Violent Memories: South Asian Spaces of Postcolonial Anamnesis

Abstract

The ambiguous phrase “violent memories” strikes at two of the key conceptual matters about which scholars of India have theorized: memories of violent acts and the violence that such recollections can do to those who remember them, those who are remembered, and those who are forgotten. The author seeks to provide an overview of the memory politics that has accompanied India’s struggle for freedom from colonialism, both during the Raj and since independence. The main events and processes that scholars of postcolonial and subaltern studies have investigated in India are reviewed, including anticolonial violence and nonviolence, the memory politics of the “Mutiny” of 1857, gendered and sexed politics and violence, the partition of 1947, communal riots, Indira Gandhi’s “Emergency,” and natural disasters. The author positions these reviews within relatively broad theoretical trends in postcolonial studies from which they have drawn and to which they have a great deal to contribute.