New Directions in Partition Studies

2007 marked the sixtieth anniversary of India's partition and independence – events of critical importance in the history of the twentieth century, whose long-term consequences are by no means wholly understood. By dividing its Indian empire when quitting it in 1947, Britain pioneered a model of decolonization which seemed to present solutions to many intractable difficulties. On the face of it, partition appeared to have much to commend it. It enabled Britain to get out of India swiftly, leaving its successors to cope with problems of law and order in an increasingly violent society. Since the Indian National Congress was ready to accept the excision of Muslim-majority districts as the necessary price for a strong centre, partition enabled Britain to establish cordial relations with the government of independent India and bind it to the Commonwealth, both priorities of its policy. Thereafter, partition came to be deployed in other parts of the colonial world as a solution to vexed political conflicts, whether in Palestine in 1948 or Cyprus in 1974. When the Cold War ended partition came back into vogue, not only in the erstwhile Soviet Union, but also in Yugoslavia, where Bosnia and Kosovo are among recent exemplars of the use of this political device. Today partition has begun to be seen as the basis of a possible exit-strategy for an alliance which finds itself mired in Iraq.

But recent studies of India's partition raise the question of whether partition in fact 'solved' anything. Partition's legacy is coming to be seen as far more complex and far-reaching than historians had previously recognized. Yasmin Khan's The Great Partition, Sarah Ansari's Life after Partition and Vazira Zamindar's The Long Partition belong to this new genre of studies, and mark a welcome and timely shift in the historiography of partition.

That historiography has been rich and lively since the mid 1980s, when the publication of the Transfer of Power documents,¹ Maulana Azad's unexpurgated memoir,² and Ayesha Jalal's controversial book about Jinnah and the Muslim League³ prompted renewed debates about who wanted partition and why. Jalal argued powerfully that Jinnah's call for partition was only a bargaining counter in a complex game that he was playing for quite different stakes. Her hypothesis provoked historians to look for the 'real' architects of partition, and in so doing threw new light on the host of myriad local and provincial movements which drove variously-conceived demands for partition, notably in the Punjab and Bengal. But another aim of these studies was to identify the villains culpable for the tragedies of 1947, and the subject took on the character of a 'blame-game'. Much of the scholarship which underpinned it fell into the trap of a Whig interpretation which assumed that the outcomes of the 'end game' closely matched the intentions of those pushing for partition.

By the late nineties this line of inquiry, and the debates it had engendered, had palpably run into the sands. Subaltern studies and post-modernism encouraged historians of South Asia to shift their focus from high politics and provincial movements to the quite different enterprise of recovering the narratives of individuals caught up in the upheavals of 1947–8, mainly in the Punjab. This in turn imposed new orientations on methodology. One consequence of the post-modernist critique of archival elisions and agendas was that official sources were now increasingly regarded as suspect. Urvashi Butalia's The Other Side of Silence (1998),⁴ and the many works in a similar vein which it stimulated, gave oral history and memory studies...