Partition, in many senses, not yet over: Book

“People who were forced to leave and lost their homes, and people who never left their homes, were both unsettled as new nation-states and their margins came to be formed.

“Economic, bureaucratic and judicial institutions and inscriptions of both states asserted themselves into a ravaged landscape of people displaced from old ties, and permits, evacuee property legislation, and passports were techniques that sought to secure uncertain and contested relationships among refugees, religious minorities and citizenship,” Zamindar, who teaches history at Brown University, writes.

The book says that the Partition of 1947 in many senses is not over; it is not behind us. Since the destruction of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya on December 6, 2001, signaling the rise of the Hindu right in India, and the communal violence that followed when chants of ‘Jao Pakistan, ya Kabristan (go to Pakistan or your graves)’ rang alongside attacks on Muslim communities across north India, the invocation of Partition and Pakistan reacquired a sinister meaning for Muslim minorities in India.

“The Hindu right’s repeated portrayal of Muslims as invasive outsiders to India tied to a militant monotheism and temple destruction combines with the notion that Partition represented an inevitable parting of ways of two incompatible religious communities,” Zamindar says.

To this day a spectrum of political opinion, from those fighting for a secular vision of India to those who imagine it as essentially Hindu, continues to draw upon understandings of and lessons from Partition to argue for Muslim inclusion or exclusion in their imaginings of modern India, the book says.

Similarly, the rise of the Muhajir Quami Movement (MQM) in Karachi and Sind and its violent confrontations with the Pakistani state in the mid-1990s also drew upon narratives of Partition, the author says.

In the book, based on over two years of ethnographic and archival research, Zamindar argues that the combined interventions of the two post-colonial 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 post-colonial 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 surveillance areas 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 ofnational histories, she draws out the resistance, bewilderment and marginalisation of north Indian Muslims as they came to be pushed out and divided by both emergent nation-states.

Zamindar asks people of both the countries to stretch ‘our understanding of Partition violence’ to include this long, and in some sense ongoing, bureaucratic violence of post-colonial nationhood, and to place Partition at the heart of a twentieth century of border-making and nation-state formation”.