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.

According to Police Special Branch intelligence reports, amidst the chaos of Partition, over 60,000 ounces of gold were stolen from fleeing Hindus and Sikhs in 1947. Alongside political identity and religious organisation and territorialisation, desire for wealth or property was a key trigger for the continuation of the Partition violence. This article documents organised communal violence which erupted in the NWFP and Punjab during 1946–47 using largely underutilised police and intelligence reports from the period. The empirical focus of the article is two-fold.

This article explores how Shauna Singh Baldwin's novel What the Body Remembers builds on Partition feminist historiography in order to exhume and retell the story of family violence against women during India's Partition, intended to “save their honor” from rioting mobs. While feminist historiographies have restored Partition survivors' memories of violence to the historical archive, Baldwin's novel explicitly foregrounds the role of gendered bodies in and as the archive of communal memories of violence.