Search

More than half a million Meos from the former princely states of Alwar and Bharatpur and the Gurgaon district of the former province of East Punjab, facing discrimination, hostility and violence in the wake of the 1947 Partition, opted to trek to Pakistan. Arriving there six weeks later, bedraggled and bereft, they faced further travails as disease swept through the refugee camps. Many died, while the survivors were eventually settled along the newly created international Punjab border between India and Pakistan. A decade later, however, they were displaced by the Pakistan state in the name of border consolidation. This article traces the Meo experience of multiple state displacements, survival and re-establishing lives in the early years of Pakistan's history when the postcolonial state was still working out its responsibilities in the process of nation formation and border consolidation. In reconstructing the story of the state's interpreting of Meos through its files in the hitherto untapped archives, supplemented with first-hand accounts from members of the community, this article provides new insights into the existing situation of the Meos and their relationship with both the local population and the authorities and, as such, reveals many dichotomies in state and community interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special section on micro partitions follows 'the reduction in scale' from macro in national to meso in regional and micro in micro-regional histories in the field of Partition studies through focusing on micro-narratives of Partition from Punjab, a region divided between India and Pakistan after the Partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947. The focus of the essays is on affective memories of Partition in testimonies and cultural representations to examine the microhistories of displaced persons in micro-regions in West Punjab, including the North Western Frontier Province (Kohat, Bannu, Derajat), South Punjab (Multan, Bahawalpur) and the Mewat region in India, resettled in metro and non-metro cities and towns in India, Pakistan and the UK, through the lens of microhistory or microstoria and affect theories. The section hopes to examine the Partition's affective charge embodied in 'vernacular' languages and representational forms left out of print cultures,1 which include both traditional genres such as ritual theatre, folk-songs, folk music, folk-tales and proverbs as well as contemporary ones like popular music, ritual practices, festivals and pilgrimage sites through which communities from these micro-regions have represented Partition's collective trauma. It draws on the methods of microhistory to closely analyse narratives of small local events, communities and neighbourhoods in Punjab's micro-regions and subregions to connect the stories of these small places and 'little' people with the macro-narrative or grand narrative of Partition, so as to inquire what microhistory can bring to the understanding of Partition, as well as whether the micro-narratives relate to or throw new light on metanarratives.2 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with Partition refugees from Bannu who identified as Bannuwals and continue to do so. It aims to examine the microhistory of post-Partition Bannu refugees resettled across North India and focuses on their preservation of their Bannuwal identity. The role of language, proverbs and songs, cuisine and rituals in identity preservation by Bannuwals has been examined. Qualitative methodology using oral history interviews to record the memories and post-memories of Bannuwals has been used to identify a distinctive Bannuwal identity. Data for the qualitative research was collected through fieldwork in cities in India where the Bannu community is primarily resettled. Secondary sources such as books and essays on Bannu and the North-West Frontier Province and archival documents were consulted to obtain an informed perspective on Bannu's historical background. Seventeen people were interviewed using unstructured interviews. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Partition of 1947 remains an important reference point for Hindu nationalist political discourse in India, defining its relationship with Pakistan and Muslims in South Asia. This article investigates the use of the label 'India's daughters' by the BJP-led NDA government (2014–15), a term originally used to describe Hindu and Sikh women retrieved from Pakistan in 1947. It offers an example of the emotional power wielded by Partition metaphors and demonstrates the BJP's attempts to insert itself into the emotional history of Partition by transforming the meanings of its terms. The case of Uzma Ahmad's retrieval from Pakistan acts as a case in point, illustrating the BJP's increasing attempts to harness Partition semantics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the history of a damaged Urdu library in Delhi reveals new perspectives on the ways in which prominent Indian Muslim scholars dealt with the violent displacements of the 1947 Partition of British India and imagined new futures for the Urdu language across the borders of India and Pakistan. The library of the Anjuman-e Taraqqi-e Urdu (Association for the Advancement of Urdu), an influential Urdu literary association, was damaged during the violence following Partition in August 1947. In contrast to the relative absence of official commemorations of Partition in post-colonial South Asia, the Anjuman's leaders documented and publicised the violence of Partition on their library. Moreover, these Urdu scholars used the material process of restoring the damaged library in 1947 and 1948 to rethink the role of the library as a repository to preserve evidence of the continuing production of Urdu knowledge in India. In turn, the disputed division of the library in 1949 illuminates competing visions for Urdu's future in India, Pakistan, and beyond. This story of one Urdu library demonstrates how changing library collecting priorities and material practices shaped broader debates over Urdu's place in twentieth-century South Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the turn of the twentieth century, a group of young men in Desna, a qasba (small town) in Bihar, founded an organisation called the Anjuman Al-Islah. There they shared their books in the name of promoting education and cultivation, which they saw as 'paramount in life's every undertaking' and essential to the defence of qasbati culture. Through sustained collaborative efforts, the Anjuman soon built up an impressive library of Urdu books and periodicals. Where other libraries were assembled at the initiative of aristocratic patrons or government officials, the Al-Islah library relied on the contributions of numerous Desnavis, both those who still lived in the qasba and those whose careers had taken them far away. In turn, the Anjuman and its library nurtured Desnavis' ties to each other and to their watan, or homeland. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper conducts a class analysis of the human experience of migration during the Partition of India using a dataset constructed from 1,000 recently published oral narratives by migrants from across the Indian subcontinent. The dataset collates and maps information for four key variables: (1) origins and destinations of migrants; (2) class backgrounds of migrants; (3) modes of transport used during migration; and (4) experiences of direct or indirect violence. Satellite mapping and network analysis are used to develop an empirically grounded cartographic understanding of the relationships between these variables. The results point to a sharply hierarchical story. Differences in class background not only closely correlate with differences in mode of transport and choice of destination, but also with the timing and intensity of an episode of violence. Most importantly, migrants' experiences show greater similarity within class background and regionality than within a religious group. Thus, not only are discussions based on the conceptual binary of religion unable to account for the large variations in the experiential aspects of Partition, they are also unable to connect these experiences to the broader social structure of the colonial polity in the Indian subcontinent. By reinstating class as an analytical category, this paper seeks to improve our understanding of the humanitarian costs and consequences of the Partition of 1947. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article engages with the subjective experiences of violence that have been written out of the histories of Partition in Kashmir. By reading the official archives 'along the archival grain', and by invoking the 'small voice of history' through memoirs (which have mostly remained untapped), this article attempts to highlight multiple experiences of Partition in the state. While the 'tribal invasion' of Kashmir has become the primary Indian nationalist trope in writing histories of the violence of 1947, the 'communal violence' which engulfed Jammu province has been treated as 'someone else's history—or even, not history at all'. Such narratives emphasise the political nature of violence in the state in 1947, presenting it as an exceptional space which remained above, as opposed to implicated in, the communal violence. In the case of 'partition violence' in Kashmir, I argue one cannot separate the political from the 'communal' and vice versa. An analysis of the violence in Jammu province allows one to understand the many ways in which the entanglement of the two played out against the backdrop of Kashmir's contested accession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper makes interventions in our understanding of the histories of Partition. Rather than treating 1947 as a moment of temporal rupture, it argues that processes that were set in motion during the two World Wars persisted into the post-colonial period and proved critical in determining the shape of contemporary Indian urbanism. While the post-Partition Indian state, obsessed with planning capital spaces, used rehabilitation as an instrument to gain control over the city, this paper argues that it was during the early 1940s, and particularly during World War II, that we can trace the genealogy of post-colonial urban governance. It will assess migration, urban planning, popular protest, war-time controls, and the political economy of land use during the 1940s in Delhi, which in many ways shaped how the city later responded to Partition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a study of the Interim Government in British India, formed during the penultimate viceroyalty of Archibald Wavell, from September 1946 to March 1947. It tries to throw light on major and minor personalities and micro and macro processes at work in this improbable interlude and, thus, probes an overshadowed ministerial and bureaucratic set-up in the lead-up to Partition. This understudied set-up constituted yet another compelling 'space before Partition' which would continue to affect the Indian state after Partition. Simultaneously, the paper seeks to complicate the teleology and inevitability of Partition by showing this interim arrangement at work, which belied its name. Bringing together official texts and the personal interpretations of many participants, it approaches the period as liminal, albeit one with limitless possibilities at this juncture, of which what followed in 1947 was but one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the geographies of Partition through an analysis of the Punjab Boundary Commission hearings of July 1947. The paper asks: what happens when geographical expertise is transported from 'the field' to courtrooms and government offices? I argue that geography was transformed, and was managed and limited by the legal framework that judged evidence according to its own rules. Examining select records of the Punjab Boundary Commission, I argue that the courtroom created certain assumptions about the nature and role of evidence in boundary-making negotiations. Rather than applying evidence to create a workable boundary, evidence was put to work in often contradictory ways in order to lend competing political claims an air of geographical authority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United Provinces and its urban centres were not in Partition's immediate hinterland or a key subject of its high politics, but were pivotal, this paper argues, at an alternative scale of political mobilisation around volunteer movements. Central to this process were the spatial dynamics of organised violence in the early to mid 1940s, not least because of how pivotal organised killings were by 1947. By exploring the provincial patterns of the development of volunteer movements, their spatial and their inter-communal associations over time, and their ideological content (using a case study focussed on P.D. Tandon), the article argues that there were longer-term associations between organised volunteer activities and instances of pre-Partition violence that foreshadowed the large-scale attacks of the summer of 1947. This potentially affects the way historians read Partition violence as a specific 'moment' of communal antagonism and the significance of these movements' ideologies of violence to India's long Partition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction frames a selection of papers that encourage a richer spatial understanding of the years before the Partition of India. The papers respond to two types of questions. One type is spatial (at what scale do we approach Partition? Through which spaces should we attempt to understand both micro and macro processes? Movements across what distances constituted Partition?). The second type is temporal (what timescales do we invoke when approaching Partition? Of what was it the endpoint? What sort of memories were invoked and made during India's multiple partitions?). This introduction establishes the main trends in Partition historiography, tracked through the last two decennial anniversaries. It sketches out spatial analyses of Partition to date, regarding territory and displacement especially, but shows that much of this geographical interpretation has been implicit rather than explicit, and that most have begun with Partition. Whilst framing many of their arguments in twentieth-century colonial practice, and occasionally straying into the post-colonial, the papers in this special issue mostly focus on the 1930s-1940s at a range of scales (from the international, through the nation-state, to cities, mohallas and courtrooms). Collectively they make the argument that if Partition has a history, then it also has an historical geography. We hope these papers will help people read these histories and geographies with a finer spatial eye. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on India's partition studies to memorize migrants' different post-Partition experiences on their to and from Sindh and importance of migrant community in diasporic consciousness.

This essay argues that diaspora is a useful analytical category for understanding certain migrant populations engendered by Partition, but not all Partition migrants can be designated as diasporas. Through a close reading of two novels—Intizar Husain'sThe Sea Lies Ahead(translated from the Urdu originalAage Samandar Haiby Rakhshanda Jalil) and Kamila Shamsie'sKartography—I show how Urdu-speaking migrants from India's Muslim minority provinces who migrated to the urban centres of Sindh have invented and preserved themselves as a diaspora in post-Partition Pakistan. Both novels enable us to see how Muhajirs havebecome a communitybased on a shared ideology of displacement that is kept alive in the group's memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues for the inclusion of ‘Sindhi Sikhs’—a minor group in terms of religion, language and number—into the archives of Partition, Sindh and Sikh scholarship. Terming this group as the ‘missing people’, we draw attention to contexts that might have made them slip through the cracks of the three archives. At a more fundamental level, the paper critiques the processes by which strait-jacketed definitions of a ‘Hindu’ or a ‘Sikh’ make invisible those who, in the logic of modern nations, appear to have oxymoronic identities. What role did Partition play in this matter? Did Partition cause further ruptures, and what kinds of negotiations did the Sindhi Sikhs undertake during and after Partition? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay approaches the Partition of British India through the perspective of the Baloch inhabitants of Karachi, who locate the city at the centre of diverse political geographies and cultural lineages. We specifically look at the testimony of the residents of Karachi's historic neighbourhoods of Qiyamahsari and Lyari. Their narratives demonstrate how Partition spelled the end of certain forms of socio-political life in the city, while reaffirming others. Together, these narratives help re-conceptualise Partition as a temporally and spatially dilated series of migrations and transformations, rather than as an event unproblematically tethered to the space and time of nation-states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the absence of a linguistically defined region of their own, the migration of Sindhi Hindus to India was particularly painful and humiliating. It propelled the refugees to either embrace homogenisation or move into unknown territory. Mohan Kalpana'sJalavatniis a rare document in Partition literature. It brings to the literary archive of Partition a hard-hitting voice hitherto missing—the voice of rage at the hostility of the host nation rather than a gruesome account of violence, the struggle for home, the paucity of resources, and the rejection associated with identity. This paper introduces the reader to this untranslated and hence unknown story of amorphous citizenship and estrangement in the wake of Partition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]