Teaching & Learning Guide for: Asking New Questions about the Partition of the Indian Subcontinent : History Compass

Asia

Teaching & Learning Guide for: Asking New Questions about the Partition of the Indian Subcontinent

By Yasmin Khan, St. Antony’s College, Oxford (June 2007)

Section: Asia

Subjects: History, Political History.

DOI: 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2007.00381.x

History Compass 2 (2004) AS 090: 1–10, 10.1111/j.1478-0542.2004.00090.x

Focus Questions

1.: Why have historians found it difficult to integrate the history of Partition’s extraordinary violence into the political narrative?
2.: In Salman Rushdie’s novel Shame, about Pakistan, he writes, ‘Perhaps the place was just insufficiently imagined . . .’ What does he mean by this and would you agree with his analysis?

Author Recommends

* Ayesha Jalal and Sugata Bose, Modern South Asia: History, Culture, Political Economy (Routledge: 1997), chapters 16 and 17.

An excellent overview of modern South Asian history by the most prominent authors working in the field which gives an impressive and succinct account of the major events leading up to 1947 and also analyses the ongoing repercussions of memories and meanings of Partition for South Asians. Includes an annotated bibliography.

* Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence (Hurst: 2000).

A moving and important set of oral accounts with Partition survivors and eye witnesses from Punjab, conducted over ten years; Butalia was one of the first to call for the history of violence and dislocation to be prioritised, but is also critical of ‘conventional’ historical methodology which has written ordinary people out of the story of 1947.

* Mohammad Mahbubar Rahman and Willem Van Schendel ‘I am Not a Refugee: Rethinking Partition Migration’ Modern Asian Studies, 37/3 (2003): 551–584.

An important intervention in the historiography; this challenges the Punjabi-centrism of many elite Partition narratives by focusing on poor Bengali migrants in the porous Bengal borderlines. This article argues for a rethinking of Partition’s scope and extent and also challenges the paradigm of ‘victimhood’ by examining the resilience and enterprise with which Bengali refugees remade their lives.

* Swarna Aiyar ‘August Anarchy: The Partition Massacres in Punjab, 1947’ in D. A. Low and H. Brasted (eds.), Freedom, Trauma, Continuities: Northern India and Independence (Sage: 1998), 15–38. Also reprinted in South Asia, 22 (special issue, 1999):155–65.

This article rethinks the ways in which Partition violence was carried out in Punjab and draws attention to the role of militia groups and demobilized soldiers in the killings. It paints a convincing picture of Punjab in 1947 while also raising new questions about the relationship between politics and violence more broadly.