ASIATIC, VOLUME 12, NUMBER 1, JUNE 2018

Amritjit Singh, Nalini Iyer and Rahul K. Gairola, eds. Revisiting India’s
Partition: New Essays on Memory, Culture, and Politics. Lanham, MD:
Lexington Books, 2016. New Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2016. xxxv+363
pp. ISBN 978-81-250-6412-1.

Although the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 was a cataclysmic event
that left millions of people stunned and brutalised, it has taken most historians
and literary scholars years to understand the true import of the disruptions that
were caused in the lives of ordinary people in South Asia. Because of this, the
Partition continues to be written upon, year after year, in creative and critical
writings. As recently as October 22, 2017, The Tribune (Chandigarh) carried an
exhaustive review of three new books on the Partition. The volume under review
is yet another commendable effort at unravelling its complexities.
The editors of the volume state in its “Preface” that they put it together
because literary scholarship on the subject had “rarely gone beyond a few well
known novels, short stories, poems, or films” (ix). In October 2012, they
organised a one-day mini-conference in Madison, Wisconsin, to locate the
subject’s unexplored aspects, sought out scholars across the globe to write on a
wide range of topics, and followed it up by reading and editing the essays to fit
its design. All this took three years. The result is a volume of high quality scholarly
essays that is varied and comprehensive and quite different from the usual run of
edited volumes of essays that are often repetitive and of uneven quality.
In their “Introduction,” the editors dwell on how the hasty and arbitrary
division of the subcontinent by the British led to the “rupturing of shared
histories, cultures, and memories between Muslims, on the one hand, and Hindus
and Sikhs, on the other” (xvi). These ruptures were so intense and traumatic that
they still haunt “South Asian cultures and lives on a daily basis” (xvii). Extending
Vazira Zamindar’s idea of the “the Long Partition” (xvii), the editors examine the
continuing cultural, political, economic and psychological effects of the Partition,
beyond 1947, to the creation of Bangladesh in 1971, the Sikh riots of 1984, the
Gujarat violence of 2002, the attack on Indian Parliament in 2001, the Mumbai
attack in 2008 and the resurgence of Hindutva within India.
The editors’ introduction also provides a synoptic account of the essays,
which are organised into five sections, to emphasise their two main features: that
they study the partition from varied theoretical perspectives, such as, trauma
studies, gender studies, postcolonial studies, ecocritical theory and digital
humanities theory, and they dwell on the impact of Partition on hitherto
neglected writings and geographical areas. Thus, Singh, Iyer and Gairola establish
that the “Partition is not a static event of the past, but an evolving moment in
history with a resounding impact on all of contemporary South Asia and its

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 Revisiting India’s Partition: New Essays on Memory, Culture, and Politics

inhabitants” (xxviii). And without being overly didactic, they signal in the
direction of much-needed healing and reconciliation.
In the opening essay of Section I, Radhika Mohanram argues that the
Partition, though an event of the past, is constantly in negotiation with memory
and forgetting, and connected with “nation and cultural memory,” “democratic
memory” and “bodily memory” (4), particularly for women. Using the notion of
the ghost and hauntology from Derrida’s Specters of Marx, Mohanram unveils the
gap between collective national and individual memories, for amidst celebrations
of nationhood, loss and pain of individual lives become a part of collective
amnesia. Because of this, Partition violence continues to turn into communal
violence within a democratic structure. She shows how in Khamosh Pani (Silent
Waters), a Pakistani Punjabi film, a Sikh woman who had converted to Islam after
the creation of Pakistan, is constrained to jump into a well in 1979, something
she refused to do in 1947. Thus the Partition did not mark a rupture but is a
continuum between the past and the present. Jasbir Jain touches upon the
complexities of home and homelessness in the context of cultural memories, and
extends the meaning of the word “refugee.” She uses a wide array of texts –
Saadat Hasan Manto’s stories, Tahira Iqbal’s story “Deshon Mein,” Intizar
Hussain’s “The Unwritten Epic,” Attia Hosain’s fiction and non-fiction, a poem
by Munawar Rana and many more – to show that a search for home is essentially
a search for belonging in a culture that was seriously ruptured by Partition, leading
both to nostalgia and regret in human lives. Since mainstream histories generally
tend to eulogise national leaders and silence individual lives, Parvinder Mehta
argues that creative writings provide an alternative space for accommodating
them. Mehta acknowledges how Urvashi Butalia has captured these histories
through the oral mode, but she highlights the ways in which we experience them
in the writings of Rajinder Singh Bedi and Shauna Singh Baldwin, and in the
aforementioned film Silent Waters.
Rahul K. Gairola shows how digital humanities make us understand that
though Coca Cola and Google promote their business by using Partition
narratives, they also provide a new insight into the event. The advertisements of
their products “capitalize on the trauma of Partition by celebrating a neoliberal
millennium in which the products facilitate harmony between India and Pakistan,
Hindus and Muslims, Indians and Pakistanis, men and women, and the rich and
the poor” (55). By bridging the time and space gap and promoting a new kind of
bonding, digital humanities creates possibilities of joy and reconciliation for
people who have been sundered from their native space.
The essays in Section II look at writings that provide space for varied
alternative narratives resulting from the Partition. Tarun Saint states that Partition
created two kinds of narratives from both sides of the divide: political ones,
written by politicians like Maulana Azad and Ram Manohar Lohia, and personal
ones, written by survivors, especially women, like Jahan Ara Shahnawaz and

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Kamlaben Patel. Though both kinds perform a testimonial function, there is a

difference between the two. The second variety brings out the horrific nature of
the “strange bestiality” (76) that overtook people, the anguish that it bred in the
saner elements of the society, the outrageous conduct of government officials,
and the complicity of the state in what happened. Though most of these writings
are in the realistic mode, some, like that of Fikr Taunsi, employ irony and absurd
humour for interrogating what happened.
Debali Mookerjea-Leonard’s essay focuses on a host of Bengali novels to
show that the dislocation caused by the Partition compelled many middle class
women to take varied kind of jobs, ushering in significant changes in the social
set up. Women became assertive and independent and lent acceptability and
respectability to what they chose to do. But this also affected moral norms and
led to conflicts in the lives of young women. Daughters who provided income to
their families were compelled to stay on in them and the ones who did not were
given away in marriage to lessen the family burden. At the same time, the ones
who stayed on found it difficult to negotiate the tension between their affective
and familial bonds. Amrita Ghosh’s essay uses Amitav Ghosh’s novel The Hungry
Tide to uncover the “massive gap and silence” (107) over the refugees from East
Pakistan into India, who returned to settle in the Sundarbans. They were
marginalised and virtually written out of historical accounts. She provides an
appropriate background to understand the complexity of their situation and
argues that Ghosh gives them voice to expose the brutalities they were subjected
to by the state. She considers their location – the Sundarbans, where the brutality
was unleashed – a “heterotopia” and the Dalit refugees “homo sacer.” By helping
us understand the complexities of the migration that resulted from the Partition,
Amrita Ghosh provides a fresh insight into the refugee question.
The essays in Section III focus primarily on the effect of Partition on
locations that have not been written about, although they were deeply affected
by the turmoil that engulfed the people who lived there. Nandita Bhavnani takes
us to the Sindh province where not much violence was witnessed in 1947, mainly
because the Hindus and Muslims shared a culture of peaceful togetherness. But
because of the changes that had taken place there during the British era, which
helped the Hindus to become landowners, violence overtook Sindh in 1948. Ilyas
Chattha takes us to the Jammu and Kashmir of 1947 and argues that though
Kashmir has always been written about right from the time of the tribal invasion
of the Valley, not much has been written about what happened to the Muslims
of Jammu soon after the Maharaja ran away from Srinagar. The Dogras of Jammu
were given weapons by the government to launch a massive attack against the
Muslims, in which 250,000 to 300,000 people were massacred, to change the
demographic character of the city, and to create a Hindu majority in the region.

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Another area that has suffered neglect is the northeast of the country, with
a past that Babyrani Yumnam thinks is “contentious, rooted in specific historical
formations and conjunctions” that have contributed to its “geographical,
political, and economic marginality” (158). Till 1947, it was a landmass that had
a close connection with Burma, Bengal and southwest China, and constituted the
colonial frontier of the Empire. The British drew and redrew its boundaries to
suit their commercial interests, and the area had very little connection with the
mainland country. But all this changed after 1947. From a “colonial frontier,’ the
northeast changed into a “post-colonial border zone” (158). Having enjoyed an
autonomous position, the people living in these areas did not feel secure in the
new set up, which resulted in national and ethnic identity clashes, creating a series
of secessionist movements. In a similar vein, Amit R. Baishya’s essay signals
another area of neglect in Partition Studies – Burma’s “forgotten long march”
(177), when 450,000 to 500,000 Indians walked into British India, because of the
ethnic violence in Burma caused by the Japanese advance that resulted in the
death of nearly 50,000 people. Baishya analyses the representation of the “Long
March” in the Assamese novel Jangam, through which he explores the ecocritical
condition, another neglected side to existing studies of Partition. In Jangam by
Debendranath Acharya, environment “emerges as a complex, dynamic subject
that functions ambivalently as a source of menace for the ‘human’” (179). Hence
Baishya’s plea that “partition studies need to pay closer attention to such
representations that engage with the fluid interactions between ‘nature’ and the
‘human’” (179).
The essays in the Section IV relate primarily to the impact of Partition upon
Pakistan and Bangladesh (East Pakistan, until 1971). Amber Fatima Riaz avers
that though Pakistan came into being in 1947, it has struggled with its identity
because the regionalisms within it militate against the unifying idea of Pakistan.
Riaz shows how the United Muslim Front tried to project that the idea of Pakistan
had existed since 1857, but it did not work because historically it was inaccurate.
Beginning with 1947, the nation of Pakistan took years to consolidate itself but
could not succeed completely because of the increasing role of the army in its
political life. Riaz uses the work of several writers to substantiate her view. Bengal
too had its peculiar problems. It had to suffer a series of partitions – the first one
in 1905, though it was repealed in 1911; the second one in 1947; and then the
most brutal one in 1971, when East Pakistan became an independent country of
Bangladesh. Poet Kaiser Haq studies these changes in the fortunes of Bangladesh
and their impact upon its Hindu and Muslim populations, by examining the
writings of Syed Walliullah, Abu Fazl, Shahidullah Kaiser, Akhteruzzaman Elias
and Mahmud Rahman. The opening section of Haq’s essay provides a
personalised account of the 1971 struggle for independence from West Pakistan
and the many cultural and political factors leading up to the formation of
Bangladesh as a separate nation. Masood A Raja discusses Shakeel Aadil Zada’s

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novel Baazigar, which has been serialised in Sab Rang, a pulp magazine in Pakistan,
for over thirty years, primarily because the “local and regional historical originary
narrative” (234) of Pakistan as a nation has been replaced by an official Pan-
Islamic narrative with Arab connections, giving boost to reactionary forces in the
country. Raja’s argument is that the novel, which has already run into more than
2500 pages, provides a collective history of a people that have their roots in India,
and signals a more nuanced and more inclusive national narrative for Pakistan.
Raja believes that this more inclusive narrative needs to be retrieved to restore
normalcy in the nation.
Mohd. Rezaul Haque draws attention to yet another neglected area: Bengali
Partition writings by Muslims who left India and settled in East Pakistan. The
focus is on the stories of Hasan Azizul Huq, who left India in 1954 and settled in
Khulna. In a personal essay “He Who Comes Inside” Huq writes how, after
leaving the country of his birth, he became an insider, without any problems
because of being part of the Bengali culture, for he considered himself Bengali
first and Muslim later. His stories revolve round the trials and tribulations of
working-class men and women who had to live through the experience of
Partition, of the “conflict between memory and desire” (245), and the pain that
they had to suffer. Some of Hasan Azizul Huq’s stories also deal with the effect
of the 1971 War of Liberation.
In their erudite essay on novelist Intizar Husain (1923-2016), Tasneem
Shahnaz and Amritjit Singh show that although Husain had at one time predicted
the disappearance of short stories, he has himself written many great ones that
superbly combine the native oral features with modernist elements. In deftly
drawn settings, Husain’s narratives enact human search for self and identity, in
which optimism soon gives way to pessimism. Like Shakeel Aadil Zada, Husain
spurns the narrow identity politics that raised its ugly head during the Partition
and that has persisted in Pakistan to this day. Shahnaaz and Singh note how
Husain uses his writings, steeped in references to Hindu and Buddhist ancient
texts, to dramatise the loss, disruption and dislocation that Partition has caused
in the lives of millions of people.
Section V, the final unit of essays in this comprehensive volume, takes us
back to India and deals with the impact of Partition violence in places like
Varanasi and Hyderabad and its representation in the fiction from south India.
Though Varanasi was far away from the main theatre of the violence of 1947,
Jeremy Rinker analyses the complex social dynamics of the city to trace the
Partition’s “historical legacies and memories of unmet needs” (285). In this
context, Rinker looks at custodial tortures among low castes and Muslims, which
led to the rise of a human rights campaign within the city to raise critical
consciousness among its inhabitants to promote peace and social harmony. Nazia
Akhtar repudiates the generally held belief that Partition did not affect the

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southern parts of India and argues that except for a few literary representations,
not much has been written about how Hyderabad was invaded by India on
September 13, 1948, in which 30,000 to 40,000 Muslims were killed by Hindus,
police and armed forces. She states that in Kishorilal Vyas Neelkanth’s Razakar
the episode called “Durga” about an eponymous Sikh woman protagonist
projects the strong Hindutva image of a warrior goddess, “a model of moral force
and martial prowess” (308), reminiscent of Bankim’s Anandmath, to provide a
rationale for present-day Hindu nationalism. As part of her argument, Akhtar also
provides a critical reading of the Hindutva’s misrepresentations of Sikhs and
Sikhism.
The essay by Nalini Iyer extends Akhtar’s analysis to argue that South India
and South Indians more broadly were affected by the Partition through empathy
and the collective sense of post-Partition India as a nation. Iyer’s contention is
that the Partition did affect people in the South, even though they saw it from a
distance, and she analyses its reflections in selected South Indian writings. R.K.
Narayan’s Waiting for the Mahatma evokes “deep cynicism about Gandhian
nationalism and the possibility of a secular national vision to thrive” (334).
Lalithambika Antherjanam’s work focuses on the “gendered and violent nature
of the Partition experience” (335) as a means to embrace national oneness
through female sisterhood. Balachandra Rajan’s novel The Dark Dancer deals
extensively with the Partition experience through Krishnan and Kamala, who
“represent the empathy of southern people as well as their transformation by
shared experience” (339).
The essays in the welcome volume, as I have tried to demonstrate, merit
attention because they live up to the promise of using new approaches to study
the known and not so well known writings on Partition, broadening the range of
enquiry by looking at writings from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, and also
uncovering areas that had not been explored by earlier critics. This makes the
volume useful not only as a source of new knowledge, but also for demonstrating
new approaches to the subject and suggesting fresh areas of inquiry. All the
essayists argue their point of view robustly and convincingly, because of their
sharp focus, which is backed by considerable research and scholarship. Nearly
one fifth of the volume is covered by extensive notes and bibliographies, which
provide a treasure trove of resources for further research. Because of the
interdisciplinary nature of most of the essays, the volume is a must for students
of literature and social sciences, and because of the clarity of their presentation,
almost all of these essays could be read profitably by general readers as well.

Tej N Dhar
Independent Scholar, India
Email: tejnathdhar@yahoo.com

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