Violence Of Partition Research Articles

Fractured identities and wounded memories in Indian comics on partition: a decolonial reading of frame and panel

ABSTRACT Within the liaison of decoloniality studies and comics studies, this paper investigates how the decolonial visual style in the comics anthology This Side That Side (Ghosh 2013) has been used to locate the traumatised past and violation of human rights due to the ‘b/ordering’ practices of partition of India . ‘The Taboo’ by Malini Gupta and Dyuti Mittal, ‘An Afterlife’ by Sanjoy Chakraborty, and ‘Making Faces’ by Orijit Sen cultivate the stories of the inhumane condition of the migrants and victims during and after the Indo-Pakistan and Indo-Bangladesh-Pakistan partition. These narratives exemplify decolonised counter comics narratives on collective and personal memories inflicted upon and against the dominant partition discourse. They help churn out the human stories of the interminable psychological violence of partition and post-partitioned reality.

Colonial trauma: Terrains of disappearance, traumatic reflexivity, and historicizing countertransference

AbstractThis article analyzes trauma as an interplay of mass violence connecting imperial occupation in British Hong Kong, and an Anglo‐Chinese family in England. It takes Devereux's concept of countertransference to interrogate how killings in the author's family reverberate as traumatic transferences in fieldwork engaging the transgenerational violence of Partition in postcolonial Pakistan. Routing through transferences, it advances a comparative analysis of colonial trauma; moving from the individual to universal through layerings of traumatic silence, existential struggles, and the unconscious. It asks: what kinds of reflexivity are entailed by the double‐nature of the traumatized subject writing about trauma? Can colonial trauma retain specificity, while speaking to the discordant temporal settlement and relational formation of broader interconnected histories, geographical partitions, and generational loss? Psychological anthropology offers a mode for filling in blanks; privileging the subjectivity of inheritors of colonial trauma for ethnographic theorizations into ways anthropologists might reckon with the psychic violence of colonial pasts.

Penning the pain of partition: Refugee camp narratives in Indian comics

Within the melange of comics studies, migration studies and autobiography studies, this article investigates the process in which the collective trauma as well as the personal trauma of refugee women has been portrayed through the visual medium in Malini Gupta and Dyuti Mittal’s ‘The Taboo’, Syeda Farhana’s ‘Little Women’ and Maria M. Litwa’s ‘Welcome to Geneva Camp’. These stories focus on the issues faced by women who migrated to Bangladesh from parts of Bengal and Bihar and thereby experienced a crucial, grief stricken life in refugee camps during the Indo–Bangladesh–Pakistan partition. Life in these refugee camps meant not only meagre resources but also a loss of nationality. In the absence of such validation, these migrants faced an extreme sense of identity or existential crisis. The group photographs, family photographs, complex roadmaps and the map of the subcontinent in the aforementioned graphic narratives are merged to serve as the ‘narreme’, the base of narratives. They are organized on the basis of experiences of women from various classes, castes and provinces, contesting with the interminable psychological violence of partition and post-partitioned reality.

“Disgrace, Distress and Death: Traumatized Women in Partition Fiction”

This paper analyzes fictional works written around the massive violence of Partition of South Asia into two nations--India and Pakistan--in 1947. It reads short stories such as Saadat Hasan Manto’s “The Return,” Kartar Singh Duggal’s “Kulsum,” Khadija Mastur’s “They Are Taking Me Away, Father, They Are Taking Me Away,” and Ghulam Abbas’s “Avtar: A Hindu Myth;” and novels like Khushwant Singh’s Train to Pakistan, Bapsi Sidhwa’s Cracking India, Bhisham Sahni’s Tamas, and Chaman Nahal’s Azadi to examine the impact of the genocidal violence specifically on female characters. The study finds that the fictional texts corroborate with the theoretical arguments of scholars such as Urvashi Butalia, and Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin that notwithstanding the suffering of millions of people, the irrational Partition made women the worst victims of the subcontinent’s tragedy highlighting the moments when they are abducted, raped, kept as mistresses, forced to work as prostitutes, traded, or even killed. The texts show that—despite rare moments of women’s agency—men from the warring communities in both nations sexually exploit vulnerable women mostly from the opposing community. The paper argues that the scenes of intense physical and psychological pain of women depicting their dishonor, disgrace, distress, trauma, or death in the examined works reveal that men assaulted vulnerable women not only to flaunt their own manliness but also to demean the religion and the manhood of the victimized community.

Transnational Voices in Contemporary Pakistani Literature: An Exploration of Fragmented Self and Hybrid Identity in Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist

For various reasons, Pakistani literature has remained at the periphery of academic enquiry and research. As an independent nation, Pakistan is relatively young, with less than 75 years of history. The partition of 1947 and the bloodshed and violence that ensued had a strong impact on the growth of Pakistani literature and culture, as shown in the early writing of the nation which focused on the violence of partition and the sorrow of the nation. However, after 9/11, Pakistan and numerous other Muslim nations were brought into the limelight by the US. This focus had its obvious negative impacts on the perception of Pakistan as a fundamentalist nation and the base of religious extremism. Nevertheless, this unwarranted spotlight on the nation has also enabled its writers to respond to the West’s homogenous categorisation of their national, cultural and religious identity as merely fundamentalist and militant. During the last decade or so, Pakistani literature has thus been gaining momentum in the international literary sphere. Contemporary Pakistani diasporic writers have made significant contributions in shedding light on the culture, traditions, and complexities of Pakistan as a nation and the indifference of the West towards Pakistan as a mere hub of terrorism and religious extremism. Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007) follows a similar train of thought and attempts to demystify the complex identity of a Pakistani Muslim migrant in America before and after 9/11. This paper explores Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist as a manifestation of the transnational voice in contemporary Pakistani literature. It also attempts to reconfigure the notion of identity beyond the boundaries of an isolated nation and culture through the inclusion of migrants embodying hybrid identities. The paper concludes by analyzing the tenability of transnationalism as an antidote to the fragmentation of identities resulting from migration.

The rāg that Burned down Delhi: Music and Memory between 1857 and 1947

The Urdu litterateur Shahid Ahmad Dehlvi (1906–1967) recorded a series of reflections and reminiscences about Delhi, its culture, and how that culture was brought to an end by the violence of Partition in 1947. In his essays on music, he documented the performances and personal histories of a range of singers, dancers, and instrumentalists based in Delhi in the first half of the 20th century and considered their plight after Independence. In this article, I examine three of these essays—two in Urdu and one in English—and ask two questions. Firstly, how does this author develop a sense of historical depth to the social and cultural rupture he experienced in 1947? I suggest that his Urdu essays draw upon a longer history of literary nostalgia and connect a Delhicentric understanding of Partition to the earlier crisis of 1857. Secondly, how did attending to music allow Shahid Dehlvi to explore the nuances of cultural rupture and personal loss?

A Partitioned Library: Changing Collecting Priorities and Imagined Futures in a Divided Urdu Library, 1947–49

This article argues that the history of a damaged Urdu library in Delhi reveals new perspectives on the ways in which prominent Indian Muslim scholars dealt with the violent displacements of the 1947 Partition of British India and imagined new futures for the Urdu language across the borders of India and Pakistan. The library of the Anjuman-e Taraqqi-e Urdu (Association for the Advancement of Urdu), an influential Urdu literary association, was damaged during the violence following Partition in August 1947. In contrast to the relative absence of official commemorations of Partition in post-colonial South Asia, the Anjuman’s leaders documented and publicised the violence of Partition on their library. Moreover, these Urdu scholars used the material process of restoring the damaged library in 1947 and 1948 to rethink the role of the library as a repository to preserve evidence of the continuing production of Urdu knowledge in India. In turn, the disputed division of the library in 1949 illuminates competing visions for Urdu’s future in India, Pakistan, and beyond. This story of one Urdu library demonstrates how changing library collecting priorities and material practices shaped broader debates over Urdu’s place in twentieth-century South Asia.

Reena NandaFrom Quetta to Delhi: A Partition Story

Nota Bene Ivan Vladislavić Flashback Hotel Archipelago Books South African writer Ivan Vladislavić offers this collection of dreamlike stories that highlights his surrealist writing style and imaginative voice. Flashback Hotel blurs the lines between dream world and reality but does so while relentlessly searching for tangible meaning and teachings within the absurd. Josephine Wilson Extinctions Tin House Books Winner of Australia’s Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2017, Josephine Wilson’s Extinctions intelligently defies expectations and unabashedly asserts itself as a masterful work of novelistic literature. Set distinctly in Australia, Wilson’s unique and intricately established characters come to life on the page, and their imperfections and traumas are portrayed naturally and honestly through her firmly grounded yet imaginative voice. reports devoted to street demonstrations against racism and police brutality. Luz, the somewhat innocent provincial young man who moved to Paris in search of a job, gets his first taste of tear gas and of charges by the CRS riot police. Overall, Luz’s lengthy graphic novel is a consistently amusing, sometimes moving account of the heyday of an irreverently satirical magazine, before it unwillingly became a worldwide icon. Edward Ousselin Western Washington University Huzaifa Pandit Green Is the Colour of Memory Kolkata. Hawakal. 2018. 64 pages. Huzaifa Pandit lives in Kashmir, India, a region under turmoil from two hostile nations that have kept this beautiful land locked in. Never a day goes by without shouts for “Azadi” (freedom) ringing out on the streets of this heaven on earth. Battles break out constantly between Indian security forces and gun-wielding “terrorists” or stone-pelting schoolgirls. Naturally, like any poet living in a contested land, Pandit’s poems also reflect this anguish. Pandit’s poetic journey, therefore, sends him in two directions, one toward a direct confrontation with the security forces like “Death in February,” where he writes, “Obituaries / that seek asylum from winter drought / in lost samovars of salted tea / at funerals to thirsty mourners.” Another way is to write of exiled poets like the Kashmiri English poet Agha Shahid Ali and spell it out: “I know I want to write a poem, but the futility of it / I can’t read, you can’t read.” “What does one do when plastic rainbows / pellet your lamenting lungs? / What does one do when amputated houses / grate against wilted coffins?” The bodies/coffins are really a nation torn asunder. These two distinctions set Pandit apart from the native and extranative Kashmiri poets, but, beneath the veneer of sorrow, he has a disguised sense of humor when he doesn’t talk about Kashmir at all in a poem entitled “Bedside Tales from Kashmir.” This is rare because his main concern is the Indian military and the besieged city of Srinagar where he teaches. In “Testimony in February,” he asks of the poet Ahmed Faraz, “We forgot your name / Won’t you silence our conversations?” For a poet living in a city under suppression by the Indian state, “Green is the colour of memory specked / with shades of yellow grey.” Pandit is emphatic that “The parchment of my heart / is empty, quite empty.” Ravi Shanker N Palakkad, India Reena Nanda From Quetta to Delhi: A Partition Story New Delhi. Bloomsbury India. 2018. 170 pages. The ethnic cleansing and mass migration of Hindus and Sikhs from the provinces that became Pakistan in 1947 form an important current of twentieth-century history. The events played a key role in shaping modern India. Many novels and stories have been published over the years that depict the atrocities, terror, and violence of Partition, on one hand, and the trauma of the survivors on the other. Reena Nanda’s new novel is a somewhat different slice-of-life memoir. Memory and family history intersect time WORLDLIT.ORG 107 Books in Review and space, and we are treated to a fascinating panorama of lost places and cultures from the vantage point of the author’s own family history. Centered on the character of Shakunt, the author’s mother (Nanda was born in 1945 in Quetta), the family saga traverses the years from before Shakunt’s birth—starting with the arrival of Shakunt’s grandparents as settlers in Balochistan—to the...

Bodies as Borderwork: From Cartographic Distance to Cosmopolitan Concern in Bapsi Sidhwa's Ice-Candy-Man and Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines

The child protagonists Lenny in Bapsi Sidhwa's Ice-Candy-Man (1988) and the unnamed child in Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines (1988) witness the immediate and longue duree losses and violence of Partition on the Indian subcontinent. In the face of distances constructed by national divisions and personal estrangements, the children attempt to breach that most reductive of borders—the corporeal—through restorative imagination and empathy rather than violence. This paper will locate the body as a border and identify key moments where the child narrators in Ice-Candy-Man and The Shadow Lines use imagination and empathy to overcome limited and imposed national identity interpellations through transnational cosmopolitan outreach.

Changing Homelands: Hindu Politics and the Partition of India by Neeti Nair (review)

Reviewed by: Changing Homelands: Hindu Politics and the Partition of India by Neeti Nair Kavita Saraswathi Datla Changing Homelands: Hindu Politics and the Partition of India. By neeti nair. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011. 356 pp. $58.00 (hardcover). The partition of the South Asian subcontinent and the independence of India and Pakistan have rightfully claimed a renewed attention from scholars across disciplines. Independence, when it came after decades of anticolonial protest, brought with it one of the largest movements of people (some 12.5 million) in modern history, numerous and heartrending instances of violence, and an estimated one million dead. Neeti Nair’s Changing Homelands pursues a persistent question that has haunted commentary and scholarship on Partition from the very moment that disbelief over the scale of violence and migration began lifting: Who is to blame for the political process that led to Partition and the violence that accompanied it? Nair approaches the question, by her own admission, to address the claims of the Hindu right that India’s Muslims should somehow be held responsible for the tragic events of 1947–1949. Nair’s evidence suggests, to the contrary, that “some Punjabi Hindus preferred Partition to a united India” (p. 1). She therefore extends an argument to the Punjab that had been made by Ayesha Jalal in The Sole Spokesman (1985) for the all-India arena, and Joya Chatterji in Bengal Divided (1994) for the case of Bengal. Nair’s answer to the question, however, is meant in part to complicate the question itself—demonstrating both that various schemes for partition of the province within the overall context of a united India were being discussed for decades and that no one, including those who were eventually uprooted, believed that Partition would be accompanied by displacements of people on that scale. In fact, Nair argues that making clear separations between those who were secular and those who were communal (and could therefore be held responsible for Partition) is nowhere near as easy as the secondary scholarship has suggested. This is perhaps where Nair’s most innovative contribution lies—in her reading of the political careers of several extraordinary Punjabi public figures: Lala Lajpat Rai, Swami Shraddhanand, and Bhagat Singh. All of these figures, covered in early chapters of the book, are placed in the exacting circumstances of contemporary events and debates. Readers seeking similarly sympathetic readings of national figures like Gandhi, “who sometimes had a penchant for the ludicrous” (p. 205), or Nehru may be disappointed. Public debates about the future of India, as Nair ably demonstrates, were varied, dense, complex, and open-ended. Readers may regret that the book’s select bibliography does not detail the secondary literature [End Page 440] on these rich subjects. Matters as foundational as the setting of boundaries, the extent of the franchise, questions about the special representation of minorities (at different levels of government), and the method of determining and weighting that special representation were all carefully discussed even as Punjabis continued to unite across religious divides in the public sphere as they did, for example, during the rural movement of 1907 or around the treatment of political prisoners during Bhagat Singh’s prison hunger strike. “The real problem lay,” Nair ultimately argues, “in the politics of irresolution grounded in the increasing absence of a coherent and genuinely inclusive anti-colonial nationalism” (p. 258). The violence of partition itself, Nair argues in chapter 5, was not wholly unrelated to the status of political negotiation being conducted by South Asia’s elite. Events on the ground, far from seemingly spontaneous acts of outrageous violence, appear here as linked not only to the course of political negotiation, but also to peoples’ growing awareness of the spectacular failure of the British, and their military and police, to maintain law and order. The sixth and final chapter of Changing Homelands, which presents an analysis of interviews conducted with some of those uprooted by Partition, confirms Nair’s argument about the power of elite and official domains of discourse to influence common understandings of events. Her thoughtful interviews reveal some of the complexity involved in sometimes contradictory Hindu memories of Partition: of how Muslims can be embraced...

Partition Narratives: Displaced trauma and culpability among British civil servants in 1940s Punjab

AbstractGrassroots accounts of the tragic events of partition are increasingly in the spotlight in studies of the transfer of power. This paper approaches the local perspective through the memories of British civil servants during their last few months in Punjab, assessing what these reflections suggest about the mentality of the departing ruling elite. The similarities between these recorded experiences suggest a process of coming to terms with grief and guilt for what they had witnessed through the creation of a narrative of transition from total power to total loss; a simplified imagery of a fully operational and peaceful pre-1947 Punjab descending with shocking suddenness into the violence of partition. This process of shaping memories not only offers an insight into the British civil servant's need for self-affirmation and a reaffirming of their sense of personal as well as professional value, but also has a broader importance in understanding the mentality of a group of people at the heart of pre-partition Punjab, who were instrumental in defining the emerging independent nation.

Floating on Silent Waters

Abstract Drawing upon the cinematic narrative of the internationally acclaimed film Khamosh Pani, I relocate the issues it raises within a wider discussion about the gendered nature of conflict between religious communities during the chaos of the 1947 Partition of British India into India and Pakistan. I explore the ways in which state-sponsored Islam in Pakistan impacts the protagonist Ayesha and her son Salim. Further, I explore how the violence of Partition as well as continued violence between Hindus and Muslims is remembered cinematically by Bombay cinema, the dominant cultural institution in the region. Finally, I interrogate Khamosh Pani's reception in India and speculate how it might influence the social constructions of Muslims in South Asia and elsewhere.

The Politics of Commensuration: The Violence of Partition and the Making of the Pakistani State

Abstract This article examines how official representations of the violence and displacement of Partition organized the sovereign power of the post‐independence Pakistani state. It addresses how Partition's chain of violence and displacement engendered the state as an entity capable of wielding the sovereign power to decide on life and death. Crucial to this process were practices of knowledge and power in which the refugee was produced ambivalently, as a figure of right and a biopolitical problem in need of resolution. Focusing on Pakistan's official response to the “refugee problem”, I analyze how the management of the potential and actual movement of populations relied upon, and informed implicit logics of official commensuration with the communal violence of the mass.

Ruination: partition and the expectation of violence (on Allan deSouza's Irish photography)

This essay takes as its occasion a series of photographs on the Irish border region by Allan deSouza. The photographs are the motive for a set of interconnecting reflections on the conditions of violence and on its relation to state formation; on violence and the forms of history; and on the place of melancholy as a relation not only to the past, which inevitably it is, but as no less a kind of opening to a future. These concerns link three works by Walter Benjamin: ‘Critique of Violence’ (1920–21); The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1924–25); and the ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (1940). The link runs between the insistence of violence in the historical foundations of the state; the function of historicism in enabling that disavowal through a rarely acknowledged mythic/symbolic aesthetic that is encrypted in it; and the counter-discourse of historical materialism that Benjamin holds in tension with melancholy. Ireland is a state marked by the virtual and the actual violence of partition. Subject to all the injunctions and institutions of modernity, to its emerging forms of state and policing as well as to its techniques and technologies of military reduction, Ireland remains a location in which the failure of projects of modernity is only too easily exemplified. Ireland's is a history in ruins, a history of ruins. Ruins are the signs of a history of incompletion and ‘ruination’ that is normally read by conventional historians as the fatality of a culture resistant to modernity and driven to return time and again to its own atavisms. Benjamin's insight is to read in ruins and in violence not merely the consequences of a past malevolently active in the present, but openings onto an alternative configuration to that suggested by historicism and modernity.