Long Partition And The Making Of Modern

Asian history.

In This Remarkable Study Based On More Than Two Years Of Ethnographic And Archival Research, Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar Argues That The Combined Interventions Of The Two Postcolonial States Were Enormously Important In Shaping These Massive Displacements. She Examines The Long, Contentious, And Ambivalent Process Of Drawing Political Boundaries And Making Distinct Nation-States In The Midst Of This Historic Chaos. Zamindar Crosses Political And Conceptual Boundaries To Bring Together Oral Histories With North Indian Muslim Families Divided Between The Two Cities Of Delhi And Karachi With Extensive Archival Research In Previously Unexamined Urdu Newspapers And Government Records Of India And Pakistan. She Juxtaposes The Experiences Of Ordinary People Against The Bureaucratic Interventions Of Both Postcolonial States To Manage And Control Refugees And Administer Refugee Property. As A Result, She Reveals The Surprising History Of The Making Of The Western Indo-Pak Border, One Of The Most Highly Surveillanced In The World, Which Came To Be Instituted In Response To This Refugee Crisis, In Order To Construct National Difference Where It Was The Most Blurred. In Particular, Zamindar Examines The Muslim Question At The Heart Of Partition. From The Margins And Silences Of National Histories, She Draws Out The Resistance, Bewilderment, And Marginalization Of North Indian Muslims As They Came To Be Pushed Out And Divided By Both Emergent Nation-States. It Is Here That Zamindar Asks Us To Stretch Our Understanding Of Partition Violence To Include This Long, And In Some Sense Ongoing, Bureaucratic Violence Of Postcolonial Nationhood, And To Place Partition At The Heart Of A Twentieth Century Of Border-Making And Nation-State Formation. A Product Of Outstanding Historical-Ethnographic Research, Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar'S Book Tells Like No One Has Done Before The Maddeningly Tangled Story Of How, In The Years After The Partition Of 1947, India And Pakistan Actually Came To Separate Their Territories, Properties, And Peoples Into Two Sovereign States. Zamindar'S Ability To Weave Into A Single Narrative The National And The Local, The Administrative And The Personal, The Everyday And The Epochal, Is Truly Remarkable. This Is A Path Breaking Contribution To Modern South Asian Studies. Partha Chatterjee, Author Of The Politics Of The Governed: Reflections On Popular Politics In Most Of The World A Deeply Moving Account Of The Contingent Category Of The No-Questions-Asked Natural Citizen Within The Indian And Pakistani Nation-States, At Birth And In Their Long, Postnatal Condition. The Hurriedly Fixed National Boundaries Here Both Necessitate And Entice, Contain And Penalize Crossings. Zamindar Richly Documents How For Some Minority Groups Travel, Kinship Ties, And A National Longing Have To Be Continually Bared To Lay Claim To Citizenship Within A Multireligious Dispensation. An Unsettling Work That Breaks Through The Chalk Circles Circumscribing The Retellings Of Our Separate And National Pasts. Shahid Amin, Author Of Writing Alternative Histories: A View From India A Remarkable Exercise Of Ethno-History From Below. In Addition To Official Sources, Zamindar Has Collected Testimonies In Archives And Interviewed Survivors Of Partition To Offer An Original And Significant Chronicle Of The Nation-Making Process In Both India And Pakistan. Christophe Jaffrelot, Author Of The Hindu Nationalist Movement And Indian Politics, 1925 To The 1990S This Is A Significant And Path-Breaking Book And Is Likely To Become The Standard Study Of The Subject. It Will Be Cited Authoritatively Or Be Argued With For Some Time To Come. Aamir Mufti, Author Of Enlightenment In The Colony: The Jewish Question And The Crisis Of Postcolonial Culture

Origins -- The refugee regime -- The transfer solution -- The partition solution -- Diasporas and homelands

A reappraisal of the tumultuous Partition and how it ignited long-standing animosities between India and Pakistan This new edition of Yasmin Khan’s reappraisal of the tumultuous India-Pakistan Partition features an introduction reflecting on the latest research and on ways in which commemoration of the Partition has changed, and considers the Partition in light of the current refugee crisis. Reviews of the first edition: “A riveting book on this terrible story.”—Economist “Unsparing. . . . Provocative and painful.”—Times (London) “Many histories of Partition focus solely on the elite policy makers. Yasmin Khan’s empathetic account gives a great insight into the hopes, dreams, and fears of the millions affected by it.”—Owen Bennett Jones, BBC

The Aftermath of Partition in South Asia draws upon new theoretical insights and fresh bodies of data to historically reappraise partition in the light of its long aftermath.

The International Bestseller 'Barney White-Spunner's book stands out for its judicious and unsparing look at events from a British perspective.' Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times Review 'This book is at its most powerful in its month-by-month narrative of how Partition tore apart northern and eastern India, with the new state of Pakistan carved out of communities who had lived together for the past millennium.' Zareer Masani BBC History Magazine 'A highly readable account . . .' Times Literary Review Between January and August 1947 the conflicting political, religious and social tensions in India culminated in independence from Britain and the creation of Pakistan. Those months saw the end of ninety years of the British Raj, and the effective power of the Maharajahs, as the Congress Party established itself commanding a democratic government in Delhi. They also witnessed the rushed creation of Pakistan as a country in two halves whose capitals were two thousand kilometers apart. From September to December 1947 the euphoria surrounding the realization of the dream of independence dissipated into shame and incrimination; nearly 1 million people died and countless more lost their homes and their livelihoods as partition was realized. The events of those months would dictate the history of South Asia for the next seventy years, leading to three wars, countless acts of terrorism, polarization around the Cold War powers and to two nations with millions living in poverty spending disproportionate amounts on their military. The roots of much of the violence in the region today, and worldwide, are in the decisions taken that year. Not only were those decisions controversial but the people who made them were themselves to become some of the most enduring characters of the twentieth century. Gandhi and Nehru enjoyed almost saint like status in India, and still do, whilst Jinnah is lionized in Pakistan. The British cast, from Churchill to Attlee and Mountbatten, find their contribution praised and damned in equal measure. Yet it is not only the national players whose stories fascinate. Many of those ordinary people who witnessed the events of that year are still alive. Although most were, predictably, only children, there are still some in their late eighties and nineties who have a clear recollection of the excitement and the horror. Illustrating the story of 1947 with their experiences and what independence and partition meant to the farmers of the Punjab, those living in Lahore and Calcutta, or what it felt like to be a soldier in a divided and largely passive army, makes the story real. Partition will bring to life this terrible era for the Indian Sub Continent.

This book examines the afterlife of Partition as imprinted on the memories and postmemories of Hindu and Sikh survivors from West Punjab to foreground the intersection between history, memory and narrative. It shows how survivors script their life stories to reinscribe tragic tales of violence and abjection into triumphalist sagas of fortitude, resilience, industry, enterprise and success. At the same time, it reveals the silences, stutters and stammers that interrupt survivors’ narrations to bring attention to the untold stories repressed in their consensual narratives. By drawing upon current research in history, memory, narrative, violence, trauma, affect, home, nation, borders, refugees and citizenship, the book analyzes the traumatizing effects of both the tangible and intangible violence of Partition by tracing the survivors’ journey from refugees to citizens as they struggle to make new homes and lives in an unhomely land. Moreover, arguing that the event of Partition radically transformed the notions of home, belonging, self and community, it shows that individuals affected by Partition produce a new ethics and aesthetic of displacement and embody new ways of being in the world. An important contribution to the field of Partition studies, this book will be of interest to researchers on South Asian history, memory, partition and postcolonial studies.

Partition's Legacies offers a selection of Joya Chatterji's finest and most influential essays. "Partition, nation-making, frontiers, refugees, minority formation, and categories of citizenship have been my preoccupations," she writes in the preface, and these are also the major themes of this book. Chatterji's first book, Bengal Divided, shifted the focus from Muslim fanaticism as the driving force of Partition towards "secular" nationalism and Hindu aggression. Her Spoils of Partition rejected the idea of Partition as a breaking apart, showing it to be a process in the remaking of society and state. Her third book, Bengal Diaspora, cowritten with Claire Alexander and Annu Jalais, challenged the idea of migration and resettlement as exceptional situations. Partition's Legacies can be seen as continuous with Chatterji's earlier work as well as a distillation and expansion of it. Chatterji is known for the elegance of her prose as much as for the sharpness of her insights into Indian history, and Partition's Legacies will enthrall everyone interested in modern India's apocalyptic past. "What emerges from the essays," David Washbrook writes in the introduction, "is often quite startling. The demarcation of Partition followed no master plan or even coherent strategy but was made up of myriad ad hoc decisions taken on the ground, often by obscure actors. Refugee policy, immigrant rights, and even definitions of national citizenship ... were produced by no deus ex machina but out of day-to-day struggles on the streets and in the courts."

The Indian Independence Act of 1947 granted India freedom from British rule, signaling the formal end of the British Raj in the subcontinent. This freedom, though, came at a price: partition, the division of the country into India and Pakistan, and the communal riots that followed. These riots resulted in the deaths of an estimated 1 million Hindus and Muslims and the displacement of about 20 million persons on both sides of the border. This watershed socioeconomic–geopolitical moment cast an enduring shadow on India’s relationship with neighboring Pakistan. Presenting a perspective of the middle-class refugees who were forced from their homes, jobs, and lives with the withdrawal of British rule in India, Home, Uprooted delves into the lives of forty-five Partition refugees and their descendants to show how this epochal event continues to shape their lives. Exploring the oral histories of three generations of refugees from India’s Partition—ten Hindu and Sikh families in Delhi, Home, Uprooted melds oral histories with a fresh perspective on current literature to unravel the emergent conceptual nexus of home, travel, and identity in the stories of the participants. Author Devika Chawla argues that the ways in which her participants imagine, recollect, memorialize, or “abandon” home in their everyday narratives give us unique insights into how refugee identities are constituted. These stories reveal how migrations are enacted and what home—in its sense, absence, and presence—can mean for displaced populations. Written in an accessible and experimental style that blends biography, autobiography, essay, and performative writing, Home, Uprooted folds in field narratives with Chawla’s own family history, which was also shaped by the Partition event and her self-propelled migration to North America. In contemplating and living their stories of home, she attempts to show how her own ancestral legacies of Partition displacement bear relief. Home—how we experience it and what it says about the “selves” we come to occupy—is a crucial question of our contemporary moment. Home, Uprooted delivers a unique and poignant perspective on this timely question. This compilation of stories offers an iteration of how diasporic migrations might be enacted and what “home” means to displaced populations.

Revisiting India’s Partition: New Essays on Memory, Culture, and Politics brings together scholars from across the globe to provide diverse perspectives on the continuing impact of the 1947 division of India on the eve of independence from the British Empire. The Partition caused a million deaths and displaced well over 10 million people. The trauma of brutal violence and displacement still haunts the survivors as well as their children and grandchildren. Nearly 70 years after this cataclysmic event, Revisiting India’s Partition explores the impact of the “Long Partition,” a concept developed by Vazira Zamindar to underscore the ongoing effects of the 1947 Partition upon all South Asian nations. In our collection, we extend and expand Zamindar’s notion of the Long Partition to examine the cultural, political, economic, and psychological impact the Partition continues to have on communities throughout the South Asian diaspora. The nineteen interdisciplinary essays in this book provide a multi-vocal, multi-focal, transnational commentary on the Partition in relation to motifs, communities, and regions in South Asia that have received scant attention in previous scholarship. In their individual essays, contributors offer new engagements on South Asia in relation to several topics, including decolonization and post-colony, economic development and nation-building, cross-border skirmishes and terrorism, and nationalism. This book is dedicated to covering areas beyond Punjab and Bengal and includes analyses of how Sindh and Kashmir, Hyderabad, and more broadly South India, the Northeast, and Burma call for special attention in coming to terms with memory, culture and politics surrounding the Partition.