Abstract
We have edited this symposium with the knowledge that the Partition, which is estimated to have left more than one million dead and around 15 million displaced, was not over in 1947. 1 Its consequences and after-effects have dragged across the interceding 75 years, though often impacting differently in different decades and spaces. “Partition”, as Antoinette Burton asserts, “is destined to return again and again not just as memory, but as history, politics and aesthetics as well” (2015: xvi). Hence, while always harking back to 1947, we have tried to focus on traces of that momentous event more than on the event itself — and these traces do include, among other things, the creation of Bangladesh in 1971. Many instances of communal violence, gendered violence, counterinsurgent state violence, and the denial of fundamental human rights, have rampantly indexed the post-1947 geopolitical formations in this region with a concomitant othering of selective communities, albeit in different forms and manifestations.
We also want to make a general point about recording the history beyond the grand narratives of national history projects through a methodology that incorporates a diversity of ideas and genres of writing. At times, where more formal archives are absent, perhaps silences may be replaced through a close reading of fiction or other forms of representation (art, film, poetry). The silences surrounding and following the Partition are further complicated by the somewhat entangled nature of history and memory in South Asia’s social and cultural life. The year 1947 is, of course, remembered and independence days are celebrated by India and Pakistan, but often skipped over quickly in these memories are those who were left behind, or who survived but were never heard from again, many of them women. Such lapses in our collective memory in the aftermath of the division of British India continue to haunt us as people across the region, not to forget the violence against women during the liberation war in 1971.
Despite such lapses, the Partition has been variously documented and studied. We did not want to simply replicate or add to this documentation of the Partition as a historical event. Instead, we urged our contributors to think of 1947 also as an ongoing process. Critics such as Vazira Zamindar (2007) do not see the Partition simply as an event, but rather as a process, pointing to the epistemological violence that has led to the creation not just of a partitioned border, but of partitioned structures and minds. Likewise, Deepti Misri advocates the need to go “beyond Partition”, to see “the inaugural violence of nation formation” on the one side and “the violence deployed by the state to sustain its own political integrity” on the other (2014: 7). On a similar note, Uditi Sen argues that “the violent arrival” of nation-statehood in South Asia gave birth to the paradoxical figure of the citizen-refugee, complicating the very notion of citizenship in the partitioned states (2018: 4). In a way, a case can be made that the setting up of the new constitutions in India and Pakistan opened up a space of pervasive trauma. Emphasizing the role of the two constitutions as adding to the trauma of the paradoxically constituted citizen-refugee, a problem that underpins both the nations, Faisal Devji writes that “India and Pakistan have retained the most repressive aspects of their constitutional history, even as they legislated new freedoms which are today being hollowed out by this inheritance” (2021: 1). On a deeper daily level, the after-effects of the Partition can be felt in everyday life on both sides of the border, as is revealed in the precarious definitions of certain minorities and suspicion about their allegiances, the forgetfulness regarding certain losses (Dalit refugees, as addressed by Debjani Sengupta here, or the unsettled status of Bihari refugees to the East following the creation of Bangladesh), and the hesitation, particularly in India, to recognize legitimate lines of emotive connection across the borders, as explored by Kamran Asdar Ali and Tabish Khair here. Evidently, the Partition has rendered an irreparable sense of loss to many, resulting in new zones of exclusion that demarcate the cartography and the minds of postcolonial citizens. This is most obvious in the ways in which various minorities continue to be othered in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, a politics of othering that is currently bearing rich electoral dividends in India. 2
Keeping this wider impact of Partition in mind, we start off with two broader articles about two of the languages that were among those most directly affected by the 1947 Partition: Bengali and Punjabi. These articles look at what happened in literature then and soon afterwards from the vantage point of 2022, but also help to provide the kind of background information about Partition that South Asians born decades later sometimes lack. This partial amnesia envelops many international readers too, apart from specialist scholars. In both these articles, literature, placed in its historical context, is used to explore many of the features of Partition, viewed, as far as possible, across the 75 years that have elapsed.
Kaiser Haq’s article looks at the Partition of 1947 as it affected Bengal, largely from the perspective of the present. It adumbrates a historical survey of the distinctiveness of the Partition experience in Bengal set against the rest of the subcontinent, by studying Partition writings from India and Bangladesh (earlier East Pakistan) and setting them up in a dialogic perspective. Haq also examines the Partition experience of Urdu- and Bhojpuri-speaking refugees in Bangladesh, which remains an under-studied area, and which we, as editors, consider to be one of the overlooked traces of 1947. If Bengali, the language, was torn apart by the border in the East, without ceasing to be Bengali on both sides, so too was Punjabi by the border in the West. Hence, Anne Murphy’s article explores further dimensions of the parallel literary commitments on both sides of the border, this time in the West, read against the legacy of the Partition. It does so by providing a close reading of the works of Najm Hosain Syed (b. 1936), a leader in the Punjabi language advocacy movement in Pakistan. It analyses how Najm Hosain Syed writes to bring “the present into the past, working against a kind of nostalgia that disengages from the political present”.
From here, we move on to the mostly obscured matter of “Dalit” experiences of the Partition. Seven decades after the Partition, Dalits’ problems are not only alive, but continue to be proliferated and heightened through caste politics that lie at the centre of Indian democracy, thus questioning and even exposing the integrative model of India’s nationalism. Similar problems afflict minorities, including caste minorities at times, in Pakistan and Bangladesh. This again underscores the fact that the Partition did not end in 1947 because identity markers continue to construct and fuel the cartographic violence that underwrites post-Partition life on both sides of the border, signalling further division by threatening the lives of minorities and questioning their belongingness. Debjani Sengupta’s article is, to the best of our knowledge, the first — and a very incisive — examination of this overlooked and living remnant of the Partition of 1947.
The next article engages with another overlooked aspect of 1947 by providing a queer reading of Khushwant Singh’s under-studied novel, Delhi: A Novel (1990). This is the only novel in English that we look at, reserving our attention for other South Asian languages, which tend to be overlooked in the field of international postcolonial literary studies. It needs to be noted that Singh’s Delhi is usually left out of discussions of “Partition literature” in favour of his more visible Partition novel, Train to Pakistan (1956). In his perceptive critical intervention, Alberto Fernández Carbajal argues that the very choice of the Sikh narrator and Bhagmati as the focalizers for contemporary Delhi in Singh’s novel “acts as a dissident antidote to the predominant binary focus on Hindus and Muslims, offering a trans*versal version of recent Indian history challenging majoritarian and minor-majoritarian identity politics”.
This is followed by a conversation between a scholar (Amina Yaqin) and an artist (Naiza Khan). It critically examines the mapping of the lived experience of Karachi through a discussion of the poetic journey of the feminist activist, Fahmida Riaz (1946–2018), and the urban planner and architect, Perween Rahman (b. 1957), who was murdered in 2013. The conversation offers a fascinating journey through Karachi, exploring gendered history, traversing masculine space, and addressing the issue of fear, and the divisions, deprivations, and violence (social and otherwise) of the city, refracted through the prism of the Partition. In this article, and the one that follows it, 1947, the historical event, is overlaid by its traces. In the final intervention, two second cousins, who are also co-editors of this special issue and grew up in India and Pakistan respectively, discuss what the Partition came to mean to families like theirs. This conversation, which was undertaken because the editors felt that an article would allow less breadth and focus than the matter demanded, looks at the various and altering significances of the Partition across borders and generations, as well as its overlap with modernity, consumerism, progressive politics, class divisions, and the rise of religious nationalisms.
Much has been written on the Partition, but, at least in the field of literary studies, there is a heavy focus on certain texts, usually of a metropolitan, Anglophone provenance, with some exceptions, like the short stories of Saadat Hasan Manto — themselves largely retrieved for English readers due to the intervention of Salman Rushdie in his 1997 anthology of the ‘‘best’’ of Indian writing — and, to a lesser extent, texts such as Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas (1973) or Quarratulain Hyder’s Aag ka Dariya (River of Fire), originally published in 1959. We have chosen to avoid such texts, despite their undoubted significance. That is why there is no article on Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice Candy Man (1988), Singh’s Train to Pakistan, or on Manto’s powerful stories. The one partial exception to this is an article on Singh’s Delhi, a novel that, as noted, has received far less attention than Singh’s Train to Pakistan. We could not cover all languages, so we have concentrated specifically on Punjabi and Bangla, languages from the two borders of the Partition, both split between India and Pakistan (now Bangladesh, in the case of Bangla). We hope that the articles will come together to enable us to trace not just what happened in and around 1947, but also how those events have unravelled over the past 75 years.