Daily Times

Revisiting India’s Partition: New Essays on Memory, Culture, and Politics
Edited by: Amarjit Singh, NaliniIyer, and Rahul K. Gairola
Publisher: New Delhi: Orient Black Swan, 2016
Pgs: 400

The partition of India and the two Muslim-majority provinces of Bengal and Punjab in 1947 continue to whet scholarly curiosity and that of the public. A growing corpus of academic literature is now available, but for a long time to come we can expect more undertakings. Each publication seeks to shed new light on our understanding of undoubtedly the most cataclysmal event in the Indian Subcontinent which tore it apart through a transfer of power by the British in a great hurry.

More than a million Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs were killed and 14-15 million crossed the international border laid down by the Radcliffe Award between India and Pakistan in Bengal and Punjab. The legacy of that gory rupture called the Partition bequeathed unending disputes over allocation of territory and resources two states carved out of British India.

Such problems were compounded by bitter ideological bickering and blame-games in which academics and publicists have taken part with relish in behalf of self-righteous national narratives or advanced novel but bogus theses that Jinnah did not want partition and it was the Indian National Congress and its leadership, particularly Nehru who forced partition on Jinnah.

Ayesha Jalal, to whom the editors and other contributors of the present volume of 19 articles defer in their contributions as an authority on partition has never researched or written on the partition, except lately an edited work on Saadat Hasan Manto’s short-stories and articles.

Her “fame” as a historian rests on a study of high politics of Jinnah in his quest to be the sole spokesman of Indian Muslims, which actual has nothing by way of explanation of what happened during partition or why? That speaks for the type of research on partition which goes on closed networks of writers insulated from what happened actually during partition and relying on dubious authorities to assert their own credentials as scholars of partition.

My claim is that distortion of the historiography of the partition in itself is a major challenge for those who want to advance our understanding of that unprecedented, cataclysmal upheaval in recent South Asian sensibilities and the the concomitant travails with identity and responsibility. In a forthcoming study I present my findings on Who did What and Why during partition.

We are very familiar with the contributions of Manto who brought forth the stark realities of the partition in a genre which is unique. It is a pity that that contribution of Krishan Chander and others are no longer in vogue because while Manto exposed the dark side of “human nature” KrishanChander put things in perspective in the larger socio-economic context and the humanism which survived the bestiality of the partition violence. I am sure KrishanChander and others will receive their due merit in course of time.

This edited volume consists of 19 essays organized under five sections: different approaches to partition; nations and narratives; borders and borderlands; from Pakistan to Bangladesh; and, partition within. The essays are of varying quality; it is not possible to comment on each one of them. I will confine my review to a few I found interesting and enriching to my understanding of the partition.

I found contributions on the experience of partition in South India and the Northeast useful addition to knowledge. Radikha Mohanram’s essay, ‘Spectres of Democracy/The Gender of Spectres makes good use of Derrida’s seminal works dealing with memory: forgetting, recalling, losing, and mourning. Derrida and Foucault notoriously use very difficult language to captures experiences and incidents for which perhaps ordinary language is inadequate.

I was pleased that Mohanram succeeds in writing a fairly intelligible essay on how partition has impacted on the national project of India. However, she seems to suggest that the liberal-secular project of nation-building has failed because of its inability to incorporate Muslims as equal citizens and the rise of Hindu nationalism under Modi as the indictment of the nation-building project. One can argue that the partition based on the two-nation theory inflicted irreparable damage on such a project and the establishment of Pakistan by no means was an example of another case of territorial nationalism.

This is twisted logic. Jinnah did make a startling speech on 11 August 1947, projecting the vision of territorial nationalism, but it had no credibility either as an idea or an argument and was discarded by him in his own life time. In fact, it was meant to prevent India expelling 35 million Muslims to complete the congress between nation and population. Gandhi and Nehru saved Pakistan from certain collapse by remaining faithful to the Congress creed of territorial nationalism while Pakistan has never wavered in step-by-step moving towards ethnic or the German model of nation-building. While Derrida is useful to deal with memory the writer is under obligation to work out the underlying logic of the two-nation theory and how Hindu nationalism now seeks to attain what Sarvarkar and Gowalkar wanted: subordination of all Muslims to the Hindu nation or the forced expulsion of all Muslims from the Hindu Rashtra called Bharat.

Tasneem Shahnaaz and Amritjit Singh have written a masterpiece on Intizar Hussain’s prolific writings on partition. Hussain moved to Pakistan from UP and settled in Lahore and became one of the prominent short-story writers whose reflections, hesitations and confusions about identity and identification have led him to search for coherent answers to his predicament of having one foot in his native village left in India and the other in Lahore. As a Shia intellectual who emigrated to Sunni-dominated Pakistan the irony of being an exposed minority dawned upon him and people like him.

As long as the Sunni and Shia ulema (clerics) directed their wrath against Hindus and Sikhs and later against non-Muslims and the controversial Ahmadia community the inherently exclusive thrust of ethnic nationalism was not felt by Shia intellectuals. Only Sahir Ludhianvi (born a Sunni and a Punjabi) realised what was going to happen in Jinnah’s Pakistan and returned to Nehruvian India. Today, both Hussain and Sahir would be confounded on what the partition was all about because the forces the Right and Reaction today pervade the politics of both India and Pakistan. It is time for creative writers to revisit the partition from a deeper, philosophical concern with the demonization and dehumanization of the Other and how it ravages the lives and the destiny of nations.

The writer is Professor Emeritus of Political Science, Stockholm University; Visiting Professor Government College University; and, Honorary Senior Fellow, Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore. He has written a number of books and won many awards, he can be reached on billumian@gmail.com

Published in Daily Times, November 19^th 2018.