The Partitions of Memory: The Afterlife of the Division of India

As nuclear bombs erupted under the ground in Pokharan in 1998, the earth and stones ironically melted and merged below the barbed wire that separates India from Pakistan. Echoes of the partition of India can be heard to this day in the daily life of the subcontinent—each time India and Pakistan play a cricket match, or when their political leaders talk of ‘unfinished business’. Sikhs who had to live through the pogrom following Indira Gandhi’s assassination recall partition, as do slum-dwelling Bengalis being forced to return to Bangladesh. The essays in this book suggest ways in which the tangled skein of partition might be unravelled. Two of them deal with culture and history in what is now a part of Pakistan. Other contributors range over issues as diverse as literary reactions to partition; the relief and rehabilitation measures provided to partition refugees; and the Dalit claim, at the prospect of partition, to a separate political identity. The power of ‘national’ monuments to evoke a historical past, and the power of letters to evoke more immediately poignant pasts, are themes in some of the other essays. Imaginatively written and grounded in painstaking scholarship, this book will stimulate great interest in partition and India’s recent history.