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Legacies of Partition in South Asia – Sponsored by the South Asian Muslim Studies Association
Organizer & Chair: Theodore P. Wright Jr., State University of New York, Albany
Discussant: Peter S. Gottschalk, Wesleyan University
Until recently, academic accounts of the partition of the British Indian empire in 1947, which led to the creation of the new sovereign nation-states of India and Pakistan and the largest population transfer in modern history, have focused on the "grand narratives" of high politics: the British viceroys and cabinet missions, the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League, of Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohammedali Jinnah. It is only in the last decade, in the context of escalating sectarian violence and militant nationalisms, that scholars from the humanities and the social sciences have begun to explore the neglected mini-narratives of Partition.
This panel proposes a third approach, a longitudinal one: to examine some of the long term consequences of legacies of Partition and its mass dislocation of population. Vazira F.Y. Zamindar will explicate the problem of "moveable people, but immoveable property". Omar Khalidi will plumb the impact of Partition and changing. recruitment policies on the composition of the Indian army. Haimanti Roy will focus on a regional problem in Bengal: "Citizens without a nation: minorities in Post-Partition Bengal 1947-65". Karen Leonard will trace an indirect product of Partition: the diaspora in Pakistan and Beyond from Hyderabad, a princely state not annexed to India until 1948.
"Moving People: Immoveable Property; the Archive of Partition"
Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, Brown University
My paper will draw upon my historical work with property records of North Indian Muslim families displaced at Partition as well as critically reflect on the construction of archives and memory in writing a political and social history of Partition. This paper will track the narrative of lost homes through oral history, familial records, Urdu newspapers, government records and court records in both India and Pakistan to understand the different registers of trauma and contestation in the making of a national ordering of people, place and memory.
While this paper will draw empirically upon sections of my forthcoming book,"On the border of History: Divided Families and National Order in South Asia" it hopes to engage broader concerns of what it means to breach histories of violence in a divided South Asia and of locating nation in the relationship between familial tragedy and historical trauma; concerns which are now central to my present project on "Memories of Violence, Violence of Memories"
An Enduring Legacy of the Raj: "Martial Races" in the Post-Partition Indian Army
Omar Khalidi, Independent Scholar
To what extent does the recruitment policy in the Indian army today reflect the "martial races" pattern during the Raj? What is the current recruitment policy? Does the composition of the military personnel mirror the religious and ethnic diversity of the Indian population? Or does the colonial pattern still prevail in the cantonments? Why are some groups, Sikhs for example, represented far in excess of population percentage whereas Muslims, Scheduled castes and Tribes are underrepresented? Does the military attempt to inculcate national values and perspective in recruit training and professional education? Does common military experience serve to reduce ethno-religious identification by building cross ethnic pressures? Is there trans-community deployment of military personnel? Are promotions based on perceived competence rather than ethno-religious affiliation? What is the impact of the polarization of Indian society along religious divide between Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs since l947?
Citizens without a Nation: Minorities in Post Partition Bengal, 1947-65
Haimanti Roy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Although the Partition of 1947 created the new sovereignties of India and Pakistan, citizenship within these nations, especially for minority Hindus and Muslims, was not immanent. This paper focuses on the Bengal region to examine the interstices between citzenship based on residence and notions of "natural" citizenship and the majority demographic calculus. I argue that in such circumsances, those Hindus in East Pakistan and Muslims in West Bengal who continued to defy implicit expectations that they would migrate became, on the one hand, necessary political subjects whose continued residence in their natal countries provided their countries with authentication for their secular aspirations. On the other hand, these minorities had to renegotiate their public and private interactions in their daily lives as their routine actions were now automatically put under the microscope of national allegiance.
The Hyderabadis in Pakistan and Beyond
Karen Leonard, University of California, Irvine
This paper looks at the versions of Hyderabadi history developed by those Hyderabadis who went to Pakistan as an indirect consequence of Partition. It also looks at how these versions and their carriers have interacted with Hyderabadis from India in other overseas spaces.