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‘A certain terror’: corporeality and religion in narratives of the 1947 India/Pakistan partition

Author(s): 
Anindya Raychaudhuri
Publisher/Sponsor: 
Oral History Forum d'historie Oral
www.oralhistoryforum.ca/index.php/ohf/article/view/647

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.

‘A certain terror’: corporeality and religion in narratives of the 1947 India/Pakistan partition

Anindya Raychaudhuri
Oral History Forum d'historie Oral
2017