Spaces before Partition: An Introduction

Abstract

This introduction frames a selection of papers that encourage a richer spatial understanding of the years before the Partition of India. The papers respond to two types of questions. One type is spatial (at what scale do we approach Partition? Through which spaces should we attempt to understand both micro and macro processes? Movements across what distances constituted Partition?). The second type is temporal (what timescales do we invoke when approaching Partition? Of what was it the endpoint? What sort of memories were invoked and made during India's multiple partitions?). This introduction establishes the main trends in Partition historiography, tracked through the last two decennial anniversaries. It sketches out spatial analyses of Partition to date, regarding territory and displacement especially, but shows that much of this geographical interpretation has been implicit rather than explicit, and that most have begun with Partition. Whilst framing many of their arguments in twentieth-century colonial practice, and occasionally straying into the post-colonial, the papers in this special issue mostly focus on the 1930s-1940s at a range of scales (from the international, through the nation-state, to cities, mohallas and courtrooms). Collectively they make the argument that if Partition has a history, then it also has an historical geography. We hope these papers will help people read these histories and geographies with a finer spatial eye.

Postcolonial geographies and colonialism's mutations: The geo‐graphing of South Asia

“…For the past two decades especially, scholarship has also pluralized the partition by turning to the ways that this event, which by 1948 had left over 1 million people dead and 15 million displaced, was experienced and remembered in not only the cleaved spaces of Bengal and Punjab, but across the subcontinent where it was etched into the very notion of citizenship, and the diaspora (Ansari, ; Chatterji, ; Ghosh, ; Y. Khan, ; Pandey, ; Zamindar, ). Gould and Legg () have argued that these research findings beg greater attention to partition's historical geographies that require not only extending its temporal dimensions to pre‐and‐post 1947, but also paying closer attention to its multiple scalar geographies, and I would add the imaginative geographies instilled in South Asian nation‐states.…”

India's democracy before the democratic discontent, 1940s–1970s

“…They also revisited the Emergency, when democracy was suspended (Clibbens, 2014; Jaffrelot & Anil, 2020; Magistrelli Plys, 2020; Prakash, 2019; Williams, 2014), and Prime Minister Nehru's era at large and the notion of India's democratic success (Sherman, 2022). These studies brought new perspectives on India's long process of democratisation from the 1930s into the 1970s from the vernacular and the local state and provincial levels, the ‘everyday state’, 9 and by exploring the spatial dimension of state building and politics (Gould & Legg, 2019; Legg, 2014, 2016). 10…”

Histories of Indian Citizenship in the Age of Decolonisation

“…Sen includes not only the familiar sites of refugee resettlement in India-Calcutta in particular-but also the less familiar Andaman Islands, an archipelago in the Bay of Bengal that territorially belongs to India but is geographically proximate to Myanmar. 19 Sen harnesses an exciting "alternative archive" of oral history transcripts, memoirs, recollections, and little-known publications in Bengali alongside state archives to reconstruct the lives of her subjects.…”