Haimanti Roy. Partitioned Lives: Migrants, Refugees, Citizens in India and Pakistan, 1947–1965.

Abstract

The Partition of India, which had multiple layers of meaning for the people of the subcontinent, represents the most contested terrain of South Asian historiography. In recent years it has been widely acknowledged that the Partition was not just an event that happened in August 1947; it had a long afterlife. The historiography of Partition therefore has shifted its focus from a preoccupation with its causes and the allocation of blames to an increasing interest in recovering the experiences of its victims, as these had profound consequences for the subsequent nation-building processes and community relations in the subcontinent. As Gyan Pandey once argued, the “truth” of the Partition lay in the violence it produced; the history of Partition should therefore reflect how this violence was conceptualized, executed, experienced, and remembered by those who lived through it—as victims, aggressors, or onlookers. A series of studies following this line of inquiry have appeared in recent years. Among these the works of Pandey, Urvashi Butalia, Subir Kaul, Kamla Bhasin and Ritu Menon, Ravinder Kaur, Vazira Zamindar, and Neeti Nair have focused on the Partition in Punjab and the experiences of the Punjabi refugees. If Bengal was initially neglected in this literature, that imbalance has been somewhat redressed by the appearance of a few significant studies by Prafulla Chakraborty, Ranabir Samaddar, Willem van Schendel, Jasodhara Bagchi,, Subhoranjan Dasgupta, and most recently Joya Chatterji. These studies have explored the uncertainties created by the new borders, the experiences of displacement of the Bengali refugees and focused on the politics of rehabilitation. Above all, they have underscored the differences in the trajectories of Partition histories in Punjab and Bengal.