IT is a bit surprising that a new anthology — Revisiting India’s Partition-New Essays on Memory, Culture and Politics — written on the partition of India almost 70 years after the cataclysmic events took place should draw the attention of editors, two of whom are non-resident Indians. In the preface therefore they justify their effort by stating that they have noted with a certain sadness and irony how most literary scholarship on the subject has rarely gone beyond a few well-known novels, short stories, poems, or films.

So under the aegis of the South Asian Conference in Madison, Wisconsin in 2013 they thought of focusing on the unexplored areas of the Partition. It is a well-known fact that though Partition studies has become an industry for half a century or more, the relatively little attention Bengal and the North-east has 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 is indeed an issue that cannot be overlooked for long.

Thus this becomes the unique selling point of this new anthology which consists of 19 richly layered and thought-provoking interdisciplinary essays on different facets of the Partition keeping in mind the relevance of the “Long Partition” paradigm developed by Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar who draws our attention to 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 boundaries and nationalizing identities that became, in some lives, interminable.”

The essays in this volume trace variant ethnic, nationalist and transnational trajectories of post-colonial South Asia in distinctively interdisciplinary contexts and provide a multifaceted approach to Partition and its aftermath. In this collection the editors have attempted to establish a dialogue among a diverse group of scholars and perspectives to help rethink Partition studies in the 21st century.

The contributors from all across the globe 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, border issues in the North-east, the impact of Partition on Southern India including the police action in Hyderabad, the impact of Partition on postcolonial 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 scholars have in their own particular way pushed forward a discussion of the legacy of decolonisation in South Asia.

The book is organised 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 link between cultural memory and democracy and in particular how Partition’s spectre haunts Indian democracy.

Jasbir Jain examines a variety of Urdu literary texts by writers such as Sadat Hasan Manto, Tahira Iqbal and Sorayya Khan to understand the cultural baggage of terms such as refugee or muhajir that articulate our sense of belonging and “at-homeness”.

Building on the work of historians such as Gyanendra Pandey as well as feminist readings of Partition by scholars like Urbashi Butalia, Parvinder Mehta examines female silence in select texts of Partition. 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. All these four essays try to move us towards new understandings, healing and reconciliation.

The second section, “Nations and Narrations” bring together three essays that focus on specific narratives. Tarun K Saint’s essay examines a variety of Partition memoirs by Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Ram Manohar Lohia and others that have been relegated to the margins of Partition discourses. By refocusing our attention on these memoirs, Saint invites us to consider their testimonial functionality as they bear witness to the trauma of Partition and its persistent afterlife.

Amrita Ghosh’s essay examines the significance of the Morichjhapi massacre of Dalit refugees in 1979 and its literary representation in Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide.

Debali Mookerjea-Leonard examines the impact of Partition on middle-class women who were brought into the workforce following their displacement. Using literary representations from fictional works by Narendranath 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 of nation, identity, and belonging.

Nandita Bhavnani examines how disputes over property — including Hindu evacuee property — shaped the violent conflict between Sindhi Muslims and muhajirs after the Partition in Sindh.

Focusing on Kashmir, Ilyas Chattha examines how communal violence led to the production of refugee populations and how communal violence plays a central role in defining the ongoing crisis in Jammu and Kashmir.

Babyrani Yumnam examines political processes in the north-east that have received scant attention in political and academic discourses of Partition and contextualises her discussion of political mapmaking as part of the capitalist expansions and state formations in the region.

Amit Rahul 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.

Impact on southern India

The fourth section explores postcolonial 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.

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 serialised Urdu novel Baazigar, by Shakeel Adil Zada, published over a 30-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 ambivalence towards Pakistan, his country and his position as an autonomous 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 novelist’s ability to build a new identity as a Pakistani.

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 Partition in contemporary Benaras and its complex social dynamics. He examines the role of custodial torture in prisons and how it marginalises communities and reconstructs inequalities in the city.

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 per cent of the officials and where the Razakars, a paramilitary organisation, forced the migration of thousands of Hindus in 1946. Through an analysis of a Telugu short story Durga in Kishorilal Vyas Neelkanth’s Razakar, Akhtar demonstrates how the Hindutva nationalists represent 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 RK 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 anxiety about the loss of the secular ideal through the communal violence of Partition.

The essays in this volume have sought to explore new areas of Partition studies beyond the traditional Punjab and Bengal. They 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 contemporary South Asia and its inhabitants and to recognise how generations of South Asians at home and abroad have continued to engage with collective memories and new art forms.

—The Statesman / India

Published in Dawn, November 9th, 2016