The Unfinished Business

Many commentators believe India’s Partition exemplifies the “unfinishedbusiness” of most such partitions, of which the most bitterly contested andintractable is Kashmir. But it’s not just unfinished business. Suvir Kaul maintainsit’s ongoing business too because “Partition’s afterlife still guides ourpublic policy and inhibits our progress from colonial state to post-colonialdemocracy”. Further, he says, India and Pakistan “require Partition, or its morelocal reiterations...to justify state authority”.

Partitions of Memory, like other recent explorations of that shattering event,departs from political history and nationalist historiography to answer questions forthose concerned with how Partition shaped relations not only between, but within, nations.

One of these questions has to do with forgotten histories. Mukulika Bannerji’sessay on the Khudai Khidmatgars of the nwfp is among the most interesting in thiscollection, for highlighting one of Partition’s abiding conundrums. Here was a peoplewho fiercely resisted any identification with religion-based division, despite being 96per cent Muslim; believed in non-violent struggle; and supported the Congress—butfound themselves in Pakistan in 1947. The KKs, denounced and vilified by the MuslimLeague, posed this question to the author in the ’90s, when she interviewed them:“If East and West Pakistan could be separated by India, why could we not form WestIndia and be separated from the rest of India by Pakistan?” But had that transpired,one is forced to wonder whether it would have become another Kashmir?

The schizophrenic nature of the India-Pakistan relationship is, as Richard Murphy says,enacted every day at sunset at the Wagah border, and every March in Lahore during Basant,celebrated with gusto by trendy Lahoris. “Mirroring” is what characterises bothrituals; at Wagah “Indian and Pakistani detachments distinguish themselves and thelarger wholes they represent, using a common symbolic language of uniforms, music andmilitary drill inherited from the Raj”. At Basant, Lahoris reinvent a Hindu festivalby investing it with rural Punjabi authenticity.

Of the four “memory” essays in this volume, Murphy’s and Bannerji’sare—literally and metaphorically—the most illuminating, both because they dealwith contemporary Pakistan, and because they show how lived reality explodes thestereotypes of fixed identities on either side of the border. Bannerji’s interviewswith the KKs skilfully juxtapose their memories with their descendants’who—imbued with the present and five decades of post-Partition history—deny therelevance of such memories. Murphy’s is a much more complicated interleaving of pastand present, of the selective appropriation of cultural practices, and of how thesyncretic character of a city like Lahore is subtly transformed. Not completely, though.Centuries of shared living make rigid demarcations impossible—and yet, difference isforced into divisiveness.

The other two “memory” essays, Sunil Kumar’s on the Qutub Minar and NitaKumar’s on children, have a much more tenuous link with Partition. Nita’sexploration of how 1947 is remembered by children in Banaras and Calcutta belies theexpectations set up by her concern: teaching and writing about the nation in “waysthat do the least possible violence, that respect and celebrate other higher and lowerlevel un-mixing and unmatching histories”. She throws up some rather astonishingconclusions about an individual’s relationship to the nation.

The refugee’s ties to the state/government is the subject of Joya Chatterji’sand Urvashi Butalia’s essays. They’re more straightforwardly“historical” in that they deal with documents rather than “memories”.Butalia’s is an archive with a difference—Partition letters written during1947-49, to various people in authority about jobs, shelter, offers of service, and sundrycomplaints to the sarkar as mai-baap. Chatterji’s richly-detailed analysis of WestBengal’s rehabilitation programme in the immediate post-Partition period is alsoabout employment, housing, social security and reconstruction, but whereas Butalia’sletter-writers (mostly Punjabis) appeal to the state’s benevolent disposition,Chatterji’s refugees demand political and economic rights from the government. Hereinlies the difference between the Punjab and West Bengal experiences. In the latter, wherethe influx of refugees was protracted and, ultimately, much greater (25 million in 50years), organising around rights made for the emergence of the Left Front as a long-termpolitical force. In Delhi by contrast, although the Jan Sangh was an important factor inrefugee rehabilitation (certain “refugee” colonies and communities support thebjp to date), it was unable to make political capital on this effort.

Each new, and different, examination of Partition reminds us how much more lies buried,unexplored. Take Priyamvada Gopal’s treatment of Manto’s Thanda Gosht,of which we thought all had been said. But it awaited a gendered reading—andGopal’s is most intelligent—not just of this story but of Manto’s Partitionoeuvre. And Ramnarayan Rawat’s account of Dalit politics and Partition politicsunderlines one of the least researched aspects of identity-formation in the context ofPartition.
As with other recent writing on Partition so, too, with this volume—we realise themore we read, the less we really know about it.