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

This book is one of the most brilliant and nuanced of the many works about the Partition of South Asia that have emerged in recent years. Its greatest strength is its fine meshing of ethnographical material and sensitivity to the stories of the people involved. It focuses on South Asian Muslim communities, particularly in Delhi and Karachi, and their experience of Partition—the construction of new borders for the sovereign states of India and Pakistan in 1947—which was intended to create a South Asian homeland for Muslims but in reality fractured this community across two countries. By taking these communities as her ethnographic subject, Zamindar places a potentially marginalized history at the centre of her text and at the heart of the narrative of nation-state creation, complicating any automatic or easy assumptions about Indian or Pakistani citizenship.

Zamindar gives real meaning and subtlety to suggestive arguments about the protracted and contested nature of partition in general, the challenges of defining citizenship, and the division of communities, showing them to be far from peripheral but constitutive of it. Personal loss, upheaval, and fluctuating identity, often thought to be incidental to the more visible traumas of violence and refugee migration in Punjab, were actually devastating within the community. After 1947, North Indian Muslims "saw themselves as part of a shared landscape, albeit an uncertain and shifting one" (76).

As Zamindar suggests, our understanding of the violence that can accompany nation-state creation has to be stretched beyond the literal murders of the Punjabi fratricide (which have understandably taken precedence in the South Asian case in earlier histories because of the sheer magnitude of death and destruction in the summer months of 1947). Her book shows that "partition violence" must "include the bureaucratic violence of drawing political boundaries and nationalizing identities that became, in some lives, interminable" (8).

Zamindar's finely crafted book has much to offer about how histories of decolonization and the postcolonial can be written in the twenty first century: She does not shy away from constructing her own categories and from interjecting her subjective observations into the narrative while also utilizing empirical material to build and support her arguments—individual stories, Urdu newspapers, and visual material ranging from cartoons to the evocative passports and permits of South Asian Muslims caught in the border wars of the late 1940s and 1950s.