Curating the Partition: dissonant heritage and Indian nation building

Abstract

The article analyses recent public initiatives to memorialise the establishment of India and Pakistan as postcolonial states in terms of violent partitioning rather than as a successful act of independence from British imperialism. The twin focal points of the article are the Partition Museum in Amritsar and the online 1947 Partition Archive. Both of these subscribe to and further the view that difficult and dissonant heritage holds transformative potential -which is seen as particularly significant in a region marked by conflictual state relations, majoritarian nationalism and extensive communal violence. However, as the article demonstrates, even though the Partition Museum and the 1947 Partition Archive collect and store previously unheard accounts of suffering, migration and rehabilitation as well as disseminate and make these available to the wider public, they fail to bring about a critical re-appraisal of the event, its lasting consequences and nation building as such. Whereas the Partition Museum -through the layout and content of its core exhibition -reproduces standard conceptions and imageries of national belonging and statehood, both initiatives rely on a use of oral history that remains overly committed to accentuating individualised and localised experiences, and to the positing of these as markers of authenticity.

Problematizing norms of heritage and peace: Militia mobilization and violence in Iraq

“…Recent centuries have seen a whole host or governments – from totalitarian regimes to liberal democracies – use the heritage of their respective nation state to develop a unifying national memory designed to engender degrees of collective identity and cohesion via the inculcation of a shared past (Gellner, 1983; Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1992 (1983)). Underpinning this national identity is a dynamic and selective engagement with the past in which processes of remembering and forgetting help legitimate the nation state itself, its borders and sovereignty, its incumbent political elites, and the parameters of inclusion and exclusion (Gillis, 1994; Svensson, 2021). Beyond the nation state, heritage can also play a role in fostering transnational belonging, such as the promotion of pan-regional cultural heritage to advance a common ‘European’ identity across the EU (Kaasik-Krogerus, 2020) or the ways in which South African sites commemorating the Apartheid regime have been utilized to connect local suffering to the global struggle against racism and oppression (Björkdahl and Kappler, 2019).…”

Can the Screen Speak?: Museum of Material Memory and the Politics of Display

“…While an emphasis on subjectivity is visible in their call for submissions, what is invisible in the final post/narrative on display is the co-creative aspect mentioned earlier. Oral histories come to life through intersubjective dialogues and they are not a single person’s account (Svensson, 2020). It is, ‘after all, always marked by the “shared authorship” between “interviewer and subject”—a shared “author-ity”’ (Svensson, 2020, p. 5).…”

“…Oral histories come to life through intersubjective dialogues and they are not a single person’s account (Svensson, 2020). It is, ‘after all, always marked by the “shared authorship” between “interviewer and subject”—a shared “author-ity”’ (Svensson, 2020, p. 5). During the interview, the founders have said that it takes ‘immense effort’ on their part as ‘it remains difficult to understand the history of an item which inherently cannot speak’ and that it is with ‘research, family conversations and effort’ that they ‘tie history, memory, culture, tradition, language and migrations into the physicality of the object’.…”

“…All the stories displayed tell us about a very subjective and personal experience of South Asian pasts, it has to be remembered that each story is a creation of both the contributor and the Museum through the founders. The involvement of the founders is integral to the functioning of the Museum and forms part of the shared ‘author-ity’ that Svensson (2020) mentions. This important aspect is missing in many posts.…”

The Ongoing Conflict between the Common Folk and the Prevailant Status-Quo in Ashfaque Ahmed’s the Shepherd

“…The second quatrain of the twentieth century marked the birth of the Progressive Movement which consisted of revolutionaries hailing from Punjab,Bihar and Bengal The prose of these famous writers acted like a doubleheaded sword as it was lively and addressed the issues of the masses and moulded their ideological framework against the British Raj which gave immense momentum to the Pakistan Movement IJELS-2022, 7 (6), (ISSN: 2456-7620) https://dx.doi.org/10.22161/ijels.76. 10 64…”