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

In the past two decades, a number of new books and research projects have tried to shed light on one of South Asia’s darkest and most violent chapters: the Partition of 1947, when the British colony was cleaved apart upon Independence into two nations, the Hindu-majority India and a predominantly Muslim Pakistan. Conservative estimates are that about half a million Hindus and Muslims were killed in the sectarian riots, about fourteen million people were displaced, and almost seventy thousand women were abducted and raped. The political and psychological wounds are embedded in the politics of the subcontinent even today.

An important addition to the emerging research on this region’s politically traumatic event, Neeti Nair’s Changing Homelands highlights how Partition memory, stored in oral histories, has been largely constructed by the region’s subsequent politics and by people’s willful act of forgetting some portions of history. The author begins by laying out the official historical record of episodes leading up to Partition; she then looks for the reasons why some of the episodes are conspicuously absent from the oral histories of people who were familiar with these developments, developments that were quite visible in the decades leading up to Partition. In analyzing the oral histories, she is paying as much attention to what is left out as what is being said.

Herein lies Nair’s dilemma: How does one assimilate the evidence from archival scholarship when it is at variance with social memory? Are there ways of negotiating these divides? Nair resolves this dilemma herself by reading evidence side-by-side, simultaneously, because she aims for an understanding that is “flexible enough to accommodate rival imaginings” (220). In doing so, she sifts through and collates the contributions made to Partition historiography by myth-making, anticolonial emotions, nostalgia, and present-day South Asian politics.

Nair unearths archival records, political speeches, newspaper articles, letters, telegrams, intelligence reports, and books, and she locates the early stirrings toward Partition in the politics of a community that she calls the “Punjabi Hindus.” She writes that their political articulation and anxieties arose out of their peculiar position of being a religious minority in the Muslim-dominated, pre-Partition Punjab region and, at the same time, being a religious majority in the larger British India. Nair traces early responses of Punjabi Hindu community to new land laws, a religious riot, and a popular anticolonial uprising in the Punjab region. She also studies the response of the larger national narrative determined by the freedom-fighting Indian National Congress (INC) party to Punjab’s events. By deploying multiple entry points, Nair explains the makings of an anxious, insecure community that gradually began articulating its concerns through a religious prism.

Confronted with their numerical weakness, the Punjabi Hindu leaders began calling for consolidation campaigns. Nair writes that the 1924 Hindu-Muslim riot “encapsulates the failure inherent in a politics that coalesced around sangathan, the strengthening of the interests of the Hindu community at the cost of inter-community interactions” (52). This was followed by a series of new measures in the province that gave more seats to the majority Muslims in the municipal corporation and gave higher grants to weaker Muslim-run schools, leaving Hindus feeling victimized. In this political rhetoric, Nair locates the slow birth of the idea of Partition—or what she refers to as “partitionist proposals”—from the 1920s (147).

She keeps returning to the central dilemma in her work: the apparent dissonance between contemporary oral histories that express the shock and disbelief of millions of Punjabi-Hindus and the meticulously researched sequence of events from the archives that establishes the historical inevitability of Partition. In Changing Homelands, she advocates “a judicious equipoise” between archival sources and people’s memories (254). She also explains how the post-Independence Indian political rhetoric involving the wars with Pakistan and the rise of Hindu right-wing politics may have shaped some of...