The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia: Refugees, Boundaries, Histories (review)

As an event, the Partition of India was not a history in itself but the histories written thereafter. Such a reflective thought suggests various interpretations of the causes of the Partition, the subsequent communal formations, both individual and institutional responsibilities for communal carnage, the pathos of displaced families and of innocent victims of various crimes, all connected to its process of artificially dividing two sick nations from a healthy society, which was not ready for any such operation. For most such histories, the official and unofficial documents distributed in the archives of India, Pakistan, and England are sufficient to provide required sources to understand the history of India's partition (e.g., Hodson, The Great Divide, Oxford, 1969; Pandey, The Ascendancy of the Congress in Uttar Pradesh, 1926-1934, Oxford, 1978; Aziz, History of Partition in India, Atlantic, 1988; Hasan and Gupta, eds., India's Colonial Encounter, Manohar, 1993; Zakaria, The Man Who Divided India, Popular Prakashan, 2001; and more). Yet Zamindar's work deepens the understanding of the effects of the Partition.

The Partition of India in 1947, like any such politically constructed division, is still vibrant not only in the living memories of the individuals whose immediate ancestral families were displaced but also in the minds of those whose families never underwent the horrendous calamities resulting from the subsequent failure of both new nations. The displacement and trauma of 1947's Partition is an objective reality for both nations, India and Pakistan. That Bangladesh split off from Pakistan in 1971 as an independent nation refutes the original argument of the two-nation theory. The communal hatred either followed by the eruption of the Partition Riots in 1947 or said to be the driving force behind the post- and pre-partition communal riots was seldom witnessed before the advent of democratic ideas in the subcontinent. The Western democratic idea of modern state formation (by simply counting heads), revolving around the axis of social equality, was problematic in a traditional, multireligious, and multicaste society, itself based upon the fundamental idea of inequality, ultimately manufactured communal and caste political identities in the pre- and post-partition subcontinent. The interactions and conflicts among the religio-political identities and caste-politico identities during electoral politics in the post-partition subcontinent have sustained the bloodstained Partition memories in people's minds.

In order to understand the effects of the 1947 Partition of India, Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar has attempted to focus on the Partition itself and endeavored to interrogate witnesses, moving the very boundaries of how to write Partition histories where the effects of the past stretch into the present. In this sense, the Partition of India of course is extended into a "long partition," not relegated only to 1947. Zamindar beautifully utilizes oral history as a primary source to refute the very connotations of the Partition's conceptualization of nation and citizen, boundaries and passports, refugees and rehabilitation, migration, and displacement. In the introduction, she raises a number of pertinent questions: "Where, indeed, is India? Where is Pakistan? Who is an Indian? Who is a Pakistani?" (2). She clarifies her purpose, not "to understand why Partition happened, but rather to clarify, with a focus on north Indian Muslim families, the post-colonial burden of this political partition" (3). The interviews of Rafi Bhai, Aziz Saheb, Salim Saheb, and Attia and Naseem Apa disclose the truth that public documents hide. The hidden histories of Hindu and Sikh refugees in Delhi and Muslim refugees in Karachi, the bureaucratic insensitivities while applying the permit system, the forced occupation of the houses first declared "abandoned," then "vacant," and finally "empty," and the surprising fact that a large number of Muslim refugees either returned or want to return to India, not only refute the ideological, sociological, and political theories propagated in dividing an ancient multicultural society but also the very modern notion of nation and citizen...