Revisiting India’s Partition: Essays on Memory, Culture, and Politics

Revisiting India’s Partition: New Essays on Memory, Culture, and Politics is a contributory volume on the Partition of India on the eve of Independence. There are 19 essays in the book drawn from interdisciplinary backgrounds on several topics pertaining to the Partition, including decolonisation and post-colony, economic development and nation-building, cross-border skirmishes, terrorism, and nationalism. The volume covers areas beyond Punjab and Bengal and includes analyses of Sindh, Kashmir, Hyderabad, and more broadly South India, the Northeast, and Burma. It, in fact, extends and expands on the original notion of the ‘Long Partition’ to examine the cultural, political, economic, and psychological impact the Partition continues to have on communities in South Asia and throughout the diaspora.

Useful for scholars in literary and cultural studies, history, political studies, sociology, Asian/South Asian studies, and women’s studies, the book has a thought-provoking introduction which provides a multi-vocal, multi-focal, transnational commentary on the Partition in relation to motifs, texts, and regions that have earlier been ignored.

Contents: Preface. Introduction: The Long Partition and Beyond/Amritjit Singh, Nalini Iyer, and Rahul K. Gairola. I. Approaches to Partition: 1 Specters of Democracy/The Gender of Specters: Cultural Memory and the Indian Partition/Radhika Mohanram. 2. Lost Homes, Shifting Borders, and the Search for Belonging/Jasbir Jain. 3 A Will to Say or Unsay: Female Silences and Discursive Interventions in Partition Narratives/Parvinder Mehta. 4 Migrations in Absentia: Multinational Digital Advertising and Manipulation of Partition Trauma/Rahul K. Gairola. II.Nations and Narrations: 5 Exorcizing the Ghosts of Times Past: Partition Memoirs as Testimony/Tarun K. Saint. 6 Difficult Choices: Work, Family, and Displaced Women in Partition Writings/Debali Mookerjea-Leonard. 7. Refugees as Homo Sacers: Partition and the National Imaginary in The Hungry Tide/Amrita Ghosh. III. Borders and Borderlands: 8 Property, Violence, and Displacement: Partition in Sindh/Nandita Bhavnani. 9 The Long Shadow of 1947: Partition, Violence, and Displacement in Jammu and Kashmir/Ilyas Chattha. 10 From Frontiers to Borders: Partition and the Production of Marginal Spaces in North East India/Babyrani Yumnam. 11 Looking East: Melodramatic Narrative, Ecotheater, and the “Forgotten Long March” in Jangam/Amit R. Baishya. IV. From Pakistan to Bangladesh: 12 The Never-Ending Partition: Pakistan’s Self-Identification Dilemma/Amber Fatima Riaz. 13 Partition and the Bangladeshi Literary Response/Kaiser Haq. 14 Cosmopolitan Aesthetics in Shakeel Adil Zada’s Baazigar/Masood A. Raja. 15 The Nexus of Class, Identity, and Politics in the Representational Economy of Partition: The Case of Hasan/Azizul Huq Md. Rezaul Haque. 16 Partition and Beyond: Intizar Husain’s Quest for Meaning and Vision/Tasneem Shahnaaz and Amritjit Singh. V. Partitions Within: 17 Buckle in the Hindu Belt: Contemporary Hindu-Muslim Violence and the Legacy of Partition in Banaras/Jeremy A. Rinker. 18 Hyderabad, Partition, and Hindutva: Strategic Revisitings in Neelkanth’s “Durga” (2005)/Nazia Akhtar. 19 Partition’s Others: The View from South India/Nalini Iyer. Index.