Partition historiography
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63 Terms
Zamindar - Historiographical purpose
Genocidal violence, forced conversion, abduction, rape - throughout North India
Unprecedented scale of displacement
‘This book asks us to stretch our very understanding of ‘Partition violence’ to include the bureaucratic violence of drawing political boundaries and nationalising identities that became, in some lives, interminable’
3 Divided Urdu-speaking Indian Muslim families
Delhi, India and Karachi, Pakistan
‘Moving between memory and record, I recover here a remarkable history of how, in the midst of incomprehensible violence, two postcolonial states comprehended, intervened and shaped the colossal displacements of Partition’
Zamindar ‘fundamental uncertainty of the political Partition itself’
Where would Muslims belong - ‘constructed category of community and political mobilisation’
Many did not support the Pakistan movement despite the Muslim Leagues’ claims
Creation of Pakistan > where would the Hindus and Sikhs in that territory belong, likewise for Muslims who resided in now India
‘Michel Rolph Trouillot’s comment that ‘history is messy for the people who must live it’ is important to foreground, not only for ordinary people caught in the chaos of their times’
Zamindar on displacement
September 1947 - genocidal violence from the Punjab spread to the capital city, and most of the city’s Muslims were forced to leave their homes and take refuge in camps and wherever they could
Complete demographic transformations have gained scholarly attention, but obscure the character of the flights and how states interfered
Crisis of emergency - had to establish legitimacy
Set up parallel Emergency Committees of the Cabinet
Ministries of Relief and Rehabilitation
12 million people displaced in Punjab alone, and 20 million people in the subcontinent as a whole
Emphasizes using the world displacement rather than migration - not a ‘voluntary exodus’
In Delhi, Muslim refugees boarded trains to Pakistan in search of refuge
Muslim homes became occupied by Hindu and Sikh refugees from Punjab - ‘pitted against that of Muslim refugees profoundly shaped the Muslim exodus’
Zamindar on the religious refugee
Scholarship has focused on recovery programs for women abducted in Punjab violence - ‘these writings show how women themselves resisted this national inscription, and many wanted to remain a part of their abductors’ families’
In a similar way, Hindu houses in Karachi became a source of ‘contention’, pitted against Muslim refugees pouring in from Delhi and North India - Sind Congress demanded Sind Hindus would be included in Indian states schemes aimed at Punjab
As instructions of rehabilitation became established on firmer footing in government, these categories of the marked refugee were self-consciously replaced in the universal language of legislations and policy as ‘displaced persons’ and ‘evacuees’’
Evacuee property was later used to rehabilit
Difficulties in partition historiography - crossing the border
Crossing the border - it is a shared history of the region - needs a converging history but there are many difficulties
Political obstacles
‘The writing of history has been an important critical activity to the making of nation in modern India, in striking contrast to Pakistan’
Delhi has remained central, while Karachi’s status has shifted and Islamabad having become the new capital
‘before the political trajectory of Partition settles into a common sense about the region’s landscape, and maps our memories entirely into nation-states, let us recover the margins that have shaped them and the roads that were not taken’
Pandey on rupture and genocidal violence
Insight into the ‘procedues of nationhood, history and particular forms of sociality’ - in the context of nation state formation
‘In the process, it reflects also on how the local comes to be folded into the national in new kinds of ways - and the national into the local - at critical junctures of this kind’
Violent character
Several hundred thousand killed
Uncountable raped and converted
Millions displaced
‘Notably, it was not a once subject, now about to be liberated population that was pitted against departing colonial rulers in these riots, but Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs ranged against one another - even if, as Indian nationalists were quick to point out, a century and more of colonial politics had something to do with this denouement’
Happened in a bizarre time frame - 7 years between first demand and the establishment for Pakistan
Pandey on the political language of violence
‘It is one of the central arguments of this book that - in India and Pakistan, as elsewhere - violence and community constitute one another, but also that they do so in many different ways’
‘It is my argument that in the history of any society, narratives of particular experiences of violence go towards making the ‘community’ - and the subject of history’
Violence can be conceptualised as a language which cuts across both ‘historical’ and ‘non-historical’ subjects
‘Official’ history and its other
How does history produce truth yet deny its force?
‘How can we write the moment of struggle back into history?’
Pandey on the relationship between memory and history
Historical imperative to close the gap between historians views of 1947 and popular, survivors accounts
Reconcile history and memory, the distinction between partition and violence
‘the relationship between memory and history has always been an unstable one’
Shared cultures, rituals, face to face communities
Altered and historicised forms
‘The triumph of the nation-state, the long arm of the major publishing houses and modern media and the homogenisation of culture, have not only produced more history: they have also produced more archetypal myths’
History appears in the form of a national, institutional memory and in different groups
Complexity of separating ‘memory’ and ‘history’
Pandey - History is sometimes presented as a scientific, objective description - however, inseparable from political agendas
Crucial need to explicate the politics of available histories
The demise of memory history has multiplied the number of private memories demanding their own individual histories
11 ‘who is it, in fact, who lives in a ‘fragmented universe’ and turns every ‘trace’ into a historical document’
Should not dismiss the history-nation connection
‘Private memories’ and ‘individual histories’ continue to feed upon the ‘memory-histories’ of states, parties, and pressure groups representing communities and nations?
‘I wish to try and recover the history of Partition, therefore, as renegotiation and a reordering, as the resolution of some old oppositions and the construction of new ones’
Butalia - Overview
Difficult to determine a beginning and the end
All communal strife is seen in terms of partition
Most records of partition are in terms of constitutional history
‘Hardly any attempt has been made to record the experiences of ordinary people both sides of the border’
Butalia herself is not a historian - interest sparked by feminist activism and political engagement
Butalia is Punjabi - explores the historical memory of partition
1984 anti-Sikh riots
Historiographical neglect or fear of ‘reopening a trauma so profound’?
1984 as a catalyst for reapproaching the history of partition
‘Experience is mediated through historical understanding, and memory is
Butalia - why was there such little work on women during Partition?
Had remained non-violent communalism?, were mostly the victims
Howevever, this is not always the case
Hindi-Muslim riots in Bhagalpur - had been complicit and participants in killing
Indeed, in our anxiety to reclaim powerful women, we tend to regard every kind of agency as positive’
How can we argue that allyship with patriarchal communities is ‘empowering’?
Butalia - women’s suffering during partition
An estimated 9-50,000 Muslim women and 15-35,000 Hindu and Sikh women were abducted.
These women were subjected to rape, forced conversion, and forced marriage.
They were forcibly 'recovered' and 'rehabilitated' by the State after partition.
They were forcibly returned to what the two States defined as 'their proper homes'.
They were torn apart from their families twice:
First, during partition by their abductors.
Second, after partition, by the State's 'recovery' and 'rehabilitation' efforts.
Many women were martyred or killed themselves
Butalia - Sikh villages around Rawalpindi - Thamali, Thoa Kalsa, Doberan, Choa Kalsa, Kallar, Mator and others
8 day period from 6 March to 13 March - much of the Sikh population was killed, houses decimated, gurdwaras destroyed
Thoa Kalsa - some 90 women threw themselves into a well in order to preserve the ‘sanctity’ and ‘purity’ of their religion, and to avoid conversion
‘A small community of survivors from these villages lives in Delhi and keeps alive the memory of these deaths by holding an annual remembrance service in the local gurdwara, in which the incidents of that week are recounted by survivors’
Tales of female sacrifice are pervasive - rhetoric of heroism, martyrdom and honour
Protecting the ‘purity’ and ‘sanctity’ of religion
While most men could go and fight, even kill, for women, children, the old and weak a ‘martyr’s death’ seemed a better option than conversion
‘for several days after these villages were surrounded and under attack, the people had been hiding out in what they felt were ‘safe’ places: large houses and gurduwara’
Particularly women and children
Butalia - How do we read accounts of mass suicide or women being killed?
‘Specifically, how can we read agency, victimhood, violence or indeed anything else, back into such accounts?’
Victimhood
Abduction, rape and suicide
What about women who took their own lives or who ‘offered’ themselves up for death?
Victims or some degree of agency?
Oral histories, such as Basant Kaur’s account, mourn the loss of lives but do not seem to question the decision of the women
42 ‘acting on a perceived notion of the good of the community’
Element of patriarchal ‘consent’ but also compulsion
Choice is not simple to reconstruct, and it might be argued that my reading of its conflicted existence back into this incident is dictated more by my involvement in the contemporary discourse of feminism, than by the incident itself’
Did women participate in any of the village discussions, or did they just receive them?
‘Agency’ and victimhood’ are not necessarily mutually exclusive
The patriarchalisation and communalisation of notions of violene obscures the fact that many men committed atrocities against their own communities and even their own families
‘In this context we can see why the danger of conversion loomed so large for various communities: conversion, rape and forcible marriage - the fate that in all likelihood awaited many women - meant a violation of community honour and purity, which, displaced onto the bodies of women, became the pretext for the killing of women, or for their suicide’
‘In many of our interviews, we found that women had been quite active in taking up arms and fighting’
Formed the Muslim League National Guard
Instrumental in the Rawalpindi killings
Butalia - Women’s rehabilitation
6 December 1947, three months after partition, the two newly formed nations agreed on the question of ‘recovering’ those women who had been abducted and ‘rehabilitating’ them in their native places
Both countries agreed this was necessary - despite India supposedly being a secular community, it defined itself in terms of religious community
Difference between actively communal and secular rhetoric
Known as the Inter Dominion Treaty, later enacted as an Act of Parliament
Mridula Sarabhai was said to have been the moving spirit behind this Treaty
Used the language of ‘persons’ but was clearly targeted at women
Little room for choice
Women could be kept in camps, couldn’t take legal action, this couldn’t be questioned in court
Aware of the delicacy of the task - different approach to taken of general refugees
Fear of a second dislocation, repeat of the trauma, more uprooting, familial nonacceptance
Many social workers such as Kamlaben Patel and Damyanti Saghal used their positions to help women who did not want to be rescued
Butalia - Women’s fear
Hindu families often non-accepting - seen as soiled, impure, part of the other community, what to do with their children - Nehru and Gandhi appealed to Hindus
Continued to be a preoccupation well into 1955 and up to 1957 - evident in Legislative Assembly records - particularly concerned about fewer Hindu women having been recovered from Pakistan than Muslim women from India
Butalia - why was ‘recovery’ such a big preoccupation of the state?
Men were formerly seen as protectors - wanted to combat this emasculation and loss of order
The state acted as ‘the patriarch of the new national family’
‘The state in turn provided coercive backing for restoring and reinforcing patriarchal norms within the family’
‘For the post-colonial, deeply contested, fragile and vulnerable State, the rescue operation was an exercise in establishing its legitimacy. Thus, both for the legitimation of the State and for the restoration of the community, the recovery of women and other related questions of gender and sexuality became crucial’
Butalia’s argument about Dalits during Partition
The majority of historiography is focused on religious differences and identity
Has rendered the history of the untouchable castes, the Harijans and the Dalits, ‘virtually untouchable even in the writing of history’
E.g interview with Maya Rani, a sweeper from Batala -spoke as a Harijanrather than a woman
Worked as a sweepter and moonlighting
The Gurdaspur district was considered a ‘disputed district’
Assumed they were part of the Hindus, but actually had their own distinct identity
Butalia - Dalits were not seen as their own distinct group
1932 - colonial state had recognised the Dalits as a distinct group, awarding them seperate electorates - this was reversed shortly after by the Poona Pact
The Cabinet Mission decided it could only recognise three main communities - General, Muslim, Sikh
The Dalits did not fit any definition of displaced people and were not able to stay in camps - discrimination between caste Hindus and scheduled castes
No way of compensation for the labour of the land - could have changed the pattern of land ownership but did not
Lack of property provided a degree of immunity? - had nothing to be looted
Butalia - the rape of Dalit women
The rape of Dalit women confuses notions of intouchability - ‘could the answer lie in the fact that rape is a different kind of exercise of power than loot and murder?’
In many places Dalits, performers of such essential services, invisble by virtue of their presence, now became visible by virtue of their absence. Where were they? Who would perform all the menial tasks that needed doing - the swabbing, the sweeping, the sanitary services? How would people live? Caste Hindus now began to ‘see’ Dalits. Dalits acquired an identity’
Gandhi and Ambedkar had focused attention on them
Dalits had rejected many things Gandhi had campaigned for such as entry into temples, same water - ‘instead, what they wanted was political clout, political power and representation, and most important of all, equal citizenship’
Conversion particularly suspect in Punjab - sense of seperateness
‘Conversion was suspect because it was done, clearly, ‘with a view to increasing their number solely for political purpose
Butalia - Acchustistan
November 1946 - founding of the All India Acchutistan movement
Articulated themselves as a separate minority from the Hindus
Congress and the ML realised the political importance of the Harijaness in achieving their political objectives, and in basic need of the services that they provided, particularly evident after Partition
‘There is another bizarre twist to this tale. For many people, the creation of Pakistan opened up a number of opportunities in terms of jobs. Groups and individuals who did not necessarily have a religious stake in the process of nation-making moved to both countries in search of a better life’
Butalia - parallels between scheduled castes and women
‘in many ways the experiences of scheduled castes paralleled those of women. Both groups were marginalised by society, and yet were so essential to its functioning. Their importance lay squarely, but differently, in the material realm’
Scheduled casts - role in production, sanitation
Women - producers and reproducers of socie
Unique notion of honour
Had little political representation or collective mobilisation
Women’s experiences were not spoken about due to their inherent nature - not present in official discourse
Daiya - seperate electorates
1900s - British tried to break up th swadesh movement through the suggestion of establishing the Muslim League in 1906, and introduced seperate electorates in the Indian Council Act of 1909
Must remember they are not uniform or ‘monochromatic’
‘After 1922, communal riots on a large scale disrupted the Hindu-Muslim alliance between the Congress and Khilafat; political reforms in this period broadened the franchise but preserved and even extended seperate electorates’
Encouraged communalism around religious, regional and caste difference
Economic and social tensions gained a communal character
Hindu Mahasabha (a strong pro-Hindu organisation) had also passed a resolution in 1937 to the effect that Hindus and Muslims are two nations and cannot co-exist harmoniously. This two-nation theory, communalist in nature, was posited as the ideological counterpart to secular nationalism’
Became the basis for Partition
Daiya - the modernity of ethnicity
Early nationalist historiography and state discourse > inevitable outcome of communalism
Partition writing has focused more on ethnic violence than migration
Bipan Chandra ‘Communal violence is false consciousness and an atavistic remnant of ‘backward’ pre-modern ideas, and evidence of the failure of ‘true’ modern nationalism’
‘The account of the development of communal ideology as the organisation of political and economic interests along religious lines fails, however, as Veena Das has also pointed out, to explain how and why this ideology might suddenly give rise to communal violence’
Partition conflict was not just a conflict along the binary of ‘communalism and national secularism’
Much Hindu influence over Congress’ secular nationalism
Some recent scholarship has rephrased ‘communalism’ as ‘culturalism’- e.g Jalal argues that to avoid viewing the Muslim as the communalist we should rename Muslim communalism as Muslim ‘cultural nationalism’
Gilmartin
interpretations of partition have carried their own powerful implications for popularised visions of world history’
Partition is sometimes portrayed as ‘the culmination of a civilisational clash between Hinduism and Islam in South Asia dating back almost a millenium’
‘In this view, partitions’s root causes lay precisely in the very forms of ‘modern knowledge’ that gave license to the large scale ‘essentialising’ cultural visions that led to the imagining of religions as historical actors at the core of bounded civilisations’
Consequence of the structures of thought brought to India by 19th century European thinkers rather than longer term Hindu Muslim relations
Gilmartin - Jinnah and Nehru’s original arguments for partition
Jinnah - ‘two nation theory’ embodying the ‘clash of civilizations’
Nehru - Argued that colonialism had distorted the progressive 19th century forces of science and secularism
‘Nehru’s ultimate acquiescence in partition was in fact a product of pragmatic calculation’
Both visions were ‘linked to a dynamic vision of the history of the world tied to modernity’
Gilmartin - 80s and 90s partition historiography
1980s
26 - Break up of Pakistan, creation of Bangladesh in 1971, Iranian revolution 1979, Russian invasion of Afghanistan in 1980s
‘Thinking about the role of Islam in the politics of the modern world began to move in new directions’
Internal political crisis within India - Hindu nationalism in the 1980s, India’s worst communal violence since partition at the time of the anti-Sikh riots of 1984
New historical interest in partition began to emerge
1990s - historians influenced by post-colonial theory
‘Rejecting civilisational arguments, these historians continued to see the roots of partition in the transformations of the colonial era. But critically, they rejected the old Nehruvian view that development and nationalism could distance India from its colonial past and from the causes of partition’
‘Saw nationalism itself as a product of the same structures of knowledge that Nehru had seen as producing partition’
Gilmartin - social historiography - Attempts to remake the meanings of partition with narratives drawn from everyday life - ‘antidote to the interlinked colonial and national narratives that had produced partitions’s violence’
Gyandendra Pandey (2001) - attempted to reclaim meaning for ordinary people, in contrast to nationalist meaning making
Urvashi Butalia
‘Probed not only partition’s violence, but the violence implicit in the imposition of official narratives on partition’s meaning’
Vazira Zamindar’s ‘The Long Partition and the Making of Modern South Asia’
Recounted the ‘deep seated impact of partition’s violence and migrations on the attempted creation of ‘national’ citizens on both sides of the India-Pakistan border
20th century - partition has become a critical subject for the development of larger postcolonial theory
‘Partition has thus come to exemplify the human costs of the attempted 20th century realisation of the ‘national’ idea
A focus ‘easily linked to the larger 20th century history of religious conflicts, ethnic identity making, and genocide, from the Jewish Holocaust to Rwanda to Bosnia to Palestine’
Individual stories and ‘histories from the margins’ counteract the ‘large narrative telelogie’s with which partition has continued to have such powerful associations’
Gilmartin - Relationship between popular and elite levels
‘Historians have shied away from drawing straight lines from the history of religious reform and revivalism to the grand acts of state making that defined partition’
Dominating historiography - ‘politics of elite conflict in late colonial India in the 1930s and 1940s, and to the elite manipulation of religion’
Growth of the Muslim League has been conceptualised as a vehicle of elite Muslims ‘seeking to protect their interests as colonial devolution went forward’
Motives?
‘Calcualated, instrumental use of religion to manipulate the masses’ vs ‘driven by their own preoccupations with religion as a deeply held idiom of order?’
‘The movement for Pakistan in such arguments arose largely from elite political machinations, and only took on the character of a popular movement in its final, climatic stages’
Hindu communalism - similarly often linked to the protection of high caste interests
Especially linked to the demands ‘by Bengali and Punjabi Hindus for the partition of those provinces once the decision to create Pakistan had been accepted, with ‘Hindu’ unity and ‘Hindu’ interests mobilised as a frame to protect dominant elite positions’
Gilmartin - limitations of elite politics
Historiography has focused on the blame game on elite actors ‘for purposes of competitive national self definition’
‘Influenced by postcolonial scholarship, historians have been deeply sensitisited in recent decades to the ‘constructed’ character of religious communities
‘Popular religion is often portrayed simply as a world that slipped out of control, as the violence of late 1946 and 1947 spread’
Gilmartin’s conclusion
Historiography has crucially moved beyond explanations rooted in long-standing Hindu-Muslim cultural and civilisational differences
Partition must be grounded in longer histories of state construction, legitimacy and sovereign authority in South Asia
Needs to be situated in global history - already an ongoing trend
Yasmin Khan on the strategic character of ‘Direct Action Day’
3 days later, at least 4,000 of Calcutta’s residents lay dead and over 10,000 were injured
‘What had once been violent, but almost theatrical, encounters between politicsed militias and activists, had burst their limits and had become targeted attacks on innocent civilians, including women, children and the elderly’
Undoubtedly a strategic manouevre - amassed different social groups along religious lines in order to demonstrate the demand for Muslim representation and give Jinnah bargaining power over the membership of the interim government which was taking place in New Delhi
The Calcutta killings reinforced, in a graphic way, the idea that Hindus and Muslims were incompatible and planted this seed in the minds of British and Indian policy makers’
Khan - ambiguity of ‘direct action’
The meaning of ‘direct action’ was ambiguous - various League officials may not have explicitly incited violence, but did give the crowds the impression ‘that they could act with impunity’
Shift from the involvement of political groups to the involvement and targeting of ordinary people - failure to deploy the military and police quickly too
‘The involvement of politicians granted the violence legitimacy in the eyes of rioters who believed that they fought for ill-formed and simplistic notions of ‘freedom’ ‘space’ and ‘history’ which hardly tallied with demanding the territorial nation state that came into being’
The violence was anticipated, with Hindu miltias being prepared to fight
Crucial links between local strongmen and politicians
Khan on the obscurity of what Partition actually entailed
‘Pakistan, then, meant myriad things to different people. The call for Pakistan could be equated with all manner of ambiguous hopes and dreams’
Calcutta killings marked a ‘psychic break between many South Asians and the idea of Pakistan - hardening of religious identities
Khan on the spread of violence
Watershed moment - followed by the first major series of Partition massacres across Northern India
Weeks after - Noakhali and Tippera ethnic cleansing
69 - ‘defined by clear strategic organisation, systematic destruction of Hindu-owned property, temples and homes, and mass killings’
Late October and November - violence spread westward
Bihar - in October, the same patterns of violence raged in Bihar despite it not really being considered a danger zone for Hindu-Muslim conflict - thousands of Muslims were killed and perhaps 400,000 Muslims were affected by mass migrations, upheaval and brutality
November: Garhmukteshwar, close to Delhi - violence started during a local religious fair, perhaps some 350 people were murdered and violence fanned out across the district
In Lahore, exaggerated accounts of events in West Bengal were being circulated in the press and political leaders called for ‘blood for blood’
Paranoia and fear spread across the country
The Calcutta killings became crucial in the propaganda war
A Bengal pro-partition movement gained traction
Khan on the atmosphere in Punjab in 1947
Home to a closely knitted Punjabi speaking population of Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims
Divided in terms of class rather than religion before 947
However, by the New Year of 1947, the Muslim League National Guard and the RSS had been recruiting and arming for months
‘All sorts of smaller armed gangs and bands proliferated’
Khan - the Punjabi government was unable to restrict militias in January 1947, signalling its weakness
Impact on everyday life - ‘specific political contests between elite members of the League and the Congress were transmuted into a more amorphous sense of Muslim versus Hindu’
Increasing pressures to display and declare religious affiliations more performatively or ostensibly
Daily life became overtly religious; some Hindu women began wearing the tilak, sales of the Jinnah cap boomed, and cross-communal greetings were abandoned in favour of religiously specific ones
Congress’s "Way Out": By March 1947, Congress leaders like Nehru accepted Partition as a "way out" of the violence and political deadlock, preferring a "chaotic transition" to continued foreign rule
Mountbatten’s Role: Arriving on 24 March 1947, Lord Mountbatten was less plagued by worries about regional repercussions than his predecessor, Wavell. He focused on a top-down constitutional settlement and rapidly concluded that Pakistan was inevitable
Khan - Punjab’s descent into civil war
Within days of collapse of the ministry in March, most of the major cities in Punjab were burning
Collapse of Services: Riots made basic tasks like mail delivery impossible; in Amritsar, postmen refused to walk the streets even when escorted by the postmaster. Municipal revenues dried up because bills for electricity and water could not be sent out
84 ‘depressing features of Partition in other parts of the subcontinent were taken to new extremes in Punjab. In Bombay in March 1947, even during lulls between episodic stabbings, people were nervous about crossing into each other’s ‘zones’
Barricades and gates were erected, and small groups of people sat hidden from view holding knives
Apprehensive families acquired basic arms, ‘but this had an escalating effect as it made other neighbouring communities feel more insecure’
Local politicians made calls to arms
Khan - the decision to Partitin
Politicians turned to the vocabulary of partition in response to the disaster unfolding
‘As Jinnah continually vetoed the vision of one strong united India, it emerged that the price of a strong central government was the division of the country’
Spread of violence hastened the process - still much ambiguity
‘What most people wanted was freedom and sovereignty over their own communities. The colonial leadership and its heirs were at a remove from the intensity of these patriotic and non-territorial demands. The idea of partitioning ancient homelands was barely contemplated or understood’
Khan on Mountbatten
Took up the post of the last Viceroy of India
Less plagued by worries about regional and bloody repercussions
A month after arriving, he thought that ‘Pakistan was inevitable and that he had arrived on the scene too late to alter the course of events fundamentally’
May - partition plan unveiled
‘Entirely dislocated from the regional nuances of political life in India, and a top-down conceptualisation of state-centred politics would be imposed directly from London on the subcontinent’
‘The plan was tragically unconcerned with human safety and popular protection’
3 June: the plan was broadcast to a nervous and expectant population
‘Local understandings of ‘freedom’ and ‘Pakistan’ inspired by millenarianism, fear and heightened anticipation of revolutionary change, suddenly had to be squared with the creation of full blown modern nation states
Muslim response
Viewed it as a triumph of independence - creating a homeland for a new Muslim state
‘other Muslim groups, with different political attachments, felt aghast at the prospect of the new state’
Khan - Questions about what Pakistan constituted
Jinnah ‘On Pakistan’ - asked what role Islam would play in the new state
‘’Immediately Pakistan was declared a reality, the convenient ambiguities which had been used to glue the League together - hazy idealism and imaginative aspiration towards Islamic statehood - started to haunt the new country’s leadership’
‘the predominant feeling was one of intense confusion, angst and anxiety about the future from all sections of society’
profound confusion, both about the precise boundaries, and about the meaning of ‘freedom’ and ‘Pakistan’ was part of the cause of the mass movement of people and stoked the ethnic violence that followed’
Jalal - Secularist vs subaltern approaches
Secularist historians emphasise political context but continue to stigmatise “communalism.”
Subaltern historians prioritise the pain and lived experience of ordinary people over high politics.
Jalal argues these positions are partially overlapping but ultimately insufficient
Jalal defends her focus on high politics, arguing that Partition cannot be understood without analysing:
colonial state structures,
centralisation,
regional political dynamics,
and the dialectic between nationalism and communalism.
She insists that subaltern agency must be recognised, but without romanticising or flattening it.
Partition historiography should integrate:
social and cultural formation of communities,
political processes at local, regional, and central levels,
and the lived experiences of subordinated groups.
Only then can we understand how subalterns were both agents and tragic victims of Partition.
Sherman on the princely state of Hyderabad’s political climate
Princely state of Hyderabad - unique culture gaining admiration
Same food, entertainment, sartortial style and literary language among different religious groups
‘Subaltern groups, speaking multiple languages, lived side by side and often worshipped in the same spaces and celebrated the same festivals’
Yet others viewed Hyderabad with suspicion of a Muslim elite monopolising power, exploiting the Hindu majority
September 1948 - Forcibly integrated into the Indian Union
Sherman on the idea of the Muslim minority in Hyderabad
Wide range of people across the social stratum
Before colonial rule - religious conflict tended to be in local communities - British rule
Muslim religious reformist movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries attempted to standardise the practices of different communities and assert the unity of India’s Muslims, even as they competed against one another.
In the political life of British India, the idea of the Muslim minority was institutionalised with the introduction of separate electorates in 1909 and their confirmation in the Communal Award of 1932, and it gained a greater degree of popular salience with the ascent of the Muslim League in the 1940s
This enclosed Muslims’ political possibilities by presuming that Muslims were unable or unwilling to separate their religious interests from their political objectives, and that Islamic history and culture had no universal elements that might be applicable outside of Muslim communities
Sherman on a growing sense of difference
'Hyderbad’s organisation remained a ‘haphazard mix’ rather than being organised along religious lines - ‘two very narrow bands of multi-ethnic elites exercised outsized influence in the territory’
There remained secular organisations, but increasingly also experienced Hindu and Muslim revivalisms creating a sense of difference
Hindu nationalist parties and the Majlis-i Ittehadul Muslimin
‘With a neighbouring state looming as a potential focal point for their allegiance, the loyalties of Muslims in India easily fell under suspicion. And because the Muslim League had demanded the creation of Pakistan, organised Muslim politics were anathema in post-partition India’
Sherman on anxieties of belonging and citizenship
Many Muslims stayed - process of negotiation can be understood as a quest for belonging
In early postcolonial India there were many simultaneous, competing and overlapping notions of belonging in circulation. These understandings were often specific to certain spheres of activity
In early postcolonial India there were many simultaneous, competing and overlapping notions of belonging in circulation. These understandings were often specific to certain spheres of activity.
Economy, languages
India’s citizenship laws only codified in 1955
‘Moreover, the forms of citizenship that eventually emerged were coloured by the experience of violence and migration’
Sherman on secuarlism and democratic governance
Nehru’s vision of secularism was deeply tied to Muslim belonging as a core part of Indian identity.
His secularism contained a central contradiction:
He urged Indians to transcend religious identities in politics,yet simultaneously reinforced those identities to reassure minorities of their place in India.
Despite assumptions in scholarship, Nehru did not control day‑to‑day governance in Hyderabad.
Nehru only intervened when petitioned by individuals or groups; his influence was episodic, not structural
Even when Nehru or Azad attempted to soften harsh policies toward Muslims, their interventions were ignored or overriden
Sherman on secularism as a contested concept
Historians agree secularism had no fixed meaning in early independent India.
But they disagree on its influence:
Some argue secularism was pervasive but vague (Tejani, Bajpai).
Others argue it was widely invoked but rarely implemented (Hasan, Gould).
Sherman argues these differences arise from different scales of analysis (elite vs. everyday politics).
Sherman - Secualism as a field of contempring fields
Secularism had context‑specific meanings, varying by policy area.
In criminal justice:
A “secular” approach was widely understood to mean equal numbers of Hindus and Muslims arrested or punished, regardless of who was responsible for violence.
This reflected colonial administrative habits.
In government employment and patronage:
Some argued secularism meant majority rule (i.e., privileging Hindus).
Others argued it meant individual rights, requiring the state to ignore religious identity.
Thus, secularism could demand either recognition or erasure of religious identity depending on context.
Dhulipala’s overall assessment of the scholarship
Scholarship surrounding Pakistan’s post-colonial crisis has been characterisised by democratic fragility, a fraught relationship between Islam and the State, and seccessionist and insurgency movement, political repression
‘Much of this scholarship invariably locates the roots of Pakistan’s precarious condition in the circumstances surrounding this nation-state’s traumatic birth in the bloody Partition of British India in August 1947’
Disjuncture between Indian Muslim aspirations and the ‘secret politics of their pragmatic and ambivalent political elites’
It has been assumed that Pakistan ‘remained an exceedingly vague idea in both elite and popular consciousness’
Argued that the ‘two nation theory’ did not produce a concrete programme of realisiation
Muslim League used the rally ‘Pakistan ka Matlab Kya, La Illaha Il Allal’ - What is the meaning of Pakistan? There is no god but God?
Political scientists recently have extended this historiography and have argued that the lack of nationalist ideological consensus is the reason for Pakistan’s post-colonial struggles
Dhulilapa’s overall argument
Development of the idea of Pakistan in the public sphere, much political enthusiasm
Examines the trajectory of the Pakistan movement in the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, despite their awareness that U.P would not be part of Pakistan
UP - Pakistan found the ‘earliest, most sustained and overwhelming support’ before it gained traction in Muslim majority provinces
Was not an abstract vague idea, but imagined in U.P as an Islamic state
Role of the Deobandi ulama in articulating this imagined national unity
Was imagined as bringing about a global Islamic revival
Dhulilapa’s on Deobandi ulama
Collaboration between the Deobandi ulama and ML leadership, demonstrating how ‘together they forged a new political vocabulary fusing ideas of Islamic nationhood and modern state to fashion the most decisive arguments for creating Pakistan’
Crucial to bridging the gap between elite ML politics and the muslim masses
Portrayed as opponents of Pakistan in the existing historiography, Deobandi ulama led by Maulana Shabbir Ahmad Usmani supported this vision of Pakistan becoming an Islamic utopia, facilitating the unification of the Ummah and the revival of Islam globally
‘These ideas meshed with the Pan-Islamist ambitions of the ML leadership and also helped resolve the contradiction between the ideal of Islamic nationhoood whose category of belonging is the global ummah, and the territorial state that revives the divisive category of national belonging for Muslims’
Dhulilapa on Ayesha Jalal
Ayesha Jalal - has become ‘the new orthodoxy’ - argued that Jinnah did not really desire a separate Pakistan but rather used it as a bargaining chip to acquire political equality for the Muslims
Cabinet Mission Plan which envisaged a weak Indian federal centre with sharing of political power between Hindus and Muslism was close to what Jinnah actually wanted
Rejected by the Congress leaders - Jalal views them as the perpetrators of Partition
‘A fundamental assumption underpinning Jalal’s thesis was that this was a secret strategy that Jinnah pursued that remained hidden from even his closest liteunants, let alone the general public’
Dismisses popular conceptions of Pakistan as vague and unformed
Dhuliapa on Anita Inder Singh
argued that Pakistan closely resembled the Muslim League’s 1940 resolution
Argued Jinnah repudiated a United India and successfully maneuvered against Congressmen to ‘successfully accomplish his goal of partitioning India and carving out a sovereign Pakistan’
‘Yet, while refuting Jalal’s thesis, Singh nevertheless agreed with her that as far as ordinary Muslims were concerned Pakistan was an extraordinarily vague concept and that it ‘meant all things to all Muslims’
Dhulilapa - Gynanendra Pandey
Ironically supported by Gyanendra Pandey who fiercely criticises Great Man and teleological history
Argues that Muslims supported Pakistan despite foregrounding ‘fragmentary histories’ involving ordinary Hindus and Muslims
Supported by Yasmin Khan’s account which emphasises the ‘confusion and uncertainty’ prevalent in India after WW2
This line of thinking is continued in regional studies of the Pakistan movement
Especially Muslim majority provinces of British India such as Punjab and Bengal
Ian Talbot on Punjab has ‘downplayed the role of religious ideology and popular agency, and instead explained Pakistan’s creation’ in terms of rural Muslim elites switching loyalties
Similar studies on Bengal - Haroon-or-Rashid
Lack of clarity or consensus over Pakistan, arguing that imagination by sections of the Bengal ML was very different from Jinnah
Dhulilapa - oral histories
‘Even as they attempt to recover the agency of these women in these trying circumstances, these studies ultimately point to the absurdity of the concepts of nationhood or nationality in relation to their shattered lives’
Zamindar’s framework of a ‘long partition’ - ‘provocative thesis thus implies that 1947 marks the beginning of the process of partitioning the land and its people and not the end point, as assumed by all of the existing historiography’
Continued confusion over nationality - human tragedies of this ‘cartographic exercise’
Newest wave focuses on the popular culture of Partition - literature, cinema and memory
‘What this newest wave in Partition scholarship again emphasises is the utter bewilderment and helplessness of the people at what was happening as their worlds collapsed around them as a result of unfathomable political decisions taken at the top in the twilight of the Raj’
Dhulilapa - scholarship specifically on the Pakistan movement
Recognised the role of religious ideology and leaders such as the ulama and Sufi pirs in Punjab, but says they do not have a clear vision
Jinnah’s views attributed to strategy rather than conviction
‘While Jinnah and the ‘secular’ ML elite occupy a central space in the Partition drama, the ulama’s contribution to the Pakistan movement has largely been ignored’ - appear opposed to Pakistan
If featured, viewed as staunch opponents
Dhulilapa - ‘If the view from the centre and partitioned provinces of Punjab and Bengal makes the Partition seem like a rather confused and murky affair, there is some consensus that the road to 1947 may well have been paved from U.P. Some of the earliest scholarship in this field, therefore, traced Pakistan’s origins to local political feuds in this province in the decade preceding the Partition’
1937 - ministry making after the U,P relection - bitterness against Congress in UP’s Muslim elite - began mass campaign of discrediting provincial Congress govt as ‘Hindu raj’
Crucial in reviving Jinnah and the declining Muslim league
Francis Robson argued that the ‘acute sense of seperate religio-political identity among the U.P Muslims provided the fundamental rationale and impetus to the Pakistan movement in the province’
Traced a self-conscious Muslim community developing, was led by the ulama after Mughal collapse, transport and communication links with areas of global Islam - more orthodox Islam, desire for Muslim governments
Dhulilapa - hostage theory
He challenges the central contention of the alternative argument which questions why Jinnah would push for a separate state when he knew it would leave millions of Muslims trapped in Hindu-majority provinces such as the United Provinces and Bihar
He suggests that Jinnah was perfectly comfortable with this sacrifice and categorised these Muslims as a ‘sub-national group’ who would have had to rely on standard minority safeguards and the ‘hostage theory’. In this light, Partition happened as Jinah anchored a vision of a sovereign Islamic state into the popular public imagination.
Chaudhary and Bandyopadhay - The historiographical neglect of the Dalit experience of Partition
Conventional narratives focus solely on religious identity - gender imbalance has been rectified, but not the caste imbalance - role of the scheduled castes and the All India Scheduled Castes Federation
Benal witnessed powerful Dalit movements during the colonial period, resisting caste-based discriminatory practices
Intersection of the history of Partition and the history of Dalit movements understudied - partition historiography simply suggests it precipitated a ‘crisis’ for the Dalit movements in Punjab and Bengal, while dalit movement historiography haven’t significantly explored the impact of partition
Due to their relative invisibility in the colonial archives, and the claim that the Dalit in North India did not indenitify with Hindu nationalism or Congress lef movements and instead asserted a distinct identity
The role of the Dalit in Partition politics has drawn more attention in recent years
Chaudhary and Bandhyopadhay on new literature focusing on caste
E.g Sen - focuses on the role of Jogendranath Mandal who established the Bengal branch of the AISCF in 1943
He holds the Congress and upper-caste machinations responsible for the marginalisation and subsequent victimisation of the Dalit in Bengal during and after the Partition
While Congress certainly was no real friend of the Dalit, the politics of this period and Dalit involvement in it had more complexities and more actors than we usually recognise
Developing strand in Partition historiography which em[jhasises the afterlife of Partition - e.g Pandey ‘truth’ of Partition lies in the violence they produced
But these social histories have not covered the ways the Dalit experienced this displacement, migration and rehablilitation
For the West Punjabi Dalit refugees, Ravinder Kaur has now recorded the story of their different treatment and resettlement in ‘separate refugee camps, separate mass housing schemes’ in the outskirts of Delhi.
Akanksha Kumar has shown how the Dalit refugees belonging to the Megh community of Sialkot remembered their experiences of Partition violence, migration to Jalandhar under military escort, and settlement in a refugee colony specially set up for such refugees
Chaudhary and Bandhopadhay - The Dalit in East Bengal
Their refugees came in multiple waves
First wave 1947-8 to East Bengal mostly upper-castes, included some educated SC middle castes too
Dalit peasants of East Bengal did not migrate at this stage - lacked social and financial capital to move, and the level of violence in 1947 was not enough to froce their migration
The AISCF in East Bengal believed in the Dalit-Muslim alliance - believed they would not get justice from an upper caste Hindu dominated Congress government
Their leader Jogendranath Mandal became the Chairman of the Pakistan CA and later joined the Pakistan central cabinet
Sarvana bhadralok peasants before 1950 considered assets and genuinely rehabilitated, in contrast to Dalit refugees who were regarded as burdens
Alliance broke down after the riots of 1950s, came the second wave of refugees who were mostly Dalit peasants
Due to rising Islamic nationalism and an unusual scarcity of resources in post-partition East Bengal
Nehru thought this migration could be stopped and reversed if communal relations could be improved in the two Bengals
April 1950 Delhi Pact - but the alliance had irreparably broken down, Dalit peasant migration continued until the border was sealed in 1957
Pt. 2 of the Dalit in Bengal
Policy of using their agricultural and labour experise to promote development projects in areas where they were most needed
Andaman islands, Dandakaranya, Bihar and Orissa
Dalit memory in West Bengal recalls that before Partition, Gandhi and Nehru had promised them proper rehabilitation in postPartition India if they were forced to migrate from their original habitat.
The Indian state clearly reneged on that promise when the time came to fulfil it in the 1950s.
Lost their natural cultural home, lost linguistic and social identity, and their ‘spatial capacity to move and agitate for their rights of equal citizenship’
Resistance to dispersal - from the grassroots level, needed the support of other political parties - United Central Refugee Council and the Sara Bangla Bastuhara Sammelan controlled by the Praja Socialist Party
Launched a major non-violent campaign that paralysed civic life in Calcutta - government conceded but later went back on the promise
Uditi Sen - argued that issue in West Bengal centred around demography and resources, refugees were treated as exacerbating overpopulation
Attitudes changed after 1954 - could be used as cheap labour for different development projects - e.g the Andaman Islands and the Dandakaranya project
Initial days of struggle and adversity, but later phases of settlement, adjustment and progress