on to social cate-
gories as a means to simplify understanding of the chaos of an ancient
city like Banaras. Even Mishra’s fictional curiosity with both Western
seekers and the concomitant way in which traditional Brahmin “regulat-
ed life was unraveled with bewildering speed” 48 draws one to read post-
 Buckle in the Hindu Belt 291

colonial Banaras as understandable only through the juxtaposition of di-

chotomies and paradox. Yet, it is through reference to the myths and
metaphors that actors narrate to us about these paradoxical relationships,
both past and present, that we can get past the “factuality” of these often
competing stories to the “interests that undergird the intent to narrate
them.” 49 In listening for these needs and interests we find the ongoing
violence meted out by the powerful (and their institutional arrange-
ments) acts to reinscribe Partition upon the bodies of the marginalized.
Simultaneously, the marginalized act in creative ways to rewrite the
means of elite inscription.

MODERN REALITIES: CUSTODIAL TORTURE AS

EXTENDED PARTITION NARRATIVE

When I asked a friend from Odisha (Orissa), a twenty-year implant to

Banaras, how he would describe his adopted home, he replied simply by
saying: “Feudal!” 50 While the myths and metaphors of the marginalized
may be crucial for reinscribing the dominant Partition narratives of Bana-
ras, the underlying interests of the majority Hindu elite cannot be over-
looked in the process. Such elite interests work to keep Partition violence
ever present in the imagination of the average marginalized Banarsi citi-
zen. In such a space, historical metaphors meet with present reality, and
communal identities are constructed like a wall, layer by layer, or better
yet, like a metaphorical line of control. Possibly the best way to excavate
the elite construction of this line of control is to look at the ubiquitous
phenomenon of custodial torture. This extreme example of human rights
abuse, though widespread across India, is particularly endemic to East-
ern Uttar Pradesh. No other act unmasks so starkly the feudal and com-
munal realities of modern India, and particularities of a complex social
milieu like Banaras. Custodial torture connects Partition pasts with the
present-day realities of marginalized exclusion. While custodial torture,
like Banaras, could easily be described as feudal, the practices’ ubiquitous
presence in modern-day Banaras underscores critical ideological links
between power, memory, identity, and justice. These are the links al-
luded to in my friend from Orissa’s inspired grammar about Banaras.
Similarly, present-day torture provides the violent canvas upon which
political elites of the dominant majority can both express their interests
and ensure their hegemonic impact on the bodies of the tortured.
It is through custodial torture that the state punishes those undesir-
able “others” and reinforces the power, identity, and sense of justice for
the Hindu elite. Einof, in arguing for a definition of torture that can be
used in cross-cultural historical analysis, argues that motive and morality
must be left out of the comparative study of torture. 51 Despite the bene-
fits of Einof’s social scientific approach for comparative analysis, such a
292 Jeremy A. Rinker

rigid definition does little to assist in explaining either torture’s historical

roots in social control or the practice’s forward-going traumatic political
effects. Torture as reinscribing a psychological fear of the “other” com-
presses the space for acceptance and reconciliation within both tortured
and torturer. Impossible to describe as amoral, apolitical, or ahistorical,
the practice of custodial torture speaks volumes to the powerless. In
speaking an elite line of control, torture reifies modern-day partitions—
partitions that are understood upon the backdrop of communal story-
lines about 1947’s Long Partition.
Still, in following Einof’s definition of custodial torture as “an act in
which severe physical pain is intentionally inflicted on a person by a
public official while that person is under the custody or control of that
official where there has not been, or not yet been, a formal finding of
guilt,” 52 one must be careful not to limit the study of torture only to
behaviors. Behaviors themselves have meaning and residual effect, and
critical research attempts to uncover the full political and social-psycho-
logical effects of torture behavior. It must be remembered that it is the
aftereffects of torture that work to control the marginalized and maintain
the majority elite’s hegemonic control. Torture reaffirms control by con-
necting new individual trauma with past collective trauma. As much as
“the psychological force of [Hindu-Muslim] rivalry has had great materi-
al impact, for state policy has been guided by fears legitimized by the
process of Partition,” 53 it is the aftermath of torture that acts to control the
marginalized. It is the fear and trauma that torture instills, which feeds
caste and communal identities and solidifies the perceived need for these
constructed dichotomies. Until this fear and trauma has a social space of
outlet, the colonial mentalities of divide and rule and collective punish-
ment will continue to reinforce communal divides and reconciliation will
remain a distant dream.
The current use of torture in the Indian context can clearly be seen as a
vestige of the colonial legacy of control because torture’s lasting social
and psychological effects reinscribe and maintain exclusion. This fact is,
indeed, supported by Einof’s claim that certain “general patterns” 54 arise
in the cross-cultural practice of torture. The first of Einof’s four general
patterns is instructive here. He says: “Torture is most commonly used
against people who are not full members of a society, such as slaves,
foreigners, prisoners of war, and members of racial, ethnic, and religious
outsider groups.” 55 Such a pattern easily applies to both low-castes and
Muslims in the local context of Banaras. Never being accepted as true
Banarsis, these groups remain marginalized and excluded from Banaras
culture and are, in the eyes of the Banaras elite, in need of control and
minimization. Add to this an ill-trained and decentralized Indian police
force and you have an incubator for torture and dehumanization aimed
at delegitimizing deviant “others” who pose a challenge to elite control
and interests. The historical connection between torture and colonial rule
 Buckle in the Hindu Belt 293

is not lost on the marginalized—indeed in post-Partition India the very

language of elite “othering” revolves around citizenship. Hindutva, liter-
ally Hindu-ness, has become a national political barometer across India,
and particularly omnipresent in Banaras. The fact is: “there is no neutral
way of stating the historical circumstances from which Hindutva ideolo-
gy emerged.” 56 Custodial torture, like Hindutva, sees no separation be-
tween history and citizenship.
Added to the obvious colonial foundations of custodial torture is an
equally obvious lacuna of training for a decentralized, locally empow-
ered, and inadequately funded police force. 57 Still, colonialism and lack
of training does not fully explain the depth or scope of the problem of
custodial torture.
From 2001 to 2010, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC)
recorded 14,231 custodial deaths. . . . These deaths reflect only a frac-
tion of the problem with torture and custodial deaths in India. Not all
the cases of deaths in police and prison custody are reported to the
NHRC. 58
While statistics also only partially expose the long psychological legacies
of trauma, they do reveal something more measurable. Between this
same period (2001–2011) only Maharashtra (250) topped Uttar Pradesh
with 174 custodial deaths in police custody. Further, Uttar Pradesh was
on the top of the list with 2,171 deaths in judicial custody. 59 Thus, people
awaiting charges were more likely to die not knowing the charges against
them in Uttar Pradesh than anywhere else in India. Clearly the descrip-
tion of Banaras as “feudal” is not so surprising when one sees Uttar
Pradesh, India’s most populous state, outstripping all other states in such
human rights indicators. Further, one could make the strong argument
that the North East region ranks the worst for police torture in all of
India. 60
Though such statistics only scratch the surface of the problem of po-
lice torture in India they give clear evidence for the caste-based hierarchy
undergirding present-day Banaras—the center of the least developed re-
gion of India. Custodial torture statistics provide a macro image of a
“culture of impunity” 61 in the city. To map the modern and highly com-
munal context of Banaras further, I outline below some of the work of the
People’s Vigilance Committee on Human Rights (PVCHR). Aimed at em-
powering local human rights workers in and around Banaras, the
PVCHR uses the power of storytelling to challenge the structure and
discourse of Banarsis’ “feudal” society. PVCHR’s work aims to recon-
struct the grammar of the marginalized so as to awaken an awareness of
privilege in the powerful. PVCHR’s testimonial therapy work not only
develops marginalized resistance to dominant hegemony, but also devel-
ops a legal and emotional testimony of Partition’s most visible and last-
ing legacy: modern torture by state agents. PVCHR’s work accounting for
294 Jeremy A. Rinker

this represents the first steps in developing a reconciling walk through

history.

CUSTODIAL TORTURE AND TESTIMONIAL THERAPY:

NARRATIVE RECONCILIATION AS A WALK THROUGH HISTORY

The People’s Vigilance Committee on Human Rights (PVCHR) is a mem-

ber based human rights movement begun in 1996 in Banaras, Uttar Pra-
desh. In working with women, children, dalits, adivasi, and Muslims the
PVCHR works to ensure human rights and build grassroots advocacy for
those most marginalized in the villages surrounding Banaras. PVCHR,
working in over 120 villages in Uttar Pradesh, has a developed network
of activists across India focused on creating people friendly villages
aimed at opening space for the marginalized to work for positive social
change. Since 2009 PVCHR has been partnering with the Danish organ-
ization Rehabilitation and Research Center for Victims of Torture (RCT-
Demark) to devise a unique approach to “the widespread use of torture
in police custody,” 62 which they call testimonial therapy. This procedure
of creating the “self-suffering story” 63 works to produce both legal testi-
mony and subjective, emotional, and cathartic release of suffering, which
culminates with a ceremony of public sharing. This process not only
empowers rural human rights activists, giving them voice and agency in
a system that allows them little, but it also unmasks a postcolonial atti-
tude towards perceived “anti-national others” in Indian society.
PVCHR activist testimonies provide a rich reservoir of narrative data
to develop the connection between postcolonial violence and elite In-
dian’s self-interest to maintain control through constructing “others” as
“non-citizens.” In addition, the testimonials the PVCHR staff help to de-
velop the means to analyze the role that narrative conflict intervention
may play in reconciling competing interests and traumatic memory. As
stated in PVCHR’s own documents: “The point of departure for our cam-
paigning and political lobbying is always the meticulous analysis of the
individual case.” 64 Such an approach decenters the dominant discourse
of communal “othering” and raises the voice of individual victims to the
fore. The transactional empowerment of the telling of past and present
violence creates links to future nonviolent outcomes.
The testimonial therapy process, first developed in India by Lenin
Raghuvanshi and Shabana Khan from the PVCHR, in collaboration with
Inger Agger of RCT-Denmark, is performed over four sessions, which
include various stages of sharing and processing suffering on the part of
the torture victim. The culmination of the process is the delivery of the
testimony in the form of a public ceremony in the village. 65 Below is a
brief overview of one exemplar public testimonial followed by a brief
analysis of this individual case which links the therapeutic relevance of
 Buckle in the Hindu Belt 295

the narrative to the idea that such intervention is needed on a much

larger scale to address the lingering legacy of the structural, cultural, and
direct violence of Partition. Without such an ability to hear the stories of
past marginalization and abuse, future attempts at peacebuilding are for-
saken and forestalled.
Asha Mushahar 66 is a forty-year-old black market hawker living in
Banaras, Uttar Pradesh. In 2010 Asha narrated a story of torture and
harassment to PVCHR field staff that underscores the embedded nature
of caste and communal legacies of violence, as well as the constructed
identity such legacies support. Threatened by police to register his small
shop, Asha went with a local Gram Panchayat leader to the local police
station to see what could be done to get the police off his back. After
being told to wait for hours, the police finally took him in the back of the
station, “planted a knife,” 67 and accused him of using it for a recent
burglary. He was “booked under public nuisance” 68 and locked up for
the night. Although Asha suffered harassment by the police since the age
of fourteen, he had never been treated like this. After taking a loan to
cover the 6,000 rupee bail, Asha attempted to move from his basti and
operate a hand cart selling goods in a different section of Banaras. Again
the police found him, breaking into his house in the middle of the night
to arrest him on burglary charges. Beaten incessantly upon arrest, Asha,
his father, and uncle were all locked up. Despite their injuries they re-
ceived no first aid. They suffered torture and abuse for three years in jail
before their case was finally dismissed. In describing the fear and torment
of beatings during custody, deprivation of food, and hard labor while in
jail Asha says: “it seemed that what crime we have committed was being
born a ‘Mushahar.’” 69 Notice how Asha equates the injustice he endures
directly with his identity and community, not with ill-training of the local
police. Asha’s brief account of his plight reveals the deeply embedded
nature of communal identities and reminds one of the costs of crossing
the line of control.
The role of testimonial therapy as conflict prevention cannot be under-
stated—it helps “survivors regain self-esteem and dignity,” 70 but it also
“creates a democratic structure for the voiceless to enable them access to
the constitutional guarantees of modern India.” 71 This grassroots re-
sponse is critical for change of the dominant discourse of oppression and
to begin to challenge the delegitimizing reality that torture engenders.
Like Muslims, the Mushahars have been completely absent from the his-
torical record of Banaras, and testimonial therapy helps them regain their
historical place and identity. By providing them the space and structure
to express their psychological needs and humanity, the testimonial thera-
py process creates an opportunity to analytically and emotionally ad-
dress immediate and long-term grievances. Given the lack of any memo-
rial space, such testimony fills a critical gap. Without such space and
structure, past psychological needs go unmet and communal conflict con-
296 Jeremy A. Rinker

tinues to spiral and grow. Asha’s story also underscores the elite use of
violence to control and further separate the marginal from Banarsi cen-
ters of power. His story highlights the need to acknowledge injustice as a
means to ensure the possibility of reconciliation.

CONCLUSION: IDENTIFYING NEEDS—BANARAS’ ENDURING

WALK THROUGH HISTORY

On December 7, 2010, as I was preparing to take a small group of De-

Pauw University students to Banaras, a bomb rocked the Dashashwa-
medh Ghat during daily Ganga Aarti ceremonies. One person was killed
and thirty to forty people were injured. Assuaging concerns, I assured
my students’ parents that this incident was relatively rare for Banaras.
Confident in this assessment, my mind drifted to the 2006 bomb that had
hit the Sankat Mochan temple dedicated to Hanuman. At least twenty
people were killed and fifty injured in this well-coordinated attack. In
trying to understand the 2010 attacks, I remembered how Upadhyaya
argued that the 2006 attack
posed an unprecedented provocation to communal harmony in the
city. Amid the serious premonitions of communal violence, the people
of Banaras showed remarkable intercommunity understanding and
forestalled any outbreak of frenzy. 72
In mapping the positive civic engagement in Banaras after the 2006 blast
Upadhyaya fills a lacuna in research about communal collaboration amid
tragedy and trauma. He highlights the socio-religious spaces in which
connection is necessary for communal peace during times of stress. Still,
Upadhyaya’s jubilatory perspective on multicultural and religious inter-
action masks ways in which the psychological needs of the vast populace
of Banaras go unaddressed in the wake of such trauma. From a marginal
perspective this collaboration was not as “remarkable” 73 as the powerful
might like to portray. Despite the religious leaders coming together to
issue joint statements, the deep psychological wounds of common Banar-
sis remained underaddressed in the wake of both the 2006 and the 2010
tragedies. Cooperation, pluralism, and multiculturalism, which are laud-
able goals, assume existing power structures are functional and equita-
ble, but this is a huge assumption in a traditionally conservative and
hierarchical locality like Banaras. Despite, the changed dynamic of the
city post-2006 bombing, the lives of the most marginalized have become
only more precarious in the wake of the attack. The tight streets of Bana-
ras are now filled with not just religious pilgrims, but also a massive
security presence. Many respondents told me that such a conspicuous
show of police force has pushed marginal communities further towards
 Buckle in the Hindu Belt 297

the margins of Banarsi society—further into their “ghettos” that demar-

cate the metaphorical line of control.
Though the dynamic of communal relations is always shifting, reflect-
ing on particular traumatic events is critical to understanding how to
marshal these dynamics towards positive outcomes. I believe the ap-
proach to historical justice of Joseph Montville provides valuable re-
sources for a place like Banaras, where the potential for violence is ever-
present. As Montville argues: “the challenge in dealing with victimhood
psychology is that of reviving the mourning process, which has been
suspended as a result of traumatic experience, and helping it move to-
ward completion.” 74 While reviving trauma may seem counterintuitive,
it is just such historical analysis that, if not acknowledged, becomes dis-
placed as future violence. Anti-racism and oppression educators have
long realized the need for acknowledgement and, thus, have attempted
to address, not suppress, past violence as a means to building not only
knowledge of suffering, but privileged allies ready to spread that knowl-
edge. “What makes violence a phenomenon of social injustice, and not
merely an individual moral wrong, is its systemic character, its existence
as a social practice.” 75 It is in the persistence of violence as a social prac-
tice, exhibited in a phenomenon like custodial torture, that marginality is
maintained and constructed.
Though PVCHR’s testimonial therapy is aimed at building “critical
consciousness” 76 among the oppressed, it also has the benefit of educat-
ing the privileged to take action. Of the 361 survivors involved in
PVCHR/RCT’s project on testimonial therapy, 89 percent of them are
from scheduled caste backgrounds. 77 The public stories fashioned from
the experiences of these testimonial therapy participants form the van-
guard of a slow walk-cum-march, through history. The broad psycholog-
ical effects of these testimonies develop the seedbed of future reconcilia-
tion. Just as collective punishment acts to silence marginal communities,
collective retelling works to unbuckle the dominant discourse of past
atrocity and unfetter the voice of the long-marginalized and overlooked.
Though the caste calculus remains the “final denominator” 78 for all social
interaction in and around Banaras, the stories of the marginalized pro-
vide a means to build allies and transform self-confidence. While such
witness is a critical tool for modern-day human rights advocacy, the ac-
counting of past trauma remains an underused instrument in attempts at
creating lasting social transformation of past injustice.
The history and legacy of Partition in multicultural places like Banaras
works to create a disequilibrium between marginalized “others” and
dominant elites. By focusing on the variegated histories of local commu-
nities and their narratives of ongoing trauma and extreme hardship, the
contours of Partition’s legacies become more transparent. In this in-
creased transparency, “story” provides critical hope for moving towards
reconciliation and power relations within society are illuminated. Recon-
298 Jeremy A. Rinker

ciliation in this sense does not mean forgiving and forgetting, but rather
coming to grips with the complex network of broken relationships that
political violence creates. This is a reconciliation that aims to understand
trauma and grief as a means to ensuring that such trauma and grief
become increasingly unfeasible. The public testimonial therapy that
PVCHR is engaged in opens space for a narrative shift from the legacy of
past trauma to the future-orientation of reconciliation. Coupled with hon-
est recounting of Partition’s deep traumatic wounds such work creates
the foundation for lasting multicultural peace. The specifics of how to
achieve this multicultural peace locally in Banaras deserve further schol-
arly attention, but some outlines of these specifics have been revealed in
the forgoing work. For one, by creating opportunity spaces for sharing
about Partition and other traumatic stories, the seeds of reconciliation can
be sown. In addition, by unmasking the elite workings of power the
space for marginalized access to this power can create newly inclusive
forms of “identity justice.” 79
The paradoxes of Banaras are both resource and curse. In dialoguing
and memorializing these paradoxes historical traumas can be trans-
formed into spaces for interconnection as opposed to markers of division
and distrust. Exploring the metanarratives of Partition in Banaras in tan-
dem with a contemporary analysis of the local social dynamics of margi-
nalization, the destructive legacy of Partition and its displacement of
trauma through communal identity and violence are not only unmasked,
but exposed as traceable, and, thus, transformable. As needs theorists
have argued, protracted social conflict, though by nature difficult to over-
come, is possible to transform through persistent attention to parties’
needs. As action science, this essay has exploited the spaces of paradox in
the life of contemporary Banarsis and highlighted ways to overcome de-
structive and traumatic Partition trajectories. Custodial torture, as reso-
nate with the most extreme examples of colonization and structural vio-
lence, requires creative response to overcome. Focus on the creativity of a
walk through history is not intended to downplay the trauma and loss of
Partition, or, for that matter, more recent communal violence, but to ex-
plore ways to empower that trauma and loss to create constructive politi-
cal and social effects. While PVCHR’s testimonial therapy program is
beginning to help reproduce, heretofore unheard, narratives of past trau-
ma in and around Banaras, this process must be expanded to reach fur-
ther back towards the historical traumas of Partition. To unbuckle the
paradoxical divides of modern Banaras, unmet psychological needs asso-
ciated with past trauma must find space for “outlet or absorption.” 80
 Buckle in the Hindu Belt 299

NOTES

1. See Priyankar Upadhyaya, Communal Peace in India: Lessons from Multicultural

Banaras (Occasional Working Paper, Banaras Hindu University, 2010), and Vasanthi
Raman, The Warp and the Weft, among others.
2. Pankaj Mishra, The Romantics (New York: Anchor, 2000), 3.
3. Johan Galtung, “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” Journal of Peace Research,
6, 3 (1969): 183.
4. Vamik Volkan, Bloodlines: From Ethnic Pride to Ethnic Terrorism (Boulder, CO:
Westview Press, 1997), 48.
5. Joseph Montville, “Justice and the Burdens of History,” in Abu Nimer, ed.,
Reconciliation, Justice, and Coexistence (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2001), 323.
6. Mark Twain, Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World (Createspace
Independent Publishing Platform, Reprinted 2013), 261. Originally published 1897.
7. See Priyankar Upadhyaya, Communal Peace in India: Lessons from Multicultural
Banaras (Occasional Working Paper, Banaras Hindu University, 2010), and Ashutosh
Varshney, Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2002).
8. Richard Jenkins, Social Identity, Third Edition (New York: Routledge, 2008), 7.
9. See John Burton, Conflict: Resolution and Provention (New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1990); Joseph Montville, “Reconciliation as Realpolitik: Facing the Burdens of
History in Political Conflict Resolution,” in D. Rothbart and K. Korostelina, eds., Iden-
tity, Morality, Threat: Studies in Violent Conflict (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006),
129–44; and Montville, “Justice and the Burdens of History,” in Abu Nimer, ed., Recon-
ciliation, Justice, and Coexistence (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2001), 367–92.
10. Sara Cobb, “Empowerment and Mediation: A Narrative Perspective” Negotia-
tion Journal, 9, 3 (1993): 247.
11. Pankaj Mishra, The End of Suffering: The Buddha in the World (New York: Picador,
2004), 215.
12. James Booth, “The Unforgotten: Memories of Justice,” The American Political
Science Review, 95, 4 (2001): 788.
13. See Asutosh Varshney, Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life : Hindus and Muslims in India
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002) for detailed comparative analysis of com-
munal riots in similarly sized Northern Indian cities.
14. Landon Hancock and Christopher Mitchell, eds., Zones of Peace (Bloomfield, CT:
Kumarian Press, 2007), 3.
15. Jonathan Perry, Death in Banaras (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994), 33; and Vasanthi Raman, The Warp and the Weft: Community and Gender Identity
among Banaras Weavers (New Delhi: Routledge, 2010), 263.
16. Paul Brass, The Politics of India Since Independence, Second Edition (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994), 22, quoted in Raman, The Warp and the Weft, 150.
17. See Upadhyaya, Communal Peace in India, and Diana Eck, “Prospects for Plural-
ism: Voice and Vision in the Study of Religion,” Journal of the Academy of Religion, Vol.
75, 4 (2007): 743–76.
18. See Priyankar Upadhyaya, Communal Peace in India: Lessons from Multicultural
Banaras (Occasional Working Paper, Banaras Hindu University, 2010); and Asutosh
Varshney, Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2002).
19. Gyanendra Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (Del-
hi: Oxford University Press, 1990).
20. David Gilmartin, “Partition, Pakistan, and South Asian History: In Search of a
Narrative,” The Journal of Asian Studies, 57, 4 (1998): 1070.
21. Joseph Montville, “Justice and the Burdens of History,” in Reconciliation, Justice,
and Coexistence, ed. M. Abu Nimer (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2001), 133.
300 Jeremy A. Rinker

22. See Peter Gottschalk, Beyond Hindu and Muslim: Multiple Identity from Narrative
in Village India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), and Amartya Sen, Identity and
Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2006).
23. By using the term “space” here I wish to underscore Lefebvre’s (1991) sense in
which space “bridges the gap between the theoretical (epistemological) realm and the
practical one, between the mental and the social, between the space of the philoso-
phers and the space of people who deal with mental things.” Henri Lefebvre, The
Production of Space (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1991), 4.
24. Zvi Beckerman, “Collective Memory and Obstacles to Reconciliation Efforts in
Israel,” in The Partition Motif in Contemporary Conflicts, ed. Smita Jassal and Eyal Ben-
Ari (New Delhi: Sage, 2007), 327.
25. Montville, “Reconciliation as Realpolitik: Facing the Burdens of History in Polit-
ical Conflict Resolution,” in Identity, Morality, Threat: Studies in Violent Conflict, ed. D.
Rothbart and K. Korostelina (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006), 367–92; and Mont-
ville, “Justice and the Burdens of History,” in Reconciliation, Justice, and Coexistence, ed.
M. Abu Nimer (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2001), 129–44.
26. Catherine Riessman, Narrative Analysis (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1993), 5.
27. Francesca Polletta, It Was Like a Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2006), 27.
28. Ian Talbot titled his own study of Amritsar exactly this, and though one may
argue that close studies of the stories of people in places like Amritsar and Delhi are
critical to reconstructing the historical narrative of violence, my work here is attempt-
ing to make a slightly different argument about the modern narrative found in those
more removed, yet still reliving Partition. Talbot’s (2006) collection, in his own words
“is an attempt to uncover a few of those private stories.” My work here is an attempt
to uncover the public stories which reinscribe collective identity and marginalization.
Ian Talbot, Epicenter of Violence: Partition Voices and Memories from Amritsar (New Delhi:
Permanent Black, 2006), 15.
29. See Johan Galtung, “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research,” Journal of Peace Re-
search, 6, 3 (1969), 167–91.
30. For detailed discussion of Partition’s impact on Delhi, see Gyanendra Pandey,
Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism, and History in India (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2001).
31. Diana Eck, “Prospects for Pluralism: Voice and Vision in the Study of Religion,”
Journal of the Academy of Religion, 75, 4 (2007): 750.
32. Vasanthi Raman, The Warp and the Weft: Community and Gender Identity Among
Banaras Weavers (New Delhi: Routledge, 2010), 263.
33. For an understanding of the recent reemergence of this historical narrative, see
Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2000); and Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin, Borders and Boundar-
ies: Women in India’s Partition (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998) in
particular.
34. Smita Jassal and Eyal Ben-Ari, “The Partition Motif: Concepts, Comparisons,
Considerations,” in Jassal and Ben-Ari, eds., The Partition Motif in Contemporary Con-
flicts (New Delhi: Sage, 2007), 29.
35. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 4th Edition (Malden, MA: Wi-
ley-Blackwell, 1990), 90.
36. See especially, Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study of Moral Theory (Notre
Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984).
37. Hannah Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1972), 95.
38. Vasanthi Raman, The Warp and the Weft: Community and Gender Identity among
Banaras Weavers (New Delhi: Routledge, 2010), 273.
39. James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 4.
 Buckle in the Hindu Belt 301

40. Vasanthi Raman, The Warp and the Weft: Community and Gender Identity among
Banaras Weavers (New Delhi: Routledge, 2010), 276–77.
41. Personal interview, Doctoral Candidate at BHU Malaviya Center for Peace Re-
search—May 2013.
42. This is described so eloquently by Asutosh Varshney, Ethnic Conflict and Civic
Life: Hindus and Muslims in India (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002).
43. Badri Narayan, Fascinating Hindutva: Saffron Politics and Dalit Mobilization (New
Delhi: Sage, 2009).
44. Vamik Volkan, Bloodlines: From Ethnic Pride to Ethnic Terrorism (Boulder, CO:
Westview Press, 1997), 43.
45. Joseph Montville, “Reconciliation as Realpolitik: Facing the Burdens of History
in Political Conflict Resolution,” in Identity, Morality, Threat: Studies in Violent Conflict,
ed. D. Rothbart and K. Korostelina (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2006), 378.
46. Gyanendra Pandey, Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism, and History in
India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 61.
47. Peter Gottschalk, Beyond Hindu and Muslim: Multiple Identity from Narrative in
Village India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 4.
48. Pankaj Mishra, The Romantics (New York: Anchor, 2000), 68.
49. Peter Gottschalk, Beyond Hindu and Muslim: Multiple Identity from Narrative in
Village India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 6.
50. Personal interview, friend and neighbor in Banaras—June 2013.
51. Christopher Einof, “The Fall and Rise of Torture: A Comparative and Historical
Analysis,” Sociological Theory, 25, 2 (2007): 101–21.
52. Ibid., 103.
53. Suvir Kaul, ed., The Partitions of Memory: The Afterlife of the Division of India (New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), 9.
54. Christopher Einof, “The Fall and Rise of Torture: A Comparative and Historical
Analysis,” Sociological Theory, 25, 2 (2007): 105.
55. Ibid.
56. Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad, “Being Hindu and/or Governing India? Religion, So-
cial Change and the State,” in The Freedom to Do God’s Will: Religious Fundamentalism
and Social Change, ed. G. ter Haar (New York: Routledge, 2003), 168.
57. Since Independence the Indian state has dramatically increased its police force.
Brass reports that between 1953 and 1983 there was an 87 percent increase in police
strength in India. Paul Brass, The Politics of India Since Independence (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1994), 59. Despite the almost equivalent population growth in
Post-Independence India, the fact is the majority of the police growth was on the lower
levels (i.e., head constables and constables) and that this growth was not accompanied
by adequate training. “Broken System,” accessed February 2015, [Link]
node/84624/section/1.
58. “Torture in India 2011,” accessed February 2015, [Link].
59. “Torture in India 2011,” accessed February 2015, [Link].
60. The tiny neighboring state of Bihar was second on the list with 1,512 deaths in
judicial custody. “Torture in India 2011,” accessed February 2015, [Link].
61. Voice of the Voiceless, Banaras: People’s Vigilance Committee on Human Rights,
1:1 (2010): 45.
62. Lenin Raghuvanshi, Shabana Khan, and Inger Agger, “Giving Voice: Using Tes-
timonial Therapy Intervention in Psychosocial Community Work for Survivors of Tor-
ture and Organized Violence,” A Manual for Community Workers and Human Rights
Defenders (Uttar Pradesh, India: PVCHR, 2008), 6.
63. Ibid., 9.
64. Voice of the Voiceless, Banaras: People’s Vigilance Committee on Human Rights,
1:1 (2010): 46.
65. Lenin Raghuvanshi, Shabana Khan, and Inger Agger, “Giving Voice, Using Tes-
timonial Therapy Intervention in Psychosocial Community Work for Survivors of Tor-
302 Jeremy A. Rinker

ture and Organized Violence,” A Manual for Community Workers and Human Rights
Defenders (Uttar Pradesh, India: PVCHR, 2008), 12–16.
66. This narrative retelling comes from the written testimony of Asha Mushahar
recorded October 15, 2010, that was later published in Voice of the Voiceless, Banaras:
People’s Vigilance Committee on Human Rights, 2:2 (2011): 5–6.
67. Ibid., 5.
68. Ibid.
69. Ibid., 6. Mushahars are on the bottom of the local caste system of graded in-
equality and are among the poorest populations in Eastern Uttar Pradesh and neigh-
boring Bihar. The Mushahar name is said to derive from two words meaning “rat
catchers” and it is assumed that this name came from the groups’ tendency to eat field
rodents in times of famine. It is not uncommon today in Varanasi to hear these people
dehumanized as “mouse eaters” or “rural untouchables.” These are the communities,
described earlier, that Narayan (2009) underscores as resisting through the recreation
of oral myths and “hidden transcripts” of their community. See Badri Narayan, Fasci-
nating Hindutva: Saffron Politics and Dalit Mobilization (New Delhi: Sage, 2009), and
James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1990), 183.
70. Lenin Raghuvanshi, Justice, Liberty, Equality: Dalits in Independent India (Kolkata:
Front Page, 2012), 59.
71. Voice of the Voiceless, Banaras: People’s Vigilance Committee on Human Rights,
1:1 (2010): 45.
72. Priyankar Upadhyaya, Communal Peace in India: Lessons from Multicultural Bana-
ras (Occasional Working Paper, Banaras Hindu University, 2010), 1.
73. Ibid., 1.
74. Joseph Montville, “Justice and the Burdens of History,” in Reconciliation, Justice,
and Coexistence, ed. M. Abu Nimer (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2001), 133.
75. Iris Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1990), 43.
76. Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed (New York: Continuum, 1970), 183.
77. Lenin Raghuvanshi, Justice, Liberty, Equality: Dalits in Independent India (Kolkata:
Front Page, 2012), 27.
78. Ibid., 29.
79. James Booth, “The Unforgotten: Memories of Justice,” The American Political
Science Review, 95, 4 (2001): 788.
80. Erik Erikson, Gandhi’s Truth: On the Origins of Militant Nonviolence (New York:
Norton, 1969), 98.

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 EIGHTEEN
Hyderabad, Partition, and Hindutva
Strategic Revisitings in Neelkanth’s “Durga” (2005)

Nazia Akhtar

The body of scholarship we now know as Partition studies took definitive

shape in the aftermath of events in South Asia in the 1980s and 1990s: the
terrible “communal” (sectarian) violence against Sikhs in 1984 and Mus-
lims in 1989; the demolition of the Babri Mosque in 1992, which was
followed by more communal violence in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh;
and the fervor with which India and Pakistan celebrated fifty years of
independence in 1997. Amid the nationalist jubilation that followed such
bloodthirsty aggression, scholars were compelled to rethink that which
remained forgotten: Partition, the darker side of independence. As a re-
sult, the corpus of interdisciplinary scholarship that concentrates on the
human dimension of Partition has expanded dramatically. However, in
spite of the determination of scholars to look for forgotten or marginal-
ized experiences, there is a tendency to assume that there was no impact
of Partition in South India because it is geographically far removed from
the provinces that were cartographically cut up.
And yet, when we look at places such as the princely state of Hydera-
bad, the experiences that emerge call for investigation through the Parti-
tion lens. In fact, Hyderabad—the largest and wealthiest princely state in
India—was completely transformed as a result of Partition. Ruled by
Osman Ali Khan (1886–1967), the seventh Nizam of the Muslim Asaf Jahi
dynasty (1720–1948), Hyderabad was home to many inequalities by the
1940s. Although the Muslim population was only 12 percent, the admin-
istrative set-up consisted of a 90 percent majority of elite Muslim offi-

305
306 Nazia Akhtar

cials. 1 Thousands of Hindus migrated out of Hyderabad after being sys-

tematically persecuted by the Razakars, a paramilitary group that
emerged in 1946 and was associated with the Majlis-e-Ittehad-ul-Musli-
meen (Council of United Muslims). The year 1946 was also when the
peasants and workers of Telangana revolted in what would become an
armed struggle that went on for five years. And large numbers of Mus-
lims poured into the state looking for sanctuary from communal violence
in British India. 2
Additionally, repeated demands were made by the Congress leader-
ship that the Nizam must unconditionally accede to India. There were
months of protracted negotiations and heated debates, in which the Niz-
am expressed his reluctance, as the head of a state which had both Hindu
and Muslim citizens, to join either India or Pakistan. 3 He cited Partition
and the communal violence that had brought misery to other parts of the
subcontinent as a valid reason to remain independent. 4 But Indo-Hydera-
bad relations had deteriorated to such an extent that India invaded Hy-
derabad on September 13, 1948, ignoring the fact that the latter had ap-
proached the UN Security Council with an urgent appeal to put the mat-
ter on its agenda for September 15. The invasion took less than five days,
for the obsolete arms, maps, and equipment used by Hyderabad’s army
and the scantily armed Razakars were able to do little in the face of an
organized, four-pronged attack by an efficient Indian army.
Following the Nizam’s surrender, there were major crackdowns by
the Indian army and police on peasants, workers, and progressive indi-
viduals, many of whom were Muslims and/or had participated in the
Telangana Armed Struggle. 5 Sources, such as the “Report on the Post-
Operation Polo Massacres, Rape and Destruction or Seizure of Property
in Hyderabad State” (1949), which is believed to have been commis-
sioned by the Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru himself but whose
existence and/or content has not been officially acknowledged by any
Indian government thus far, state that the military regime particularly
targeted Muslims, and that many hundreds of Muslim women were
raped and approximately 30,000 to 40,000 Muslims were killed by local
Hyderabadi Hindus and Indian police and armed forces. 6 The impor-
tance of this report is underscored when we realize that no other official
record of the actions of Indian state apparatuses in Hyderabad is known
to exist.
These realities of Hyderabad in the 1940s—Razakar violence, feudal
oppression, the Telangana struggle, the military invasion of Hyderabad
(sanctioned by a government whose key members had struggled non-
violently for independence from British rule), and the persecution of Hy-
derabadi Muslims by the apparatuses of a constitutionally secular Indian
state—remain mostly unacknowledged in Indian and Partition historiog-
raphy. 7 Literary depictions, on the other hand, tend to deal retrospective-
ly and, often, seemingly tangentially or obliquely with these questions in
 Hyderabad, Partition, and Hindutva 307

relation to Hyderabad. Prominent texts include short stories, such as

“Kaali Raat” (“The Black Night,” undated, Urdu) by Aziz Ahmad
(1914–1978), and novels, such as Anita Desai’s canonical text Clear Light of
Day (1980; English), Samina Ali’s Madras on Rainy Days (2004; English),
Huma R. Kidwai’s The Hussaini Alam House (2012; English), Ian Bedford’s
The Last Candles of the Night (2014; English), and Kishorilal Vyas Neel-
kanth’s Razakar (2005; Hindi).
It is Neelkanth’s text that I am concerned with in this essay. The “nov-
el” is divided into discrete, often thematically unconnected sections that
incorporate specific legends, anecdotes, and/or historical episodes from
Hyderabad. For the purpose of this essay, I will focus on the preface and
the episode called “Durga.” This restricted choice is made necessary by
the complexity and diversity within the text. I have also chosen “Durga”
specifically because it is a literary text that represents Razakar violence
towards Hyderabadi women. The episode opens with an idyllic portrayal
of a peaceful residential locality called Jampanna Gate in Brahmapuri,
Nizamabad district. But soon this locality is threatened by Razakars.
Since the men have left for work, only women and children are at home.
The women cower in fear, certain that the Razakars will rape and murder
them. It is a Sikh woman called Balwinder Kaur, a refugee from parti-
tioned Punjab, who adopts the warlike demeanor of the goddess Durga,
confronts the menacing Razakars, and saves the women from them.
This essay focuses on the writer’s choice of Durga as the women’s
savior and the fact that it is a Sikh woman who plays her. Neelkanth’s
episode is, as I show in this essay, a Hindu nationalist (Hindutva) text
that serves as an example of how the Hindutva right-wing represents the
history of sexual violence perpetrated by Muslim Razakars against Hin-
du women in Hyderabad in the late 1940s as a pretext to justify present-
day violence against Muslims. In doing so, I argue, Neelkanth conflates
the Razakars, who were dominant only from 1946 to 1948 and whose
activities were limited to princely Hyderabad, with almost all Muslims in
present-day India. In fact, Neelkanth declares that the Hindu/Indian state
must not let its guard down; it must watch Muslims constantly in order
to ensure that new Razakars are not born among them. The problematic
nature of Neelkanth’s text also extends to the attempted cooptation of
Sikhs into the Hindutva fold, as the representation of the Sikh woman in
his text suggests. I argue that this is a subtle but forceful strategy em-
ployed by Hindutva groups in an effort to close ranks against minorities
such as Muslims.
The most insidious strategy through which Neelkanth narrativizes his
agenda is through the depiction of Balwinder Kaur as the goddess Durga.
This image is carefully crafted through a focus on Balwinder’s appear-
ance and visage, both of which recall Durga as a warrior-goddess. The
earliest representation of Durga in this military avatar probably occurs in
the “Devi Mahatmya” (circa 400–500 CE), which portrays her as a weap-
308 Nazia Akhtar

on-wielding, ten-armed goddess who strides purposefully into an occu-

pied Heaven to defeat the asuras and restore Heaven and worldly order
to the gods. In Neelkanth’s story, as the Razakars threaten to break the
door, Balwinder becomes Durga as she is depicted in the “Devi Mahat-
mya”: she leaps up and snatches a sword hung on a nail, draws it from its
scabbard, and loosens her long hair. The sword flashes like lightning in
the sunshine, and we are told that “Balwinder’s face had an unflinching
and sacrificial expression. Her face was lit with a strange glow. Her big
eyes and open hair recalled Durga of Bengal.” 8 She shouts at the Razak-
ars, daring them to enter the premises. The Razakars scatter.
While Durga has many gentler and creative attributes, the one that is
usually propagated by both mainstream Hindu culture (such as the Ben-
gali Durga Puja festival) as well as Hindutva organizations such as the
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Association of Self-Volunteers;
RSS) and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (World Hindu Council; VHP) is
that of her ferocity, aggression, and anger as she slays the demons. This
particular image suppresses “the available pastiche of Durga myths and
attempts to emerge as a totalising narrative which renders its material as
coherent, continuous and unified.” 9 And it becomes even more proble-
matic when we remember that “Hindu deities are . . . constituted through
plurally authored, multiply motivated myths which must be read not
only as alterations and reinterpretations but also as appropriations and
contestations.” 10 It becomes imperative, therefore, to explore the objec-
tives behind the privileging of one specific attribute of Durga through
constant narrative reiterations of the same in Hindutva representations
and mainstream portrayals. 11
Furthermore, Neelkanth appropriates Durga as she is referred to in
Sikhism. Durga as Chandi was Guru Gobind Singh’s favorite literary
subject, and she appears in many compositions, such as Chandi Charitra
(Braj; The Exploits of Chandi), Var Durga Ki (Punjabi; The Ballad of Dur-
ga), and Akal Ustati (Braj; In Praise of the Timeless One). Nikky-Guninder
Kaur Singh and Nidar Singh Nihang and Parmjit Singh have argued that
Durga is recalled as a mythical and literary figure and metaphor in the
Guru’s compositions. They point out that the Guru’s narration uses the
archetypal and psychological potential of myth to set up Durga as “a
model of moral force and martial prowess for both men and women.” 12 It
is easy to see why such an idea appealed to the Guru. Durga is the only
goddess in the Puranas who is independent of male partners. She also
impressively personifies the battle against injustice and evil because she
is the central figure fighting the demons who threaten to destroy the
world. 13
Singh points out that the Durga of the Puranas will not go on a ram-
page and annihilate the world. On the contrary, her disciplined energy
and fury are “directed towards annihilating and destroying only the de-
mons, symbolic representations of evil and negative forces in the individ-
 Hyderabad, Partition, and Hindutva 309

ual psyche and in society.” 14 Durga and her sword remain central to Sikh
religious practice, and the first verse of Var Durga Ki is recited at the
beginning of prayers. 15
Hence, it would appear at first glance that it is not unusual for Bal-
winder to be connected to Durga. Balwinder as Durga is successful in
protecting the helpless Hindu women without any male assistance. The
historical parallel between the Sikhs of the seventeenth-century fighting
Mughal state’s repression and Balwinder in the mid-twentieth century
fending off a communal paramilitary force from a Muslim-ruled state is
clear. 16 The decision to lay the responsibility of protecting the Hindu
women in Balwinder’s hands is also perhaps made apt by the informa-
tion we are given earlier in the text about Balwinder’s refugee status.
Balwinder and her husband have experienced personal and financial loss
during Partition and have fled from the violence in Punjab. So when she
becomes the one who dispenses with the Razakars, it appears as if justice
is served.
But although there is a precedent in Sikh religious tradition that
would make such a representation plausible, this portrayal has to be read
in its immediate context: the attempted cooptation of Sikhs into the vio-
lent project of Hindutva. Besides claiming to represent all Hindus, Hin-
dutva ideology threatens to engulf certain other minority communities
such as Sikhs, many of whose members resist these attempts because
they wish to maintain a separate political and religious identity. 17 How-
ever, organizations from the Arya Samaj to the RSS “have been consistent
in their claim that Sikhs are an integral part of the Hindu social and
religious structure.” 18 Since Partition, which positioned Sikhs and Hin-
dus against Muslims, Hindu nationalist discourses have claimed with
greater and greater insistence that Sikhs are Hindus because Muslims
killed Sikhs along with Hindus during Partition. 19 But in spite and per-
haps partly because of this discourse, tensions between Sikhs and Hindus
continued in independent India, most prominently during the Khalistan
movement, which sought to establish a separate homeland for the Sikhs.
Veena Das has argued that Sikh militants’ discourse in the 1980s con-
sciously pitched a singular construction of Sikhs as a masculinized, mar-
tial community against an equally unidimensional construction of Hin-
dus as an effeminate, weak, and cunning community in control of the
Indian state. 20 The escalation of the tension maintained by this discourse
culminated in Operation Bluestar (June 3–6, 1984), a state military opera-
tion designed to weed out militants hiding in the Sikh Golden Temple at
Amritsar. This attack by what was seen by Sikh militants and their fol-
lowers as “the Hindu state” on the most sacred Sikh shrine was followed
by the assassination of Indira Gandhi on October 31, 1984, by two of her
Sikh bodyguards. The assassination in turn triggered off anti-Sikh riots in
Delhi and its surrounding areas in which 3,000 Sikhs were killed, many of
them by Congress leaders and workers, in Delhi alone. 21 It is estimated
310 Nazia Akhtar

that a total of 5,000 Sikhs were killed during these “riots,” which affected
mostly North Indian states that were being governed by the Congress. 22
Political efforts to mend the Hindu-Sikh breach after 1984 include the
alliance between the BJP and the Akali Dal in Punjab in 1996, which
resulted in the government patronage of the Sangh Parivar, which in turn
has allowed the RSS, VHP, Bajrang Dal, and Shiv Sena to develop Hin-
dutva activities in Punjab. 23 The RSS also created an organization called
the Rashtriya Sikh Sangat (National Sikh Association; Sangat) in Delhi in
the aftermath of 1984. What is deeply objectionable about this organiza-
tion is that it is meant exclusively to drive home to rural Sikhs the point
that they are, after all, Hindus and must reintegrate with their brethren to
serve the violent cause of Hindutva against Muslims. 24 Through its door-
to-door campaigns and personal contact programs (strategically begun
around the three hundredth anniversary of the inauguration of the Khal-
sa in 1699), the RSS has tried to recruit young Sikhs. Through these out-
reach programs, the RSS and the Sangat have tried “to impress on villag-
ers in Gurdaspur and Amritsar districts that Sikhs are only a sword arm
of the Hindu faith.” 25 The RSS also took considerable pains to emphasize
to Sikh villagers that those who seek to institutionalize a separate identity
for the Sikhs are nothing but “Pakistan-sponsored terrorists,” 26 thereby
revealing the perennial anxieties of the Hindutva right-wing about fur-
ther post-Partition “vivisections” of the “motherland.” Such fears not
only permeate the advances Hindutva organizations make towards
Sikhs, but they also become rhetorical justifications for persecuting In-
dian Muslims, who are constantly being suspected of conspiring to di-
vide the country.
However, what makes the presence of the Sangh Parivar in Punjab
dangerous is the sheer versatility and innovation of Hindutva ideology. 27
It is this remarkable ability of Hindutva to act expediently that we see in
the insidious narrative strategies in Neelkanth’s “Durga.” Through the
martial representation of a Sikh woman, the armed savior of the Hindu
women, Neelkanth subtly and meaningfully employs mainstream narra-
tives of Partition, which incorrectly maintain the perception that Partition
violence exclusively consisted of intercommunal (and never intracommu-
nal) violence against women. 28 He places Hindu and Sikh women in
binary opposition to predatory Muslim Razakars in yet another political-
ly motivated attempt by Hindu nationalists to build bridges with Sikhs
against Muslims after 1984. He does this by applying to Balwinder the
template of the warlike aspect of Durga, which, as I will explain later, is
being used by Hindutva organizations to recruit Hindu women to com-
mit violence against Muslims during periods of communal tension. By
referring to the context of Partition, when many Hindu and Sikh women
were raped by Muslim men, and aligning a Sikh female character along-
side Hindu women against Razakars, Neelkanth is emphasizing what
Hindu nationalists have been stressing for a century or more: Sikhs are,
 Hyderabad, Partition, and Hindutva 311

after all, Hindus and must fight alongside Hindus against Muslims, all of
whom, according to Neelkanth, have the potential to be Razakars.
Thus, couched in a familiar and convenient Partition story about the
possible abduction of women by violent men of the Other community,
the upright and righteous Balwinder as Durga represents yet another
Hindutva attempt to mobilize Sikhs against Muslims. 29 Neelkanth’s sus-
tained focus on Balwinder’s sword, which “flashed like lightning,” 30 is an
appropriation of the great ritual, scriptural, and historical significance of
the sword for Sikhs. Indeed, Nihangs Sikhs, the traditional Sikh warrior
class, worship swords and other weapons, in line with Guru Gobind
Singh’s teachings. 31 Furthermore, the ardas, a supplicatory prayer recited
at the end of daily prayers and before the start of a significant undertak-
ing, also starts with “remembering the sword,” a meditative process that
starts with the inspirational material reality of the sword and encourages
contemplation beyond the physical sword and upon the formless, infinite
being of God. 32 Durga’s feats and the deeds of her sword become inter-
changeable, 33 and “[t]he means for the restoration of an ethical order is
the sword.” 34 Moreover, like Durga, the sword “was to be invoked only
in self-defense and as a last resort,” making both the sword and, by
implication, Durga symbols of self-respect and freedom in Sikhism. 35
While it is also this connection between the sword and the way to free-
dom under tremendous odds that is behind Neelkanth’s extensive focus
on Balwinder’s sword, we must also situate this representation in terms
of Hindutva attempts to appropriate Sikhs for a cause that has little to do
with freedom or justice.
What reinforces these points is the preface, where Neelkanth lays the
ground for the rest of the text and where his own motives emerge. In it,
Neelkanth praises Vallabhbhai Patel’s “foresight and courage” in dealing
with the Indo-Hyderabad dispute, which was resolved in 1948 through
the invasion of Hyderabad by the Indian army. That the political ap-
proach and language of Patel, the Deputy Prime Minister of India, con-
tributed to the systematic persecution and killings of Muslims and others,
many of whom were fighting against feudal and communal oppression
in Hyderabad, does not appear to bother Neelkanth. In fact, Neelkanth’s
admiration for this communal statesman marks Neelkanth himself as
communal. Further, he points out that “today Hyderabadi Muslims are
ashamed of the past anti-national violence perpetrated by the Razak-
ars.” 36 Such a statement considers all Hyderabadi Muslims today com-
plicit in the guilt of the Razakars, who were active and influential only in
Hyderabad and specifically between 1946 and 1948. It holds all Hydera-
badi Muslims, from the 1940s till today, accountable for the actions of the
Razakars and suggests that there is a need for them to explicitly de-
nounce the Razakars in order to establish their loyalty to the nation. 37 The
ahistorical, deceptive sense of a homogeneous Muslim community with a
single, fixed political outlook is reinforced. No allowance is made for
312 Nazia Akhtar

differences in political opinion stemming from diversity of sect, class,

caste, gender, sexuality, language, or region. As I have shown above with
reference to Sikhs, such a collapsing of a large demographic of people
into one group with a uniform and singular identity, which can then
become politically useful as a symbol of good or evil, is a strategy Hindu
nationalists use not only to deal with Muslims, but also in the way they
relate with Sikhs and other minority communities such as Buddhists,
Jains, Christians, etc.
Neelkanth writes that “[t]he Razakars are finished. But who knows,
some leftover Razakars may have become active again—having changed
their name and guise! They may be boring holes in the court of republi-
can values again!” 38 He stresses the need to “investigate” whether or not
there are still active Razakars around, “if only in the context of bomb
explosions! If only in the context of terrorist activities!” 39 The repeated
use of exclamation marks at the ends of these sentences conveys an un-
mistakable sense of urgency and is intended to encourage watchfulness
and even fear of Muslims among Hindus. Neelkanth emphasizes that
bigotry has not ended and that it is challenging humanitarian values
across the world, “its thousand [snake] hoods raised.” 40 At first glance,
Neelkanth’s concerns with terrorism seem unremarkable, given the re-
cent context of the attack by terrorists on the Indian Parliament in 2001 as
well as the many incidents of past as well as ongoing militant violence
that pepper the fraught history of Kashmir, yet another much disputed
erstwhile princely state. However, his warnings to his readers to remain
alert for the signs of bigotry take on an entirely new hue when we consid-
er the specific context of Razakars, Hyderabad, and Muslims in which he
situates his writing in 2005. In a country where there is already wide-
spread persecution of Muslims, the most horrifying example in recent
history being the genocide in Gujarat in 2002, Neelkanth’s comments in
2005 become another source of justification for the violence that Hindut-
va organizations promote and perpetrate against Muslims. Indeed, be-
cause Neelkanth holds all Muslims guilty for Razakar violence, thereby
effecting a smooth narrative fusion between the terms “Razakar” and
“Muslim,” so that both become synonymous in his writing, every Muslim
becomes a justified target for surveillance and persecution.
Thus, to preface a literary narrative containing a martial representa-
tion of a Sikh woman who protects Hindu women from Muslim Razakars
with an implicit call for the need to watch Muslims in a climate of rapid
Hindutva expansion is tantamount to pointing out to Sikhs their instru-
mental function as those who will lead Hindutva oppression. Let me
clarify that I am not suggesting that there is no possibility of there being
plural, fluid notions of community in which Sikhs and Hindus flourish
side by side. My concern is that the kind of Sikhism Hindutva promotes
seeks to erase any ambivalence that Sikhs may profess towards Hindutva
and aims to instead use them as weapons in an aggressive, expansionist
 Hyderabad, Partition, and Hindutva 313

cause that is not in the interests of any kind of democratic or egalitarian

thought. What is significant is the fact that this move to incorporate mi-
nority groups into one singularly defined Hindu nationalist identity at-
tempts to engulf everyone into the service of an ideology that has no
claim to fighting the kind of oppression it claims Hindus are suffering.
This Hindutva strategy amounts to the misappropriation of the teachings
of Sikh Gurus engaged in fighting a kind of state repression that does not
exist today. To suggest that a confrontation of Sikhs and Hindus against
Muslims that is comparable to the conflicts that arose in the later Mughal
period (or even during Partition) exists today in India, and that Sikhs
need to contribute to the cause of Hindutva and fight some imagined
specter of “Muslim tyranny” is, quite simply, a total fabrication which
tries to fraudulently manipulate Sikh history, an attempt that many Sikhs
are actively resisting. Indeed, there is little threat of Hindus or Sikhs
getting wiped out by Muslims who are, as Tapan Basu et al. note, “in real
life a minority, grossly under-represented in the bureaucratic, military,
professional and business elites.” 41
The insidious manner in which Hindutva ideology functions to create
these myths is also visible in the dedication of Razakar. Out of many
Hyderabadi heroes such as Ailamma, Doddi Komarayya, Acchamamba,
Raj Bahadur Gour, and Makhdoom Mohiuddin, who also fought against
the Razakars, Neelkanth chooses Shoebullah Khan, a radical journalist
slain by the Razakars. The dedication on the title page informs us that the
book is a tribute to
the bright pillar of keen national consciousness . . . the immortal jour-
nalist martyr Mr. Shoebullah Khan, who was murdered in broad day-
light on August 20 [sic], 1948 by fundamentalist Razakars, and who has
been completely forgotten by state as well as national governments. 42
While these words appear at first glance to attest to Neelkanth’s secular
credentials, it is an attempt to appropriate the figure of a communist
journalist who boldly challenged the Razakars in his writings. Enraged
by Khan’s refusal to stop his public criticism, the Razakars sought to
prove that the pen was not mightier than the sword by chopping his
hands off. Not only does Khan’s terribly violent and symbolically mean-
ingful death serve as fertile ground for Neelkanth’s literary talents as a
writer, it also suits his purpose of reminding his readers how dangerous
and cruel the Razakars were and, therefore, because he conflates the two,
how violent and menacing all Muslims can be.
Khan’s death is also a better platform for Neelkanth because it mark-
edly differs from the relatively unremarkable deaths of Ailamma and
Makhdoom Mohiuddin. However, the fact that Neelkanth ignores Doddi
Komarayya’s equally violent death during the Telangana struggle and
dedicates Razakar solely to Khan also points to the BJP’s attempts to man-
ufacture an identity for Muslims that would be tolerable in a foreseeable
314 Nazia Akhtar

Hindu nation. 43 The essential aspect of this proposed “Muslim” identity

is, in line with Hindutva ideology, the disavowal of any other identity
(religious, linguistic, cultural, historical) over the nation. 44 It is this at-
tempt to expand the influence of the right-wing by feigning a secular
identity through the strategic recuperation of a Muslim figure that is seen
in the tone of Neelkanth’s dedication, which fits in well with the attention
the BJP has showered on Khan as a nationalist hero from Andhra Pra-
desh. For example, on August 21, 2012, a day before his sixty-fourth
death anniversary, the state BJP honored Khan in Hyderabad as a nation-
alist martyr who died for the sake of the freedom of the Indian nation. 45
By a simple, seemingly innocuous slippage, the struggle of Hyderabadis
to end princely rule as well as get rid of the Razakars is reinterpreted as
the struggle to defend the Indian (read Hindu) nation against “Muslim
tyrants.”
Neelkanth considers Razakar an attempt to peep into history through
the novelistic medium. Once again, this intention to create a literary me-
morial of Partition appears to make sense in light of the official silences
on the subject, 46 until we take into account the context in which Neel-
kanth writes, and quite possibly, the readership that he addresses. He
writes that his novel “is a challenge to the appeasing policy of govern-
ments . . . in which the guilty escape scot-free and law-abiding gentle-
men, common folk are continuously suffering.” 47 Neelkanth’s tellingly
familiar reference to the “appeasing policy” of governments replicates
the exact words of the BJP and the RSS in their permanent refrain against
successive non-BJP governments, such as the last UPA government
(2004–2014) and their supposedly biased policies with regard to Mus-
lims. 48
This idea of appeasement of Muslims in India, which is explicit and
implicit in Neelkanth’s choice of words and context, is followed by his
view that
[g]overnance is, after all, always carried out through hard punish-
ment. . . . For an administration that has justice and discipline, asser-
tiveness and foresight like that of Sardar Patel are requisites. History
never forgives those who ignore the good of the nation as a result of
their own weakness. Razakars have no religion; consequently, the first
duty of any good administration is to harshly crush their hoods of ill-
intention. The age of Razakars was a nightmare that has passed. What
must be ensured is that it is never repeated. 49
It is clear from the context of Razakar violence in “Durga” that Neel-
kanth’s ideas of good governance and the “good of the nation” revolve
around the central tenet of Hindutva: national security and territorial
integrity, which are, as I have explained above, seen to be incompatible in
Hindutva politics with the interests of Muslims. Both the security and
territorial integrity of the nation can only be ensured by the ideal govern-
 Hyderabad, Partition, and Hindutva 315

ment, whose contours are delineated in two ways. First, the glowing
references to Patel suggest that Neelkanth condones aggressive state
strategies such as armed invasion and the subsequent crushing of minor-
ity demographics in order to fulfill this agenda. Second, the prescription
of hard punishment for perpetrators and criticism of “polite protection”
in present-day politics are implicitly directed against all Hyderabadi
Muslims through his reference to Razakars, who are, as I have shown
above, depicted as representative of all Muslims. 50 Thus, through a nar-
rative blurring of the crucial difference between Razakars, a paramilitary
group active in late 1940s Hyderabad, and Muslims, who were then and
today a part of subcontinental society and polity, the maintenance of
national security is portrayed as integrally involving the repression of
Muslims. This as well as the need to “harshly crush” present-day Razak-
ars expose the Hindutva stance outlined thus by Tanika Sarkar:
revenge must be taken on present-day Muslims both for historical
wrongs and for the future danger they embody. . . . For the Muslim of
today embodies all past offences and future threats that have been
allegedly committed and could be committed. Therefore, revenge may
be taken on any Muslim anywhere for anything that any Muslim could
do or had done. 51
And Neelkanth’s preface indeed encourages the perception that Razakars
represent all Hyderabadi Muslims at all times, past or present. Therefore,
according to Neelkanth, it logically follows that if history is not to judge
us (read Hindus/Indians) harshly, we must hold responsible all present-
day Hyderabadi Muslims for the Razakars’ actions and make them bear
the consequences for what the Razakars did more than sixty years ago.
To suggest the ineffaceability of the crimes perpetrated by Razakars,
Neelkanth quotes a Hyderabadi Muslim professor whom he does not
name: “The history of the Razakars is an indelible blot on the forehead of
Hyderabadi Muslims.” 52
The central contradiction in these statements is that although Neel-
kanth professes secular thoughts such as “Razakars have no religion,” he
also goes on to profess his adoration and uncritical approval for Patel and
his approach to the Indo-Hyderabad dispute, which culminated in India
invading Hyderabad. The many rapes and murders of Muslims that hap-
pened as a result of the invasion were actively hushed up by Patel and
other prominent figures such as Nehru.
In addition to this, what makes Neelkanth’s suggestive fearmongering
even more troubling is that there is ample evidence to suggest that there
is nothing spontaneous about communal riots in India; narrative con-
structions of Muslims, particularly Muslim men, as innately and sponta-
neously violent and dangerous contribute a great deal to the atmosphere
in which riots are prone to occur. Indeed, these narratives have become
part of the elaborate preparations that go into riots. Most major commu-
316 Nazia Akhtar

nal riots in the past thirty years exhibit this trend, 53 but we need only take
as an example the Gujarat riots of 2002, where official estimates suggest
that nine hundred people were killed, and unofficial assessments suggest
that this number may be anywhere between 2,000 and 5,000. 54 Sarkar
points out that the Gujarati press had invented the rape and murder of
eighty Hindu women traveling on the Sabarmati Express at Godhra rail-
way station. 55 Details such as the chopping off of women’s breasts, a
trope that goes back to the reality of Partition violence, were also fabricat-
ed. Sarkar points out that the falsity of such “news” was established by
the fact that even the Gujarat police, which was notorious for its involve-
ment in the violence, denied any such rape or murder of the women
traveling on the Sabarmati Express. 56 In spite of this, such narratives
created a situation where the impalement, disembowelment, rape, gang
rape, torture, burning alive, and burying alive of Muslim infants, chil-
dren, and women were considered justified. 57 The public acts of sadism
that constituted the violence in Gujarat were not only unprecedented, but
they were of such magnitude that Sarkar is forced to conclude that “we
have exceeded the achievements of Nazi terror, Bosnian atrocities, our
own partition violence—if not in scale or numbers, then in the intensity
of torture, the sheer opulence and exuberance in forms of cruelty.” 58
Furthermore, many scholars besides Sarkar, such as Paola Bacchetta,
Anja Kovacs, and Amrita Basu, have explained how, in addition to narra-
tives that precede or fan riots, Hindutva organizations school their ado-
lescent cadres, both boys and girls, in historical narratives of Muslim
tyranny and violence against Hindus and Hindu women. In such a vola-
tile situation, where narratives of historic wrongs, real or imagined, can
feed such terrible violence, Neelkanth’s tone in the preface to Razakar
appears more and more politically interested, ideologically motivated,
and terribly dangerous.
It is this careful construction of Partition narratives, such as Razakar
violence, that emerges with particular force when we scrutinize how
Neelkanth’s representation of Durga situates itself in terms of Hindutva
discourse. Kovacs and Sarkar believe that the position of Durga in Hindu
nationalism was firmly established with the canonical novel Anandamath
(1881–1882) by Bengali writer Bankimchandra Chattopadhyaya
(1838–1894). 59 It was with Anandamath that the two concepts “Hindu”
and “national” were united into one, singular, compelling icon of the
Mother goddess, which incorporates the avatar of Durga. 60 And it is this
interchangeability of “Hindu” and “national” (rashtriya) that RSS ideo-
logues such as M. S. Golwalkar considered central to their conception of
nation, nationality, and citizenship.
It is this nation Mother as Durga that is deployed as both inspiration
and role model by Hindu nationalist organizations, such as the RSS and
(to a greater extent) the Rashtriya Sevika Samiti (National Committee of
Women Volunteers; Samiti), both of whom construct Muslim men as
 Hyderabad, Partition, and Hindutva 317

inherently violent. Furthermore, “the violence ascribed to them can only

be expelled when the latter [Muslim men] are neutralised.” 61 In addition
to this, “Muslimness” (contained in Muslim men) is associated with the
collective memory of violence against Hindus, as well as the notion of
“justice,” which can and must be achieved through revenge. This collec-
tive memory is a cherry-picked narrative of reconstructed histories that
spans not only “Muslim invasions” but also centrally showcases the “viv-
isection” of Bharat Mata (Mother India) during Partition and the rapes of
Hindu women in this period. Bacchetta points out that “the ‘original’
violence is always essentialised, and out of it is extracted the notion of
‘Muslimness.’” 62 Each subsequent Hindu-Muslim conflict is constructed
in “a chain of substitution as metaphorically related to the so-called origi-
nal violence.” 63 This inflation is consistently present in Hindutva ideolo-
gy today and is compounded when sister affiliates of Hindutva organiza-
tions construct their feminine selves as dependent on the male Hindu
nationalist’s discursive construction of Muslim men as “demonic, threat-
ening, and in particular, threatening to Hindu women.” 64 In turn, Hindu
nationalist discourse depends on this construction of Hindu femininity,
which is “fabricated as essentially vulnerable” to attacks by Muslim
men. 65
The contribution of Bankim’s Durga-as-Motherland characterization
can be seen in the name, ideology, and operations of the Durga Vahini
(Durga’s Army), the women’s wing of the VHP. Founded, significantly,
in the aftermath of the enthusiastic participation of Hindu nationalist
women during the Babri Mosque demolition in 1992, this organization
aims to institutionally channel the energy of their many fifteen to thirty-
five-year-old “Durgas.” 66 While their declared intentions of providing
relief to young women in need and setting up centers to assist them
appear to be worthy causes, these are little more than active recruiting
strategies for the VHP’s violent political ideology. 67
Put differently, any claim to the appropriation of Durga as radical and
empowering for women in Hindu nationalist discourses or writings such
as Neelkanth’s “Durga” is completely undermined when we note the
material conditions of women in India today. Goddesses are the products
of the feminization of attributes such as righteousness, justice, wealth,
and learning, and do not represent any real, practically applicable status
of women. 68 So while India has many goddesses, the sex-ratio is alarm-
ingly unequal and points to other gender-related problems such as fe-
male feticide, female infanticide, lower life expectancy for girls and wom-
en, trafficking, domestic violence, and dowry deaths. In fact, the 2014
annual report of the National Crime Records Bureau notes that crime
against women increased in 2013 by no less than 26.7 percent when com-
pared to the number of crimes in 2012. 69 These figures throw into particu-
larly sharp relief any attempts to prove that the worship of goddesses is
connected to the real status of Indian women. Furthermore, the promo-
318 Nazia Akhtar

tion by organizations such as the Durga Vahini of the notion that the
veneration of goddesses corresponds to the high status that Hindu wom-
en are supposed to have enjoyed in the Vedic period has been effectively
refuted by scholars. 70
What is significant is that unlike the men’s organizations’ appropria-
tion of Durga as “an iconographic representation of the current or future
state of Bharat Mata meant primarily to arouse the nation’s virile sons,” 71
the goddess has agency and a wide spectrum of behaviors, ranging from
docile and domesticated to fierce and chaotic in the narratives of the
Samiti and the Durga Vahini. 72 However, many members maintain that
even though there is compassion and kindness in Durga’s nature, these
can be “no longer administered; in fact, it is explicitly argued that, in the
face of ‘evil’, it is important not to show compassion anymore.” 73 And it
is to protect the people whom the Hindutva right-wing deems “Hindu”
that their inner Durga emerges. It is in this context that we must read
Neelkanth’s narrative choice of gendering the attempted appropriation of
Sikhs into the Hindutva fold through the characterization of Balwinder as
Durga.
The way Neelkanth manipulates goddess narratives as well as Parti-
tion narratives in conjunction with one another is another Hindutva strat-
egy, similar to the assertion by the VHP’s Krishna Sharma that it was the
Muslim “lack of respect” for women that caused (Hindu) women to com-
mit suicide during Partition. The Samiti’s Asha Sharma also valorizes the
self-immolation of women during Partition riots as an instance of sati. 74
Indeed, gendered Partition violence is used again and again by Hindu
nationalist women to justify current violence against Muslims 75 and is
the most immediate referent for recent violence against Muslims. 76 In
this, then, Neelkanth is not alone, as he solders memories of Partition in
“Durga” onto his carefully crafted fear of the Muslim Other in the pref-
ace.
Furthermore, the always present external threat discourages any dis-
cussion on patriarchy within Hindu communities in the light of maintain-
ing “unity.” 77 In Neelkanth’s writing, it is the singularly defined image of
women as homemakers and caregivers that emerges as ideal and desir-
able to the Hindutva project. In this way, in Hindutva texts such as Neel-
kanth’s “Durga,” the powerful goddess is just a temporary avatar, to be
employed when women—not only Hindu, but also, through their at-
tempted appropriation, Sikh—are required to be violent and to be aban-
doned as soon as the Razakars have fled. This is why we are told that
after the Razakars run away, Balwinder holds on to the sword, alert for
any signs of the Razakars’ return; but as the other women weep, her eyes
also become moist and she too weeps. Her tears signify the ebbing away
of Balwinder’s fierce avatar as Durga as well as her assertive role as an
independent woman. Balwinder is back to being a woman, a fact which is
signified by the tears that she sheds out of relief that she has managed to
 Hyderabad, Partition, and Hindutva 319

avert certain catastrophe. In the words of one Samiti leader, “[t]he tender-
hearted woman becomes bold and aggressive, if time demands” 78 and
then returns to her “feminine” qualities when that time is past.
The myth of Durga as Mahishasuramardini is frequently used by these
Hindu nationalist women, such as those of the Vahini, to justify their role
in the devastating communal violence that occurred in Bombay in
1992–1993 and in Gujarat in 2002. 79 Flavia Agnes has shown how Shiv
Sena women, driven by a temporary shift in the Hindutva image of the
traditional, ideal woman to that of Durga as Mahishasuramardini, partici-
pated in and facilitated communal violence in Bombay. 80 In the riots of
1992, in which a thousand people died, 81 women mobilized by the Shiv
Sena slept on the streets to prevent army trucks and fire engines from
entering areas to put out fires or rescue Muslim hostages. 82 They also
blocked the arrests of several Shiv Sena leaders, looted stores, and at-
tacked Muslim women. 83 The sharpest indictment of their participation
in the post-demolition riots must come for the fact that they tore off other
women’s clothes to facilitate rape. 84 In connection with the horrific riots
in Gujarat in 2002, violence escalated dramatically in the Naroda Patiya
area of Ahmedabad when BJP MLA Maya Kodnani—a Sevika (Samiti
member) from a well-established family of RSS workers who were dis-
placed from Sindh during Partition—arrived on the scene. Ninety-seven
Muslim men, women, and children were killed in this massacre alone. 85
Kodnani was sentenced to twenty-eight years in jail in August 2012, but
was released on bail in July 2014.
Thus, Hindu nationalist women’s presence is not limited to their be-
ing symbolic figures. With an active leadership, hierarchical organiza-
tional structure, and constantly reiterated ideology, it is the women’s
organizations, which uphold Durga as an ideal, that have caused the
presence of Hindu nationalist women to develop and flourish at the
grassroots level both in India as well as many countries abroad. 86 These
Durgas, then, unlike the Durga imagined by Guru Gobind Singh, fight
for a misplaced sense of justice. Far from saving the world, they appro-
priate a powerful myth and threaten to destroy any semblance of India’s
secular, democratic fabric. And it is ultimately in the service of this ideol-
ogy that Neelkanth represents Balwinder Kaur as Durga. While his text
highlights the power of Durga to protect and defend the women of Jam-
panna Gate, the appropriated agency he accords to the Sikh woman be-
comes questionable in light of his Hindutva convictions, which, as I have
shown, are represented in his preface.
In light of this problematic representation of Durga in Hindutva texts,
ideology, and practice, we must take into account the crucial questions
Rajeswari Sunder Rajan asks about women’s agency and the way it is
understood and deployed, often uncritically, in questionable or uncon-
sidered ways and towards questionable and dangerous ends. 87 In high-
lighting these questions and underscoring a particularly interested repre-
320 Nazia Akhtar

sentation of a Sikh woman, I have demonstrated in this essay how the

representation of Partition narratives is complexly manipulated by writ-
ers such as Neelkanth, who effectively infuses his retrospective gaze with
shades of his divisive and patriarchal present-day Hindutva understand-
ing of nationhood, citizenship, and belonging. In elaborating upon these
points, I have outlined how narratives of Partition violence from Hydera-
bad are being used as the rationale for present-day militant Hindu na-
tionalism by Neelkanth, who betrays one of Hindutva’s most persistent
and pernicious practices: its relentless persecution of Muslims.

NOTES

1. P. Sundarayya, Telangana People’s Struggle and Its Lessons (Calcutta: Communist

Party of India [Marxist], 1972), 8.
2. Raj Bahadur Gour, “Hyderabad People’s Revolt Against Nizam’s Autocracy: A
Diary of the Struggle,” in Glorious Telengana Armed Struggle, by Raj Bahadur Gour et al.
(New Delhi: Communist Party of India, 1973), 66, 70; Wilfred Cantwell Smith, “Hyder-
abad: Muslim Tragedy,” in Hyderabad: After the Fall, ed. Omar Khalidi (Wichita: Hy-
derabad Historical Society, 1988), 19; K. M. Munshi, The End of an Era: Hyderabad
Memories (Bombay: Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1957), 1, 137.
3. Nizam’s Government, Hyderabad’s Relations with the Dominion of India (Hydera-
bad: Government Press, 1948), 1.
4. Ibid., 11.
5. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, “Hyderabad: Muslim Tragedy,” in Hyderabad: After the
Fall, ed. Omar Khalidi (Wichita: Hyderabad Historical Society, 1988), 20–1; P. Sunda-
rayya, Telangana People’s Struggle (Calcutta: Communist Party of India [Marxist], 1972),
9; Sunderlal Committee, “The Sunderlal Committee Report on the Massacre of Mus-
lims,” in The Destruction of Hyderabad, by A. G. Noorani (New Delhi: Tulika, 2013), 373.
6. Sunderlal Committee, “Sunderlal Committee Report,” 373.
7. However, Hyderabad city has seen a growing interest in retrieving this history,
as talks and seminars at various locations, such as the University of Hyderabad, the
English and Foreign Languages University [EFLU], and the Anveshi Research Centre
for Women’s Studies can attest.
8. Kishorilal Vyas, “Neelkanth,” Razakar (New Delhi: National Publishing House,
2005), 8–9. All translations are mine.
9. Zakia Pathak and Saswati Sengupta, “Resisting Women,” in Women and the
Hindu Right: A Collection of Essays, ed. Tanika Sarkar and Urvashi Butalia (New Delhi:
Kali for Women, 1995), 288.
10. Ibid.
11. Although this analysis is beyond the scope of this essay, the cultural and relig-
ious status of Durga as Mahishasuramardini (Slayer of Mahishasura) becomes very
problematic also when we remember the association of the demons or asuras with
Dalit and adivasi communities. See Jotiba Phule’s seminal text Slavery (1873) for a
dismantling of Brahminical sacred texts from the standpoint of the asuras.
12. Nikky-Guninder Kaur Singh, The Feminine Principle in the Sikh Vision of the
Transcendent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 127; Nidar Singh Ni-
hang and Parmjit Singh, In the Master’s Presence: The Sikhs of Hazoor Sahib, Vol. I (Lon-
don: Kashi House, 2008), 198.
13. Nikky-Guninder Singh, The Feminine Principle in the Sikh Vision of the Transcen-
dent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 127.
14. Ibid., 128–29.
15. Ibid., 123, and Nidar Singh Nihang and Parmjit Singh, In the Master’s Presence:
The Sikhs of Hazoor Sahib, Vol. I (London: Kashi House, 2008), 122.
 Hyderabad, Partition, and Hindutva 321

16. Another obvious connection—that Neelkanth does not recognize—between Hy-

derabad, Sikhs, and Durga is that of the position of honor given to Durga as Chandi or
Kali and the worship of weapons at Takht Sachkhand Shri Hazoor Abchalnagar Sahib,
the gurudwara complex at Nanded (present-day Maharashtra; erstwhile Hyderabad
state) built to commemorate the spot where Guru Gobind Singh breathed his last in
1708. For more, see Nidar Singh Nihang and Parmjit Singh’s In the Master’s Presence:
The Sikhs of Hazoor Sahib, Vol. I (London: Kashi House, 2008).
17. Christine Moliner, “The Boa and Its Petty Enemy: Contemporary Relationships
between Hindu Nationalists and the Sikhs,” in Cultural Entrenchment of Hindutva: Local
Mediations and Forms of Convergence, ed. Daniela Berti et al. (London: Routledge, 2011),
312; see also [Link], ed. Ratinder Singh and Navjot Singh, accessed July 23, 2015,
[Link]
18. Christine Moliner, “The Boa and Its Petty Enemy: Contemporary Relationships
between Hindu Nationalists and the Sikhs,” in Cultural Entrenchment of Hindutva: Local
Mediations and Forms of Convergence, ed. Daniela Berti et al. (London: Routledge, 2011),
307; cf. V. D. Savarkar, Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu? (New Delhi: Hindi Sahitya Sadan,
1923/2003), 39, 41, 54–55, 108; M. S. Golwalkar, Bunch of Thoughts (Bangalore: Vikrama
Prakashan, 1968), 67, 105; Tapan Basu et al., Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags: A Critique of
the Hindu Right (Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1993), 4.
19. Christine Moliner, “The Boa and Its Petty Enemy: Contemporary Relationships
between Hindu Nationalists and the Sikhs,” in Cultural Entrenchment of Hindutva: Local
Mediations and Forms of Convergence, ed. Daniela Berti et al. (London: Routledge, 2011),
313–14.
20. Veena Das, Critical Events: An Anthropological Perspective on Contemporary India
(New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1995), 118–22. This martial self-representation of
Sikhs and its manipulation in Hindutva ideology is connected not only to the military
history of Sikhism or Sikh militants’ discourse in the 1980s (see Das, Critical Events,
121–34) but also eventually to the post-1858 definition of Sikhs by the British as one of
the “martial races” of the country. See A. H. Bingley’s Sikhs (Patiala: Department of
Languages, 1899/1970) and Lieutenant-General George MacMunn’s The Martial Races
of India (London: S. Low, Marston and Co., 1933).
21. Jyoti Grewal, Betrayed by the State: The Anti-Sikh Pogrom of 1984 (New Delhi:
Penguin, 2007), 2.
22. Jarnail Singh, I Accuse: The Anti-Sikh Violence of 1984 (Viking: New Delhi, 2009),
30.
23. Christine Moliner, “The Boa and Its Petty Enemy: Contemporary Relationships
between Hindu Nationalists and the Sikhs,” in Cultural Entrenchment of Hindutva: Local
Mediations and Forms of Convergence, ed. Daniela Berti et al. (London: Routledge, 2011),
308.
24. Ibid., 317–18; Sarabjit Pandher, “RSS Enlisting Activists in Rural Punjab,” The
Hindu, June 14, 2000, [Link] (ac-
cessed July 28, 2015). See Moliner’s essay also to understand how the Sangat distorts
Sikh scriptures and cultural heritage as well as how individual and secular and relig-
ious organizations resist these activities. Besides the voices highlighted by Moliner,
there are citizens’ groups who have joined together to reconstruct pre-Partition cross-
community bonds between Sikhs, Hindus, and Muslims in Punjab. For example, rural
Sikhs and Hindus have recently “repaired, rebuilt or built from scratch” two hundred
mosques across Punjab that were damaged during Partition (Chander Suta Dogra,
“Shades of the Old Punjab,” [Link], August 20, 2012, http://
[Link]/article/shades-of-the-old-punjab/265962 (Accessed July 27,
2015). These ongoing efforts to rebuild communities rent asunder by Partition are
steps towards jointly getting over the trauma of Partition and focusing on reconstruct-
ing crumbling pre-Partition communities, interactions, and alliances.
25. Sarabjit Pandher, “RSS Enlisting Activists in Rural Punjab,” The Hindu, June 14,
2000, [Link] (accessed July 28,
2015).
322 Nazia Akhtar

26. Quoted in Pandher, “RSS.”

27. Christine Moliner, “The Boa and Its Petty Enemy: Contemporary Relationships
between Hindu Nationalists and the Sikhs,” in Cultural Entrenchment of Hindutva: Local
Mediations and Forms of Convergence, ed. Daniela Berti et al. (London: Routledge, 2011),
315.
28. See Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India
(New Durham: Duke University Press, 1998/2000), 153–71, and Ritu Menon and Kam-
la Bhasin, Borders and Boundaries: Women in India’s Partition (Delhi: Kali for Women,
1998), 45–60.
29. And there are other examples of this attempted mobilization through narratives
in Neelkanth’s “novel”: the idea that Sikhs are the sword arm of Hindus is empha-
sized; an old Hindu practice of dedicating the eldest son of each family to Sikhism is
sought to be revived so that each Hindu family has a Sikh bodyguard, as it were (128);
and Hindus are criticized for not learning “the language of the ‘sword’” from the Sikhs
(134).
30. Kishorilal Vyas Neelkanth. Razakar (New Delhi: National Publishing House,
2005), 8.
31. Nidar Singh Nihang and Parmjit Singh, In the Master’s Presence: The Sikhs of
Hazoor Sahib, Vol. I (London: Kashi House, 2008), 24, 27, 35–36; cf. 36–42.
32. Nikky-Guninder Singh, The Feminine Principle in the Sikh Vision of the Transcen-
dent (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 143.
33. Ibid., 146.
34. Ibid., 147.
35. Ibid., 147–48.
36. Kishorilal Vyas Neelkanth. Razakar (New Delhi: National Publishing House,
2005), xii.
37. This is in general connected to the question of the loyalty of Indian Muslims,
whose faith is considered “alien” because it was born outside the territorial boundar-
ies of the nation. For more on this point, see V. D. Savarkar, Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu?
(New Delhi: Hindi Sahitya Sadan, 1923/2003), 39, 41, 54–55, 108; M. S. Golwalkar,
Bunch of Thoughts (Bangalore: Vikrama Prakashan, 1968), 127, 133, 321. See also Gya-
nendra Pandey’s critique of Savarkar and his notion of nation as a territorial entity in
his “Which of us are Hindus?” in Hindus and Others: The Question of Identity in India
Today,” ed. Gyanendra Pandey (New Delhi: Viking, 1993), 252.
38. Kishorilal Vyas Neelkanth. Razakar, ( New Delhi: National Publishing House,
2005), xii–xiii.
39. Ibid., xiii.
40. Ibid.
41. Tapan Basu et al., Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags: A Critique of the Hindu Right
(Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1993), 113.
42. Kishorilal Vyas Neelkanth. Razakar (New Delhi: National Publishing House,
2005), dedication page.
43. This is also why the BJP has puppet Muslim politicians as well as a Minority
Morcha (Minority Front), which gestures towards Hindutva as “expansionist and
adaptable,” “(selectively) incorporative of various ‘progressive’ elements in the politi-
cal interests of enlarging its appeal to women, lower castes and, even, other minority
communities” (Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, “Is the Hindu Goddess a Feminist?” Economic
and Political Weekly 33.44 [1998]: 38, [Link] [Accessed July
30, 2015]).
44. V. D. Savarkar, Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu? (New Delhi: Hindi Sahitya Sadan,
1923/2003113, 139; M. S. Golwalkar, Bunch of Thoughts (Bangalore: Vikrama Prakashan,
1968), 127, 133, 321.
45. Sakshi TV, BJP Paid Grand Tribute Journalist Shoaibullah Khan, YouTube video,
00:33, August 21, 2012, [Link]
46. Anjali Gera Roy and Nandi Bhatia, eds., Partitioned Lives: Narratives of Home,
Displacement, and Resettlement (New Delhi: Dorling Kindersley, 2008), xiv.
 Hyderabad, Partition, and Hindutva 323

47. Kishorilal Vyas Neelkanth. Razakar (New Delhi: National Publishing House,
2005), xiii.
48. Tapan Basu et al., Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags: A Critique of the Hindu Right
(Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1993), 37; cf. “UP Government Appeasing Minorities:
BJP,” Outlook India, accessed September 15, 2012, URL not available.
49. Kishorilal Vyas Neelkanth. Razakar (New Delhi: National Publishing House,
2005), xiii–xiv.
50. Indeed, with the exception of Inayat Khan, an elderly clerk who is kind to the
lonely Rama, there is not a single Muslim in “Durga” who is not a Razakar. And
nothing more is said about Inayat Khan; he does not influence the action or the plot.
This feature separates Neelkanth’s “Durga” from other examples of Partition litera-
ture. In fact, the exclusive Hinduness of the locality that Neelkanth celebrates as a
“little India” is carefully constructed through sacred symbols that require no explana-
tion for Hindu readers. Thus (in agreement with Benedict Anderson), the Hindu na-
tion, which is still not realized in truth, is imagined in and through reading. The
contribution of the peculiar genre ambiguity of “Durga” to this literary imagining lies
in the fact that it represents the idyllic nation in a compact form devoid of internal
complications or contradictions. In the space of a few pages, Neelkanth creates a
microcosm of the Hindu nation whose blissful sense of community is only threatened
by the outsider; this, predictably, is “the Muslim.”
51. Tanika Sarkar, “Semiotics of Terror: Muslim Children and Women in Hindu
Rashtra,” Economic and Political Weekly 47.44 (2002): 2874, [Link]
tary/[Link] (Accessed July 27, 2015).
52. Kishorilal Vyas Neelkanth. Razakar (New Delhi: National Publishing House,
2005), xii, emphasis mine. By not naming this source, Neelkanth makes it impossible
for his readers to verify the information that he gives to them.
53. Tapan Basu et al., Khaki Shorts and Saffron Flags: A Critique of the Hindu Right
(Hyderabad: Orient Longman, 1993), 102–6; S. Anitha et al., “Interviews with Wom-
en,” in Women and the Hindu Right, 332.
54. People’s Union for Democratic Rights, ‘Maaro! Kaapo! Baalo!’ State, Society, and
Communalism in Gujarat (Delhi, 2002), [Link]
maro_kapo_balo.pdf (Accessed July 26, 2015).
55. Tanika Sarkar, “Semiotics of Terror: Muslim Children and Women in Hindu
Rashtra,” Economic and Political Weekly 47.44 (2002): 2875.
56. Ibid.
57. Ibid. Living in Gujarat in 2002, I found very significant the repeated bi-weekly
telecast in March of the film Gadar: Ek Prem Katha (Mutiny: A Love Story; 2001), which
is marked by its virulent anti-Pakistani and by extension anti-Muslim hate speech.
That a film based on Partition, representing Muslim men in an unredeemable light,
was shown repeatedly during the Gujarat violence is a chilling reminder of two things:
the timely use of Partition narratives by Hindutva groups to justify violence against
Muslims and the elaborate methods of dissemination of Hindutva propaganda against
Muslims during the 2002 pogrom.
58. Ibid., 2872.
59. Anandamath marks the birth of a new Hindu goddess who was equated with the
Hindu nation (see Tanika Sarkar, “Birth of a Goddess: ‘Vande Mataram’, ‘Ananda-
math’, and Hindu Nationhood,” Economic and Political Weekly 41.37 (2006), 3959, http://
[Link]/special-articles/[Link] (Accessed July 22, 2015) and in
whom “both Hindu and Nation were imagined through acts of opposition against the
Muslim” (ibid., 3969). The narrative constructs Durga as “the mother as she would be”
(Bankimchandra Chatterjee, The Abbey of Bliss [Anandamath], trans. Nares Chandra
Sen-Gupta (Calcutta: Padmini Mohan Neogi, 1881-2/undated), 41) when all her devo-
tees, her children, worship her by killing all Muslims in India, who are held respon-
sible (through the same narrative blurring that Neelkanth too employs) for the tyran-
ny of certain Muslim rulers.
324 Nazia Akhtar

60. Tanika Sarkar, “Birth of a Goddess, ‘Vande Mataram,’ ‘Anandamath,’ and Hin-
du Nationhood,” Economic and Political Weekly 41.37 (2006), 3959, [Link]
special-articles/[Link] (Accessed July 22, 2015), 3969.
61. Paola Bacchetta, “‘All Our Goddesses are Armed’: Religion, Resistance and Re-
venge in the Life of a Militant Hindu Nationalist Woman,” in Against All Odds: Essays
on Women, Religion and Development from India and Pakistan, ed. Kamla Bhasin et al.
(New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1994), 149.
62. Ibid.
63. Ibid.
64. Ibid., 134.
65. Ibid., 148.
66. Anja Kovacs, “You Don’t Understand, We Are at War! Refashioning Durga in
the Service of Hindu Nationalism,” Contemporary South Asia 13.4 (2004): 376, http://
[Link]/doi/abs/10.1080/09584930500070597#.VbpTL_mqqko; (Ac-
cessed July 22, 2015) cf. Vishva Hindu Parishad, “Durga Vahini,” Vishva Hindu Pari-
shad, 2010, [Link] (Accessed June 23, 2015).
67. See, for example, S. Anitha et al., “Interviews with Women.” In Women and the
Hindu Right: A Collection of Essays, edited by Tanika Sarkar and Urvashi Butalia (New
Delhi: Kali for Women, 1995): 329–35 for the VHP women activists’ deeply problemat-
ic patriarchal positions on arranged marriage, domestic violence, and divorce. Indeed,
the sister organizations of the BJP, the RSS, and the VHP intensively promote the
wifely and maternal ideal espoused by sacred Vedic texts. These positions validate
Rajan’s point that the recuperation of radical goddesses such as Durga by Hindutva
organizations (or writers such as Neelkanth) becomes problematic when we take into
account two things: the way this radicalism is invoked, evoked, and deployed (against
the interests of Muslim women) (Rajeswari Sunder Rajan. “Is the Hindu Goddess a
Feminist?” Economic and Political Weekly 33.44 (1998): 34–38. [Link]
stable/4407322 (Accessed July 30, 2015). 34), and the fact that the prominence of god-
desses in India does not necessarily represent the material and historical conditions in
which the goddesses are worshipped (ibid., 35; Zakia Pathak and Saswati Sengupta.
“Resisting Women,” in Women and the Hindu Right: A Collection of Essays, edited by
Tanika Sarkar and Urvashi Butalia, (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1995), 287.
68. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan. “Is the Hindu Goddess a Feminist?” Economic and Polit-
ical Weekly 33.44 (1998): 35 [Link] (Accessed July 30,
2015).
69. This rise remains worrying even after we make allowances for the increased
reporting of crimes against women since the terrible Delhi bus gang rape of December
16, 2012. National Crime Records Bureau, Crime in India: 2013, 79 (see also 79–88),
[Link] (Accessed July 25, 2015).
70. See Kumkum Roy, “‘Where Women Are Worshipped There the Gods Rejoice’:
The Mirage of the Ancestress of the Hindu Woman,” in Women and the Hindu Right: A
Collection of Essays, edited by Tanika Sarkar and Urvashi Butalia (New Delhi: Kali for
Women, 1995), 10–28 and Uma Chakravarti, “Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi?
Orientalism, Nationalism and a Script for the Past,” in Recasting Women: Essays in
Colonial History, ed. Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (New Delhi: Kali for Women,
1989), 27–88.
71. Anja Kovacs, “You Don’t Understand, We Are at War! Refashioning Durga in
the Service of Hindu Nationalism,” Contemporary South Asia 13.4 (2004): 376, http://
[Link]/doi/abs/10.1080/09584930500070597#.VbpTL_mqqko; (Ac-
cessed July 22, 2015) 377.
72. Ibid., 376; Paola Bacchetta, “All Our Goddesses Are Armed’: Religion, Resis-
tance and Revenge in the Life of a Militant Hindu Nationalist Woman,” in Against All
Odds: Essays on Women, Religion and Development from India and Pakistan, edited by
Kamla Bhasin, Ritu Menon, and Nighat Said Khan (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1994),
136.
 Hyderabad, Partition, and Hindutva 325

73. Anja Kovacs, “You Don’t Understand, We Are at War! Refashioning Durga in
the Service of Hindu Nationalism,” Contemporary South Asia 13.4 (2004): 376, http://
[Link]/doi/abs/10.1080/09584930500070597#.VbpTL_mqqko (Accessed
July 22, 2015).
74. Anitha et al., “Interviews with Women,” in Women and the Hindu Right: A Collec-
tion of Essays, edited by Tanika Sarkar and Urvashi Butalia (New Delhi: Kali for Wom-
en, 1995), 331.
75. Paola Bacchetta, “‘All Our Goddesses are Armed’: Religion, Resistance and Re-
venge in the Life of a Militant Hindu Nationalist Woman.” In Against All Odds: Essays
on Women, Religion and Development from India and Pakistan, edited by Kamla Bhasin,
Ritu Menon, and Nighat Said Khan (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1994), 150.
76. Ibid., Gender in the Hindu Nation: RSS Women as Ideologues (New Delhi: Women
Unlimited, 2004), 6.
77. Kumkum Roy, “‘Where Women Are Worshipped, There the Gods Rejoice’: The
Mirage of the Ancestress of the Hindu Woman.” In Women and the Hindu Right: A
Collection of Essays, edited by Tanika Sarkar and Urvashi Butalia (New Delhi: Kali for
Women, 1995), 12.
78. Quoted in Kovacs, Anja Kovacs, “You don’t Understand, We are at War! Refash-
ioning Durga in the Service of Hindu Nationalism,” Contemporary South Asia 13.4
(2004): 376, [Link]
_mqqko (Accessed July 22, 2015), 376.
79. Ibid., 374.
80. See Flavia Agnes, “Redefining the Agenda of the Women’s Movement within a
Secular Framework,” in Women and the Hindu Right: A Collection of Essays, edited by
Tanika Sarkar and Urvashi Butalia (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1995), 150. The same
expedient shift can also be seen among the RSS. For more on this aspect, see Amrita
Basu, “Feminism Inverted: The Gendered Imagery and Real Women of Hindu Nation-
alism,” in Women and the Hindu Right: A Collection of Essays, edited by Tanika Sarkar
and Urvashi Butalia (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1995), 158–80.
81. Sikata Banerjee, “Hindu Nationalism and the Construction of Woman: The Shiv
Sena Organises Women in Bombay,” in Women and the Hindu Right: A Collection of
Essays, edited by Tanika Sarkar and Urvashi Butalia (New Delhi: Kali for Women,
1995), 218.
82. Ibid., 216; and Flavia Agnes, “Redefining the Agenda of the Women’s Move-
ment within a Secular Framework,” in Women and the Hindu Right: A Collection of
Essays, edited by Tanika Sarkar and Urvashi Butalia (New Delhi: Kali for Women,
1995), 150.
83. Ibid.
84. Gabriele Dietrich, “Women and Religious Identities in India after Ayodhya,”
Against All Odds: Essays on Women, Religion and Development from India and Pakistan,
edited by Kamla Bhasin, Ritu Menon, and Nighat Said Khan (New Delhi: Kali for
Women, 1994), 42.
85. Rohit Bhan, “Naroda Patiya Riots: Former Minister Maya Kodnani Gets 28
Years in Jail,” NDTV, August 31, 2012, accessed July 21, 2015, [Link]
cheat-sheet/naroda-patiya-riots-former-minister-maya-kodnani-gets-28-years-in-jail-
498254; “Gujarat Riots: BJP’s Maya Kodnani Jailed for 28 Years,” BBC [Link],
August 31, 2012, [Link] (Accessed July
21, 2015).
86. Amrita Basu, “Women’s Activism and the Vicissitudes of Hindu Nationalism,”
Journal of Women’s History 10, 4 (1999): 105, [Link]
mary/v010/[Link] (Accessed July 21,2015); Anja Kovacs, “You Don’t Under-
stand, We Are at War! Refashioning Durga in the Service of Hindu Nationalism,”
Contemporary South Asia 13.4 (2004): 376, [Link]
09584930500070597#.VbpTL_mqqko (Accessed July 22, 2015) 381; Paola Bacchetta, “All
Our Goddesses Are Armed’: Religion, Resistance and Revenge in the Life of a Militant
Hindu Nationalist Woman,” in Against All Odds: Essays on Women, Religion and Devel-
326 Nazia Akhtar

opment from India and Pakistan, edited by Kamla Bhasin, Ritu Menon, and Nighat Said
Khan (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1994), 135.
87. Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, “Is the Hindu Goddess a Feminist?” Economic and Polit-
ical Weekly 33.44 (1998): 34–38. [Link] (Accessed July 30,
2015).

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 NINETEEN
Partition’s Others
The View from South India

Nalini Iyer

It is commonplace in both everyday conversations as well as in Partition

scholarship for people to note that Southern India was untouched by
Partition violence. For example, J. N. Dixit and Gyanendra Pandey 1 in
their books make this observation, and this notion is also at the heart of
Balachandra Rajan’s novel The Dark Dancer. 2 At the same time, recent
Partition studies (Pandey, Butalia, Daiya, Sarkar) have underscored how
that experience of violence and upheaval have been central to the forma-
tion of an Indian sense of citizenship and belonging. For example, in
Violent Belongings: Partition, Gender, and National Culture in Postcolonial
India, Kavita Daiya argues that Partition has shaped the discourse of
citizenship and belonging in South Asia and its diaspora since 1947. She
writes, “The Partition constitutes a field of transformation and a dis-
course that became the condition of possibility for the gendered ethni-
cization of citizenship and belonging in postcolonial South Asia.” 3 Vazira
Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar has noted in her study, The Long Partition, that
the dislocation of peoples and the “making of refugees as a governmental
category . . . that new nations and the borders between them were
made.” 4 Daiya’s and Zamindar’s studies and those of others who have
explored the impact of Partition generate some important questions: if
Southern India did not experience Partition violence directly, then how
does the discourse of Partition shape citizenship and belonging for those
in Southern India? If Partition is not the major constituent of national
identity in South India, then how is nation imagined by people in the

329
330 Nalini Iyer

South. I propose that it is necessary to interrogate the assumption that

South India was unaffected by Partition violence, and that the assump-
tions about citizenship and Partition distinguish between those who were
directly impacted by the violence and those who witnessed the events at
a distance through newspaper reports and stories that circulated in the
communities. This essay argues that writers from Southern India—R. K.
Narayan, Lalithambika Antherjanam, and Balachandra Rajan—write
about Partition from the perspective of those who witnessed the violence
and the upheaval indirectly and at a distance. Their Partition fiction of-
fers an empathetic understanding of the suffering of those in the Punjab
and Bengal. They also propose a different understanding of nation, mi-
nority rights, and belonging in the South where questions of caste and
language were more urgent political concerns than Partition and its ac-
companying turmoil. In engaging the Partition experience, these novel-
ists attempt to articulate an imagined nation that is more secular while
also accounting for distinctly regional perceptions, and at the same time,
they express anxiety about the loss of the secular ideal because of the
communal violence of Partition.
We must first interrogate this assumption that Partition made no im-
pact on the South because Hyderabad, a princely state ruled by the Mus-
lim Nizam, saw “police action” in September 1948 when the Indian state
hearing of reprisals from Muslim militants (Razakars) against Hindus
invaded Hyderabad. 5 The Nizam’s forces were defeated and Hyderabad
was incorporated into India. After hearing about possible mass murder
and rape of Muslims, Nehru sent a multi-faith investigative group
headed by Pandit Sunderlal, a Congress Party leader. Sunderlal’s report
noted that the Indian army and local police had colluded in rural areas of
Hyderabad State to commit mass murders and other atrocities. Sunder-
lal’s report concluded that somewhere between 27,000 and 40,000 people
died. This report was not published and these details remain quite un-
known to most Indians. Thus, there persists the assumption that the
South was untouched by Partition. 6
So, it would be more accurate to state that Hyderabad’s experience
with Partition was not recognized as such because the Indian state saw
this as “police action” against a recalcitrant Nawab. Since the Indian state
was reeling from the events of 1947, there was a focused attempt to man-
age reportage of communal violence to prevent sparking another ethnic
conflagration. 7
A second example of the South’s encounter with Partition was the
place of Sindhi refugees, 8 many of whom resettled in cities like Hydera-
bad, Bangalore, and Chennai and established businesses, community
centers, and religious shrines in these cities. The experiences of Sindhis
with dislocation and adaptation have become part of the culture of the
South especially in the cities. 9 Although Sindhis have made significant
economic contributions and have adapted in their new locations, they are
 Partition’s Others 331

identified as North Indians and thus perpetually viewed as foreign in the

South. It is this foreignness rather than the stories of their displacement
during Partition that shape perceptions of Sindhis in the South.
A third point to note is that while Partition violence and dislocation
are a significant part of the discourse of Muslim communities across
India, Muslims in Kerala, the Mapillas, were relatively unaffected by the
Partition violence. In Remembering Partition, Gyanendra Pandey writes,
“In many parts of the new domains of India and Pakistan, being a Sikh or
a Hindu (on one side) or a Muslim (on the other) had become virtually
synonymous with being a refugee and a foreign national. . . . The Meos of
Mewat, the Moumins of UP and Bihar, the Mapillas of Malabar—all be-
came simply Muslims and, for a while, nothing else.” 10 Although specific
regional Muslim identities were erased post-Partition in India, Yoginder
Sikand 11 writes that few Kerala Muslims migrated to Pakistan during
Partition, and he attributes this to a different historical and social model
for Muslims in Kerala. Although the Mapillas participated in the Khilafat
movement and there was violence against Hindus in 1921 during what is
referred to as the “Mapillah/Moplah Rebellion,” Partition did not have an
impact on Kerala Muslims in terms of national identity and citizenship in
the same way that it did for Muslims in Punjab or Bengal. The preceding
examples of Hyderabad, of Sindhi immigrants, and of Mapillas demon-
strate that because of the scale and horror of the violence in the north-
western and northeastern borders of India, the discourse of Partition has
overlooked the impact of Partition on people in the South. Yet, writers in
the South were acutely aware of the political upheaval of Partition and
used their fiction to express empathy, to condemn violence, and to inter-
rogate the impact of Partition on discourses of citizenship and belonging.
To further the discussion of Partition experiences and the South, this
essay examines three different works: R. K. Narayan’s Waiting for the
Mahatma, Lalithambika Antherjanam’s short story “A Leaf in the Whirl-
wind,” and Balachandra Rajan’s novel The Dark Dancer. 12 These writers,
all of whom were Hindus, produced works which demonstrate that Parti-
tion did have a profound impact on people in the South as they conceptu-
alized citizenship and belonging in a newly emergent nation. Their re-
sponses ranged from empathy with the victims to horror at the events
and extended into a larger analysis of what it meant to be Partition’s
Other. These writers recognized the impossibilities of a homogeneous
Indian citizenship and articulated that while there were religious com-
monalities among people across India, the differences of language, geog-
raphy, gender, and culture raised the specter of recurring violence. At the
same time, each writer also articulates a vision for a secular nation that
would overcome the sectarian violence of Partition and also account for
the regional concerns of the South. In the following pages, I explore the
writings of R. K. Narayan, Lalithambika Antherjanam, and Balachandra
Rajan to examine how each author narrates the darkness of Partition and
332 Nalini Iyer

the resulting anxieties for those who were assumed to be untouched by

Partition.
Published in 1955, Narayan’s Waiting for the Mahatma focuses on the
political awakening of a young man, Sriram, from Malgudi, Narayan’s
fictional small town in Southern India. Sriram is politically naïve and
quite immature when he meets Bharati, a young Tamil woman, totally
dedicated to Gandhi and his cause. Gandhi’s nationalism and his impact
on Sriram are profound and Sriram’s primary motivation in following
Gandhi is to win Bharati’s hand in marriage. Apart from the obvious
symbolic nature of “Bharati” as the young, emergent, India, the novel
also notes that Gandhi and his message were not particularly welcomed
in Malgudi. Chief among Gandhi’s critics is Sriram’s grandmother, who
finds Gandhi’s focus on eradicating untouchablity quite challenging as it
threatens her way of life. While Granny can be easily read as representing
the last bastion of caste priorities, through her concerns Narayan articu-
lates a central tension in Tamil Nadu politics at this time between the
Indian National Congress and the Justice Party of E. V. R. Periyar. 13 For
Tamil people, the concerns about emerging nationalism and minority
representation hinged on caste representation and also resistance to what
is seen as the hegemony of North Indian (Aryan) culture on South Indian
Dravidian culture. This caste- and region-based resistance to the Con-
gress party and its politics has influenced electoral politics in Tamil Nadu
since the 1920s. 14 Hence Sriram’s growth into an awareness of nationalist
and Gandhian politics is framed against the backdrop of this regional
political debate. During the Quit India movement, Sriram ends up in jail
and is labeled a common criminal instead of a political prisoner. Conse-
quently, he does not get released from prison until after independence
has arrived. As a prisoner, the naïve Sriram is even less informed of the
happenings in the world beyond the jail and his town. When he is re-
leased, he seeks out Bharati and Gandhi and upon her invitation travels
to New Delhi in January 1948.
It is in this final section of the novel that Narayan addresses Partition.
Sriram is traveling from Madras to New Delhi on the Grand Trunk Ex-
press and, as is common in a lot of Partition narratives, the train becomes
the site of sharply articulating communal identity framed by fear and the
need to survive. During the journey, Sriram finds himself alienated from
the culture as the train travels North. Narayan presents this as Sriram’s
inability to speak Hindi and to be understood by anyone outside of South
India. In the middle of the journey, two men board Sriram’s compartment
and ask him a question. He does not understand them and responds in a
mix of Tamil and English to their query. The men are menacing and step
forward in a threatening way, and suddenly one of them pulls Sriram’s
earlobe and notices the piercings done to many Brahmin male children at
the time. Using the piercing to identify Sriram as a Hindu, the men leave
him alone. 15 Only after they have left does Sriram piece together that his
 Partition’s Others 333

experience is linked to that of others who had been similarly subjected to

proving their religious identity on trains. Partition stories also consistent-
ly demonstrate that men were made to drop their clothing and reveal if
they were circumcised to confirm their religious identity, so Sriram’s
earlobe piercing experience is anomalous and perhaps reveals a certain
coyness on sexual and bodily depictions for Narayan. When Sriram ar-
rives in New Delhi, he is greeted by a worn out and distraught Bharati.
As she takes him to her home with Gandhi at a refugee camp, they are
greeted by children who call her mother, and she tells Sriram that these
children had become orphans in the Partition riots. She informs him of
Gandhi’s deep grief at the rioting, his work in Calcutta among riot vic-
tims as Independence arrives, and his concern over the plight of women
who were abducted or raped:
I have seen with my own eyes aggressive rowdy-looking men taking a
vow of non-violence and a vow to protect the opposite faction—don’t
ask what community they were: what one community did in one part
of the country brought suffering on the same community in another
part of the country. . . . It’s no use discussing whether this community
committed greater horrors or the other one. 16
She tells him that Gandhi has forbidden references to religion and has
renamed the children with religiously neutral names. Sriram is quite
overwhelmed by her narrative and is clearly unaware of the scale of
violence. He is horrified when Bharati notes that in accordance with Ma-
hatma’s wishes, she was willing to commit suicide should she have be-
come a potential victim of sexual violence while working in the riot-torn
areas.
While Narayan uses this exchange to present the horrors of Partition,
it is clear that people from the South varied vastly in their understanding
of the political situation. Whereas many like Sriram received their infor-
mation secondhand, there were a few like Bharati who were actively
involved in mitigating the situation. As a new national sensibility
emerges, the novel makes clear that there is a chasm between the South
and New Delhi. Gandhi’s assassination at the end of the novel empha-
sizes the ambiguity. Narayan’s narration of the Partition in this final
section of the novel is less interested in examining the violence or the
psychological and social impact on those who were dislocated, attacked,
or lost their kin. The two men on the train remain nameless menaces, and
the orphans make a cameo appearance to allow Bharati to continue to
educate Sriram on Gandhian ideals. Narayan does recognize that a bewil-
dered Sriram who has no ability to communicate in Hindi will remain a
perpetual outsider in the mainstream nationalist discourse. Although the
ending is ambiguous, the novel which was published just as the language
issues were heating up in the South underscores that a large part of the
country would always be understood as needing tutoring on nationalism,
334 Nalini Iyer

citizenship, and identity. The novel expresses deep cynicism about Gand-
hian nationalism and the possibility for a secular national vision to thrive.
Although Sriram and Bharati presumably marry and raise the orphans
and continue Gandhi’s work, the novel’s ending underscores the fragility
of the new secular nation and seems to suggest that for the people of the
South, there is no possibility of shaping the narrative of nation, just an
unquestioning capitulation to its dominance.
Lalithambika Antherjanam (1909–1985) presents a very different re-
sponse to Partition. As a fiction writer and an essayist, she has written
extensively about women, gender, and caste before and after Indian inde-
pendence with a particular emphasis on the Namboodiri community in
Kerala. Although her early writing was focused primarily on the issues
facing Namboodiri women such as seclusion, child marriage, property
rights, and motherhood, she also wrote about national issues. Her story
“A Leaf in the Whirlwind” (1948) is one of the first to address Partition
from the perspective of a South Indian who was witnessing the events
that were occurring along the Indian border with Pakistan. She lived far
away from these borders and heard of the events through newspaper and
radio reports as the newly formed nation was grappling with political
independence and the accompanying bloodshed of Partition. In her essay
“A Woman Writer’s Reply,” she explains that the Punjabi woman, Jyoti,
the protagonist of “A Leaf in the Whirlwind” is one of her favorites
because she is drawn completely from the imagination. I had not visit-
ed Punjab when I wrote the story, nor had I met any refugees. I read in
the newspaper one day that a certain number of women who had been
raped would be handed over at the border in exchange for the same
number from the other side. When I went to bed that night, I thought of
this bit of news and the identity of one of the women refugees who had
endured such unimaginable sorrow took shape in my mind. I got up at
once and wrote the story. The image of this girl, who reflects the dis-
tress of one caught in a terrible dilemma of womanhood, is very dear to
me, for it was my imagination that created her. 17
Antherjanam’s imaginative recreation of the Partition experiences of a
Punjabi woman precedes the work of feminist scholars of the 1980s who
began rethinking Partition history from women’s perspectives.
She writes of Jyoti, a woman in a refugee camp in the Punjab border,
who had been raped and then exchanged along with other women as
part of a state-sponsored effort to repatriate rape victims of Partition.
Jyoti is brought to a refugee camp on the Indian side of Punjab where she
is surrounded by women who have all endured unspeakable horrors and
loss. Each woman copes with her traumas differently. Jyoti is neither
silent nor passive. Her name, which means “light,” suggests symbolically
the character’s agency despite the attempts of the state and social work-
ers to commandeer her body after its violation. As the exchange occurs,
 Partition’s Others 335

Jyoti angrily asks, “Are you taking us from one prison to another,
then?” 18 Jyoti comes from a wealthy family and we learn that she was
abducted and raped repeatedly. She struggles with post-traumatic stress;
not only does she relive the rape in her mind, but she also struggles with
an unwanted pregnancy. As her pregnancy advances, she thinks of dif-
ferent ways in which she could end her life. She refuses food or drink,
and a doctor is brought in to coax her to eat. She angrily asks the doctor if
he is capable of killing her unborn, unwanted child. The narrative notes
that the doctor was the “disciple of the great Indian teacher of Ahimsa” 19
and is taken aback by the question. By referencing Gandhi in this pas-
sage, Antherjanam criticizes both the futility of the philosophy of Ahimsa
embraced by Gandhians but also parallels Jyoti’s suicidal starvation to
Gandhi’s satyagraha. While Gandhi’s political strategy emphasized the
moral imperative of freedom for Indians, Jyoti’s hunger strike comes
from the desperation of a woman who had her autonomy denied first by
her rapists and then by the state. The doctor responseds to Jyoti: “A
terrible whirlwind blows through our unfortunate motherland now from
all directions. But Bharat is sure to survive, and you are a woman of
Bharat aren’t you?” 20 The doctor’s abstract philosophizing of nationalism
stands in stark contrast to the material and bodily consequences of that
abstract nationalism that is borne by women in this refugee camp. In this
powerful exchange, Antherjanam juxtaposes binaries male/female, ab-
stract nationalism/material realities of Partition to expose the gendered
and violent nature of the Partition experience. Antherjanam concludes
this exchange between the doctor and Jyoti by noting that Jyoti drank
some milk. She writes, “Either the doctor’s words had moved her, or she
had reached the limits of despair and now wanted to live.” 21 Like Naray-
an, Antherjanam evokes the symbolic woman as nation through the por-
trayal of Jyoti but unlike Narayan’s Bharati who had a theoretical plan for
what to do if she were sexually violated, Jyoti portrays a raped but coura-
geous woman who endures against all odds.
Later in the narrative, Jyoti births her son alone in a field near the
camp. As the infant lies howling, she endures a phenomenal struggle
between her desire to let the child simply die or to embrace it and nurture
it into life. The story concludes,
The young mother gathered her son in her arms and hugged him. She
kissed his icy forehead over and over again till it became warm. Her
lifeblood flowed to the child as milk.
The mother walked toward the camp holding her little one to her
breast. The stars smiled down on her as if they had found the answer to
a difficult question. 22
As Jyoti chooses life for herself and her newborn son, the narration notes
that the cosmos had found an answer to a difficult question. Ambiguity
surrounds both the question and the response in this passage—is the
336 Nalini Iyer

question about life and death? About citizenship? Will Jyoti raise her son
or will she abandon him? What will be the future of that child born of
bloodshed and religious hostility? Antherjanam poignantly imagines
through Jyoti the plight of thousands of women who had been raped and
abducted during Partition riots. Not for them large questions of national-
ism and ahimsa but the everyday realities of survival. In imaginatively
embracing the complexities of nationalism and citizenship while also re-
creating for her readers, others like her who had not been directly im-
pacted by Partition, the material realities of other ethnic groups, Anther-
janam’s writing also compels individuals to think beyond the ethnic and
communal and to embrace the national. Her story claims sisterly commo-
nality among all Indian women negotiated through what for Antherja-
nam are biological and essential impulses of life and motherhood that
transcend socially constructed discourses of nation, citizenship, and be-
longing. The Others—Punjabis, refugees, Partition victims—are now Us
because we (women) all share bonds of motherhood. This, then, is also a
reframing of the discourse of Mother India popular in nationalist dis-
course of the time. Mother India is not an idealized Goddess, a transcen-
dent symbol of the nation. 23 For Partition survivors like Jyoti, traumatic
motherhood seals an alliance with other Indian women and forges the
bonds of troubled citizenship. Antherjanam’s story not only creates em-
pathy for refugee women like Jyoti, but by articulating the shared bonds
of motherhood and sisterhood, she offers an alternative to the Othering
of women in the dominant discourses of nationalism and Partition. Un-
like Narayan who portrays the South as left out of nationalist conversa-
tions, Antherjanam presents a way to embrace national oneness through
the sisterhood of women.
Balachandra Rajan’s novel The Dark Dancer (1958) has been largely
overlooked in studies of Partition literature. Rajan’s novel is the only
extensive treatment of the Partition which explores the dilemmas of
South Indians grappling with Partition. His protagonist, a Tamil Brahmin
named Krishnan, is a recently returned England-educated civil servant
who is unwittingly drawn into the Partition because of his romantic di-
lemmas. Caught between his westernized education and his Brahmin
upbringing, the cynical Krishnan acquiesces to an arranged marriage to
please his mother. Although he deliberately chooses Kamala to challenge
his mother’s beliefs in priests and horoscopes, he discovers that Kamala
overturns his preconceived notions of South Indian women. The idealis-
tic Kamala is an ardent Gandhian nationalist and draws Krishnan into
satyagraha and emerging politics. Rajan’s characters, Krishnan and Ka-
mala, in many ways mirror Sriram and Bharati from Narayan’s novel, but
the critical difference is that Krishnan has lived in Britain for a significant
period and is, consequently, unaware of the scope and intensity of the
anticolonial movement. Upon his return, Krishnan becomes a civil ser-
vant in New Delhi, and he experiences the independence of India and
 Partition’s Others 337

Pakistan from a profoundly bureaucratic perspective—How do papers,

files, and people involved in the British Indian Civil Service transition
into two bureaucracies at once hostile and similar to one another?
Krishnan grows increasingly skeptical about Indian independence,
but as a South Indian civil servant, he is fairly cocooned from the violence
and the hardships of others. Despite being in Delhi, he experiences Parti-
tion at a distance created both by his regional identity as well as his class.
Unlike his Sikh colleague, Pratap Singh, he does not have to agonize over
his relatives’ safety. When Pratap Singh worries about his family’s fate,
he says, “I’m a Government servant, I’ve a discipline to keep. . . . You
wouldn’t guess it from all the mass marches and pacific protests, but
down in many of us there’s a core of desperation waiting to explode
whenever the pressure is turned off.” 24 When Krishnan responds to this
with “I’ve felt some of it myself,” 25 Singh retorts, “Thanks for sympathiz-
ing, but you don’t know. You couldn’t possibly unless it happened to
you. You’re a South Indian, you’re two thousand miles away from it,
your people aren’t on the invasion route, your land isn’t torn by this kind
of dissension.” 26 Although both Singh and Krishnan are safely ensconced
in a civil service office, this exchange sharply articulates that to under-
stand Partition, one has to experience it directly and that empathy alone
is not enough. It will always be a poor substitute for experiences. Al-
though both Krishnan and Singh are citizens of the new nation, there is a
distinction to be made between “your land” and “my land” from Singh’s
perspective. Krishnan will never belong unless he feels the same loss as
Singh.
Krishnan is neither an ardent nationalist nor an enthusiastic Anglo-
phile. He is torn between both perspectives and, at first, maintains a
cynical distance. Rajan represents Krishnan’s dilemma through his ro-
mantic troubles. As the newlywed Krishnan settles into marital routine,
his former lover, an English woman, Cynthia, comes back into his life.
Ironically, it had been Cynthia, an Indophile and an apologist for the
British Empire, who had educated him about colonial resistance and Jalli-
anwallah Bagh. As an Indian student in Britain, Krishnan’s understand-
ing of nationalist politics was sketchy at best. Like Narayan’s Sriram,
Krishnan too is a naïve South Indian and both male protagonists are
schooled by women. Narayan’s Bharati channels Gandhi’s views some-
what uncritically to Sriram, whereas Krishnan learns about nationalism
from both his wife and Cynthia. While Cynthia narrates recent historical
events to educate Krishnan, Kamala educates by action. With the return
of Cynthia who comes to India to witness independence, Krishnan quick-
ly enters an adulterous relationship and abandons his wife. Krishnan’s
choice may be read as the educated elite rejecting homegrown national-
ism for an English understanding of nationalist resistance as spectacle.
He scandalizes his family and his colleagues by his actions, but the tu-
mult in the nation begins to eclipse his actions.
338 Nalini Iyer

Kamala surprises him as she refuses to be victimized by his actions

and become a burden on her family. Following her Gandhian ideals, she
goes to a refugee camp in the Punjab border to serve the many who have
been displaced and brutalized by Partition. Krishnan, recognizing his
errors, follows her to the refugee camp trying to woo her back. It is in that
journey to the border that Krishnan experiences Partition directly. As he
boards a crowded train, Rajan’s narrative embraces one of the common
elements in Partition narratives, the train journey between two nations
splintered by religion where religious identity can be life threatening and
where passing is necessary for survival. Krishnan’s dramatic encounter
in the train bathroom with a Muslim passing as Hindu and with a Sikh
man on a murderous rampage to avenge his family’s losses by murdering
Muslims is transformative. He witnesses brutality and experiences his
own primal survival instincts. Once he recognizes that he is capable of
killing for survival and that he is not shielded by his superior intellect or
his westernized education, Krishnan understands that citizenship and
belonging are more than philosophical constructs—they are identities
formed in violence and a man is called upon to prove his masculinity by
saving himself and his kin by any means possible. When Krishnan seems
horrified by the murder of the Muslim, the Sikh asks him, “Whose side
are you on, anyway, you South Indian weasel?” 27 Krishnan retorts, “I’m
an Indian. . . . It may sound stupid, but I’m on the side of India.” 28 The
Sikh angrily remarks, “You think I’m not Indian! . . . You think we
haven’t paid for being Indian? The thousands that are dead and the mil-
lions that are homeless. The rich land abandoned and the lives we’ve left
behind. That’s been our sacrifice for making India. What have you done
that gives you the right to talk?” 29 While Krishnan might have had a
closer experience of the Partition violence on the train, the Sikh makes it
amply clear that unless one has sacrificed for one’s country, there is no
claim for citizenship. There is a difference between witnessing and expe-
riencing and those who witness only will never be full-fledged citizens of
the new nation born of bloodshed and profound sacrifice.
Krishnan’s education does not end on the train. After he arrives in the
refugee camp, ironically named Shantipur, he learns more about those
who have survived—the diseases, the abysmal living conditions, the rup-
turing of families, and the sacrifices of those who volunteer to minister to
the refugees. He too is drawn into serving the community. As Krishnan
serves beside Kamala, he embraces a Gandhian approach to serving those
in need side by side with his wife. Their relationship as a couple is sub-
sumed by their service to the nation and its most vulnerable citizens.
Once again the Krishnan-Kamala story parallels that of Sriram and Bha-
rati with each couple reframing marriage as a social commitment to the
vulnerable and not a private, domestic arrangement. While there are plot
similarities between Narayan and Rajan’s portrayals of the South Indian
male’s understanding of nationalism and belonging, Rajan’s protagonist
 Partition’s Others 339

evolves from naïveté and Anglophilia to a more nuanced and passionate

understanding of nation. Narayan’s depiction of Sriram remains static—
Sriram experiences great events but is never transformed by them. Thus,
Narayan presents a more cynical view of the ability of people in the
South to embrace a national identity that transcends regional politics.
Krishnan is confronted by Partition violence once more when he and
Kamala are out for a walk and try to save a young girl who is being
pursued by men who seek to avenge deaths and abductions of women in
their own community. It is significant that the narrative does not identify
either the girl or her attackers by their religion. They are simply part of a
repeated narrative that is no longer about religious or ethnic identity but
about asserting rights and revenge mediated by women’s bodies. When
Kamala steps forward to stop the men and is stabbed in the process, we
see her act and eventually her sacrifice in a way that Krishnan never
does. When Krishnan tries to save Kamala from the communal violence
that surrounds the camp, he is unsuccessful. Kamala, whom Rajan ele-
vates to the ideal Indian woman who nurtures and serves, dies in the
attack and leaves Krishnan deeply stricken. Kamala’s death finally puts
Krishnan on equal footing with the Sikhs, Hindus, and Muslims of the
Punjab who had sacrificed land and kin to claim citizenship. He is no
longer the distant South Indian who views Partition from the safety of his
office or home, but one who has been baptized in blood, so to speak, into
the new nation.
Rajan’s narrative challenges the assumption that Southern Indians
were distanced from the violence that shattered Northern India. Krishnan
and Kamala represent the empathy of southern people as well as their
transformation by shared experience. The violence, for Rajan, is larger
than regional identities. His symbol of the “dark dancer” evoking Shiva
as Nataraja performing the cosmic dance of destruction and rebirth be-
comes symbolic of the idea of India. The old (imperial India) is being
destroyed while the new is being birthed. While the dance is devastating
in its power, its result is powerful and new. However, Rajan’s vision of
Partition and nation are expressed in deeply Hindu terms with the ideal-
ized Indian woman, Kamala, sacrificed for the greater good is quite prob-
lematic. His vision of the new India is both Hindu and patriarchal in its
expression. If Antherjanam transcended communal differences by forg-
ing bonds of sisterhood for women through their shared experiences of
violence, Rajan’s narrative offers shared bonds of violence and loss as the
narrative of nation in which regional and communal identities are super-
seded by a profoundly Hindu and masculine symbology.
Narayan, Antherjanam, and Rajan all wrote within the first decade of
independence and Partition when the raw narratives and images circulat-
ed across India and Pakistan. As writers rooted within South Indian cul-
tures and aware of the distinct preoccupations of South Indian politics
regarding caste and language, their works express anxiety about how the
340 Nalini Iyer

experience of Partition was shaping ideas of citizenship and belonging in

a new nation. Were those in the South to be perpetual outsiders in the
nation? Narayan expresses ambivalence about the nationalist narrative as
a whole and is cynical about the South being granted full citizenship;
Antherjanam reclaims a secular nation by claiming bonds of universal
sisterhood and motherhood, and Rajan depicts a South Indian woman as
martyr in Partition violence to claim a space in the discourse of citizen-
ship and belonging for those from the South. These novels offer a correc-
tive to the assertion that the South was unaffected by Partition; yet, these
narratives also run the risk of appropriating Partition narratives to forge
claims of belonging for those who knew Partition violence from a dis-
tance.
While this book engages the idea of the “Long Partition” and how to
interpret and/or unearth overlooked experiences, this essay insists that
Partition discourse while not absent in the South is still secondary to
other concerns of caste and language. At the same time, as the impact of
Partition on citizenship and belonging extends beyond the happenings of
1947 and continues to influence politics in India, those events impact the
South differently. For example, when North India—particularly New
Delhi, Chandigarh, and Amritsar—grappled with the invasion of the
Golden Temple by the Indian army, the assassination of Mrs. Gandhi, the
Sikh separatism and militancy, and the violence against Sikhs that
evoked memories of Partition, in Tamil Nadu the people were enraged
by the treatment of Tamils in Jaffna and supported the Tamil Tigers. As
Sri Lanka reeled from the effects of that civil war in 1982–1983, Tamil
Nadu grappled with a shared sense of ethnicity with the Tamils of Sri
Lanka. Many Tamils supported Eelam and the partition of Sri Lanka for a
Tamil homeland. The impact of India’s intervention in Sri Lanka was
shockingly felt with the assassination in 1991 of Rajiv Gandhi by a suicide
bomber. So any discussions of the Long Partition must account for the
South’s complex relationship to both the narrative of the nation and the
role of Partition in shaping that narrative.

NOTES

1. J. N. Dixit, India-Pakistan in War and Peace (New York: Routledge, 2003); Gyanen-
dra Pandey, Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism, and History in India (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Understandably most Partition studies
focus on the events in the borderlands whether East or West. However, when these
studies such as Bhaskar Sarkar’s study of cinema (Bhaskar Sarkar, Mourning the Na-
tion: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition, Durham: Duke University Press, 2009) or
Kavita Daiya’s study or literature (Kavita Daiya, Violent Belongings: Partition, Gender,
and National Culture in Postcolonial India, Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008)
or Gyan Pandey’s examination of Partition historiography make the move from the
particulars of Partition experience to examinations of nation and belonging, the as-
sumption is that the events in the borderlands influence the whole nation-state. For
example, then Sarkar can make a case for mourning and national identity through a
 Partition’s Others 341

study of Bengali cinema. But regional cinema in the South does not focus intensely on
mourning through Partition experiences. Tamil cinema, for example, is much more
focused on caste and class issues than it is on mourning the trauma of Partition. Films
like Mani Ratnam’s Roja (1992) are exceptions rather than the norm. Time and time
again, the Southern states (Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka) have
expressed contrary and different understandings and anxieties about nationalism.
While their articulations have been largely secular, they have had significant concerns
over language and caste issues. The argument in this essay is not intended to reify an
“us” versus ”them” rhetoric common for nearly eight decades in the South but to note
that any examination of the Long Partition and/or nationalism must account for the
contestations to the same from the South.
2. Balachandra Rajan, The Dark Dancer (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1958).
3. Kavita Daiya, Violent Belongings: Partition, Gender, and National Belonging in Post-
colonial India (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2008), 5
4. Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, The Long Partition and the Making of Modern
South Asia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 3.
5. See Nazia Akhtar’s essay in this volume for a detailed discussion of Hyderabad
and Partition.
6. Mike Thomson, “Hyderabad 1948: India’s hidden massacre” September 24,
2013, [Link] (Accessed August 27, 2015).
7. See Mira Debs, “Using Cultural Trauma: Gandhi’s Assassination, partition and
secular nationalism in post-independence India.” Nations and Nationalism, 19, 4 (2013):
635–53.
8. For a substantive examination of the Sindhi experience with Partition, see Rita
Kothari’s The Burden of Refuge: Partition Experiences of the Sindhis of Gujarat (New Delhi:
Orient Blackswan, 2007); and Nandita Bhavnani’s essay in this volume.
9. See “Catholic in Outlook,” The Hindu, April 3, 2003, for a description of Sindhi
culture in Chennai.
10. Gyanendra Pandey, Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism, and History in
India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 132.
11. Yoginder Sikand, ”Muslims in Kerala and Elsewhere: Accounting for the Differ-
ence,” [Link], June 30, 2007, [Link]
[Link] (Accessed August 27, 2015).
12. R. K. Narayan, Waiting for the Mahatma (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1955); Lalithambika Antherjanam, “A Leaf in the Whirlwind,” in Cast Me Out if You
Will: Stories and Memoir, trans. Gita Krishnankutty (New York: Feminist Press, 1997),
79–88; Balachandra Rajan, The Dark Dancer (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1958).
13. Early in his career, Narayan worked briefly for a newspaper called The Justice
which promoted the rights of non-Brahmins; Narayan’s commitment to this cause as a
Brahmin is indicative of his awareness of the regional political situation. E.V.R. Periyar
and the Justice Party were both critical of the North Indian orientation of the Congress
and sought to reformulate political and nationalist discourse around Tamil cultural
identity and the eradication of caste-based discrimination.
14. For a discussion of Tamil nationalism, see Marguerite Ross Barnett’s The Politics
of Cultural Nationalism in South India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976) and
Eugene Irschik’s Politics and Social Conflict in South India: The Non-Brahmin Movement
and Tamil Separatism, 1916–1929 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969).
15. Saadat Hasan Manto writes of the sexual violence experienced by men in his
very brief short story “Mishtake” with none of the coyness of Narayan. See Memories of
Madness: Stories of 1947 (New Delhi: Penguin, 2002): 457
16. R. K. Narayan, Waiting for the Mahatma (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1955), 244.
17. Lalithambika Antherjanam, “A Woman Writer’s Reply,” Cast Me Out if You Will:
stories and Memoir, trans. Gita Krishnankutty (New York: Feminist Press, 1997), 154–55.
18. Lalithambika Antherjanam, “A Leaf in the Whirlwind,” Cast Me Out if You Will:
Stories and Memoir, trans. Gita Krishnankutty. (New York: Feminist Press, 1997): 79.
342 Nalini Iyer

19. Ibid., 81.

20. Ibid., 81.
21. Ibid., 81–82.
22. Ibid., 87.
23. For a detailed discussion of Mother India, see Sumathi Ramaswamy’s The God-
dess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010).
24. Balachandra Rajan, The Dark Dancer (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1958): 76
25. Ibid., 76.
26. Ibid., 76.
27. Ibid., 199.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid.

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Nationalism in Post-Independence India.” Nations and Nationalism, 19, 4 (2013):
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Dixit, J. N. India-Pakistan in War and Peace. New York: Routledge, 2003.
Irschick, Eugene F. Politics and Social Conflict in South India: The Non-Brahmin Movement
And Tamil Separatism, 1916–1929. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969.
Kothari, Rita. The Burden of Refuge: Partition Experiences of the Sindhis of Gujarat. New
Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2007.
Manto, Saadat Hasan. “Mishtake.” Memories of Madness: Stories of 1947. New Delhi:
Penguin, 2002. 457.
Narayan, R. K. Waiting for the Mahatma. Chicago and London: University of Chicago
Press, 1955.
Pandey, Gyanendra. Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism, and History in India.
London: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Rajan, Balachandra. The Dark Dancer. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1958.
Ramaswamy, Sumathi. The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India. Durham:
Duke University Press, 2010.
Sarkar, Bhaskar. Mourning the Nation: Indian Cinema in the Wake of Partition. Durham:
Duke University Press, 2009.
Sikand, Yoginder. “Muslims in Kerala and Elsewhere: Accounting for the Difference.”
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Thomson, Mike. “Hyderabad 1948: India’s Hidden Massacre.” September 24, 2013.
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 Index

Abataranika (Staircase) (Mitra), 92 Ambedkar, B.R., xxviiin3

Abbas, Khwaja Ahmad, 85n1 American South, 270
Acchamamba, xxvii, 313 Amritsar, xix, 80, 82, 149, 287, 300n28,
Acharya, Debendrath, 178 310, 340
Adorno, Theodore, 263 Anam, Tahmima, 229
Advani, L. K., xx, xxiii Ananda Prize, 228
Aesop, 264 Anandamoth (The Abbey of Bliss)
Afghanistan, xxviiin3, 30 (Chattopadhyaya), 224, 227, 316
“An Afterlife” (Chakraborty), 229 Anandpur Sahib Resolution, xxxiin23
Agamben, Giorgio, 56, 86n29, 108, 116, Anarkali, 62
117 Andaman, 109
Agger, Inger, 295 Anderson, Benedict, 211n2, 234, 238,
Agnes, Flavia, 319 243, 247, 323n50
Agunpakhi (Phoenix) (Huq), 228 Anek Suryer Asha (Hoping for Sunrise)
Ahimsa, 335 (Jainuddin), 226
Ahl-i-Hadith, 209 Anglo-Burmese War of 1825, 159
Ahmad, Aziz, 307 Ansari, Sarah, 204
Ahmed, Akbar, 199, 202, 203, 206 Antherjanam, Lalithambika, xxviii,
Ahmed, Shah Sayyid, 224 330, 332, 334, 336, 339, 340
Ahmedabad, xxviiin3, 319 Anzaldua, Gloria, 39
Ahom Dynasty, 183 Appiah, Anthony, 243n1
Ailamma, 313, 314 Arab World, xxii, 26, 235, 238
Ajmer, 88, 136 Arabic, 115, 118, 212n20
Akalis, xxxiin23, 310, 311 Arakan, 118, 164, 178
Akali-Janata Coalition, xxxiin23 Archibuge, David, 243n1
Akbar, M. J., xix Arendt, Hannah, 86n29
Akhtar, Nazia, xxi, xxviii, 305–328, Arjan Dev, Guru, 45
341n5 Arunachal Pradesh, 163, 164, 166, 167,
Akhter, Sanjida, 252 169n1, 170n20, 170n22
Alam, Fukrul, 225 Arya Samaj, 309
Ali, Chaudhary Rahmat, 200 Asaf Ali, Aruna, 85n1
Ali, Maulana Keramat, 224 Asaf Jahi Dynasty, 306
Ali, Samina, 307 Ashraf, Agha, 199, 201, 202
Alif Laila , 266 Ashram, Gandhi Vanita, 78
Aligarh Movement, 199 Ashwatthama , 270, 271
Aligarh Muslim University, 128, 199 Asia, 54
Allottee Tehreek, 138 Assam, 13, 109, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162,
All-India Muslim League, 247 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169n1,
Alwar, 136 170n20, 170n24, 170n31, 178, 180,
Ambala, 15 182, 183, 188, 217, 218

343
344 Index

Assamese, 178, 180, 183, 186 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224,
Atkins,, xvi 225, 227, 229, 230, 246, 247, 265, 268,
“Atmoja O Ekti Karobi Gachh” (A 273, 305
Daughter and an Oleander Plant) Bangladesh Liberation War, 257n13
(Hasan), 251, 253, 254, 255 The Bangladeshi Reader , 228
Attenborough, Richard, xvii Baramulla, 147
Attlee, Clement, xv Barelli, Rae, 224
Auden, W. H., xiv Barua, S. N., 164
Auerbach, Eric, 275 Bashu, Samaresh, 92
August 1947, 65, 76, 82, 136, 143, 197, Basti (Husain), xix, 25, 26, 29, 262, 265,
201, 333 268, 271, 274, 277n22
Aulingar Zui (Mahanta), 186 Basu, Amrita, 316
Awami League, xxii, 218, 219 Basu, Tapan, 312, 321n18
Ayodhya, 267 Baxter, Craig, 208
Azad, Alauddin, 226 Bedford, Ian, 307
Azad Kashmir, 147, 148, 151 Bedi, Rajinder Singh, xxv, 38, 41, 42, 80
Azad, Maulana Abdul, xxvi, 73 Bengal, x, xiii, xvi, xviii, xxii, xxv, xxvii,
xxviiin3, xxxiin23, 4, 92, 97, 100, 103,
Baazigar (Zada), xxvii, 235, 243 109, 114, 131, 134, 135, 144, 158, 159,
Babar, Emperor, xxiii 160, 164, 165, 166, 168, 204, 206, 207,
Babri Masjid, xx, xxiii, 223, 305, 317 217, 218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224,
Bacchetta, Paola, 316 225, 226, 227, 229, 230, 246, 247, 248,
Bachelard, Gaston, 22 308, 330, 331. See also East Bengal;
Badami, Anita Rau, xx West Bengal; Bangladesh
Badshahi Mosque, 56 Bengali language, 91, 92, 95, 101,
Baishya, Amit Rahul, xviii, xxvii, 104n17, 108, 109, 111, 113, 115, 117,
177–193 118, 119n10, 119n12, 120n24, 120n38,
Baishya, Anirban, 180 206, 218, 250
Baital Pachchisee , 266 Bengali Muslims, xxvii, xxviiin3, 246,
Bajrang Dal, 310 255, 256
Bakke, Kristin, xxxin22 Benjamin, Walter, 262, 263, 264
Bakurgunj, 110 Bhabha, Homi, 243n1
Baldwin, Shauna Singh, xxv, 38, 45–46 Bhagalpur, xxv
Balkan Peninsula, 201 Bhalla, Alok, xix, xxxiin24, 266, 267,
Ballimaran, 82 275n5
Balochi Party, 213n64 Bharali, Sailen, 179
Baluchistan, xxviiin3, 127, 218, 221 Bharat Mata, 316, 318, 335, 336
Banaras, xxviii, 283, 284, 285, 286, 287, Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), xxiii, 12,
288, 289, 290, 291, 293, 294, 295, 296, 13, 310, 314, 319, 322n43, 324n67
297, 298 Bharatiya Jana Sangh. See Bharatiya
Banaras Hindu University (BHU), 289, Janata Party
290 Bharatpur, 136
Bandopadhyay, Manik, 249 Bhasin, Kamla, xxv, 74, 81, 247
Bangalore, 331 Bhashani, Maulana Abdul Hamid
Bangamata, 97, 99 Khan, 218, 224
“Bangistan”, xxviiin3 Bhatia, Ramlal, 75, 82
Bangladesh, xiv, xvii, xix, xx, xxii, xxv, Bhatt, Amy, 65
xxvii, xxviii, 11, 25, 93, 107, 109, 110, Bhavnani, Nandita, xxvii, 125–141
111, 114, 159, 167, 168, 177, 206, 207,
 Index 345

Bhindranwale, Sant Jarnail Singh, Butler, Judith, 46, 48

xxxiin23
Bhutan, 159, 170n24 Cachar, 159, 160
Bhutto, Zulfikar Ali, xxvii, 207, 219 Calcutta (also Kolkata), xvi, 25, 76,
Bihar, 21, 33n38, 76, 93, 104n9, 109, 134, 86n19, 96, 101, 102, 103, 107, 109,
168, 170n27, 218, 220, 238, 239, 331 117, 119n12, 120n18, 157, 161, 164,
“Binder Chele” (Binder’s Son) 220, 222, 223, 225, 227, 228, 238, 239,
(Chattopadhyay), 104n17 333
Bindra, Sukhwant, 208 Can You Hear the Nightbird Call?
Birla Mandir, xxiii (Badami), xx
“Boat” (Kishti), 264 “Cartographies of Silence” (Rich), 39
Bollywood, 49n7, 57, 62, 220 Central Asia, xviii
Bombay, xx, 24, 81, 319 Chakraborty, Sanjoy, 229
Bombay Presidency, 128, 129 Chakravartty, Gargi, 92, 100
“The Border” (Haq), 229 Chandi Charitra (Singh), 308
Bordoloi, Rajanikanta, 183 Chandigarh, 340
Bourke-White, Margaret, xvi Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 251
Bose, Nirmal, 111 Charkhi Village, 42
Bose, Sugata, 201 Chatterjee, Enakshi, 104n2
Bracher, Mark, 241, 242 Chatterjee, Partha, 242, 244n22
Brah, Avtar, 22 Chatterji, Joya, 100, 101, 220
Brahma, 288 Chattha, Ilyas, xxi, xxvii, 143–156,
Brahmapuri, 307 153n14, 154n40
Brahmaputra, 164 Chattopadhyay, Sarat Chandra, 104n17
Brahmastra , 270 Chattopadhyaya, Bankimchandra, 224,
Brahmin, 76, 285, 291, 337, 341n13 227, 228, 316, 317
“The Brahmin Goat” (Husain), 267 Chattopadhyaya, Kamladevi, 85n1
Brass, Paul, 154n35, 301n57 Chaudhuri, Hena, 93
Brennan, Timothy, 234, 235, 238 Chaudhuri, Sukanta, 53
British Raj, xiii, xiv, xviii, xxi, xxii, Chaudhuri, Supriya, 227
xxviii, xxviiin3, 8, 35, 36, 53, 61, 63, Chawla, Devika, xxxn21
65, 66, 84, 127, 128, 129, 131, 143, Chea, Pheng, 243n1
146, 153n12, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, Chekov, Anton, 266
164, 170n31, 177, 178, 179, 182, 183, Chenab, 81
187, 197, 199, 200, 201, 202, 204, Chennai, 128, 331
211n12, 212n20, 218, 219, 275n5, 306, Chettiar, 177, 179
321n20, 337 China, 158, 159, 163, 164
Buddhism, xviii, 26, 83, 165, 238, 239, Chindwin, 164, 178
264, 266, 312 Chittagong, 160, 164, 165, 178, 221, 226
Buragohain, Purnakanta, 183 Chow, Rey, 63
Burdwan, 247 Chowdhury, Biseswar, 180
Burki, Shahid Javed, 207 Christianity, xiv, xv, xxiii, xxv, 165, 242
Burma, xxv, xxvii, 158, 159, 160, 161, A Chronicle of the Peacocks (Morenama)
162, 163, 164, 165, 169n7, 177, 178, (Husain), 269, 270, 271
179, 180, 181, 183, 184, 186 Chughtai, Ismat, 85n1, 271, 272
Butalia, Urvashi, xviii–xix, xxv, xxvi, Ciafone, Amanda, 56
xxxn21, 37, 46, 74, 79, 81, 152, 246, “The City of Sorrows” (Husain), 265,
247, 320n10, 330 273
Butchers’ Quarters, 94, 95, 104n9 Clear Light of Day (Desai), 307
346 Index

Clifford, James, 243n1 Deolali, 136

Coca-Cola Company/Corporation, xxv, Derrida, Jacques, xxvi, 22, 32n4
xxvi, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 63, 64, Desai, Anita, 307
65, 66, 67, 68 Deshbhager Galpo (Stories of Partition)
Communist Party, 110, 226 (Hasan), 252
Communist Mazdoor Kissan Party, 208 “Deshon Mein” (Iqbal), 24
“Complete Knowledge” (Poora Gyan) Devi, Jyotirmoyee, 92, 93, 100, 101, 102,
(Husain), 269 104n2
Congress Party, xix, xxii. See also Devji, Faisal, 198, 203
Indian National Congress Dhaka (Dacca), xiii, xxvii, 25, 119n3,
Conrad, Joseph, 265 136, 139, 164, 200, 220, 221, 222, 223,
Constituent Assembly of India, xvii, 15 224, 227, 229
The Constructivist Moment: From Dhaka University, 218
Material Text to Cultural Poetics Dhar, Maloy Krishna, xxixn4, xxxiin34
(Watten), 38 Dharampur, 136, 139
Cooch Behar, 165, 168 Dhulipala, Venkat, xxxn11
Copland, Ian, 145, 151, 153n12 Dhumuha, 180
Council of Islamic Ideology, 209 Dibai, 262
Cowasjee, Saros, xv, xvi Dickinson, Emily, 273
Cracking India (Sidhwa), xxv Didur, Jill, 258n46
Curzon, Lord, 170n16 Dina, Sarifa Saloa, 252
Direct Action Day, 76, 134
Dacca. See Dhaka Dirks, Nicholas, 160
Daily Telegraph, 148 Divided Legacy (Zaman), 226
Daiya, Kavita, xxv, 44, 50n31, 330 Dixit, J.N., 330
Dalits, xxvi, xxviiin3, 107, 108, 110, 115, Doa Bakhsh, 247
116, 119n11, 149, 236 Dogra, 146, 148, 149, 150
Dalrymple, William, xvi Dooars, 161, 162, 170n24
Dandakaranya, 110, 117 Dulat Chak, 148
Darjeeling, 162 Durga (goddess), 42, 47, 307, 308, 309,
The Dark Dancer (Rajan), 330, 332, 337, 311, 316, 318, 319, 320, 320n11,
338, 339 321n16
Dar-ul-Harb, 224 “Durga” (Neelkanth), xxviii, 307, 311,
Dar-us-Salaam, 224 315, 317, 318, 319, 323n50
Daruwalla, Keki, 269 Durrani, F. K. Khan, 237
Das, Bisham, 83 Dutt, Kanai, 111
Das, Veena, 74, 310 Durabhashini (Lady Telephone
Dasgupta, Rana, xxiv Operator) (Mitra), 92
Dashashwamedh Ghat, 296 Durga Puja, 222, 308
Datta, Sutara, 92, 93, 100, 101, 102, 103
Dawn (newspaper), 81 Eagleton, Terry, 259n72
Deb, Siddhartha, 157 Earth (Mehta), xxv
Deccan Agriculturalists Relief Act, 131 East Bengal, 74, 95, 101, 110, 119n12,
Delhi, xix, xxiv, xxxiin23, 56, 60, 75, 78, 162, 165, 170n27, 218, 221, 222, 223,
80, 81, 82, 101, 103, 114, 117, 132, 226, 227, 251
136, 137, 139, 157, 158, 167, 199, 239, East India Company, 227
268, 276n7, 287, 288, 300n28, 310, East Pakistan, xiii, xvi, xix, xxii, xxvii,
337 74, 95, 96, 107, 109, 158, 164, 165,
Deobandis, 209 167, 168, 197, 206, 207, 218, 219, 220,
 Index 347

222, 223, 225, 226, 227, 228, 246, 248, Gajjala, Radhika, 53, 54, 55
249, 251, 252, 265, 273 Gandhi (Attenborough), xvii
East Punjab, 24, 147, 149 Gandhi, Indira, xix, xxxiin23, 246, 247,
Eck, Diana, 288 310, 340
Eid, 229 Gandhi, M. K., xvii, xx, xxii, xxiii,
1857 War of Independence, 199 xxviiin3, xxxiin33, 75, 82, 83, 211n12,
Einof, Christopher, 292, 293 220, 332, 333, 334, 335, 337
Einstein, Albert, 83 Gandhi, Rajiv, 340
Elias, Akhteruzzman, 227, 228 Ganga, 114
Eliot, T. S., 266, 270 Ganga Aarti, 296
Elliott, C. S., 160 Gangaram Hospital, 78
Elst, Koenraad, xxxiin34 Gangetic Basin, 159
Elwin, Verrier, 163 Ganguly, Sunil, 120n24
Empire of Ava, 160 Garhmukhteshwar, 76
England, 27, 28 Garo Hills, 159, 165
English language, 111, 118, 128, 130, Gellner, Ernest, 234, 237
178, 203, 224, 229, 246, 247, 333 Ghalib, Mirza, 83
Epar Ganga Opar Gonga (River Ghatak, Ritwik, 100
Churning) (Devi), 92, 93, 100, 101, Ghosh, Amitav, xiii, xvii, xx, xxvi, 107,
103, 104n2 108, 109, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116,
Erikson, Erik, 286 117, 118, 119, 163, 164, 168, 178, 182,
“The Escape” (Waliullah), 225 190n7, 222, 246
Europe, 64, 160, 235 Ghosh, Amrita, 107–122
Evans, Alexander, 145 Ghosh, Vishwajyoti, xxv, 229
“The Exit Plan” (Islam), 229 Gianchandani, Sobho, 135
Ezdeni, Yvonne, 190n7 Gilmartin, David, 286
The Glass Palace (Ghosh), 163, 178, 179
Faiz, Ahmed Faiz, 273 Global South, 56, 65
“Family Ties” (Baldwin), xxv Goalpara, 162
Faraizi Movement, 224 Goa, 188
Farhana, Syeda, 229 Gobind Singh, Guru, 308, 311, 319,
Farid, Baba, 266 321n16
Fatehpuri Mosque, 81 Godhra, xxiii, 136, 139, 316
Father and Daughter: A Political Godse, Nathuram, xxiii, xxxiin33
Autobiography (Shahnawaz), 73 Goldberg, David Theo, 111, 112
Faulkner, William, xvii, 270 The Golden Age (Anam), 229
Fazl, Abdul, 226 Golden Temple (Amritsar), xix,
Final Solution (Sharma), xx xxxiin23, 310, 340
Fisher, Max, 61 Golwalkar, M. S., xxiii, 130, 316, 322n37
Five Queen’s Road (Khan), 27, 31 Google, xxv, xxvi, 55, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64,
Fokir, 112, 116, 118, 119 65, 66, 67
The Forgotten Long March (Burma Gorky, Maxim, 249
March), xviii, xxvii, 177–193 Gour, Raj Bahadur, 313
Foucault, Michel, 38, 47, 49n7, 108, 114, Great Calcutta Killing, xv, 220
119 Guha, Ramachandra, xxxiin34
Freud, Sigmund, 85 Guhathakurta, Bina, 92
Friedman, Thomas L., xix Guhathakurta, Meghna, 126
Gujral, Satish, 85n1
Gairola, Rahul K., xiii–xxxv, 53–70
348 Index

Gujarat, xx, xxiii, 13, 78, 80, 81, 146, Hölderlin, Friedrich, 22
312, 316, 319, 323n57 Holocaust, 78, 86n29, 86n31, 154n34
Gupta, Seema, 57 Holström, Lakshmi, 28
Gurdaspur, 310 hooks, bell, 38
Gurgaon, 82, 136 Hosain, Attia, 28, 29
Hudood Ordinance, 267
Hajari, Nisid, xvi Hukawng, 178, 184, 186, 187, 188
Hall, Stuart, 58, 59 “Hum khud udharne lagte hain” (Rana),
Hamid, Mohsin, 210 30
Haq, Kaiser, xxii, xxvii, 217–232 Humayun’s Tomb, 75
Haque, Md. Rezaul, xxvii, 245–260 The Hungry Tide (Ghosh), xxvi, 107,
Harun-or-Rashid, 220 108, 109, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116,
Harvard University, 288 118, 119
Hasan, Mushirul, xxxn17, 25, 28, 85n1 Hunter, W. W., 224
Hasan, Rafia, 202 Huq, Fazlul, 218, 219, 224
Hazratdal Incident, 222 Huq, Hasan Azizul, xxvii, 228, 246,
Heart of Darkness (Conrad), 112 247, 248, 249, 251, 252, 253, 255, 256
Hedgewar, K.B., xxiii Hurs, 130
Heidegger, Martin, 22, 23, 25, 31 Husain, Intizar, xix, xxvii, 25, 26, 27, 29,
Hidayatullah, Ghulam Hussein, 132 262, 263, 264, 265, 266, 267, 268, 269,
Himalayas, 160, 163 270, 271, 272, 273, 274, 275, 275n5
Hindi language, 78, 118, 212n20, 266, Hussain, Altaf, 81
333, 334 Hussain, Syed Sajjad, 225
Hindus, xiii, xiv, xv, xvii, xviii, xix, xxi, The Hussaini Alam House (Kidwai), 307
xxiii, xxiv, xxv, xxviiin3, xxxiin23, Huttenbach, H. R., 154n34
10, 12, 13, 15, 16, 27, 31, 54, 55, 56, Hyder, Qurratulain, 273
60, 65, 67, 76, 81, 82, 83, 91, 101, 102, Hyderabad, Sind, 128, 134, 135
104n9, 108, 109, 110, 114, 115, 125, Hyderabad, India, xxi, xxv, xxviii, 306,
126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 307, 312, 314, 315, 320, 320n7,
134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 144, 146, 147, 321n16, 330, 331
148, 150, 151, 152, 154n28, 165, 197, Hyman, Anthony, 206
200, 201, 202, 205, 210, 212n20, 217,
218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 226, Iberian Peninsula, 201
227, 228, 229, 233, 235, 236, 237, 239, Ikramullah, Begum Shaista, 73, 74
240, 242, 243, 255, 256, 266, 267, 268, “An Ilish Story” (Islam), 229
270, 275n5, 283, 291, 293, 306, 309, Imperial War Graves Commission,
310, 311, 312, 313, 315, 316, 318, 68n17
321n25, 323n50, 330, 331, 333, 338, Imphal, 166
339 Indus, 81
Hindu Jats, 136 India, xiii, xiv, xv, xvi, xvii, xix, xx, xxi,
Hindu Mahasabha, xxii, xxiii, xxixn4 xxii, xxiii, xxvii, xxviii, xxviiin3, 4–6,
Hindu Rashtra, xxiii 7, 8, 10, 13, 15, 16, 17, 21, 22, 23, 24,
Hindu-Muslim Relations, 286, 292 25, 26, 27, 30, 31, 36, 55, 57, 58, 60,
Hindutva, xxiii, xxviiin3, 224, 293, 307, 61, 62, 64, 65, 79, 85, 107, 109, 110,
309, 310, 311, 313, 315, 318, 320, 114, 119n12, 125, 131, 132, 133, 134,
322n43 136, 137, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148,
Hingorani, Raibahadur Totaram, 133 151, 152, 153n12, 154n28, 158, 159,
Hitchens, Christopher, xiv 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169n6,
Hobbes, Thomas, 111 170n22, 178, 179, 180, 181, 182, 183,
 Index 349

184, 186, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, Jamwal, Anuradha Bhasin, 153n13
204, 205, 206, 207, 208, 210, 211n12, Jangam (Acharya), xxvii, 178, 179, 180
212n20, 217, 218, 220, 221, 222, 223, Japan, 128, 166, 178, 180, 181, 182, 183,
225, 226, 227, 229, 230, 234, 235, 236, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190
237, 238, 239, 241, 246, 247, 250, 252, Japji Sahib , 44, 45
255, 262, 267, 268, 269, 271, 273, Jataka, the, 263, 264, 266, 267, 269
275n5, 285, 291, 293, 294, 295, 296, Jatunagar, 273
301n57, 305, 306, 314, 315, 316, 318, “Je Bhitore Ashe” (He Who Comes
319, 330, 331, 332, 335, 338, 339, 340 Inside) (Hasan), 247, 248
India Gate, 61, 68n17 Jessore, 110, 119n12
India’s Constituent Assembly, xvii Jhelum, 81, 146
Indian National Congress (INC), xvii, Jinnah, Muhammad Ali, xiii, xvi, xvii,
xxii, xxxiin23, 132, 209, 310, 332 xxii, xxvii, xxviiin3, xxxiin33, 81, 83,
Indophobia, 64 130, 132, 197, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202,
Indo-Canadians, xxxin22 203, 206, 207, 209, 211n1, 211n2,
Inner Line Regulation of 1873, 161, 162 211n12, 218, 247
Iqbal, Muhammad, xiii, xxviiin3, 83 Jis Lahore Nahin Dekhiya O Jamiya hi
Iqbal, Tahira, xxvi, 24 Nahin (Wajahat), 31
Irrawady, 164, 178 Jonas, Hans, 115
Islam, xxiv, xxv, 27, 43, 44, 45, 83, 109, “Journey to No End” (Hosain), 29
114, 127, 128, 129, 130, 165, 198, 202, The Journey to Pakistan , 119n3
208, 209, 211n1, 219, 234, 235, 237, Judaism, xxv
248, 269 “The Jungle of the Gonds” (Gondon ka
Islam, Khademul, 229 Jungle) (Husain), 268, 270
Islamabad, 25
Islamic Pakistan, 263 “Kaali Raat” (“The Black Night”)
Islamaphobia, 53, 64 (Ahmad), 307
Islamization, xxviiin3, 268 Kabir, Ananya Jahanara, xx, xxxiin28,
Ismat, Chughtai, 272 11, 18n24, 217, 220, 223, 224, 266, 283
Iyer, Nalini, xiii–xxxv, 65, 329–342 Kadambini, 97, 99
Kaiser, Shahidullah, 226, 227
Jacob, Satish, xxxin22 Kali, 321n16. See also Durga (goddess)
Jaffna, 340 Kant, Immanuel, 234
Jaffrelot, Christophe, 206 Karbala, 267
Jains, 21–34, 312 Karachi, 75, 81, 128, 130, 132, 133, 134,
Jain, Jasbir, xxvi, 21–34, 271 135, 136, 137, 139
Jaintia Hills, 159, 165 Kargil War, 151
Jainuddin, Sardar, 226 Kar, Bodhistava, 162, 170n31
Jalais, Annu, 110 Karnal, 80
Jalal, Ayesha, xxii, 197, 200, 201, 209, Kashi, 283
210, 247 Kashmir, xxi, xxiii, xxvii, xxviiin3, 4, 5,
Jalandhar, 15, 78 7, 12, 13, 143, 144, 146, 147, 148, 149,
Jallianwallah Bagh, 337 151, 152, 205, 221, 222, 312
Jama Masjid, 61 Katha Sarit Sagar , 269
Jamia Millia Islamia, 31 Kathua District, 150
Jammu, xxi, xxvii, 143, 144, 145, 146, Kaul, Suvir, xxxiin34, 44, 153n10
147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 154n28, Kerala, 331, 334
154n31 Kerala Muslims, 331
Jampanna Gate, 307, 319
350 Index

Khalistan (Sikhistan), xxxiin23, 148, Krishak Sramik Party (Party of the

309, 340 Peasants and Workers), 218
Khalsa, 310 Kshudha O Asha (Hunger and Hope)
Khamosh Pani (Silent Waters) (Sumar), (Azad), 226
xxv, 38, 42, 44, 47 Kudaisya, Gyanesh, xxxn20, 108, 110,
Khan, General Ayub, xxvii, 197, 198, 120n18, 136
205, 206, 207, 212n43 Kumar, Sukrita Paul, 274
Khan, General Yahya, 207 Kurukshetra, 270
Khan, Imran, 198
Khan, Inayat, 323n50 Labour Government, xv
Khan, Liaquat Ali, 149 LaCapra, Dominick, 85
Khan, Nyla Ali, xxxiin30 Ladakh, xviii
Khan, Osman Ali, 306 Lahore, xxv, 25, 31, 56, 60, 61, 62, 67, 78,
Khan, Shabana, 295 80, 82, 84, 200, 207, 262, 265, 270
Khan, Shoebullah, 313, 314 Lahore 1947 (Salim), 85n1
Khan, Sorayya, xxvi, 27 Lajja (Shame) (Nasreen), 223
Khan, Syed Ahmed, 199 “Lajwanti” (Bedi), xxv, 38, 41, 42, 46,
Khan, Yasmin, xxxn17, 64, 65, 197, 202, 47, 48, 80
204 Lakhimpur, 162
“Khancha” (The Cage) (Hasan), 250, The Last Candles of the Night (Bedford),
251 307
Khasi, 159, 162, 165 “A Leaf in the Whirlwind”
Khatri (caste), 80, 81 (Antherjanam), 332, 334, 335, 336
Khayber Pakhtoon Khwa Province, 198 “Leaves” (Husain), 267, 269
Khilafat Movement, 129, 331 “Letters to Uncle Sam” (Manto), 24
Khoabnama (The Interpretation of Levi, Primo, 77, 78
Dreams) (Elias), 226, 228 Line of Control (LoC), 289
Khoja, 131 “Little Women” (Farhana), 229
“Khol Do” (Manto), xxv “The Location of Brazil” (Rushdie), 274
Khurho, Mohammed Ayub, 131, 132 Lohia, Ram Manohar, xxvi, 73, 74
Khulna, 247, 248 London, xv
Khurshid, Sorayya, 153n13 The Long March (Burma), xxv, 199
Kidwai, Anis, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, The Long Partition, x, xvii, xx, xxiii,
85, 85n1 xxv, xxvi, xxxin22, 53, 54, 55, 56, 60,
Kidwai, Ayesha, 75, 78 68, 341n2; S ee also Zamindar, Vazira
Kidwai, Huma R., 307 Lord Irwin, 68n17
Kidwai, Shafi Mohammed, 75 Lord Shiva, 283
Killing the Water (Rahman), 229 Lorde, Audre, 39
Kodnani, Maya, 319 Lucknow, 25, 31
Koh, Adeline, 53 Ludden, David, 164
Kolkata. S ee Calcutta Lushai Hills, 160, 166
Komarayya, Doddi, 313, 314
Koran. See Quran Machis (Matchsticks) (Gulzar), xxxiin23
Korson, J. Henry, 208 “Ma Tumi Debi” (Mother, You are a
Kothari, Rita, xviii Goddess), 104n17
Kotoky, Prafulla, 179 Maachh (Fish) (Palit), 92, 93, 94, 95, 96,
Kovacs, Anja, 316 97, 100, 103
Krishak Praja Party, 219 Mackenzie, Alexander, 160
Madhya Pradesh, 109, 110
 Index 351

Madras on Rainy Days (Ali), 307 Mian, Dadu, 224

Mahabharata , 262, 269, 270 The Middle East, xix
Mahanta, Anurag, 186 Midnight’s Children (Rushdie), 168
Maharashtra, 293, 321n16 Minha, Trinh T., 39
Mahishasuramardini , 319, 320n11 Minority Morcha (“Minority Front”),
Mahmud, Nazim, 248 322n43
Majlis-e-Ittehad-ul-Muslimeen Mirabai, 266
(“Council of United Muslims”), 306 Mirpur, 147
Majumdar, Arati, 92 Mishra, Pankaj, 283, 291
Makhija, Neena, 66 Misra, Sanghamitra, 164
Making of a Poet (Hasan), 229 Mitra, Narendranath, 92
Malabar, 331 Mizoram, 158, 165, 166, 169n1, 170n22
Malaya, 164 Modi, Narendra, xxiii, 13, 17
Malgudi, 332 Mohan, Rakesh, 140n18
Malihabadi, Josh, 85n1 Mohanram, Radhika, xxvi, 3–20
Mallick, Ross, 113 Mohiuddin, Makhdoom, 313, 314
Mallick, Samip, 66 Moliner, Christine, 321n23, 322n29
Manchu, 162, 163 Montville, Joseph, 290, 297
Man Booker Prize, 262 Mookerjee, Shyama Prasad, xxiii
Mandalay, 178, 184 Mookerjea-Leonard, Debali, xxvi,
Manipur, 159, 161, 166, 167, 169n1, 91–105
170n20, 170n22, 170n31, 178 Moraga, Cherrie, 39
Manto, Saadat Hasan, xxv, xxvi, 23, 24, Morely, David, 67
49n7, 83, 225, 247, 271, 272 Morenama (Husain). See A Chronicle of
Manzilgah, Masjid, 129, 130, 132, 138 the Peacocks
Mapillas, 331 Morichjhapi, xxvi, 108, 109, 110, 111,
Mapillah/Moplah Rebellion, 331 113, 115, 116, 117, 118, 120n23,
“Mari” (The Plague) (Hasan), 252, 254, 120n24
255 Mosley, Leonard, xv
Marxism, 226 Mother India, 317, 336
Mayaram, Shail, 136 Moumins, 331
Mbembe, Achille, 188 Mountbatten, Lord Louis, xv
McMahon Line, 163, 164 The Mughals, xxiii
Meatless Days: A Memoir (Suleri), 25 Mughale-Azaam (film), 62
Mecca, 265 Muhajirnama (Rana), 30
Medina, 114, 265 Muhajirs, 126, 133, 134, 135, 137, 138,
Meghalaya, 158, 159, 161, 165, 168, 139
169n1 Muhammad, Prophet, 26, 265
Meghe Dhaka Tara (Cloud-Capped Star) Muharram, 129
(Rajguru), 92, 93, 96, 97, 99, 100, 103 Mukherjee, Kamala, 92
Mehta, Deepa, xxv Mukherjee, Tutun, 226
Mehta, Gita, xxxin22 Multan, 76
Mehta, Krishna, 147 Mumbai, x, xxiii, 128, 136, 139, 240; S ee
Mehta, Parvinder, xxvi, 35–51 also Bombay
Memon, Muhammad Umar, 274 Mundas, 170n27
Menon, Ritu, xxv, 74, 81, 85n1, 246 Murray, Padmini Ray, 53
Menon, V.P., xv Musafirkhana, Mauledina, 135
Meos, 331 Mushahar, Asha, 295, 296
Mewat, 331 Mushahars, 295, 302n69
352 Index

Muslims, xiii, xiv, xv, xvii, xviii, xix, Naxalites, 166

xxi, xxii, xxiii, xxiv, xxviii, xxviiin3, Neelkanth, Kishorilal Vyas, xxviii, 307,
xxxiin33, 10, 12, 13, 15, 26, 31, 33n38, 308, 311, 312, 313, 314, 315, 316, 318,
43, 44, 46, 54, 55, 56, 60, 65, 67, 75, 319, 320, 323n50
76, 81, 83, 101, 102, 103, 104n9, 108, NEFA. See North-East Frontier Agency
114, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, Nehru, Jawaharlal, xv, xvi, xvii, xxi,
133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 143, 144, 145, xxii, xxiv, xxxiin33, 33n38, 82,
146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 211n12, 306, 315
153n13, 165, 170n27, 197, 198, 199, New Delhi, xxiii, 6, 56, 60, 67, 332, 333,
200, 201, 202, 203, 205, 207, 208, 209, 334, 337, 340. See also Delhi and Old
211n1, 211n12, 212n20, 212n26, 217, Delhi
218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 226, 1940 Pakistan Resolution, 200
227, 228, 235, 236, 237, 238, 239, 240, 1947 Partition Archive, 66
242, 243, 246, 247, 248, 251, 256, 266, 1984, xviii, xxxin22, 246, 305, 309, 310
267, 268, 270, 275n5, 285, 288, 289, Nirmal Bhakat (Bordoloi), 183
291, 293, 296, 305, 306, 307, 309, 310, Nizam, xxi, xxviii, 306, 314, 330
311, 312, 313, 314, 315, 316, 318, 320, Nizam-e-Mustafa, 267
321n25, 322n37, 323n50, 323n57, 331, Nizami Hotel, 82
338, 339 Noakhali, 76, 101, 103, 104n9, 220
Muslim League, xvi, xvii, xxii, xxviiin3, Nongor (Anchor) (Rushd), 227
74, 81, 129, 130, 132, 197, 200, 201, North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA),
202, 205, 207, 209, 211n12, 212n26, 161, 170n20, 170n33
218, 219, 220, 227 North East India, xxv, xxvii, 157, 158,
Muslim Nizam, 330 159, 160, 161, 163, 164, 166, 167, 168,
Muslim Razakars, 307, 311, 313 169, 169n1
Mussoorie, 75 Northwest India, xxviiin3
Muzaffarabad, 147 North-West Frontier Province, 132,
Myanmar, 169n7, 186 146, 147, 218
Myint-U, Thant, 164 Novak, James J., 224
Mymensingh, 224
Mytina, 164 Old Delhi, 61. See also Delhi; New Delhi
Old Silk Route, 164
Naga, 160, 166, 167, 169n1, 170n20, Olsen, Tillie, 38
170n22, 186 Operation Bluestar, 1984, xxxiin23, 310
Naganand, K., 57 Operation Recovery, 78
Nagappan, Ramu, 39 Odisha (Orissa), 110, 218
Nanak Dev, Guru, 45
Nanded, 321n16 Pakhtun (Pashtun), 209, 213n64
Narang, Avneesh Singh, 57 Pakistan, xiii, xiv, xvi, xvii, xviii, xix,
Narayan, Badri, 290 xx, xxi, xxii, xxiv, xxv, xxvii, xxviii,
Narayan, R.K., xxviii, 264, 290, 330, xxviiin3, 4, 7, 10, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26,
332, 333, 334, 335, 337, 339, 340, 27, 28, 30, 31, 33n38, 42, 43, 45, 53,
341n13 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 60, 62, 64, 65, 67,
Nasreen, Taslima, 223, 227 78, 79, 80, 81, 85, 119n3, 125, 130,
Nataraja, 339 131, 132, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 143,
National Book Trust, 78 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 151, 152,
Navaro-Yashin, Yael, 187 165, 168, 177, 179, 197, 198, 199, 200,
Nayak, Sukesh Kumar, 61 201, 202, 203, 204, 205, 206, 207, 208,
Nawabshah, 125 209, 210, 211, 211n1, 211n12, 212n43,
 Index 353

218, 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, Patiala, 148
228, 229, 233, 234, 235, 236, 237, 238, The Pemberton Line, 161
239, 241, 242, 243, 246, 247, 248, 262, People’s Vigilance Committee on
263, 265, 267, 268, 270, 271, 273, 274, Human Rights, the (PVCHR), 288,
275n5, 277n22, 289, 305, 306, 331, 294, 295, 297, 298
334, 337, 340. See also Bangladesh; Periyar, E.V.R., 332, 341n13
East Pakistan; West Pakistan Persian language, 115, 212n20, 247
Pakistan Liberation War, 248, 249 Phera (The Return) (Nasreen), 227
Palestine, 30 Phoenix Fled (Hosain), 28
Palit, Dibyendu, 92–100 Pinjar (The Skeleton) (Pritam), 80
The Panchatantra, 263, 266 Pirgunj, 96, 97
Pandavas, 262 Pitkin, Hannah, 289
Pandey, Gyanendra, xxvi, xxxn17, 36, “The Platform”, 268, 270
152n1, 259n68, 286, 300n37, 330, 331 The Pluralism Project, 288
Pandits (Kashmiri), 144, 145, 151, 152, Point of Return (Deb), 157, 158
153n8 Poonch, 147, 149
Panja Sahib Gurdwara, 43 Portuguese, 201
Panjnad, 81 Pradesh, Andhra, 314
Parliament of India, xxiii, 312 Pritam, Amrita, 80, 85n1
“Parobashi” (The Outsider) (Hasan), “Profit and Loss” (Rahman), 229
252, 255, 256 Progressive Writers Movement, 266
Partition, ix, x, xiii, xiv, xvi, xvii, xviii, The Promise of Happiness (Ahmed), 55
xix, xx, xxii, xxiii, xxiv, xxv, xxvi, Punjab, x, xvi, xviii, xxii, xxiv, xxv,
xxvii, xxviii, xxviiin3, xxxiin33, 21, xxviiin3, xxxiin23, 4, 13, 16, 24, 43,
23, 24, 25, 28, 30, 31, 33n38, 36, 37, 67, 79, 82, 83, 108, 109, 131, 135, 144,
38, 41, 42, 43, 44, 48, 49, 49n7, 53, 54, 145, 146, 148, 149, 151, 154n35, 168,
55, 59, 61, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 91, 198, 204, 213n64, 217, 218, 220, 230,
92, 93, 96, 97, 100, 101, 104n9, 107, 307, 309, 310, 311, 321n20, 330, 331,
108, 109, 119, 119n12, 125, 126, 130, 334, 335, 336, 339. See also East
133, 134, 135, 136, 138, 139, 143, 144, Punjab; West Punjab
145, 146, 151, 152, 158, 159, 162, 165, Punjab Boundary Force, 84
166, 167, 168, 169n1, 199, 201, 202, Punjabi Muslims, xxii
204, 205, 206, 211n1, 211n2, 217, 219, Punjabi Century (Tandon), 75, 80
220, 221, 223, 225, 226, 227, 228, 229, Purana Quila, 75
230, 233, 246, 247, 248, 249, 250, 251, The Puranas, 263, 264, 308
252, 254, 255, 256, 257n13, 262, 265, Purbo-Paschim (East-West) (Ganguly),
267, 268, 270, 273, 274, 275, 275n5, 120n24
284, 286, 287, 288, 289, 290, 291, 292, Purdah to Parliament, From
294, 295, 298, 300n28, 305, 306, 309, (Ikramullah), 73
311, 313, 314, 316, 318, 319, 323n57,
330, 331, 333, 334, 335, 336, 337, 338, Qadirpur, 273
339, 340 The Quaid: Jinnah and the Story of
Partition Studies, x, xxvi, 305 Pakistan (Ahmed and Muneer), 199
“Partition” (Auden), xiv Quit India Movement, 332
Pasharini (The Peddler Woman) Quran, 26, 42, 83, 209
(Bashu), 92 Qureshi, Tehmina, xix
Patel, Kamlaben, 75, 78, 79, 81, 85, 85n1
Patel, Sardar Vallabhbhai, 312, 314, 315 Radcliffe, Cyril, xiv, 65, 66, 165
Pathan, 146, 147, 198 The Radcliffe Line, xxvi, 64, 165
354 Index

Raghuvanshi, Lenin, 295 Rehabilitation and Research Center for

Raghavan, Srinath, xxxiin31 Victims of Torture (RCT-Denmark),
Raheja, Natasha, 66 294, 295, 297
Rahman, Mahmud, 229 Remembering Partition (Pandey), 331
Rahman, Mujibur, 107, 109, 207, 219, “Report on the Post-Operation Polo
221, 224, 225 Massacres, Rape and Destruction or
Rahmet Ali, Chaudhry, xiii, xxviiin3, Seizure of Property in Hyderabad
199 State”, 306
Rai, Aishwarya, 57 Reunion (Google advertisement), 60, 61,
Raina, Ajay, 153n7 62, 64, 65, 67
Raja, Masood A., xxii, xxvii, 233–244 Riaz, Amber Fatima, xxii, xxvii,
Rajasthan, 166 197–215
Rajagopalachari, C., xxii, xxviiin3 Rich, Adrienne, 39
Rajan, Balachandra, xxviii, 324n67, 330, Rinker, Jeremy, xxviii, 283–304
332, 337, 338, 339, 340 Ripon, Lord, 160
Rajguru, Shaktipada, 92–100 Risam, Roopika, 53
Rajkot, 136 Robbins, Bruce, 233, 243n1
Rajpura, 148 Robbins, Kevin, 67
Rajshahi University, 228 Rohdoi Ligiri (Bordoloi), 183
Rama, xxiii, 323n50 The Romantics (Mishra), 283
Raman, Vasanthi, 288, 289 “Roots” (Jadein) (Chughtai), 271
Ramaswamy, Sumathi, 24 Roshan, Hrithik, 57
Ramayana , xxiii, 269 Roy, Jamini, 104n17
“Ramrajya”, xxxiin33 Roychoudhary, Ranjit K., 119n12
Rana, Munawwar, 30, 31 Royal Bengal Tiger, 109, 112, 114, 118
Ranga Prabhat (Radiant Dawn) (Fazl), RSS. S ee Rashtriya Swayamsevak
226 Sangh
Rangili (Bordoloi), 183 Rupnagar, 271
Rangoon, 164, 178 Rushd, Abu, 227
Raschid,Bilal, 190n7 Rushdie, Salman, 168, 263, 274
Rashid, Khaled, 248, 249 Russia, 30
Rashtriya Sikh Sangat, 310
Rashtriya Sevika Samiti, 316 Sab Rang, xxvii, 233
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), Sabarmati Express, 316
xxiii, 12, 13, 77, 130, 133, 138, 144, Sadhbelo, 129
148, 149, 308, 309, 310, 314, 316, Sahitya Academy, 178
324n67 Sahni, Bhisham, 272
Rawalpindi, 45, 76, 146, 148, 208 Said, Edward, 262, 263, 274, 275
Ray, Manas, 86n19 Saint, Tarun, xxvi, 73–89, 274
Razakars, xxviii, 306, 307, 308, 309, 311, Salim, Ahmad, 85n1
312, 313, 314, 315, 319, 323n50, 330 Samiti, 318
Razakar (Neelkanth), 307, 308, 309, 311, Sandipan (Kindling), 248
313, 314, 315, 316, 318, 319, 323n50 Sangat, the, 321n25
The Red Fort, 268 Sangh Parivar, 310, 311. See also
The Red Cross, 220 Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh
Reddy, G. K., 148 Sankat Mochan Hanuman Temple, 296
Reforms Commissioner, xv Sanskrit, 212n20, 247
Refugee (film), 220 Santhals, 170n27
Sarabhai, Mridula, 78
 Index 355

Saraf, M. Y., 154n28 Sikand, Yoginder, 331

Sardar Patel, Vallabhbhai, xvii, xxii, Sikhs, xiv, xv, xvii, xix, xxiv, xxxiin23,
xxxiin33, 314, 315 10, 15, 16, 43, 44, 54, 76, 82, 108, 125,
Sarila, Narendra Singh, xxxn11 132, 134, 136, 137, 144, 146, 147, 148,
Sarkar, Bhaskar, 330, 341n2 149, 150, 151, 152, 217, 246, 305, 307,
Sarkar, Tanika, 315, 316 308, 309, 310, 311, 313, 318,
Sarki, Nuruddin, 130 320n12–322n26, 322n29, 331, 338,
Sarma, Phani, 180 339, 340
Sarwar, Golam, 220 Sikh Brigade, 148
The Satanic Verses (Rushdie), 263 Sikh Massacre, 1984, xxxiin23, 310
Satwari, 150 Sikhism, 127
Saudi Arabia, xxvii, 211n1 Sikhistan. See Khalistan
Savarkar, V. D., xxiii, xxviiin3, 322n37 Sikkim, 169n1
Schendel, Willem Van, 107, 109, 119n3, Silent Waters (Khamosh Pani) (Sumar),
165, 168, 177 38, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47
Schmidt, Peter, 63 Siliguri Corridor, 159
“Second Thoughts: Light in Divided Sindh (Sind), xxv, xxvii, xxviiin3, 125,
Worlds” (Hosain), 28 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133,
Sen, Amartya, xxxiin34 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 168,
Sen, Ramprasad, 104n17 213n64, 218, 319, 331
Sengupta, Nitish, 220 Sindh Government, 132, 133, 134
Shadow Lines (Ghosh), xiii, 168, 222 Sindh, Premier of, 131, 132
Shah, Munshi Baitullah, 227 Sindhi, 126, 127, 128, 136
Shahaduzzaman, 252 Sindhi Hindus, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134,
Shahnaaz, Tasneem, xix, xxvii, 261–280 135, 136, 137, 138
Shahnawaz, Jahan Ara, 73 Sindhi Muslims, xxvii, 130, 131, 132,
Shahnawaz, Mumtaz, 74 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139
Shahre-e Afsos (Husain), 265 Sindhi Voices Project, 66
Shafi, Mohamad, 74 Singh, Amritjit, xiii–xxxv, xxxin22, 63,
Shangshaptak (Kaiser), 226 261–280
Shantipur, 339 Singh, Bishan, 23, 25, 271
Shariatullah, Haji, 224 Singh, Ganda, 140n22
Sharif, Nawaz, 198, 213n64 Singh, Gurharpal, 144, 205
Sharma, Amit, 61 Singh, Hari, xxi
Sharma, Asha, 318 Singh, Khushwant, 49n7, 85n1
Sharma, Krishna, 318 Singh, Maharaja Hari, 146, 148, 154n28
Sharma, Rakesh, xx Singh, Master Tara, xvii, 137
Shias, 209, 267 Singh, Nidar Nihang, 308
Shikarpur, 128, 131, 133 Singh, Nikky-Guninder Kaur, 308
Shimla (Simla), 136 Singh, Parmjit, 308
Shingbwiyang, 187 Singh, Ritu, 61
Shiv Sena, xxiii, 310, 319 Singh, Swaran, xxxiin23
Shiva, 288, 339 “Siyah Hashye” (Black Margins)
Shyama Sangeet (Sen), 104n17 (Manto), 83
Sialkot, 146, 148, 149, 150, 154n31 The Six Seasons Review , 229
Sibsagar, 162 The Sixth River: A Diary of 1947
Siddiqi, Abdul Rahman, 75, 81, 82, 85 (Taunsvi), 75, 82, 84
Siddique, Abubakar, 248 South Asia, xiii, xvii, xviii, xix, xx, xxii,
Sidhwa, Bapsi, xxv, 49n7 xxiv, xxv, xxviii, 6, 10, 12, 53, 54, 56,
356 Index

59, 61, 62, 64, 66, 67, 68, 246, 267, Tamreswari’s Mandir, 183
269, 270, 273, 275n5, 284, 288, 305, Tan, Tai Yong, xxxn20, 108, 110,
330 120n18, 136
South Asian Literary Association Tandon, Prakash, 75, 80, 81, 85, 85n1
(SALA), ix Tangup Pass, 164
South India, xxv, xxviii, 305, 330, 331, Tariqah-e-Muhammadiya, 224, 228
332, 334, 337, 339, 340 Taunsvi, Fikr, 75, 82, 83, 84, 85, 85n1
Spivak, Gayatri Chakavarty, 38, 39, 47, Tawang River, 186
112, 119 Tegh Bahadur, Guru, 44
Sri Lanka, 340 Tehreek-e-Pakistan (Ashraf), 199
Srinagar, 147, 148 Telangana [Armed] Struggle, 306, 314
“The Stairs” (Seedhiyaan), 273 Thanatos, 82
Stein, Jean, 270 Thieme, John, 117
Stewart, Frank, 274 “Thinking Territory” (Ramaswamy),
Stilwell Road, 164 24
“Stroll Through the New Pakistan” “Third Definitive Article” (Kant), 234
(Manto), 83 Tibet, 159, 162, 163, 164, 239
Stories About the Partition of India, 226 Time Magazine , 61
Sufism, xxv, 109, 126, 127 Tippera, 104n9
Suhrawardy, Husain Shaheed, xvi, 218 “Toba Tek Singh” (Manto), 23, 24, 25,
Sukhmani Sahib, 45 271
Sukkur, 129 Tomsky, Terri, 115
Suleri, Sara, 25, 85n1 Torn from Roots (Patel), 75, 78
Suman, 60, 61, 62 Torpey, John, 64
Sumar, Sabiha, xxv, 38, 42 “Tortoise” (Husain), 265, 269
Sun, Laichen, 164 Train to Pakistan (Singh), 272
Sundarbans, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, Tripura, 109, 162, 165, 166, 168, 169n1,
113, 114, 115, 117, 118, 119, 121n39 170n31
Sunderbans Government Reserve Tully, Mark, xxxin22
Forest Act, 113 Tulsidas, 266, 283
Sunder Rajan, Rajeswari, 320 Twenty-Four Parganas, 110
Sunderlal, Pandit, 330
Sunlight on a Broken Column (Husain), ULFA. See United Liberation Front of
28, 29 Assam
Sunni, 209, 267 Ummah, xxviiin3
Syed, G. M., 130 UNCIP. S ee United Nations
Sylhet, 162, 164 Commission for India and Pakistan
United Kingdom, xx, 64
Tagore, Rabindranath, 97, 104n17 United Liberation Front of Assam
Taiyuni Movement, 224 (ULFA), 186
Taj Mahal, 25, 268 United Nations, xxi, 225
Tajuddin, Munshi/Molla, 247 United Nations Commission for India
Talbot, Ian, 205, 300n28 and Pakistan, 150
Taliban, 209 United Nations Security Council, 306
Talpurs, 127, 128 United Progressive Alliance
Tamas (Sahni), 272 Government, 314
Tamil language, 333, 340 United States, xx, 30, 63, 207
Tamil Nadu, xxxiin23, 177, 340 United States-Iraq War, 270
Tamil Tigers, 340 Unthaw, 189
 Index 357

“An Unwritten Epic” (Husain), 25, 262, The West, 64, 65, 67
273 West Bengal, xxxiin23, 93, 107, 109,
Upadhyaya, Deendayal, xxiii, 296, 297 110, 111, 117, 119n10, 119n12,
Urdu language, xxii, 75, 78, 82, 202, 120n18, 120n23, 164, 165, 218, 220,
203, 206, 212n20, 218, 233, 235, 238, 223, 227, 228, 246
247, 266, 268 West Pakistan, xvi, xxii, 130, 197, 198,
“Uttar Bashonte” (After Spring) 206, 207, 219, 225
(Hasan), 249, 250, 251, 252, 254, 255, West Punjab, xxiv, 75, 80, 81, 132, 136,
256 147, 148
Uttar Pradesh (UP), 21, 33n38, 135, 137, What the Body Remembers (Baldwin),
275n5, 291, 293, 294, 295, 331 xxv, 38, 45, 46, 47, 48
Wiesel, Elie, 78
Vajpaye, Atal Bihari, xxiii Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 289
Var Durga Ki (“The Ballad of Durga”), “Women Become Breadwinners”
308, 309 (Chaudhuri), 93
Varanasi, 283 Woolf, Virginia, 102
Varshney, Ashutosh, 197, 205 Wordsworth, William, 22
Vassanji, M.G., xx World War II, xxvii, 136, 164, 180
“Vikram, the Vampire and the Story”
(Husain), 262 Younghusband, Francis, 163
Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) Yumnam, Babyrani, xxvii, 157–175
(“World Hindu Council”), 12, 308,
310, 317, 318, 324n67 Zada, Shakeel Aadil, xxvii, 238
Zafor, Abu, 252
Wagah, 30, 41 Zaman, Niaz, 226, 227, 247
Wahabi, 198, 209, 211n1, 228 Zamindar, Vazira, x, xviii, 53, 54, 134,
Wahhabism, xxviiin3, 268 144, 197, 202, 204, 330
Wahid, Siddiq, xviii Zee News , 61
Waiting for the Mahatma (Narayan), 332, Zia-ul-Haq, General Muhammad, xxii,
333, 334, 337, 339 xxvii, 15, 42, 198, 205, 207, 208, 209,
Wajahat, Asghar, 31 211n1, 267, 268
Waliullah, Syed, 225, 226 Zionism, 203
War on Terrorism, xxiii, 65 Ziring, Laurence, 224
Wasteland, The (Eliot), 266 Zomia Highlands, 162
Watt, Ian, 254 Zoroastrianism, xxv
Watten, Barrett, 38, 46, 48
 Contributors

Nazia Akhtar received her doctorate in comparative literature in 2013

from the University of Western Ontario, Canada. She has taught courses
in women’s studies and comparative literature departments as well as in
study abroad programs in Hyderabad. Having completed a book manu-
script based on her doctoral thesis, she has recently embarked on a new
project about representations of early- and mid-twentieth-century Hyder-
abadi women and their participation in public life.

Amit R. Baishya is an assistant professor in the Department of English at

the University of Oklahoma. He teaches courses on postcolonial literature
and theory, world literature, and cultural studies. He is currently com-
pleting a book manuscript on states of terror and survival as represented
in post-1980 fictions from Northeast India.

Nandita Bhavnani is an independent scholar and writer with degrees in

law and anthropology. She is the author of The Making of Exile: Sindhi
Hindus and the Partition of India (2014). She lives and works in Mumbai.

Ilyas Chattha is a postdoctoral scholar at the Centre for Imperial and

Post-Colonial Studies at the University of Southampton. His publications
include Partition and Locality: Violence, Migration and Development in Guj-
ranwala and Sialkot, 1947–1961 (Oxford 2011). He has also published es-
says on Partition in South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies, Modern Asian
Studies, and in R. D. Long, ed., State and Nation-Building in Pakistan (Rout-
ledge 2015).

Rahul K. Gairola is assistant professor of English and comparative

literature at the Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, India. His essays
have appeared in journals such as South Asian Review, Jouvert: A Journal of
Postcolonial Studies, South Asian Popular Culture, and Comparative Litera-
ture. He is currently working on two book projects: Homelandings: Di-
asporic Genealogies of Belonging in Nation and Digital Homes: Electronic
Agency in 21st Century South Asia. He is an article editor for Postcolonial
Text and the editor for salaam, the newsletter for the South Asian Literary
Association (SALA).

359
360 Contributors

Amrita Ghosh, a PhD from Drew University, is a lecturer in English at

Seton Hall University. She is the coeditor of Subaltern Vision: A Study in
Postcolonial Indian Text (Cambridge Scholars, 2012) and the editor of a
forthcoming anthology from Sage, An Anthology of Bengal Partition. Ghosh
is the founder-editor of an online transnational journal named Cerebra-
tion, which strives to bridge the gap between academic and non-academic
communities across boundaries.

Kaiser Haq is a distinguished poet, translator, critic, and professor of

English at Dhaka University, Bangladesh. His recent publications include
Published in the Streets of Dhaka: Collected Poems (2012) and Triumph of the
Snake Goddess (Harvard UP, 2015). An active participant in the 1971 Ban-
gladesh liberation war, he was honored with several awards for his ser-
vice. He has translated, among others, Rabindranath Tagore and Sham-
sur Rahman, and also edited Contemporary Indian Poetry (OSU Press,
1990). He won the Bangla Academy Award in 2014.

Md. Rezaul Haque is professor of English at Islamic University, Kushtia,

Bangladesh. He received his PhD from Flinders University, Australia. He
coedited The Shadow of the Precursor (Cambridge Scholars Publishing,
2012) and has published internationally on Indian English fiction, Rokeya
Sakhawat Hossain, and Hasan Azizul Huq. He is also a poet and transla-
tions editor for Transnational Literature (Australia).

Nalini Iyer is professor of English and director of research at Seattle

University. She specializes in postcolonial Anglophone literatures and
her publications include Other Tongues: Rethinking the Language Debates in
India, coedited with Bonnie Zare (2009), and Roots and Reflections: South
Asians in the Pacific Northwest, coauthored with Amy Bhatt (2013). Her
essays have appeared in ARIEL: A Review of International English Litera-
tures, South Asian Review, and Alam-e-Niswan: Pakistan Journal of Women
Studies.

Jasbir Jain, formerly of the University of Rajasthan, is at present Hon-

orary Director of the Institute for Research in Interdisciplinary Studies
(IRIS). Her many awards include the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship as
Writer in Residence (2009), UGC Fellow (2005–2007), and K. K. Birla Fel-
lowship for Comparative Literature (1998–2000). She was elected life
member of Clare Hall, Cambridge University, and she has also received
Fulbright and ACLS Fellowships. She is author or editor of over twenty
books, including Beyond Postcolonialism: The Dreams and Realities of a Na-
tion (2006), The Writer as Critic: Literature, History and Culture (2012), and
The Diaspora Writes Home: Subcontinental Narratives (2014).
 Contributors 361

Parvinder Mehta has a PhD in English from Wayne State University. Her
research and teaching interests include postcolonial literature and film, as
well as multi-ethnic American literature. Her essays have appeared in
Journal of South Asian Diaspora, Journal of South Asian Popular Culture,
South Asian Review, and Sikh Formations. She is currently completing a
book manuscript on Asian American women writers titled Mimic Women:
Cultural Camouflage and Global Modernity.

Radhika Mohanram is professor of English and critical and cultural theo-

ry at the University of Cardiff, Wales. Her publications include Black
Body: Women, Colonialism and Space (Allen and Unwin, 1999) and Imperial-
ism as Diaspora: Race, Sexuality and History in Anglo-India (2013), coau-
thored with Ralph J. Crane. She was also the guest editor of “Compara-
tive Partitions,” special section of Social Semiotics (2011). She has pub-
lished widely on gender issues in journals such as Gender Forum, Continu-
um: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, Journal of Cultural Studies, and
Feminist Studies in English Literature. Her current work focuses on trauma,
cultural memory, and the Partition of 1947.

Debali Mookerjea-Leonard is associate professor of English and world

literature at James Madison University. She is the author of Literature,
Gender, and the Trauma of Partition: The Paradox of Independence (Routledge,
2016). She has also coedited an anthology of essays entitled The Indian
Partition in Literature and Films: History, Politics, Aesthetics. Her work has
been supported by fellowships from the American Association of Univer-
sity Women, the American Institute of Indian Studies, and the National
Endowment for the Humanities. Mookerjea-Leonard has contributed to
anthologies and journals including The Journal of Commonwealth Literature,
Feminist Review, and Social Text.

Masood A. Raja is associate professor of postcolonial literature and theo-

ry at the University of North Texas and editor of Pakistaniaat: A Journal of
Pakistan Studies. His critical essays have been published in such diverse
journals as Interactions, Mosaic, Prose Studies, South Asian Review, and oth-
ers. Author of Constructing Pakistan (Oxford, 2010), he is currently work-
ing on his next book entitled Democratic Criticism: Poetics of Incitement and
the Muslim Sacred.

Amber Fatima Riaz teaches at Douglas College in British Columbia. She

has a PhD in English literature from the University of Western Ontario.
Her dissertation examined the representations of the Muslim veil, as well
as the zenana (women’s space) in literature, music videos, TV drama seri-
als, and film. Her current research interests include gender and literature
in the South Asian context, migrations and borders, diaspora and postco-
lonial theory, architecture theory, and representations of space in litera-
362 Contributors

ture and popular culture, as well as alternative theater in Karachi. She

has published essays on parent-activists in New York, the Partition of
India, and on the representation of the burqa in Tehmina Durrani’s novel,
Blasphemy.

Jeremy A. Rinker, PhD from George Mason University, is an assistant

professor at the University of North Carolina Greensboro’s Department
of Peace and Conflict Studies where he researches the intersections be-
tween narrative, violent conflict, and nonviolent conflict transformation.
As a 2013 Fulbright Fellow at the Malaviya Center for Peace Research at
Banaras Hindu University he focused his research on the centrality of
justice discourse in conflict transformation and reconciliation.

Tarun K. Saint is associate professor of English, Hindu College, Delhi

University. His areas of research include the literature of the Partition
and science fiction. He is the author of Witnessing Partition: Memory, His-
tory, Fiction (Routledge India, 2010). He has edited Bruised Memories: Com-
munal Violence and the Writer (Seagull, 2002) and coedited (with Ravikant)
Translating Partition (Katha 2001).

Tasneem Shahnaaz is associate professor of English at Sri Aurobindo

College, University of Delhi. She wrote her PhD dissertation at Jamia
Millia University, New Delhi, on Adrienne Rich. Her teaching and re-
search interests include the English language, translation, feminist stud-
ies, and South Asian literatures. A published poet, she has read her poet-
ry in the World Poets Meet and on the radio. Author of many scholarly
essays and book reviews, she has coauthored Business English (2008) and
English and Communication Skills, Parts I and II (2015).

Amritjit Singh is Langston Hughes Professor of English at Ohio Univer-

sity and has held visiting positions at New York University, Wesleyan
University, College of the Holy Cross, and University of California at
Berkeley. He taught at Rhode Island College from 1986 to 2006 and was a
Fulbright-Nehru Visiting Professor at University of Delhi in 2014–2015.
Books edited, coedited, or authored by him include: The Novels of the
Harlem Renaissance (1976, 1994), India: An Anthology of Contemporary Writ-
ing (1983), Conversations with Ishmael Reed (1995), Conversations with Ralph
Ellison (1995), Memory and Cultural Politics (1996), Postcolonial Theory and
the United States (2000), Collected Writings of Wallace Thurman (2003), Inter-
views with Edward Said (2004), and The Circle of Illusion: Poems by Gurcharan
Rampuri (2011). A widely traveled academic, Singh received the MELUS
Lifetime Achievement Award in 2007 and the SALA Distinguished
Achievement Award in Scholarship in 2014. His poems and poetry trans-
lations have appeared in Chelsea, Kavya Bharati, Edinburgh Review, Muse
 Contributors 363

India, New Letters, Nimrod, Toronto Review, Salzburg Poetry Review, and Re-
Markings.

Babyrani Yumnam is a PhD candidate in the Sociology Department at

Binghamton University, State University of New York. Her dissertation
project is on the politics of cross-border trade between India and Myan-
mar under India’s Look East Policy in Moreh (Manipur) in Northeast
India. Her broader research interests include borderlands, historical soci-
ology, political economy, international development, and transnational
studies.