Partition’s First Generation: Space, Place, and Identity in Muslim South Asia By Amber H. Abbas

Abstract

Partition’s First Generation starts with the author’s family connections to the city of Aligarh in the western part of the largest and most populous Indian state of Uttar Pradesh (UP). Her ancestral family home was located on Amjad Ali Road, named in honour of her great-great grandfather, a leading lawyer in Aligarh. The narrative starts in 2009 with her trying to locate the road and the ancestral home, where her grandmother and father were born, only to discover that Amjad Ali Road no longer existed. Following the destruction of the sixteenth-century Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, eastern UP, on 6 December 1992, many Muslims neighbourhoods across the state were targeted by emboldened Hindu nationalists, including this area. Despite this erasure, Abbas managed to locate the property, which now belonged to a Hindu family who had fled Lahore in 1947 and received this as refugee property. This personal opening to the book frames its broader institutional focus, which is to examine the history of the iconic Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), est. 1875, and situate this history in the ‘before, during and after’, of Partition (p. xiii). It highlights the continuum of violence straddling 1947, the ways in which it affected the people moved between places, and whether their movements had been voluntary or forced.