The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan (review)

In this fine book, Khan not only understands the dynamics of how national histories operate; she has also sought to overcome their limitations by drawing from a vast variety of secondary literature and finding accounts of eyewitnesses. For instance, she has gone to archives in America to look at United States Consular accounts of activities in India, to the accounts in the British records of India, to interviews, and to Indian records in a number of different localities.

Khan is even-handed in her attempt to look at the action from different perspectives. Her interest is to examine the “givens” about the Partition with a new and fresh eye to determine the constituent elements of the problems that arose from the enormous confusion and speed with which Partition was accomplished. For instance, her argument is that the Partition was not an inevitable outcome but the contingent product of a specific moment, when individuals and ways of thinking or discourses coalesced around formulations to resolve particular problems. At the end of the book, she notes, however, that the Partition really satisfied no one, certainly not the dalits (formerly called “untouchables” or “Harijans” by Gandhians). Sikhs were not only displaced but later became the focus of great hatred at the pogrom that was instituted after Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards in October 1983.

According to Naipaul, post-Partition India became a place of a million mutinies—the site of revolts from many groups whose issues had not been addressed by the great emphasis that people had placed on the Partition.¹ To her credit, Khan spends much time on events in and around Pakistan, ensuring that her presentation be balanced.

Some of the best writing in the book concerns the circumstances surrounding the large number of women who were raped, mutilated, and killed in India and Pakistan. This is an area of considerable scholarship. Menon and Bhasin, in particular, show that many of women who were rescued were ultimately transported to camps and fitted into a bureaucratic mold of what a middle-class woman should be.² Khan quotes the words of one of these women who complained about the kind of busy work that the camps were training them to do and the kinds of women that they were training to be. These women embodied the honor of their respective countries, which tried to “rehabilitate” them; they were no longer acceptable to their own families because they were “tainted.”

At the end of her book, Khan briefly looks at the accounts of this episode in South Asian history in the schoolbooks of both India and Pakistan, concluding that both “national histories” in these schoolbooks “come remarkably close in the cursory manner in which they deal with the violence associated with Partition. The horror and suffering that millions of ordinary men and women faced receive no more than a few lines of cold recording.” She finds a great gulf between “these later renderings and the actual experiences of Partition” (202–204).

Although many questions will not be answered without further research, Khan has done a fine job of attempting to report what “really happened” in north India and Bengal between 1945 and 1950.