Chair: Craig Baxter, Juniata College

The 1947 Partition of British India resulted in a division of territory, of people, and ultimately of memory. An estimated 13 million people were uprooted following the delineation of the new national boundaries of India and Pakistan, producing the biggest refugee movement of the twentieth century. Such was the magnitude of death, destruction, and suffering that the partition is often referred to in South Asia as a ‘holocaust.’ Most studies have concentrated however, on the division of territory rather than people. The experiences of countless refugees and migrants have been neglected. Indeed, memory itself has been partitioned as the events of 1947 have become an ‘official’ benchmark to confirm ideological readings of the subcontinent’s history and societies.

This panel breaks new ground in its exploration of partition, migration, and resettlement ‘from beneath.’ Unlike other pioneering attempts at democratising the history of partition, it examines events in both India and Pakistan. Three major themes are developed in the papers: first the need to bring a gendered dimension to the understanding of partition’s impact on identity; second the re-mapping of identity and the superimposing of old borders onto new landscapes as the migrants’ were resettled; third, the interrogation of stereotypical and constructed narratives of partition through the recovery of individual testament from historically marginalised communities.

Sarah Ansari, Royal Holloway

This paper examines the relationship between borders, memories, and identity in the context of the Pakistani provinces of Punjab and Sind during the late 1940s and 1950s. Cities in the Punjab such as Lahore and Faisalabad, together with their counterparts in Sind such as Karachi and Hyderabad, experienced substantial growth during this period as new groups of people from distinct backgrounds came together within them as a result of partition-related migration and subsequent political and economic changes in this part of South Asia.

For many migrants, the process of settling offered them the ‘opportunity’ to try to reconstruct their communities in these new environments, and so very often they tried to reproduce or replicate at city-level, the kinds of boundaries which had delineated their communities in the past. This re-mapping of identity and superimposing of old borders onto new landscapes was not entirely voluntary—migrants often had to draw on their own resources and resourcefulness as a result of the deficiencies of the new state—but the spatial distribution of community identity under these circumstances very much helped to preserve these identities and to create the complex ‘ethnic’ map which still characterizes Pakistan’s urban reality.

Urvashi Butalia, Kali For Women

This paper, which is based on many years of pioneering fieldwork, addresses three interrelated sets of questions. What are the different ways in which the memory of partition has been handed down? How important is it to excavate the memories of people who are generally considered marginal characters in history: women, children, untouchables, eunuchs, mental patients, prisoners, minorities? Is it better to leave the memories of the trauma of partition alone and let its survivors continue to live the lives they have so painstakingly built for themselves?

The paper, after bringing out the differences between ‘official,’ collective, and subaltern memories, argues that while it may be dangerous to remember partition, it is essential to do so, as unlocking memory and remembering is an essential part of the process of resolving and perhaps even forgetting. Pretending partition did not happen will not make it go away as even a cursory examination of contemporary India reveals with its divisions on the basis of religion, ethnicity, and communal polarization. It is only when the memories of partition are confronted that both their importance and their lack of partiality are revealed. This understanding is crucial to the task of dealing with the realities of communalism in modern-day India.

Lucy Chester, Yale University

The partition of the Punjab in August 1947 was accompanied by the greatest refugee movement of the twentieth century. This paper which draws upon both cartographic and gender history suggests that the tragic repercussions of the partition-related violence and migration can be partially explained by the process of boundary-making. The Radcliffe Award, which based sections of its line on economic rather than demographic factors, left large blocs of Muslims, Hindus, and Sikhs on the ‘wrong side’ of the new international borders. The repercussions of the discontinuity between the boundaries of the political state and the problematic borders of the national community were visible in the violence and destruction of property and especially in attacks on women and governmental attention to recovering abducted women. These events reveal not only local groups’ use of violence to stake their own territorial claims and to violate the integrity of other communities, but also the ways that governmental reaction to the violence focused on efforts to make the state’s international boundary conform to the human borders of the nation.

Ian A. Talbot, Coventry University

The human costs of partition have been largely ignored in Pakistani nationalist historiography. It has focused instead on the achievement of Jinnah and on the ‘high politics’ which culminated in the acceptance of the 3 June 1947 partition plan. Where the human dimension of partition has been mentioned at all, it is in terms of anti-Hindu/Indian stereotypes or of the sacrifices of the Urdu-speaking North Indian mohajir community. The experiences of the East Punjabi Muslims who soon dropped the mohajir label, although they formed the bulk of the migrants from India have long been historically silenced. This paper sets out to break new ground in providing their testimony.