Violence: A Break-Up

The nation has indeed been receiving some hard knocks of late in Indian history writing. The mantle of nationhood, as sensitive historians have pointed out time and again, can be hugely repressive. This is not just the physical coercion of the nation-state, but the stifling discipline of new norms which in the name of the nation—the moral community of free citizens—sweeps under the carpet the struggles and aspirations of religious minorities, women and Dalits. Digging up their suppressed histories has been a major enterprise of Partition historians in recent years. A pioneering range of very powerful and unsettling essays by among others Urvashi Butalia, Ritu Menon, Kamala Bhasin and anthropologist Veena Das, have shown how both India and Pakistan in their efforts to recover abducted women had little concern for their sufferings. Instead, their recovery became a point of honour for the proud young nation-states. Thus the surviving women, some of whom had found new homes with their abductors, had to face violence a second time around—this time from the state—as they were forcibly repatriated to countries they did not necessarily want to come back to. At the heart of this argument was a concern to refocus on the nature of violence. Violence, these historians have argued, was not an undifferentiated phenomenon but was deeply gendered. But it was not only the state that was patriarchal, so was the family. In Punjab, many Sikh families killed their women fearing attack by mobs. In most of the cases the men survived the attacks and went on to build new lives afterwards.

Pandey too is principally concerned with the nature of violence and he traverses some of the same ground covered by the early historians. In the first four chapters of the book, which is a long extended argument with professional historians and the conventional nature of history writing, Pandey seems to be making a plea for moving out of the closed world of archives, on to the street where the constantly shifting ground of memory throws up new challenges. It is in this arena that the violence inherent in the face-to-face communities in the countryside and in the cities becomes more palpable. Pandey’s own conclusions are that violence, both real and symbolic, go a long way in making and remaking communities. That it is possible to read a pattern in insensate violence if we closely investigate the way communities fashion themselves. In his extended field work among men and women who lived through the events in the late 1940s in Delhi, Punjab and in Garhmukhteshwar (Uttar Pradesh), Pandey tries to grapple with ways in which communities drew a veil over violent events, invoking selective amnesia to present a kind of unity to the outside world. A peculiar kind of denial is also at work when cataclysmic violence is unleashed by the community on others. Such is the force of this assertion that all violence is attributed to forces "outside" the immediate boundaries of the community. In a more utopian vein, Pandey argues that the resources for such violence within the community need to be recognised if only to make possible more open-ended and tolerant communities in the future.

Pandey’s book is passionately written and very accessible. Especially in its introductory chapters it is by turns indulgently self-reflective, provocative and combative. It is also intensely political. Pandey is one of India’s most distinguished historians. The focus on community, perhaps, is an attempt to answer his critics who said of his earlier work on communalism that it had too exclusively focused on the imperatives of colonial governance. One cannot help noting that the cover of the book reproduces a painting by Bhupen Khakar. In this graphic portrayal of violence, an androgynous figure is seen with the dismembered limbs of another human being. Pandey’s last book too had a striking painting on a similar theme by Vivan Sundaram. It just goes to show that it is not only historians who are concerned about communal violence in India today.