1st Edition
Remembrance, Forgetting and Utterance Rethinking the Politics of Memory in South Asia
List of figures viii
List of Contributors ix
Acknowledgements xiii
Introduction 1
ISHA DUBEY
PART I
Memory as Agency 15
1 Reclaiming Identity Memory as Mechanism of Protest in Two Bengali Dalit Narratives 17
RUNA CHAKRABORTY PAUNKSNIS
2 Remembering and Responsibility: A Study of Dalit Life Narratives 32
GREESHMA MOHAN
PART II
Contested Articulations and Curations of Collective Pasts 43
3 Missionary Geography and the Imaginations of Sacred Space in Post-colonial North-East India 45
HAMARI JAMATIA
4 Evoking Public Memory and Re-writing Histories: Memorials within the Anti-Caste Movements 59
SHABANA ALI
PART III
Ghosts from/of the Past: Spaces of Memory and Forgetting 73
5 Spectrality of the Past:
Haunted Memories, Transforming Urban Space and Bengali Cinematic Imagination 75
ŠARŪNAS PAUNKSNIS
6 Romancing Ruins: Architectural Memory in Gulabo Sitabo 88
ZEHRA KAZMI
PART IV
Negotiating History and Memory 105
7 Memory and Counter-Memory: Re-membering the Malabar Rebellion 107
MANOJ PARAMESWARAN AND AISWARYA SANATH
8 History Writing and the Pakistani Ulama: Competing for Legitimacy 123
MOHAMMAD WAQAS SAJJAD
PART V
Remembering Displacement 135
9 Cultural Memory of Climate Crisis and Human Displacement in Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island 137
TRINA BOSE AND PUNYASHREE PANDA
10 Are You What You Eat? Food as Memory Among Punjabi Partition Survivors 148
MOHINI MEHTA
PART VI
Historical Injustice and Collective Trauma 169
11 Reading Remembrance and Reconciliation in Post-War Nepal through Tara Rai’s Chapamar Yuwati ko Diary 171
KRITIKA CHETTRI
12 Curating National Pasts and Historical Trauma: Mourning and Loss in the Cultural Memory of the 1971 Bangladesh War 184
ISHA DUBEY
Index 207
Biography
Isha Dubey is an assistant professor at IIIT Hyderabad’s Human Sciences Research Centre (HSRC). She graduated with a PhD in history from the School of Culture and Society, Aarhus University, Denmark. Prior to joining IIIT, Isha has worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Swedish South Asian Studies Network (SASNET) at Lund University, Sweden, and the Department of Global Studies, Aarhus University. She is a co-investigator in a Danish Research Council funded research project Constructing the Ocean: Indian Ocean Infrasructures and Thick Transregionalsim. The temporal and regional focus of Isha’s research is modern and contemporary South Asia, and her work is guided by an overarching interest in histories of migration and displacement especially in the context of the Partition and the 1971 Bangladesh War, memory studies and urban history.
