The Performance of Nationalism: India, Pakistan, and the Memory of Partition by Jisha Menon (review)

Jisha Menon’s The Performance of Nationalism is a welcome addition to the growing body of scholarly work on the partition of the South Asian subcontinent in 1947. As its title hints, this is no standard history of the event, though the book does give brief, lucid accounts of what happened when the British hastily departed the subcontinent. It explains, for example, the competing ideologies of the Muslim League and the Indian National Congress, and why the problem of Kashmir has been so intractable and tragic. But what the book offers, up against conventional histories, are close readings of alternative narratives, carefully chosen instances of public performance that disrupt, unsettle, astonish, and more than anything, provoke us to rethink conventional wisdom about the event, the major parties, and the ordinary people who have lived in its wake.

Menon states that her study “explores the affective and performative constitution of the Indian and Pakistani nation in the wake of [Partition]” (5–6). The goals of the book are ambitious and complex: to trouble the notion of homogenous, monolithic groupings in South Asia – national, religious, or otherwise – and to impress upon us the monumental impact Partition has had on individuals and South Asian society on many levels. One of the chief ways the Partition lives on, she suggests, is through memory: “The memory of the Partition continues to shape social relations between Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs in the subcontinent; conversely, contemporary religious conflicts shape and revise past narrations of the Partition” (5).

In the methodological and theoretical material presented in the opening chapter, Menon walks us through some familiar terrain. She draws on the work of Edward Said and other scholars of cultural and postcolonial studies regarding the ossification of religious identities in the colonial period, and its continued impact on communalism and ethnic violence, and surveys some of the most influential theorizing on nations and publics: “imagined community,” “print capitalism,” “imaginative literature,” and “public sphere” are among the big ideas considered. But where others might merely utilize them to underscore seemingly inevitable or natural historical processes in South Asia, Menon supplements such interventions with her understanding of mimesis, as both aesthetic practice and social relation, one which works to problematize facile thinking on identity and place, or as she puts it, “reified certitudes of community and nation” (21). In short, she wants to discredit civic and religious forms of nationalism that rely on the impression of unity and uniformity (21). Menon’s understanding of mimesis adds to an intellectual lineage spanning Walter Benjamin, Rene Girard, and Michael Taussig.

What Menon sees, in her examples of embodied performance, is mimetic doubling: characters, places, and events eerily repeat themselves and mimic each other in manifold aesthetic and social practices. Menon’s point is that these performative practices – at once, or by turns, uncanny, sartorial, somatic, affective, and diachronic – are instances of mimetic semblance; they can lay bare a doubleness in the affective memory of the Partition. This is how she can posit that the rivals India and Pakistan (and their respective citizens) are not one and the same – her project is not to erase difference – but, rather, are more akin to two orphaned siblings or fraternal twins separated at birth, both analogies that come out in the examples she discusses. Seeing traces of otherness in the self, recognizing kinship over reified categories of civic and religious nationalisms, and having recourse to what she calls unconditional hospitality are all, Menon proposes, good things.

All of the public performances Menon considers evoke in some way the spectre of the Partition. She begins with a “spectacular theatre of nationalism” (23), the quotidian and world-making retreat ceremony, at Wagah on the India-Pakistan border (chapter two). The next three chapters discuss the plight of Bengali refugees, in Ritwik Ghatak’s Partition trilogy (chapter three); the displacement of Hindu and Muslim minorities, in the film Garam Hawa and the play Jis...