In the Shadow of Partition

Seventy-Five Years and Beyond

Nalini Iyer, Debali Mookerjea-Leonard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781032836478
• eBook ISBN: 9781040225400
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Indian & South Asian History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book brings together conversations about the Partition and its haunting residues in the present as represented in literary, visual, oral, and material cultures of the subcontinent and beyond.

The seventy-fifth anniversary of Partition confronts scholars with significantly new subjects for reflection. The question of historical memory has now largely transformed to one of its reproductions through mass politics and mass media and, perhaps, professional academic inquiry, while the very meaning or value of Independence is in crisis. This edited volume includes chapters on representations of partition experiences and the re-drawing of the subcontinent's political map. While the impact of the partition of the Punjab has been the focus of much scholarly studies in the past, and Bengal to a smaller extent, this collection extends the examination of the impact of this political event elsewhere in other communities in the subcontinent, and across other differentials.

This book will be of interest to students, scholars and researchers of Indian history, Partition studies, literature, popular culture and performance, postcolonial studies, and South Asian studies. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of South Asian Review.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: The Partition at 75+
• 1 Grooving on at Seventy-Five: Shah Rukh Khan, Salman Rushdie, and the Indian Muslim’s Ecstatic Return
• 2 “Ancestral Voices Prophesying War”: Investigating the Legacy of the 1947 Partition in the 21st-Century Indian Cultural Imagination of Nuclear War
• 3 Retooling Trauma: Partition as Celebratory Nationalism in Neoliberal Metropolitan Cinema
• 4 Materializing the Memory: The Shawl in Partition Narratives
• 5 Death and Life in the Bordersand: On the Queer Remembrance of Partition through Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand
• 6 “The Story of Our Shame”: Confronting the Silenced ‘Bihari’ Other in Mahmud Rahman’s “Kerosene”
• 7 Hypereventing History: Ecological and Political Disaster in Bengali Dalit Narratives on Partition
• 8 Synchronizing the Dalan, Chandal Aesthetics and Namashudrayan in Manoranjan Byapari’s Autobiography Interrogating My Chandal Life
• 9 Partition in Bangla Little Magazines: Trajectories of Politics and Culture
• 10 Entangled by Borders: Bodies, Citizenship, and Gender in Assam
• 11 Descendants of a Difficult Past: Narratives of the Sindhi Partition Refugees in Bangalore
• Index