Uncertain Partitions

Abstract

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgements A version of this paper was presented at a symposium on ‘1947/8/9’ at Queen Mary, University of London on 10 June 2006. I am grateful to all those who offered their comments that day and to Professor Lyn Innes for reading through a draft of this article. Notes 1. Gyanendra Pandey has made the most sustained analysis so far of the failure of historical narratives in Remembering Partition (2002). But see also Tan and Kudaisya, chapter 1; Tharu Tharu , Susie . ‘Rendering Account of the Nation: Partition Narratives and Other Genres of the Passive Revolution’ . The Oxford Literary Review 16 (1994) : 69 – 91 . [Google Scholar]; Mayaram Mayaram, Shail. 1997. Resisting Regimes: Myth, Memory and the Shaping of a Muslim Identity, Delhi: Oxford UP. [Google Scholar], chapter 6; and Gilmartin Gilmartin , David . ‘Partition, Pakistan, and South Asian History: in Search of a Narrative’ . Journal of South Asian Studies 57.4 (Nov. 1998) : 1068 – 95 . [Google Scholar]. 2. Ayesha Jalal Jalal, Ayesha. 1985. The Sole Spokesman: Jinnah, the Muslim League and the Demand for Pakistan, Cambridge: Cambridge UP. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]'s The Sole Spokesman remains the key reference work on the political calculations at work behind this demand. 3. It should also be noted that this period marked a burgeoning of the short story form in many Indian languages, particularly Urdu and Hindi. 4. An extended discussion of the importance of the motif of spatial liminality in Partition stories can be found in Kamra Kamra , Sukeshi . ‘Ruptured Histories: Literature on the Partition (India, 1947)’ . Kunapipi XXV . 2 (2003) : 108 – 27 . [Google Scholar]. 5. Women's bodies frequently came to be seen during Partition as ‘territory’ to be ‘occupied’ by men of the other faiths (Tan and Kudaisya 22). 6. The ending of the story brought down a banning order on the Pakistani journal that published it. Another Partition story by Manto, ‘Cold Meat’ (1949), presented its readers with a similar radical ethical uncertainty — and earned its writer a lengthy spell in the dock on a charge of ‘obscenity’ (Gopal Gopal, Priyamvada. 2005. Literary Radicalism in India: Gender, Nation and the Transition to Independence, Abingdon: Routledge. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar], 104, 112). 7. In her 1994 article on Partition narratives Susie Tharu makes a persuasive case for the parallels between the nationalist account of Partition and these later Hindu Nationalist narratives. 8. In Remembering Partition Pandey draws on this opposition between history and memory in reference to ‘non-disciplinary’ accounts of Partition violence.