The question of ‘tribes’ displaced by the partition of India 1947 (original) (raw)
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REVISITING PARTITION OF INDIA 1947 - THE VOICE OF DALIT REFUGEES
International Journal of Social Science and Economic research, 2019
Caste is an integral part of Indian society, this understanding cannot be overlooked when dealing with discourses on the oppressed, marginalised and excluded. Historians and scholars have engaged with the socio-political and economic impact of partition on the sub-continent ever since the sub-continent was divided. Refugees, especially those from the marginalised sections of society namely dalits, have recently been a topic of discussion and exploration when interrogating partition of India, 1947 and its aftermath. Menon, Bhasin, Butalia and Karuna Chanana have exactly done that on the gendered naratives of partiton refugees through personal interviews and so have traced the histories of woman refugees from Punjab. However, the present paper intends to tell a different story while archival records have been used in the paper to weave the story of how, when and if all Dalit refugees migrated to the East, post Partition, oral history has been used a tool to explore the experiences of the hitherto ignored history of the Dalit refugee with reference to the Partition of India, 1947 ( in this case Punjab and Delhi). The paper studies a Dalit refugee colony of Jalandhar Punjab where a large number dalit refugees belonging to Megh community, evacuated from Sialkot by the Indian government were resettled at this colony (Bhargava Camp Jalandhar). The paper will study the experiences of surviving dalit refugees of this colony, through oral history. Lastly, the paper is therefore an attempt to include the history of these refugees who have till now largely been outside the paradigm of the largest migration of history.
Imagining the ‘Tribe’ in Colonial and Post-Independence India
Politeja
In the context of the changing nature of India’s relationship with her tribal or Adivasi population, this paper seeks to analyse the construction ‘tribes’ in colonial India and how these came to influence contemporary India’s understandings of the category. Arguing that state policies are actuated by myriad ways in which target populations are defined, conceptualized and represented, this paper seeks to trace the contentious categorizations and multiple identities that have been imagined for, thrust upon and assumed by such communities since colonial times. It thus critically explores and engages with a range of ideologies that informed and shaped independent India’s tribal policies.
Deen and Duniya, and the Indian Partition: perspectives from oral history
Contemporary Islam: Dynamics of Muslim Life, 2024
This article explores how religious concepts like deen and duniya in North India became entwined in the everyday life worlds of Ashraf refugee women who migrated to Pakistan in 1947. Deen, signified by pious humility historically imbibed as part of Ashraf heritage in pre-Partition North India, underwent transformation as post-Partition Pakistan produced a new materiality and new duniya for Ashraf migrants. The formation of a new duniya led to the partial reinvention of a pragmatic deen based on pre-Partition memories simultaneously suited and fitted to the exigencies of the new duniya of Pakistan. This article is based on two Partition oral narratives that explore the entrenchment of deen and duniya as lived but changing cultural and historical concepts, where a new pragmatic deen allowed Ashraf women to narratively emerge as nation, family, and community-makers in Pakistan, while simultaneously retaining their Ashraf status.
The Journal of Migration Affairs (TISS), 2019
This paper studies the 1947 Partition of India, more specifically the Partition of Bengal, which took place along with the Independence of India and Pakistan. Discourses around the Partition— an event of enduring socio-political significance — have predominantly focused on the moment of rupture that compelled individuals as well as their families to cross the Radcliffe Line. A common critical consensus is that the two most dominant themes that characterise the 1947 Partition are trauma and nostalgia, and these have multiple connotations for those who migrated during the Partition. This paper focuses on the Partition of Bengal and the argument that the vivisection of land initiated a process of cross-border migration that continued unabated for three decades. While scholars have mostly studied cross-border migration in Bengal against the backdrop of nationalism and nation-state formation, the paper intends to study the life-stories of refugees to determine if it is empirically productive to think of migration in terms of caste and not just the nation-state parameter. This paper studies caste against the backdrop of the Partition but does not restrict itself to a chronological reading of the history of caste in Bengal; rather it attempts to move beyond its epistemological determinations to see how ‘lived experiences’ can lead to an alternate canon formation that might interrogate the way narratives of displacement have been studied so far.
De-Constructing the term " Tribe/Tribal " in India: A Post-Colonial Reading
The word " Tribe/Tribal " brings to one's mind a general picture of half naked people, arrows and spears in their hands, feathers in their heads, unintelligible language often combined with myths of savagery and cannibalism. They are projected as savage, animistic, uncivilized or headhunters and their life as nasty, brutish and short. Their art as crude, their religion as a medley of superstitions and they are dirty with dark complexion, hideously wild, diseased and ugly visages. 1 All the early explorers and administrators including professionals like anthropologists, historians, academicians as well as different religious leaders and Missionaries in general have piled over one another in their use of uncomplimentary adjectives to describe the " tribals ". 2 Even many of us today adopt either of these views in their entirety in Indian " tribals " while narrating and speaking on them. Whatever sample history and literature has been produced on them till the date is from outsiders and it makes sometimes confusion and controversy in the matters of so called tribals' age old oral history, tradition, concepts, interpretation and values. Hardly one can find references on them in most social Abstract The British colonial administrator-ethnographers in India were pioneers who surveyed and carried out expeditions on tribes but often their methods were doubtful. Their survey reports and papers became the source of precious information about such province and at the same time a tool for their continuous development of colonial administration. However by using official machinery and tour for collecting data they bypassed the ethical consideration of research. Their writings in many ways ended up contorting tribes as being synonymous with being backward, uncivilized and barbarous. This study critically analyzes the notion of tribes in India as perceived and studied by anthropologists. It also interrogates the Ontology and Epistemic premises of their Knowledge Production on tribes in India. The paper concludes by discussing the various issues on tribal discourse in India.
Colonial Constructions of the ‘Tribe’ in India: The Case of Chotanagpur
A closer look at the record reveals that we may be too hasty in dismissing colonial narra- tives in this summary fashion. Indeed I argue that earlier generations of ethnographers did actually very often understand the complexities of ethnic identity and cultural dynam - ics. In similar ways, colonial discourse did not just conjure up an imaginary landscape, but analysed real landscape differences. In fact, it can be said that the material and the imaginary landscape constituted one another in complex ways. Colonial administrators did participate and engage with the land and the people and were forced to contend with indigenous knowledge and ideas of place. The narratives of these travellers, surveyors and officials of the company raj were not merely a 'representation of place' that could be used to root colonial claims to possession, but a far more ambiguous relationship with the place and its native inhabitants1. The ambiguities, contradictions and often acute observations ...
Ruptured Histories: Literature on the Partition (India, 1947
2003
In 1994, the editors of the Indian Review o f Books lamented: ‘it would seem that the great writing that a cataclysmic event like the Partition should have produced is yet to come in full measure, and offer the catharsis that only literature perhaps can’ (1). In the same year, Alok Bhalla, the editor of one of the first Englishlanguage collections of Partition literature reportedly stated in an interview: ‘there is not just a lack of great literature, there is, more seriously, a lack of history’ (qtd. in Ravikant 160).1 This lament has taken on the force of tradition with Professor Jaidev commenting, in 1996, that Partition literature ‘is not a gallery of wellwrought urns’ (2) and Ian Talbot, in 1997, stating that the ‘stereotypes and stylised emotional responses’ typical of ‘lesser novelists’ is ‘pervasive in much of the literature of partition, whether it has been produced by contemporaries or those distanced from the actual events’ (105-106). As recently as 2001, an otherwise val...