1st Edition
Regional perspectives on India's Partition Shifting the Vantage Points
This book expands the scope of understanding of the vast, albeit uneven, experience of the 1947 Partition of India by including localities and life stories from and beyond the regions of Punjab and Bengal.
Building on existing research on Partition, the chapters present and analyse the consequences of Partition displacement and the resilience of communities in different parts of the nation. Regions discussed include the Chitmahals, Assam, Tripura, Mizoram, Hyderabad, Andaman Islands, and Jammu and Kashmir. The contributors show that the heterogeneity of people’s experiences reside in spaces of the family, home, neighbourhoods, villages, towns and cities refugee settlements, letters, memoirs, biographies, films, fiction, oral histories, and testimonies. The book examines the Partition’s complex effects in regions, localities and contexts and its material and psychological ramifications.
This book is a unique and comprehensive contribution in enabling a more complex understanding of how Partition played out and continues to do so for groups and generations across India. It will be of interest to a multidisciplinary audience, including history, literature, comparative literature, colonial and postcolonial studies, modern Asian studies, studies of South Asia, and studies of memory and trauma.
Introduction, Anjali Gera Roy and Nandi Bhatia; 1. Shadowy Pasts of Violence and their Negotiation: Rethinking Partition Violence (1947), Sukeshi Kamra; 2. Bordering the Nation: Livelihood, Labour and Memory in Bangla Partition Fictions from Assam and Tripura, Debjani Sengupta; 3. Brick, Verse, Echo: Partition and the Decline of Urdu Poetry in Jeelani Bano’s Aiwan–e–Ghazal (1976), Nazia Akhtar; 4. Poisoned Rivers: Partition in Punjabi Literature, Hina Nandrajog; 5. Screening the Spectre, Nishat Haider; 6. Multan, Padmini Mongia; 7. Sites of Memory: Popular Sufi Shrines in Post-Partition Punjab, Yogesh Snehi; 8. Sindhi Sikhs: Their Histories and Memories, Himadri Banerjee; 9. Partitioned Subjects: Women in Mainland ‘Permanent Liability’ Camps and Andaman’s Archipelagic Settlements, Raka Banerjee; 10. Caught in a Time Warp: The Fate of the West Pakistan Refugees in Jammu and Kashmir, Javaid Iqbal Bhat and Iftikar Hussain Bhat; 11. Living off the Grid: Surviving the Stateless Era in India-Bangladesh Chhitmahals (Enclaves), Md Rashedul Alam; 12. Histories, Territories, Partitions, and Memories among the Zo hnahthlak and the Chakma in the State of Mizoram, Anup Shekhar Chakraborty; 13. The Mechanics of Partition, Gopa Sabharwal; 14. Vicissitudes of Listening: Witness as the Archive of Pain, Sadan Jha
Biography
Anjali Gera Roy is Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, India. She is the author of Memories and Post-memories of the Partition of India (2019) and Imperialism and Sikh Migration (2017), also published by Routledge.
Nandi Bhatia is Professor in the Department of English and Associate Dean (Research and Graduate Studies), Arts and Humanities at The University of Western Ontario, Canada. Her monograph Women’s Stories of India’s Partition is forthcoming with Routledge.
