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--------------The Troubled Past Literature of Severing and the Viewer/Viewed Dialectic Huma Ibrahim When one nation, albeit with great self-contained diversity, "chooses" to split into unequal halves, what questions are we forced to ask about the historical and social psyche of peoples who were part of an uneasy whole but whose severance led to a massive butchery of one another? At the theoretical level, this violence against so-called different religious groups has a long-standing history in the subcontinent, from nearly a thousand years of Muslim colonial rule to two hundred years ofWestern, primarily British, colonialism . The somewhat artificial sub-continental partition gives rise to a presupposition of what I call a viewer/viewed dialectic, but that dialectic never unveils the intricate dynamics of the violence or commences a dialogue about that same troubled past between peoples both connected and severed. It is useful to employ the dichotomy of viewer/viewed in regard to the subcontinental partition, because Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs have all taken turns being subject and object in relation to the violence that occurred-in other words, being viewers of the massacre as it is external to their own subjective reality and being viewed as the immediate victims of that same trauma. What I have called the viewer/viewed dialectic becomes a mechanism for evasion, for putting the blame on the other side and collapsing into a regressive sentimentality . In this essay, I explore where the specifics ofthis particular evasion ofhistorical violence originate. The analogy ofsilence and the breaking ofsilence that comes to mind is the African American one. As recently as the 1980s and 1990s, prominent writers such as Toni Morrison and August Wilson have entered the process of "rememorying" the gender specifics ofthe violent past. This"story," as Morrison has said on the last page of her novel Beloved, is "not to pass on."1 299 The Troubled Past The story must be told, however, and as Leslie Marmon Silko says, there must not be "any lies." The recounting or recoding ofthe violent subcontinental partition is necessary precisely because it provides a window into the complexities of imperial political agendas as well as other sources of internal animosities. At the time of the partition, those on what was to become the Pakistani side of the subcontinent worried that the "British swine" would favor the Indians, for wasn't Nehru so thick with the Mountbattens that he was even said to be sleeping with the lady side of that contingent? and everybody knew how reserved and cool ]innah could be, et cetera, et cetera. Here, I want to elaborate on the nervousness about a politically conscious analysis of the partition as an evasion of historical processes in which the colonial subject participates, imperialism notwithstanding. Even the findings documented by the historian Gyanendra Pandey become evasive about the actual violence.2 Statistics such as those of the centuries-old slave trade tend to horrify at an emotional level but are not often translated to a historical analysis of oppression. Further, this sort of evasiveness constitutes another aspect ofwhat has to become the dialectic of decolonization. In other words, the silence that claims an important part of the past must be addressed, and the partition itself, fraught with ambiguity, must become part ofthe sociohistoric dialogue between Indian peoples as well as the peoples of what became Pakistan in 1947. This essay attempts to bring people from both sides of the border onto common ground so that they can analyze a joint history of the oppression out of which the violence of partition emerged. Gyanendra Pandey has talked about· the violence in Indian history as a "known," the "contours and characters" of which are "simply assumed" and therefore "need no investigation." His observations are accurate in that there is great reluctance to explor~ the issue in detail, but I would argue that "historical discourse" on the partition has simply not "been able to capture and represent the moment of violence," even "with great difficulty."3 I agree with Pandey's contention that the present-day violence between Muslims and Hindus in India is part of an aftermath of the animosities occurring during the par-, tition, but unlike him, I argue that the very nature of the violation of loyalties and of the violence freezes the dialogue between Hindus and Muslims into what seems like an impossible impasse. I call this impasse the viewer/viewed dialectic because it is based on suspicion, lack ofinformation, and only the beginnings...

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