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Partition, unquestionably a pivotal event of the South Asian twentieth century, has become a subject of great significance in its own right.1 Studies of partition began with a profound reexamination of why it happened;2 they gathered momentum as scholars looked at the provincial and local roots of the drive to divide India;3 and the subject took a big step forward when oral histories revealed how women and men experienced the traumas of its bloody upheavals, the violence of “the burning plains of the Punjab” becoming a metaphor for partition itself.4 [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The house has stood empty since Partition. Its Muslim family abandoned their Bihari village in India for a new life in West Pakistan, 1,300 kilometers distant. Unlike most other homes left behind by emigrants, this one's doors still open to its owner's keys, since his brothers remained in their homes nearby. One of those brothers follows invitations across north India preaching the Tablighi Islamic revival. In conversation, he demonstrates little interest in the religious traditions of the Hindu majority of his large village. Two decades ago, his son, Farhad, opened one of the first private schools in the area, anticipating the surging demand for education that has overtaken India. Some of the first classrooms built had brick walls pierced by concrete screens decoratively depicting a Quran, crescent moon, and star. Most of the school's students and many of its teachers are Hindu. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The February 2014 issue of the Journal of Asian Studies opened with a section made up of two brief “Reflections” on partition—the traumatic South Asian developments of the late 1940s that accompanied the end of British rule over the subcontinent and led to the founding of India and Pakistan as separate nation-states. The first of this pair of short pieces was an introductory look at partition by Gerald James Larson, which I asked this prominent scholar of religion to write. I suggested that it take the form of an at-most lightly footnoted overview of the topic, which would provide basic information of a sort that would help nonspecialists understand the historical background of the partition and would serve to frame the main commentary to follow. That second piece, a meditation on memory and loss by historian Manan Ahmed Asif, was experimental in form for an academic article (a hallmark of the Journal's one-year-old “Reflections” genre) and accompanied by photographs. The trio of essays that follow here, titled “Further Reflections on Partition,” are part of a two-stage effort to respond to and carry forward discussion of issues raised in the earlier pieces. This sort of sequel to previously published work is unusual for the JAS, and is not something I expect to run with any regularity as editor, so some further remarks are in order. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]