Partition’s First Generation: Space, Place, and Identity in Muslim South Asia By Amber H. Abbas (original) (raw)

Partition's First Generation starts with the author's family connections to the city of Aligarh in the western part of the largest and most populous Indian state of Uttar Pradesh (UP). Her ancestral family home was located on Amjad Ali Road, named in honour of her great-great grandfather, a leading lawyer in Aligarh. The narrative starts in 2009 with her trying to locate the road and the ancestral home, where her grandmother and father were born, only to discover that Amjad Ali Road no longer existed. Following the destruction of the sixteenthcentury Babri Masjid in Ayodhya, eastern UP, on 6 December 1992, many Muslims neighbourhoods across the state were targeted by emboldened Hindu nationalists, including this area. Despite this erasure, Abbas managed to locate the property, which now belonged to a Hindu family who had fled Lahore in 1947 and received this as refugee property. This personal opening to the book frames its broader institutional focus, which is to examine the history of the iconic Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), est. 1875, and situate this history in the 'before, during and after', of Partition (p. xiii). It highlights the continuum of violence straddling 1947, the ways in which it affected the people moved between places, and whether their movements had been voluntary or forced. The book is based on seventy oral histories collected from AMU alumni, now spread across India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Aligarh Muslim University served as a modern educational centre for Indian Muslims, but full of medieval resonances being located ninety miles from Delhi, the subcontinent's historic capital, which had seen citadels from thirteenth-century Siri to the seventeenth-century Shahjahanabad as capitals during the Sultanate and Mughal periods. This history of its surrounding locality, the institution itself, and its students is refracted through contemporary frames of belonging and identity in South Asia. With respect to the empirical ethnographic base, from which this historical tracing is attempted, Abbas acknowledges that her interviewees are largely upper-class/ elite, educated men-the story of these well-heeled gentry-folk is unlike most oral histories of Partition. Some interviews were done with women, largely educators, but they do not feature prominently in the book. Given the nature of this sample, Abbas is keen to highlight how their accounts 'differ substantially from existing Partition histories in that they illuminate repercussions throughout the region, not just on the borders' (p. xviii). At the outset, it must be admitted that it is surprising that this kind of work has not been done sooner, for AMU was at the heart of the Partition story, because of its spiritual, material, and intellectual connection with the Pakistan movement (1940-47),