Ghoshal, Anindita. 2022. Revisiting Partition: Contestation, Narratives and Memories. New Delhi: Primus Books. Pages xvii+494. Price INR 1450. ISBN 978-93-5572-147-1 (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Spoils of Partition: Bengal and India, 1947-1967
2007
The partition of India in 1947 was a seminal event of the twentieth century. Much has been written about the Punjab and the creation of West Pakistan; by contrast, little is known about the partition of Bengal. This remarkable book by an acknowledged expert on the subject assesses partition's huge social, economic and political consequences. Using previously unexplored sources, the book shows how and why the borders were redrawn, as well as how the creation of new nation states led to unprecedented upheavals, massive shifts in population and wholly unexpected transformations of the political landscape in both Bengal and India. The book also reveals how the spoils of partition, which the Congress in Bengal had expected from the new boundaries, were squandered over the twenty years which followed. This is an original and challenging work with findings that change our understanding of partition and its consequences for the history of the sub-continent.
2009
The British divided and quit India in 1947. The Partition of India and the creation of Pakistan uprooted entire communities and left unspeakable violence in its trail. This volumeby two highly regarded scholars in this fieldtells the story of Partition through the events that led up to it and the terrors that accompanied it, to migration and resettlement. In a new shift in the understanding of this seminal moment, the book also explores the legacies of Partition which continue to resonate today in the fractured lives of individuals and communities, and more broadly in the relationship between India and Pakistan and the ongoing conflict over contested sites such as Jammu and Kashmir. In conclusion, the book reflects on the general implications of partition as a political solution to ethnic and religious conflict. The book, which is accompanied by photographs, maps and a chronology of major events, is intended for students as a portal into the history and politics of the Asian region.
Anita Inder Singh " s The Partition of India, the book under review, was published more than a decade ago. A reassessment of this thesis after so many years, however, continues to be both timely and necessary since the subject, the partition of India, remains relevant in contemporary Indian politics, mainly for four reasons: firstly, the vast body of partition literature continues to dominate South Asian studies, which includes not only history, but also law and sociology. Secondly, this book places the study of India " s partition in the backdrop of the partitions of other European countries through the twentieth century that makes this study extremely relevant and suitable for review more than a decade after its original publication. Thirdly, the study of South Asian politics affecting and affected by the partition needs to be explained and reviewed freshly to reveal the causes that went into the making of the vivisection. And fourthly, this book continues to be relevant since the partition still haunts the public memory of numerous Indians, quite a few of whom lived in this subcontinent at the time of the vivisection. The relevance of the topic, given the magnitude of the crisis and its aftereffects, does not diminish in merely a decade. This book offers a well crafted explanation of the course of events that eventually led to the division of two of the largest and most densely populated provinces of British India at the time of the India " s independence from British rule in the middle of the twentieth century. Written from the point of view of high politics, this book offers a plausible explanation of the factors that led to the endgame of empire and its final denouement, leading to the creation of India and Pakistan, the two successor states of the British Empire in South Asia. The author reveals not only a detailed but also a nuanced grasp over the development of political events that were responsible for the first partition of the Punjab and the second partition of Bengal in 1947. These two vivisections adversely affected the lives of millions of Indians in the aftermath of the dismantling of an empire, changing the course of the history and politics of South Asia in a way that few other partitioned provinces or regions in the world have had to cope with in the last century.
Revisited: Partition and the Bengali Muslims of India
The Geopolitics, 2022
It may come as a surprise to many people that Bengali-speaking Muslims form the second largest Muslim ethno-linguistic group in the world after Arab Muslims. The 1947 Partition is remembered largely by the massacres of more than a million people, which took place as Hindu and Muslim mobs clashed during the migration of between fifteen to twenty million people to newly created India and Pakistan. While the scholarship of the event is largely focused on the Punjab region where some of the worst massacres took place, there is a need to produce more scholarship on what other regions experienced. It is important to note that, despite the growth in scholarship about Bengal’s partition in recent years, there remains a particular need to document the Partition experiences of Bengali Muslims of India and conduct archival research in light of the increasing strength of the Indian right-wing, which continues to label this group as “outsiders”. Hence, in this article commemorating the seventy-fifth anniversary of India’s partition, it will be worthwhile to look at the colonial history concerning the Bengali Muslims in three of the states of India: West Bengal, Assam, and Tripura.
INDIAN PARTITION of 1947 - A tragedy for Indian Sub-Continent
Indian Partition - A Tragedy for all, 2023
I realize that the title and the theme of my first series of deliberations will raise many eyebrows, and I may even receive scorn from people, both who know me, as well as from total strangers. I am daring to talk on a sensitive subject, that is a concern of life and death for 42 million Muslims of the sub-Continent. This excludes the 16 million in Bangladesh, who were lucky to chart their own path, and went on their own independent way. Muslims in India, and Pakistan are not that lucky. Both find themselves in different kinds of quandaries and blind alleys, with no immediate ray of hope. The problem is of immense, immediate, and dangerous consequences to both groups of Muslims. This is a non-emotional take on the Topic, hoping to start a scholarly debate based on ground realities.
A Revised History of the Partition of India in 1947: A Trailor of Things To Come
A Woke-Leftist journal on the internet, thewire.in, has taken up the task of promoting attempts to revise the history of the Partition of India in 1947. According to this article, and the books it espouses, it was originally the tendency of Hindus to consider their religion "superior", and to treat the Muslims as invaders, which sowed the seeds of Partition.
Interpreting the legacy of partition in the subcontinent: Indian and Pakistani perspectives
Politeja, 2016
The twentieth century partitions, it has been argued, have been essentially the by‑products of three interlinked global developments: (a) decolonisation; (b) democratisation and the (c) Cold War dynamics. The partition of the Indian subcontinent, in particular, bore the imprint of the maelstrom produced by the intertwining of these three forces. The process of partition in South Asia did not only involve simple division and reorganisation of territories but was accompanied by devolution and indigenisation of political institutions and governance, placing partition at the heart of the process of nation‑state formation. In this sense, the longue duree process of the partitioning of the subcontinent has continued to cast its long shadow over the nation‑building process leading to internal discrepancies and the development of regional dynamics, often competitive and conflictual in nature.
Partition Literature In Bengal
I In the post world-war period, the partition of India is the biggest tragedy of this sub-continent. The partition of a country does not merely mean an extra line to draw on the map or some fences running through paddy fields, it is also a person's partition from his society, culture, family and above all, himself. The partition of India in 1947 was practically an undeclared civil war. The religion based division of the country anticipated many questions like communalism and the rise of religious fundamentalism. The gory event witnessed the three main religious communities of the sub-continent, the Hindus, the Muslims and the Sikhs, trying to destroy each other completely. Thousands of innocent people were killed, looted, raped and mutilated. While documenting the partition and the resulting calamity, we face many problems. If one community speaks only about its distress then the story-line automatically raises its finger against the other community and the story becomes one-sided and fragmented. Partition, almost uniquely, is one event in our recent history in which familial recall and its encoding are a significant factor in any general reconstruction of it. The importance of literary, autobiographical , oral, historical and fragmentary material for an understanding of partition has now been hugely acknowledged by historians. While the western front witnessed only the 1947 partition, the eastern front, that is, the partition of Bengal was a two fold affair. First, in 1947, Bengal was divided into east and west Bengal. West Bengal remained as a part of India while East Bengal got included into Pakistan as a Muslim oriented land. Then after years of fighting to make Bengali as the national language, in 1971, east Bengal emerged as an independent country, Bangladesh, the birth of which was based solely on language. Within this 25 years [from 1947 to 1971], the Indian subcontinent has witnessed many political changes such as the partition and the birth of Bangladesh, but these events did not have the expected effect on the Bengali literature as it should have. Where we have a vast and noted literary canon of partition literature on and about the division of Punjab, we can hardly count the texts written on partition and its effects in Bengal. While discussing the lack of proper partition literature in Bengal, we come across some significant issues. On one hand, the partition did not affect the established people of west Bengal much, irrespective of religion. For them, the 'refugees' were just the 'others' and partition was considered solely 'their' problem. On the other hand, the 'others', the uprooted people of east Bengal who lost their everything-family, home, motherland, wanted to forget, to wipe out this haunting memory of partition once and for all.
Bengal Partition Stories: An Unclosed Chapter Edited by Bashabi Fraser
2017
This is a review of Bashabi Fraser's edited volume on the partition of Bengal. The review highlights our need to read the partition event as a warning for future and ongoing genocides. The review also shows the superiority of literature over history. And finally it has something to say about translation and separately, on P Lal.
Partition in Bengal: Re-visiting the Caste Question, 1946-47
The essay introduces caste as a category for discussing the history of Partition of India, which until now has focused almost exclusively on the Hindus, Sikhs and the Muslims. The Dalit or the 'untouchables' of India are usually left out of this discussion, and whenever they are brought in, they are portrayed as either disinterested onlookers or accidental victims. On the contrary, as this essay will argue, the Dalit were deeply entangled in Partition politics, which threatened their natural habitat in eastern Bengal, where they had reclaimed land from marshes and forests, extended cultivation and set up human settlement. Their regional movement was gradually drawn into the broader subcontinental politics that led to Partition, and the movement as a result lost unity, autonomy and purpose. While one group of the Bengali Dalit leaders were opposed to Partition and believed that a Dalit–Muslim alliance was in the best interest of the Dalit, others got closer to Hindu nationalism and demanded Partition of Bengal. Many Dalit peasants were caught in this politics and became both victims and perpetrators of violence. The essay concludes that while the Dalit lacked power to influence the decision to partition, they nevertheless were forced to take positions within the political divide, which they did according to their own perceptions of caste interests and preferred political future of their physical space.