Partition, Pakistan, and South Asian History: In Search of a Narrative

Abstract

Few events have been more important to the history of modern South Asia than the partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan in 1947. The coming of partition has cast a powerful shadow on historical reconstructions of the decades before 1947, while the ramifications of partition have continued to leave their mark on subcontinental politics fifty years after the event.Yet, neither scholars of British India nor scholars of Indian nationalism have been able to find a compelling place for partition within their larger historical narratives (Pandey 1994, 204–5). For many British empire historians, partition has been treated as an illustration of the failure of the “modernizing” impact of colonial rule, an unpleasant blip on the transition from the colonial to the postcolonial worlds. For many nationalist Indian historians, it resulted from the distorting impact of colonialism itself on the transition to nationalism and modernity, “the unfortunate outcome of sectarian and separatist politics,” and “a tragic accompaniment to the exhilaration and promise of a freedom fought for with courage and valour” (Menon and Bhasin 1998, 3).

The Indian nation and selective amnesia: representing conflicts and violence in Indian history textbooks

“…8 This difficulty is not specific to textbooks as several scholars noted the complicated place that partition occupies in the historiography of South Asia (Brass 2003;Gilmartin 1998;Pandey 2006). 9 Moreover, the political science textbook (for class XII) evokes for the first time the 1975-77 Emergency, the 1986 anti-Sikh riots and the 2002 post-Godhra violence in Gujarat.…”

“…This difficulty is not specific to textbooks as several scholars noted the complicated place that partition occupies in the historiography of South Asia (Brass ; Gilmartin ; Pandey ).…”

Political violence, community and its limits in Kannur, Kerala

“…9 These communities in Kerala-bound 7 See especially Gilmartin (1998). One of the earliest formulations of schismogenesis maybe found in Bateson (1935) where he describes it as progressive differentiation between groups where each drives the other along a similar path, leading to extreme rivalry and hostility.…”

Partition Historiography

“…By the 1990s, another significant paradigm shift took place from causes to effects. At the end of this decade, one scholar urged historians to eschew the pursuit of a “master narrative” of Partition and foreground, instead, how the “tension between multiple constructions of identity and the search for moral community itself defined the partition event.” For most historians, even though the question of causes was never resolved, it did recede, making way for a new line of questioning: How would scholars write non‐nationalist histories of Partition? The posing of this question implied an effort to explore the causes of Partition differently; by investigating effects, for example, feminist scholars retrospectively cast into new light the causes of violence within neighborhoods, localities, and the space of the family.…”