The Independence of India and Pakistan: Sixtieth Anniversary Reflections (review)

This was perhaps the largest gathering of historians, anthropologists, literature scholars and writers interested in the Partition of the Indian subcontinent ever held in the UK. Despite its title the conference, organized by Professor Ian Talbot of Southampton, was centred on traumatic experiences of Partition rather than triumphant experiences of Independence. It was a testament to the seriousness with which the subject is finally being treated in universities.

Older debates about constitutional debates and map-making in 1947 were resurrected but inevitably the majority of innovative papers focused on the humanitarian disasters which surrounded the disengagement from the Raj in 1947: this has been the direction of serious historiographical research in the subject for almost a decade, especially since the publication of Urvashi Butalia’s book, The Other Side of Silence (1998). Not only does this approach – founded on interviews and social history – draw attention to the gravity of migrations and killings, it also gives back agency to South Asians in the story. Butalia’s own plenary lecture envisioned new directions in Partition scholarship and movingly built on her earlier work to suggest how legal records, myth and oral history could be intertwined to build a more holistic picture of events in Punjab and their aftermath.

Refreshingly, many of the papers had taken up this call by adding nuance to older imagery of partition ‘victims’ and ‘refugees’. Ravinder Kaur, for example, highlighted the differences in class and circumstance of refugees, and the privileges as well as the disadvantages of certain groups. Some refugees, drawing on networks of information and inside contacts, could further their own rehabilitation and tap into state resources far more easily than others. The sense of upheaval at the grassroots was well conveyed from region to region, and Andrew Whitehead’s work, piecing together the attack on the Baramulla Mission Hospital in Kashmir, illustrated how a subject often analysed only from the perspective of high politics really requires fleshing out with the socialhistorical record.

Other major themes were the fragmented and terribly conflicted questions of sovereignty in the years after 1947 and the decolonization of empire. There was evidently no smooth transition from empire to two nation states and in some papers the difficulties of this constitutional process for the states after 1947 were opened up. As Yaqoob Bangash reminded us, much of Pakistan’s territory was made up of princely states, many of which continue to have complicated relationships with Pakistani sovereignty; the official number of princelystate accessions in 1947 is still unknown and some were not even technically part of Pakistan until the 1970s. Few papers tackled Bangladesh and there is still much work needed on the question of its creation, some of which was movingly addressed from the viewpoint of the victims of war and violence in 1971 in the reflections of Yasmin Saikia.

Other speakers focused on representations of Partition in cinema, theatre and literature and in newsreel and newspaper coverage. These papers ranged from analysis of the writings of the canon (in the work of Salman Rushdie and Attia Hosain, for example) to discussions of new and experimental representations of Partition on the South Asian stage. Bollywood’s relationship to Partition was debated and Farrukh Khan’s documentary Stories of the Broken Self told the past through the voices of displaced Pakistani women.

A sense of a real transition towards a humanistic interpretation of Partition prevailed, not least in the fact that scholars from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh and the UK could meet and debate this work in one place.