Partition's Legacies by Joya Chatterji and David Washbrook (review)

Since the publication of Bengal Divided: Hindu Communalism, and Partition 1932-1947 (1994) and The Spoils of Partition: Bengal and India, 1947-1967 (2007), Joya Chatterji has emerged as one of the foremost historians working on the division of India. These works, which have become the standard texts on the subject, are now complemented by this copious volume, which brings together a collection of essays written over a period of twenty years in which the author examines broader themes that shaped this seminal moment in modern South Asian history. The collection is grouped into four categories: identities, decolonisation and nation-making; refugees, mobility and migration; immobility; and citizenship. It also includes an introduction by the late David Washbrook summarising how Chatterji has both anticipated and has been at the forefront of the changing theoretical landscape of the study of the Partition of India. The common theme that binds the volume is Chatterji's focus on Bengal—its history, people and post-1947 development in South Asia and beyond in the Bengali diaspora.

There is much to admire in this rich, voluminous collection. Foremost, it offers an excellent example of how to use comparative political history to re-evaluate the Partition that is so often viewed as sui generis. Most essays in it follow a common structure by challenging existing conventional wisdom, formulating the research question, offering a solid empirical foundation for the arguments outlined, and the need for broader comparative reflection to make sense of Partition and its enduring processes. It is impossible to do justice to this collection, but I highlight four aspects that I found especially noteworthy.

Chatterji's understanding of decolonisation with its rushed transfer of power reinforces her earlier readings that it was Congress' pursuit of a downsized India without the Muslim-majority provinces that precipitated the cataclysmic events of 1947. "The Congress party's single-minded Unitarianism," she observes, "forced a de-territorialised, variously imagined, 'Muslim nation' into a 'moth-eaten and truncated'state" (33-4). Related to this, the Congress engineered to control the processes and outcomes of the Boundary Commission, so much so that Mountbatten accepted the party's proposed terms of reference without demure, dismissing Jinnah's suggestion that the whole process should be overseen by the United Nations. Heavily influenced by the Congress, Sir Cyril Radcliffe, according to Chatterji, eventually "carved out Pakistan like an inexpert butcher from those parts of the empire the Congress leaders no longer wanted" (34). The essays on the refugees provide strikingly new insights not only into the reasons and nature of the migratory flows that took place but the complex interplay of government actions and individual and collective social capital. A new reading is offered of the settlement of refugees in West Bengal which is traditionally associated with the rise of the communist movement in the state and substantially explains the subsequent ghettoization of Muslims in a few districts and urban localities. And finally, there is much in the volume of the making of identities—historical, modern and diasporic—in shaping the politics of Bengal and the related contestations around citizenship in South Asia and overseas.

A collection of this nature inevitably includes some generalisations that are difficult to sustain. Chatterji's contention that "no one expected the carnage that followed" (34) the British withdrawal is hard to justify because since 1940, if not earlier, the Sikh leadership had consistently warned of the consequences of the partition of Punjab if Sikh interests were marginalised. Throughout the 1940s, intelligence reports recognised the fact but the decision-making leadership was comfortable with dismissing Sikh demands as a "nuisance." In the event, Master Tara Singh's declaration after the Lahore Resolution that any scheme for Pakistan would have to cross an "ocean of blood" was much closer to the mark than the statements of Jinnah or Nehru that a transfer to power to the dominions of India and Pakistan would not be accompanied by mass migration. Similarly, it is difficult to see how the inter...