It was the best of times, it was the worst of times . . . it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness
This Dickensian depiction of the social milieu against the backdrop of the French Revolution holds true for newly independent India in August 1947. While at the stroke of midnight India rejoiced at the unfurling of the tricol-our bringing to an end nearly two centuries of colonial rule, thousands who found themselves on the âwrongâ side of the newly demarcated international boundary, began their âtryst with destinyâ. How can we interpret 1947? A cataclysm or a defining moment when India, from ânation and its fragmentsâ (Partha Chatterjee) and ânation-in-makingâ (Surendranath Banerjea), graduated to a nation in 1947? The colonial administration never considered India as a nation, âIndia does not make the territory of a nationâ.1 It was believed that the anti-colonial struggle would infuse India as a nation and the stress was on âcomposite cultureâ â the syncretism of Hinduism and Islam â that would form the bedrock of the nation. The two-nation theory dealt a rude blow to this synthesis of culture. While Jinnah, observed in 1940, that India has always been divided into âMuslim India and Hindu Indiaâ,2 thus demanding a separate homeland for the Muslims, the ultraradical M.S. Golwalkar opined, âIn this country, Hindus alone are national, and Muslims and others, if not actually anti-national, are at least outside the body of the nationâ.3 Did the Partition of 1947, contoured along religious lines, achieve the obverse, i.e. unity amongst people on either side of the Radcliffe line and forge a nation? What legacy did 1947 leave? As Gyanen-dra Pandey aptly point out, âThere are many different stories to be told about 1947, many different perspectives to be recovered, stories and perspectives that tell of other historiesâ.4 Partition changed not only the fate of the people but along with it that of the countries too. Not only that of the triumvirate of IndiaâPakistanâBangladesh but also that of South Asia, Asia and the world. The central premise on which this anthology is based is continuity and in the process enriches our understanding of an event that still continues to shape and influence our lives. The essays cannot be compartmentalised sequentially as the beginning, the aftermath and the present, since each, from various viewpoints, dealing with a plethora of sources, namely, personal narratives, archival documents, fictional depictions together with theoretical engagements, cull out how 1947 still resonates in the psyche of the people and the nation â how it transcends the boundaries of time and space. At a time, when the social space is increasingly being fraught with conflicts, at a time when identity is increasingly premised on dress, moral codes and religious practices, the anthology engages in a dialogue between the past and the present to look to the future and in the end the past, present and future flow into each other. Its distinctiveness lies in unearthing the less-explored attitudes and realities of Partition encompassing the peripheral and the marginal into an integral part of the total experience, both tragic and triumphant. The outcome is a holistic experience where the central and the peripheral merge, interchange and interact.
How the colonial state envisaged the process of decolonisation and Partition has been well chronicled in the existing historiography â the process and the players involved.5 Subsequent developments show how faulty this process of delineation was, where the fault lines became glaring and the chasm deepened. For the British administration, border making was premised on âascertaining the contiguous areas of Muslims and non-Muslimsâ.6 Religion was posited as the fulcrum in the official discourse. Though the concept of Partition in creating new nations was not exclusive to India, nevertheless, what sets apart the sub-continental Partition from its counterparts was that the two major religious contenders â Hindus and Muslims â belonged to the same stock and same people. It was under the British rule that the Muslims became a backward, deprived and, in turn, an aggrieved community. This grievance was further exacerbated by the colonial masters through tools of enumeration like the maps and census. As David Ludden shows that right from the latter half of the nineteenth century, the administration became increasingly pre-occupied with a more bureaucratic, empiricist and more quantitative project of data collection.7 The discourse on difference was impregnated with statistics and data to make the claims of backwardness more infallible. In the colonial imagination, thus, ânumber played a crucial roleâ.8 Reece Jones argues that the basic assumption of boundary making was faulty to the core since it hinged on the notion that categories like â âHinduâ and âMuslimâ were stable, fixed identities that fundamentally defined the group membership of individuals. Once that assumption was made, the task of drawing new boundaries was relatively simple â gather census data and place areas with a majority of one group on one side and members of the other group on the otherâ. The faulty premise and the hastily executed scheme of boundary demarcation by Radcliffe led to borders being controversy-ridden and fluid, which Subhasri Ghosh demonstrates in the context of a segment of the Indo-Bangladesh border that gave rise to terms like âenclaveâ, âadverse possessionâ and ânowhere peopleâ. Almost 75 years down the line, the two countries are still in the process of figuring out the modalities of exchange and till then the fate of thousands of people would hang in balance.
Nations are fiercely territorial. At the same time, it is the socio-religio-temporal space that makes up a nation, i.e. a nation is as much a territory as it is of its inhabitants/citizens. As social scientists point out, âA ânationâ is the exclusive territorial domain of persons who share an âidentityâ . . . fusion of identity with an exclusive territoriality conforms to the construction of the ânationâ â.9 However, reterritorialisation and deterritorialisation in the sub-continent led to not only the recasting of the geographical space but also the social and the psychic space, where the concept of âidentityâ remains fluid. Identity is constructed and determined through myriad lenses but remains a contested and debatable issue. The failure to fit the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle into designated spaces to complete a compact picture that would lead to a clinical accomplishment of the surgical process, thus, led to a messy follow-up, amply demonstrated by Victoria Redclift that âboundaries of the nation stateâ shed light on ânation-in-formationâ echoing the sentiment that Partition can be seen as a mode of production of nations, which, in turn, reveal the shifting landscape of national belonging and the complicated accommodations required. Partition being wrought on the body-politic of the nation with religion as the overarching discourse in the scheme, minorities on either side had to engage in complex processes of negotiations. In spite of Nehruâs high rhetoric during the âtryst with destiny speechâ on the midnight of 14â15 August where he exhorted âAll of us, to whatever religion we may belong, are equally the children of India with equal rights, privileges and obligationsâ, accommodation and assimilation remained elusive. Sayeed Ferdous shows how the people at the border areas were kept on tenterhooks during the boundary formation process. Taking the example of Hili â a town at the Indo-Bangladesh border on the West Bengal side â his article shows how mistrust racked the psyche of the two communities in 1947 and continue to do so, âthey believe they had been deprived of their proper shareâ and that the border was thrust upon them, âwhich we had not asked forâ. Not only the border areas, as Joya Chatterji and Subhasri Ghosh have analysed, the social space of Calcutta, post-1947, became increasingly fractured with the ghettoization of the Muslim population, aided no less by the policies of the government itself.10 The media, as Aditi Mukherjee contends, played no less a crucial role in this âotheringâ of identity that led to communal frenzy. She goes on to portray how the mainstream vernacular media âactively participated in communal and sectarian discourses resulting in the stateâs religious minorities becoming an easy victim of media otheringâ. Mistrust was rife in the air which paralysed previously cordial relationship between families of the two communities on either side, leading to cross-border migration for a safe haven. Debasri Basu cites two such novels with the theme on human dimension of Partition, where 1947 not only ruptured relationship but also the festering wound continues to ooze and colour emotions. The portrayal of the experiences of the two protagonists Alam and Altaf testify to the souring of inter-personal relationships amongst families, acquaintances for generations, who now become conscious of their religious identity. Thus while Alam is refused to be met by her lady-love Raka because âthere is a resistance in her, a wall which prevents her from following her heartâ,11 Altaf is openly labelled as a âforeignerâ by his childhood friend Ambika. In the same vein, Sabnam Ghosh interprets a selection of Bengali novels that reflect on the âprocess of othering the familiarâ. Family is a microcosm of the nation. Estrangement of relationship between families, Basu concludes, is concomitant to the tensions in Indo-Bangladesh relation over illegal migration, water-sharing and boundary disputes.
âOtheringâ was not limited to religious minorities only. The social space was fissured not only along communal lines, but there were rifts also along linguistic, ethnic and cultural lines, aptly portrayed by Victoria Redclift whose article on the plight of the Muslim migrants from various parts of eastern India to East Pakistan, following 1947, clubbed as Urdu-speaking Biharis, who had to wait till 2008 to erase the label of âstatelessâ people, portrays how religious affinity could not bridge the divide between Muslim hosts and the majority non-Bengali speaking Muslim migrants. The latter were looked upon with suspicion because of linguistic kinship with West Pakistan and hence deprived of citizenship and along with other basic rights.
For those who acquired citizenship was the situation somewhat different in the sense did citizenship alter the condition of the migrants for better in terms of inclusion? Was the inclusion/exclusion binary premised on the grant of citizenship? In 1950, the Constitution of India was adopted, where Articles 5â8 outline the clauses for acquiring citizenship. By virtue of Article 6 of the Constitution, those migrating before 19 July 1948 and those on or after that date were bestowed citizenship of India. Since the emergence of India as an independent nation in 1947, the terrain of citizenship has continued to be characterized by multiple contestations. With the raging controversy on citizenship in current times, Binayak Dutta rewinds to the Partition days in Assam to contextualise the current debate in its historical continuity. Through a nuanced analysis of contemporary printed texts, parliamentary debates and court judgements, Dutta shows how re-reading of the displacement histories of Assam can transform the way the socio-legal history of citizenship and the idea of continuity and disruption in the politics of the region can be explored. By fleshing out the politics centring on citizenship in Assam, he critically engages with the larger question of the determinants of citizenship â whether citizenship in India has been de-linked from religion, i.e. whether religion-citizenship linkage is a phenomenon exclusive to the present regime, or whether in a subtle/overt manner we find such reflections in the early years. Dutta cogently explores this connection in the early years of Assam when the Government of India passed the Illegal Immigrants (Expulsion from Assam) Act, 1950, whereby a distinction was made to âprovide for the expulsion from Assam of undesirable immigrantsâ as distinguished from âpersons who on account of disturbances or disorder in Pakistan or any other country have come to take refuge in Assamâ, thereby contributing âto create a legal foundation for a differentia between Non-Muslim and Muslim migrants, on the ground by crafting a difference in understanding the nature of migration on religious linesâ. Thus, a clearcut demarcation between persecuted displaced minority community person/ refugee from East Pakistan and illegal/undesirable migrants from East Pakistan who had âsubsequently come to reside in Assamâ was ingrained in the discourse of citizenship right from its inception, and this holds true not only for Assam but also for the whole of the country. Citizenship laws in India, right from its inception, have been subtly merged with religion. Thus, there has been considerable othering, where the Indian state, right from its birth, while making the transition from subjects to citizens, has sought to create a category of âperipheral citizensâ, based on ethnicity and religion.
For the migrants, who could âsuccessfullyâ make the transition from refugees to citizens fitting into the box labelled by the government as âpersecuted minorities of East Bengal/East Pakistanâ, Zamindar shows rehabilitation was a potent methodology of integration, where the migrant âthrough the discursive and institutional regimes of rehabilitation, was made into a citizen of the nationâ.12 Uditi Sen further explores and problematizes this narrative within the framework of the interface between nation-building and post-Partition rehabilitation, whereby Mothe...
