Abstract
ABSTRACTThis article analyses the Partition narrative of an Ashraf Muslim woman, who was seven years old at the time of Partition. Now resident in California, Zeba Rizvi was interviewed as part of the 1947 Partition Archive project, archived at the Stanford University Library. In this article, I interrogate relationships between memories and emotions of Partition, reconstituted through oral history that suggests the additional reframing of Partition-memory archives as an emotions archive. While Zeba’s interview reveals how emotional gaps are arbitrated by rapport, or absence thereof, I argue, using a phenomenological approach, that Partition memory-emotions conform to the narrator’s evolving and dynamic sense of self through time, that is also evident in the interview. Zeba Rizvi resists and reconstructs the politics of Partition in agential ways, using art to express secularism and its emotions: love-pyar, while re-inscribing and conforming to Ashraf values of gender, class and the celebration of heritage.
Highlights
This article is a micro-history of Partition memories and emotions
Resident in California, Zeba Rizvi was interviewed as part of the 1947 Partition Archive project, archived at the Stanford University Library
While Zeba’s interview reveals how emotional gaps are arbitrated by rapport, or absence thereof, I argue, using a phenomenological approach, that Partition memory-emotions conform to the narrator’s evolving and dynamic sense of self through time, that is evident in the interview
Summary
This article is a micro-history of Partition memories and emotions. Based on septuagenarian Zeba Rizvi’s interview, curated by the 1947 Partition Archive, housed in the Stanford University Library, the article explores how individual narratives of Partition can be fruitfully compared with scholarly discussions about its multifaceted experiences that characterize Partition as a collective process consisting of many fragments, rather than as a singular event. This article explores how narrative space within Partition memorialization and public history projects become agential and emotional spaces that reframe and reorder analysis about home, religion, community and nation.
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