This omnibus edition brings together for the first time four classics dealing with the emotive issue of India's Partition: Prelude to Partition: The Indian Muslims and the Imperial System of Control 1920 - 1932.The Origins of the Partition of India 1936 - 1947Divide and Quit: An Eyewitness Account of the Partition of India With Contribution from Marc Tully and Tapan RaychaudhuriStern Reckoning: A Survey of the Events Leading Up To and Following the Partition of India
"Finally, and as a first-hand account based on personal observation and the reports of a government fact-finding organization, Stern Reckoning documents in great detail the riots, massacres, casualties, and political occurrences that led to the Partition. The narrative carries an immediacy, a documentary predilection, and biases that are both interesting and unavailable in later works on the same period."--BOOK JACKET.
This book interrogates representations – fiction, literary motifs and narratives – of the Partition of India. Delving into the writings of Khushwant Singh, Balachandra Rajan, Attia Hosain, Abdullah Hussein, Rahi Masoom Raza and Anita Desai, among many others, it highlights the modes of ‘fictive’ testimony that sought to articulate the inarticulate – the experiences of trauma and violence, of loss and longing, and of diaspora and displacement. The author discusses representational techniques and formal innovations in writing across three generations of twentieth-century writers in India and Pakistan, invoking theoretical debates on history, memory, witnessing and trauma. With a new afterword, the second edition of this volume draws attention to recent developments in Partition studies and sheds new light as regards ongoing debates about an event that still casts a shadow on contemporary South Asian society and culture. A key text, this is essential reading for scholars, researchers and students of literary criticism, South Asian studies, cultural studies and modern history.
The dark legacies of partition have cast a long shadow on the lives of people of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The borders that were drawn in 1947, and redrawn in 1971, divided not only nations and histories but also families and friends. The essays in this volume explore new ground in Partition research, looking into areas such as art, literature, migration, and notions of ‘foreignness’ and ‘belonging’. It brings focus to hitherto unaddressed areas of partition such as the northeast and Ladakh.
Partitioning Palestine is the first history of the ideological and political forces that led to the idea of partition—that is, a division of territory and sovereignty—in British mandate Palestine in the first half of the twentieth century. Inverting the spate of narratives that focus on how the idea contributed to, or hindered, the development of future Israeli and Palestinian states, Penny Sinanoglou asks instead what drove and constrained British policymaking around partition, and why partition was simultaneously so appealing to British policymakers yet ultimately proved so difficult for them to enact. Taking a broad view not only of local and regional factors, but also of Palestine’s place in the British empire and its status as a League of Nations mandate, Sinanoglou deftly recasts the story of partition in Palestine as a struggle to maintain imperial control. After all, British partition plans imagined space both for a Zionist state indebted to Britain and for continued British control over key geostrategic assets, depending in large part on the forced movement of Arab populations. With her detailed look at the development of the idea of partition from its origins in the 1920s, Sinanoglou makes a bold contribution to our understanding of the complex interplay between internationalism and imperialism at the end of the British empire and reveals the legacies of British partitionist thinking in the broader history of decolonization in the modern Middle East.
MAPPING PARTITION “A hugely productive partnership between geography and history, ‘Mapping Partition’ does a great service to the field of Partition studies - it leaves us in no doubt about both the long-term cartographical processes that contributed to how South Asia was divided in 1947, and the importance of bringing a geographer’s insights to bear on this complex history of boundary making.” Professor Sarah Ansari, Professor of History (South Asia), Royal Holloway University of London “Fitzpatrick produces spatial readings of partition’s knowledge formations, geopolitical imaginaries, administrative cartography, and legal geographical expertise. These enrich the histories and geographies of partition through painstaking archival, textual, and visual analysis which will resonate far beyond historical geography and South Asian studies.” Professor Stephen Legg, Professor of Historical Geography, University of Nottingham Mapping Partition delivers the first in-depth geographical account of the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947. The book explores the impact of colonial geography and geographers on the boundary, both during the partition process and in the period preceding it. Drawing on extensive archival research, Hannah Fitzpatrick argues that colonial geographical knowledge underpinned the partition process in heretofore unacknowledged ways. The author also discusses the consequences of placing different ethnic, communal, and linguistic groups onto the colonial map and the growing importance of majority and minority populations in representative democratic politics. Mapping Partition: Politics, Territory and the End of Empire in India and Pakistan is required reading for students and researchers studying geography, colonial and imperial history, South Asian studies, and interdisciplinary border studies.
The fragmentation of Bengal and Assam in 1947 was a crucial moment in India's socio-political history as a nation state. Both the British Indian provinces were divided as much through the actions of the Muslim League as by those of Congress and the British colonial power. Attributing partition largely to Hindu communalists is, therefore, historically inaccurate and factually misleading. The Partition of Bengal and Assam provides a review of constitutional and party politics as well as of popular attitudes and perceptions. The primary aim of this book is to unravel the intricate socio-economic and political processes that led up to partition, as Hindus and Muslims competed ferociously for the new power and privileges to be conferred on them with independence. As shown in the book, well before they divorced at a political level, Hindus and Muslims had been cleaved apart by their socio-economic differences. Partition was probably inevitable.
This volume offers a collection of essays focused upon the representation of one of the most traumatic events in the history of India―the 1947 Partition―in literature and cinematographic adaptations. The focus here is placed on various strategies of representation and different types of memory at work in the process of remembering/re-membering Partition. All these avoid the traditional Hindu vs. Muslim perspective, and analyse other sides of the same story, seen from the perspective of marginal people belonging to other religious minorities, whose stories have generally been ignored and silenced by the official historical discourse. The book also demonstrates that the multiple “truths” engendered by this crucial event in India’s history lie along “improbable lines” randomly generated between history, amnesia and memory, between personal drama and collective trauma, loss and rupture, religion and nationalism, and longing and belonging.
The Sovereign Lives of India and Pakistan explores what it has meant for the two countries to act as sovereign states entangled at birth by an unsatisfactory partition. Sovereignty is conventionally understood as a means to achieve the goals that states set for themselves. This book argues that for India and Pakistan, sovereignty has become an end in itself, and that its pursuit has aided majoritarianism, insecurity, and mutual estrangement. It examines the trajectory of three problems that the partition of 1947 bequeathed to the two states. It investigates the state–minority relations, national identity debates, and contestation over Kashmir to outline the parallel processes of minoritization, homogenization, and territorialization. It shows how these processes signify the two states' quest for sovereignty. The scholarship on India and Pakistan often privileges their bilateral relations. In contrast, the author carries out the deeper task of a single-frame analysis and critique of their intertwined statehoods. Ultimately, the book shows the inadequacy of the nation-state form as the basis for political community in the subcontinent. It concludes by pointing to the contemporary relevance of alternative ideas of sovereignty and political community in South Asia that were articulated during the first half of the 20th century.
