Creating Histories: Oral Narrative and the Politics of History-Making. By Wendy Singer. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997. xx, 339 pp. $32.00 (cloth) (original) (raw)
Related papers
Literature has emerged as an alternative archive for partition history, which has great potential to bring in forefront the silenced local accounts of the marginalized people often elided in the fact-based statist History. India experienced one of the world's largest population displacements in 1947 at the time of partition of British India. The year 1947 signified not only the inscription of spatial borders but also erected a national-historical checkpoint across which old cultural and familial histories were erased only to be replaced by the new nationally imposed identities. Further segmentation of Pakistan in 1971 on the basis of language marked a big question mark on the partition of 1947. This paper represents a comparative analysis of RahiMasoom Reza's AdhaGaon (1966) and IntizarHussain'sBasti (1978) to retrieve the history of those who had to migrate, were caught in the sectarian violence, and lost their homes, hearth and their families. Both of the novels are the best examples in which serious attempts are made to capture the human side of the historic event: the sense of loss at being uprooted from one's home, the feeling of helplessness and dejection at the deterioration of the newly constructed nations. The novels strongly interrogate in retrospect the religion-based partition or rather partitions of the Indian subcontinent. The paper humbly shows that the selected novels can be read as potential sources of history.
Islamic Contestations: Essays on Muslims In India and Pakistan. By Barbara D. Metcalf
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2007
ing that samsara is no different from nirvana metaphysically, we still need to work out its implications ethically. I would recommend that to get the best out of this book a reader should first read an essay and then jump to the relevant section in Magliola's afterword in order to see Magliola's analysis of that piece, as well as his often spirited challenge of the author's blind sights in his/her interpretation of Buddhism and vigorous defense of the Derridean deconstruction project.
Mohammad Sajjad’s book, however, makes a courageous attempt to go beyond this conventional understanding of Muslim politics. He endeavours to look at those unexplored areas that have not been given any serious intellectual attention so far. More precisely, the study adopts a threefold research strategy to get rid of the conventional historiography of Muslim politics. Instead of offering a grand narrative of South Asian Islam, the book concentrates on a geopolitical entity called Bihar. This regional focus (in a conceptual as well as geographic sense) turns out to be a productive ‘vantage point’ to revisit some of the given explanations of Muslim political responses especially in colonial India. Second, the book discusses the Muslim resistance to the two-nation theory to produce a complex and diversified picture of Muslim politics in the post-1930s Bihar. In fact, the study makes a serious claim that the Muslim political attitudes in colonial India should not be seen merely in relation to the rather known story of Muslim separatism. Finally, the book attempts to establish an analytically useful relationship between the colonial past and the post colonial realities. In fact, the contemporary Muslim politics is not looked at as a residue of the past; rather the complexities of the contemporary are analysed in its own entirety.