Abstract: This essay is based on my engagement with the Sindhi-speaking Hindu minority of Sindh that migrated to India in and around 1947, when the province of Sindh became a part of Pakistan. It privileges therefore a specific religious group and its response and negotiation to a specific moment. My current research on Sindhi-speaking Muslims along the border interrogates the classification of ‘Sindhis’ as a spatially fixed identity, and revisits the state-endorsed premises of irrevocability and border-formation.
Abstract: The Partition of India was a traumatic event whose repercussions continue to impact on South Asian subjectivities in complex ways that scholarship on that event and its representations has recently begun to illuminate. This paper offers two methodological propositions, both broadly indebted to scholarship on the representation of the Holocaust, to those investigating narrative representations of Partition. First, it suggests that all investigations into the event of Partition should proceed from a radical awareness of subject position.
Abstract: This essay draws upon the anthropological conceptualization of ‘rites of passage’ to consider the 1947 Partition of the Indian sub-continent as such a rite, into what Liisa Malkki has called the national order of things. As a rite of passage, analytically distinguished into three phases of separation, transition or limen and incorporation, Partition stories can be seen as potentially about the phase of liminality — Pakistani-Indian and not-Pakistaninot-Indian — a liminality which is both ‘structurally invisible’ and deeply threatening to the ‘stable state’ or national order.
Abstract: Bapsi Sidhwa's novel, Cracking India, presents the experiences of women during the violence of the subcontinental partition of 1947. In broaching the topics of rape and trauma, topics considered culturally taboo or unspeakable for subcontinental women, the novel obliges us to confront both the possibilities and the limits of literary representation.
Abstract: Using a feminist episteme I examine the exclusion of the East Bengal/East Pakistan experience in constructions of contemporary narratives of Partition. Including the double colonialism of East Bengal, its particular location in the ethnic and religious hierarchies of the region, and the simultaneity of separation and violence as well as freedom and social mobility challenges the emergent meta-narrative of violence by contributing a contradictory interpretation of the Partition experience.
Abstract: While the partition of the Indian subcontinent, as an event of shattering consequence, underlies the very origin of the postcolonial Indian state, historiographies of Indian nationhood are often marked by their failure to acknowledge or claim this cataclysmic history.
Abstract: During the 1947 Partition of India, an estimated 75,000 to 100,000 women were abducted by members of other religious communities – to be raped and murdered, sold into prostitution, or forced into marriage. In response to this crisis, the governments of India and Pakistan initiated a bilateral recovery programme whose objective it was to return ‘abducted persons’ to their natal or conjugal families. Over the last decade or so, however, criticism of this programme has become increasingly vociferous.
