This article will take as its case study the 1947 India/Pakistan partition, and is based on a large oral history project, which took place over the last five years. In this article, I focus on selected excerpts from some of my interviews, examining the ways in which people describe religious belief, practice, prejudice and violence as corporeal experiences, with markers of religiosity often inscribed on the body. I examine how the corporeality of religious violence was not an aberration from everyday religious practices, but in effect an extension of religion as an embodied entity.
While the library of scholarship that engages with the cultural representation of the 1947 India/Pakistan partition is immense, the specific genre of theatre has been surprisingly under-examined. This chapter aims to redress this balance through a focus on a selection of Anglophone plays which deal with partition. In this chapter, I argue that a useful lens to study these plays through is that of farce. Although the plays do not always follow the generic rules of farce to any great degree, they do often aim to construct a narrative of partition as itself a farcical event.
The experience of partition as a political and territorial separation of groups and societies is shared by a number of states in contemporary times. As many societies have been shaped in significant yet uniquely different ways by partition, this essay examines its relevance in facilitating conversations across cultures. In moving beyond contexts and cultural specificities, this essay searches for comparative insights and approaches with the potential for fruitful dialogue.
"This paper attempts to delineate and focus on the common narrative thread running through subsequent cinematic treatises on the situation of women during the Partition, particularly those kidnapped and sexually violated during the vivisection. It proposes to construct a cultural and memorialized history of the Partition through a reading of mediated representations of literary engagements with the event, particularly the narrativization of the cinematic trope of the ‘radicalized’ Muslim and his involvement in the abduction of “chaste” Hindu women during the cataclysmic event.
