Memories and Postmemories of the Partition of India

Anjali Gera Roy, Anjali Roy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780429017360
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This book examines the afterlife of Partition as imprinted on the memories and postmemories of Hindu and Sikh survivors from West Punjab to foreground the intersection between history, memory and narrative. It shows how survivors script their life stories to reinscribe tragic tales of violence and abjection into triumphalist sagas of fortitude, resilience, industry, enterprise and success. At the same time, it reveals the silences, stutters and stammers that interrupt survivors' narrations to bring attention to the untold stories repressed in their consensual narratives.

By drawing upon current research in history, memory, narrative, violence, trauma, affect, home, nation, borders, refugees and citizenship, the book analyzes the traumatizing effects of both the tangible and intangible violence of Partition by tracing the survivors' journey from refugees to citizens as they struggle to make new homes and lives in an unhomely land. Moreover, arguing that the event of Partition radically transformed the notions of home, belonging, self and community, it shows that individuals affected by Partition produce a new ethics and aesthetic of displacement and embody new ways of being in the world.

An important contribution to the field of Partition studies, this book will be of interest to researchers on South Asian history, memory, partition and postcolonial studies.

1 Introduction

Why remember?

Between one and two million people are estimated to have been killed and fifteen million displaced in the Indian Partition of 1947 (Dalrymple 2015),¹ a tragic event that became part of a collective forgetting in official histories of the Indian nation.² With “the emergence of memory as a key concern in Western societies” and the acceleration of memory discourses in the West (Klein 2000: 127) energized by the broadening debate on the Holocaust in the 1980s, oral histories of Partition 1947 compiled by feminist scholars (Das 1990; Butalia 1998; Menon and Bhasin 1998) in the 1990s triggered a surfeit of survivor memories spawning an insatiable Partition industry. What Andrea Huyssen calls “a culture of memory as it has become pervasive in North Atlantic societies since the late 1970s” (2000) has become globalized, and memory and forgetting have become dominant concerns across the world (Ricoeur 2006: 90). Despite Huyssen’s issuing a strong caveat against “using the Holocaust as a universal trope for historical trauma” in relation to local, contemporary events (2000: 23),³ a new commemoration industry converging on projects of archiving, musealizing and monumentalizing Partitioned memories, patterned on the Holocaust model, has bourgeoned even as the last generation of Partition survivors is on the brink of disappearing. However, in view of the Partition generation’s resolute refusal to break its silence on the unsayable violence of Partition for seven decades or its resistance to musealizing (1983) Partition, one needs to ask, along with Huyssen, “whether and how the trope enhances or hinders local memory practices and struggles, or whether and how it may perform both functions simultaneously” (2000: 26).

The conspiracy of silence, or “non-porousness of Partition”, as Sukeshi Kamra aptly puts it in her award-winning book Bearing Witness: Partition, Independence, End of the Raj (2008: 106), maintained by Partition survivors for several decades, foregrounds the issue of revisionist histories’ recourse to local memory practices for documenting historical events. In contrast to Holocaust survivors’ obsession with memorializing and musealizing, Partition survivors’ suspicion of memorializing appears to emanate from both a desire for forgetting and scepticism about the power of language to be able to capture the experience of Partition. Unlike survivors, historians’, including oral historians’,⁴ attempt to recover, archive and explain Partition appears to break the pact of secrecy that has strictly forbidden survivors from sharing secrets, especially painful ones, other than in the intimate space of the family. In other cases, rules related to sharing individual or family secrets prevent both perpetrators and victims from sharing stories of their traumatic experiences, even with family (LaCapra 1994). Concealing affairs, mistakes, addictions, even crimes, both from the outside world and from other family members, is an established family practice in many cultures, either because of the shame attached to them or rules related to someone else’s right to know personal information. While shame, trauma, patriarchy, inarticulateness and protective concern have been recognized as possible explanations for survivors’ concealment of Partition traumas (Das 1990; Butalia 1998; Menon and Bhasin 1998; Raj 2000), the difference in remembering, memory and forgetting in archival, oral and survivor accounts of the event has not been engaged with in sufficient depth.⁵

Attributing the excess of memory to a crisis in memory ushered in through the information explosion and to the marketing of memory, Huyssen argues that public and private memorialization constitute the present century’s survival strategies for counteracting the “fear and danger of forgetting” arising from the instability of time and space (2000: 28).⁶ As Paul Ricoeur shows, recall and forgetting are intimately related and that it is “the effort to recall that offers the major opportunity to remember forgetting” (2006: 30).⁷ The ‘unforgetting’ of Partition through the retrieval of survivor memories appears to have been impelled by “the fear of having forgotten, of continuing to forget, forgetting tomorrow to fulfil some task or the other” (2006: 30) in the generation of descendants whose “duty memory” is obliged “not to forget” (2006: 30) by discharging its responsibility of documenting and preserving stories before they are completely obliterated.⁸

This book focuses on the ethics and aesthetics of remembrance by posing certain fundamental questions. What good is the memory archive in view of memory being fallible, selective, affective, intuitive and corporeal (Butalia 1998: 13)? How can it deliver what history alone no longer seems to offer? In view of doubts raised by the unreliability of memory and factual accuracy of oral storytelling, why are stories being increasingly used to reconstruct histories of Partition? How do we carry the stories of survivors forward without appropriating them? What is at stake in the stories? Why do we need to circulate stories that were intended to be shared in the intimate embodied space of the family?

The book draws on recent debates in history (White 1973, 2014; Ginzburg 1992a; Levi 2001), memory (Nora 1989, 1996; Malkki 1991; Tonkin 1991; Terdiman 1993; Stoller 1995; Werbner 1998; Huyssen 2000; Ricoeur 2006), postmemory (Hirsch 2012) and trauma (Das 1990; Felman and Laub 1992; Caruth 2016) to uncover the afterlife of the Partition of 1947. Through examining the stories of both adult survivors and those who were children at the time of Partition and grew up listening to Partition, it implicates the process of memory and postmemory in the silence and remembering of Partition. In documenting their narratives, it calls attention to the process through which survivors and their children script and emplot their life-stories to rewrite tragic tales of hapless and abjected victims of violence poignantly documented in oral histories of Partition as triumphalist sagas of fortitude, resilience, struggle, industry, enterprise and success. At the same time, it reveals the silences, stutters and stammers that interrupt these heroic sagas to bring to light the untold stories of traumatic experiences repressed in the consensual narratives constructed by survivors and their families. The book deconstructs the narratives of predominantly middle class, upper-caste Hindu and Sikh survivors displaced by the Partition-in-the-west⁹ and forced to resettle in different parts of India to trace the traumatizing effects of both the tangible and intangible violence of Partition in their struggle to make new homes and lives in strange, unhomely lands and transform themselves from refugees to citizens.¹⁰

Unforgetting Partition

The silence of official Indian histories on one of the most violent events in world history foregrounds the elisions, omissions and erasures of what Gyanendra Pandey memorably labelled “historian’s histories” (1992: 189). As Partition scholars have convincingly demonstrated (Das 1990; Butalia 1998; Menon and Bhasin 1998; Pandey 1992, 2001), the masternarrative of Indian Independence could have been produced by the Indian state only through the repression of gendered, classed, casteist, sectarian, regionalist stories of Partition that interrupt triumphalist nationalist history through their testifying to its unspeakable violence and suffering. Through recovering the lost stories of ordinary people displaced by the violence of 1947, they have filled up important lacunae in the official histories of Independence and put together an alternate history of the events of 1947.

The “memory turn” in Partition studies foregrounded individual and collective memories of Partition survivors in providing an alternative understanding of Partition 1947. Urvashi Butalia’s highly engaged enterprise The Other Side of Silence (1998), which signalled this turn through privileging individual or group memory over archival accounts and oral stories of ordinary people over written histories, was undoubtedly inspired by the Holocaust memory project but went beyond it to suggest a different methodology for documenting Partition memories. Similarly, other feminist historians, such as Veena Das (1990), Ritu Menon and Kamla Bhasin (1998), appeared to have followed a global memory trend both in recovering voices of the women affected by Partition and in using oral history methodologies in articulating the memories of women. Even as Jasodhara Bagchi and Subhoranjan Dasgupta (2003), Manas Ray (2008) and others stepped in by supplementing the stories of Partition-in-the-west with stories of Partition-in-the-east,¹¹ new narratives of displacement from other parts of India began to emerge, refuting the myth of Partition as being confined to Bengal and Punjab.¹² After the initial impulse to expand the range of narratives, anxieties about the disappearance of memories have catalyzed a surfeit of memory in the shape of transnational memory projects that have dedicated themselves to compiling stories from across the world before the generation of survivors disappears altogether.¹³

Scholars in literary, cinema and cultural studies have similarly analyzed the workings of fictionalized memories to make a convincing case for legitimizing fictional representations of Partition as historical documents in several ways. These scholars have not only called attention to fictional accounts of local events that find no mention in official histories of the nation (Gera Roy & Bhatia 2008) but also established them as forms of testimonia with the author serving as a historical witness (Bhalla 1999; Hasan 2002; Kamra 2002). They have also turned to fiction and cinema to recover marginalized voices of Partition differentiated by class, caste (Mooney 2008; Kaur 2008), gender (Didur 2007), ethnicity (Mukherjee-Leonard 2008), language and religion. Positing fictional representations against historical, they have made a convincing case for literary texts as sole contemporary documents through which the unsayable, petrifying violence of Partition 1947 could have been articulated (Bhalla 1999; Datta 2008; Kamra 2008; Sarkar 2009; Menon and Bhasin 1998). In examining Partition novels of memory, they have provided extremely sophisticated analyses of memory in the representation of the traumas of Partition while acknowledging its limitations in representing chronological events (Yusin and Bahri 2008). Equally important is their privileging of literary explanation of the events of Partition as more multi-layered, complex, nuanced than logical explanations of historians. Together, they have succeeded in establishing the status of fictional representations as memory histories of Partition 1947.

Crisis in history and the memory turn in history

These alternative, counter, oral and literary people’s history projects have been facilitated by the crisis in history (White 1966) that largely centres on the doubts raised about history’s claims to objective truth (White 1984), its shift in scale and practices. In particular, cultural historian Hayden White’s concept of history as narrative and the value of narrativity in the representation of reality (1973, 2014), Primo Levi’s notion of microhistory based on close observation and its shift to microscopic dimension (2001) and Carlo Ginzburg’s microhistory (1992), which hypothesizes the more improbable sort of documentation as being potentially richer, have revealed the conspicuous lacunae in dominant archive-based histories.¹⁴ These projects have increasingly begun to address the scientific claims of history to objectivity and truth and examined the relationship between memory and history (Nora 1989, 1996; Ricoeur 2006). They have also interrogated the conventional polarization of memory as subjective, fallible and unreliable and history as objective, factual and scientific by unmasking historical truth (White 1973, 2014) to be a narrative produced by historians through the process of selection, interpretation, emplotment and explanation (Louch 1969: 54; White 1973, 2014), which intersects with the methods of other narrative genres.

In “Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know about It”, Carlo Ginzburg traces the genealogy of the term microhistory and shows that it developed in response to political histories’ macrohistorical focus on dominant groups and events that failed to encompass the local, the subaltern and the apolitical (1993). In his discussion of microhistory, Ricoeur dwells on the difference in the selection of events by official histories and microhistories (2006). In contrast to official histories that concentrated on political events and dominant historical figures, microhistories signalled the shift from the political to the social, or even the cultural. Ginzburg’s The Cheese and Worms (1992a), which deals with the life of a miller living through a particular era, inaugurated this shift from the nation to the village, from the elite to the ordinary and to the interrelation between the political and the economic. In his definition of microhistory, Luis Gonzalez equates it with matria history, which focuses on the family, the personal and the affective in contrast to patria history’s focus on the public, intellectual and critical (1968).

The focus of political histories on dominant individuals or groups and macropolitical upheavals in sharp contrast to microhistories’ emphasis on ordinary people and regional, local events is visible in the people’s history of Partition produced by Partition scholars. The macronarrative of Independence and Partition is interrupted in these histories through their making audible small voices, selection of a set of events different from those in official accounts and regional or local impact on specific individuals and groups differentiated by class, caste, ethnicity, gender, religion and region. In contrast to archival history, which has compiled documentary evidence of political events related to Partition and the role played by key figures, such as Cyril Radcliffe, Louis Mountbatten, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, Mohammed Ali Jinnah and others, to reconstruct the history of the Partition of India and Pakistan, memory histories bring a close focus on Partition’s impact on the lives of specific individuals in particular localities and neighbourhoods, whose shared experiences either reconstruct collective memories or interrupt one another to put together discordant versions of the same event.

However, while recovering people’s stories of Partition and displaying sensitivity to the small voices of women, Partition historians unintentionally created a macrohistory of Partition in which the Punjab experience became a universal trope for theorizing the Partition experience.¹⁵ Although the Punjab model has been modified through the experience in the east, the multiplicity of memories that have emerged in the last three decades impel that memories of Partition need to be differentiated further. The myth of Partition-in-the-west as a one-time exchange of populations has been refuted by the continuing influx of migrants from Sindh¹⁶ and the presence of Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan and Afghanistan (Stancati and Amiri 2015).¹⁷ Narratives of Kashmir are inflected by the frequent boundary making in border regions.¹⁸ The clubbing of Hindus and Sikhs as victims of Muslim violence in Partition literature needs further unpacking since they emerge from divergent historical pasts and collective interpretations of past.

This book hopes to correct the common understanding of Punjabi refugees¹⁹ receiving a preferential treatment from the post-colonial Indian state through being rehabilitated in Punjab and areas surrounding the capital Delhi by charting the tortuous itineraries of those who were forced to resettle in parts of Himachal Pradesh, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh and even in the deep south, by drawing on state as well as filial networks.²⁰ Through reconstructing these microhistories, it hopes to show that Partition-in-the-west, as in the east, was not one uniform experience shared by all those who crossed the border from the west but varied accordi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of interviews
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 History, memory, forgetting
• 3 Intangible violence
• 4 Scripting their own lives
• 5 They stuttered: non-narratives of the unsayable
• 6 Not at home
• 7 Memories of lost homes
• 8 Resettled homes
• 9 Moving on
• 10 Partitioned subjects
• Bibliography
• Index