The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia

Refugees, Boundaries, Histories

Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780231511018
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Indische & südasiatische Geschichte

Nation-states often shape the boundaries of historical enquiry, and thus silence the very histories that have sutured nations to territorial states. "India" and "Pakistan" were drawn onto maps in the midst of Partition's genocidal violence and one of the largest displacements of people in the twentieth century. Yet this historical specificity of decolonization on the very making of a nationalized cartography of modern South Asia has largely gone unexamined.

In this remarkable study based on more than two years of ethnographic and archival research, Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar argues that the combined interventions of the two postcolonial states were enormously important in shaping these massive displacements. She examines the long, contentious, and ambivalent process of drawing political boundaries and making distinct nation-states in the midst of this historic chaos.

Zamindar crosses political and conceptual boundaries to bring together oral histories with north Indian Muslim families divided between the two cities of Delhi and Karachi with extensive archival research in previously unexamined Urdu newspapers and government records of India and Pakistan. She juxtaposes the experiences of ordinary people against the bureaucratic interventions of both postcolonial states to manage and control refugees and administer refugee property. As a result, she reveals the surprising history of the making of the western Indo-Pak border, one of the most highly surveillanced in the world, which came to be instituted in response to this refugee crisis, in order to construct national difference where it was the most blurred.

In particular, Zamindar examines the "Muslim question" at the heart of Partition. From the margins and silences of national histories, she draws out the resistance, bewilderment, and marginalization of north Indian Muslims as they came to be pushed out and divided by both emergent nation-states. It is here that Zamindar asks us to stretch our understanding of "Partition violence" to include this long, and in some sense ongoing, bureaucratic violence of postcolonial nationhood, and to place Partition at the heart of a twentieth century of border-making and nation-state formation.

Notes

INTRODUCTION

1. Saadat Hasan Manto, Mottled Dawn: Fifty Sketches and Stories of Partition (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 1997), p. 10.

2. See Ayesha Jalal, The Sole Spokesman (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 1, and more recently Gyanendra Pandey, Remembering Partition (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 15.

3. George Marcus, “Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-sited Ethnography,” Annual Review of Anthropology, no. 25 (1995): 95.

4. E. Valentine Daniel, Charred Lullabies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 150.

5. There are many histories of the making of religious community and communalism in modern South Asia. For instance, see Gyanendra Pandey, The Construction of Communalism in Colonial North India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990); Sandria Freitag, Collective Action and Community (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Barbara Metcalf, “Presidential Address: Too Little and Too Much: Reflections on Muslims in the History of India,” Journal of Asian Studies 54, no. 4 (November 1995); Mushirul Hasan, “The Myth of Unity: Colonial and National Narratives,” in Contesting the Nation, ed. David Ludden (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), pp. 185–209.

6. Choudhary Rehmat Ali coined the word Pakistan as an acronym for Punjab, Afghanistan, Kashmir, Sind, and Baluchistan, and it literally means the land of the pure. I draw here upon Ayesha Jalal’s discussion, “Muslim Schemes of the Late 1930s Reconsidered,” in Self and Sovereignty (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 388–422. She gives an important account of the extraordinary map-making exercises of this time which I have called “fabulous” in the sense Sumathi Ramaswamy uses it to recover place-making that is not false but “unavailable outside the imagination.” See Lost Land of Lemuria (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), p. 6. My metaphoric use of maps is self-conscious, for, as Ramaswamy has argued, it is a modern form of knowledge that, like the census, has had an important role in shaping the political imagination of nation. The phrase “moth-eaten Pakistan” is attributed to Mohammad Ali Jinnah, as he accepted a division of the provinces of Punjab and Bengal as part of the Partition plan.

7. Since 1947, countless contentious studies have examined the question of why Partition happened. This book is part of a broad historiographical shift in which attention has now turned to examining what happened at Partition. For a review of the earlier historiography, see Asim Roy, “The High Politics of India’s Partition: The Revisionist Perspective,” in India’s Partition: Process, Strategy and Mobilization, ed. M. Hasan (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993); D. A. Low, “Digging Deeper: North India in the 1940s,” in Freedom, Trauma, Continuities: Northern India and Independence, ed. D. A. Low and Howard Brasted (Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira, 1998), pp. 1–14.

8. David Gilmartin, “Partition, Pakistan, and South Asian History: In Search of a Narrative,” Journal of Asian Studies 57, no. 4 (November 1998): 1081–83.

9. Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 131.

10. Pandey, Remembering Partition, p. 1.

11. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), p. 110.

12. Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, India Wins Freedom (Delhi: Orient Longman, 1988), p. 216.

13. Sardar Patel to Parmanand Trehan, July 16, 1947, in Durga Das, Sardar Patel’s Correspondence 1945–50 (Ahmedabad: Navajivan Publishing House, 1973), p. 289. Quoted in Pandey, Remembering Partition, p. 626.

14. CAP, March 6, 1948.

15. Mushirul Hasan, Legacy of a Divided Nation: India’s Muslims Since Independence (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 173 and n.; Census of Pakistan, 1951, p. 84.

16. Tai Yong Tan and Gyanesh Kudaisya, Aftermath of Partition in South Asia (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 197. See also Dr. Salahuddin, Dilliwallae (Delhi: Urdu Academy, 1986); R. E. Frykenberg, ed., Delhi Through the Ages: Essays in Urban History, Culture, and Society (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986).

17. Sayid Ahmad Khan (1817–1898) wrote Asar-us-Sanadid and Silsilat ul-Mulk about Delhi’s architecture, leading families, and rulers. Asar-us-Sanadid was written a decade before the Revolt of 1857, but was republished in different versions several times in the ensuing decades. See also A. H. Hali’s Hayat-i-Javed: A Biography of Sir Sayyid, trans. David Mathews (Delhi: Rupa & Co.,1994).

18. The Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Hind, Anjuman-e-Taraqi-e-Urdu, Jamia Millia Islamia, the Muslim League Dawn newspaper, the Jang, and Anjam are some of the institutions that were located in Delhi.

19. V. N. Datta, “Punjabi Refugees and the Urban Development of Greater Delhi,” Delhi Through the Ages; Veronique Dupont, “Spatial and Demographic Growth of Delhi since 1947 and the Main Migration Flows,” in Delhi: Urban Space and Human Destinies, ed. Veronique Dupont, Emma Tarlo, and Denis Vidal (Delhi: Manohar, 2000), p. 229.

20. See Ajmal Kamal, ed., Karachi ki Kahani, 2 vols. (Karachi: Aaj Magazine, 1996); Hamida Khuhro and Anwer Mooraj, eds., Karachi: Megacity of Our Times (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1997).

21. Census of Pakistan 1951, vol. 1, GOP, p. 83.

22. Tan and Kudaisya, “Capital Landscapes: The Imprint of Partition on South Asia’s Capital Cities,” in Aftermath of Partition, pp. 163–203; Ian Talbot, Divided Cities: Lahore, Amritsar and the Partition of India (Karachi: Oxford University Press, 2006).

23. On the postcolonial state, see in particular Partha Chatterjee, “The National State,” Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), ...