Zeba Rizvi’s memory-emotions of Partition: silence and secularism-pyar

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the Partition narrative of an Ashraf Muslim woman, who was seven years old at the time of Partition. Now resident in California, Zeba Rizvi was interviewed as part of the 1947 Partition Archive project, archived at the Stanford University Library. In this article, I interrogate relationships between memories and emotions of Partition, reconstituted through oral history that suggests the additional reframing of Partition-memory archives as an emotions archive. While Zeba’s interview reveals how emotional gaps are arbitrated by rapport, or absence thereof, I argue, using a phenomenological approach, that Partition memory-emotions conform to the narrator’s evolving and dynamic sense of self through time, that is also evident in the interview. Zeba Rizvi resists and reconstructs the politics of Partition in agential ways, using art to express secularism and its emotions: love-pyar, while re-inscribing and conforming to Ashraf values of gender, class and the celebration of heritage.

KEYWORDS:

• Partition
• silence
• memory
• emotions
• narrative

Introduction

This article is a micro-history of Partition memories and emotions. Based on septuagenarian Zeba Rizvi’s interview, curated by the 1947 Partition Archive, housed in the Stanford University Library, the article explores how individual narratives of Partition can be fruitfully compared with scholarly discussions about its multifaceted experiences that characterize Partition as a collective process consisting of many fragments, rather than as a singular event. The Partition has been hailed as one of the largest global mass-migration movements of the twentieth century, involving genocide, the displacement of millions and the abduction and maiming of thousands, remembered today as a ‘sacrifice’ in the history of South Asian nation-building. The 1947 Partition Archive, itself an emotional venture that seeks to memorialize and document the Partition experiences of erstwhile refugees, honors its respondents as Partition veterans – now a fading generation. Conserving and disseminating their witnessing voices by opening their interviews to international access is, hence, an initiative that includes Partition as part of the public history and documentation of emerging twentieth century global nationalisms. And though Partition memorialization and archive-building are emotional, public and nationalist ventures, it is not always easy, as the article reveals, for respondents to express their own emotional memories of Partition, as these are frequently subjects of trauma and taboo within their present lives.

Partition memories are powerfully infused with an emotional history that percolates into the quotidian memorialization of emotional moments and experiences, annually relived as the bitter underside of India’s Independence in 1947.¹ The urgency of documenting Partition emotions and memories has also resulted in the inauguration of other memory-based museums² and oral-narrative projects founded by survivor/families,³ academicians⁴ and artists. Partition memory-projects are considered important within the public domain, viewed as fulfilling a lacuna in social history by exploring alternative resources for the history of Indian nationalism. Since alternative resources such as oral narratives have the potential of decolonizing modern Indian history as a nationalist product, they constitute a ‘history from below’, highlighting the complicity of Partition in producing post-Partition nationalism in India and Pakistan. But Partition memorialization projects also produce an emotional archive, and as suggested by Rosenwein (2006), emotions possess enough agency to produce history-writing and memorialization. This article, exploring Zeba Rizvi’s Partition memories and emotions, has been accessed from the 1947 Partition Archive that has uploaded many of its interviews on the Stanford University Library webpage. I seek to read Zeba Rizvi’s interview, translated and transcribed by me from Urdu, in the light of existing scholarship on Partition experiences, exploring the way emotional memories of Partition experiences are used to reconstruct the events of 1947.

Scholarship typically underscores emotional expressions of pain, guilt and rage associated with Partition that are described in visceral terms as spreading ‘poison’ or deepening ‘madness’.⁵ Feminist researchers additionally foreground silence as a variety of gendered and emotional memorialization among women, linked to honor within patriarchal communities.⁶ While Das describes the silencing of women within the discursive naming mechanisms of Partition,⁷ such as Bharat ki Beti or India’s daughter (Das 1995, 82) for abducted and retrieved women,⁸ Butalia (2010, 314–327, 1998, 347–371) and Kidwai (2011) forward classic definitions of silence that focus on women’s victimhood and agency. Breaking silences mired within patriarchal and oppressive structures of shame, guilt and honor is considered emotionally agential for women within Partition memorialization; a position supported by Subaltern Studies stalwarts like Pandey (2001), who exhort Partition scholarship to uphold the importance of individual memories of rupture as the ‘other’ of official records. ‘Silence’ is one of the most pervasive gendered emotions of Partition-memorialization associated with trauma that is heavily cited in academic research, literature⁹ and domestic discourse.¹⁰ Nandy (2007, 98–140), for example, cites the psychological experiences of the tired ennui of caravan-lines crossing the borders between India and Pakistan as ‘silent’. But this silence of tired caravan lines is different from the narrative space that recounts the same journey seventy years later within the scope of memorialization projects; a duration of time wherein memories and emotions have been restructured, sifted and combined to mutually concur, reformulating collective experiences, present identities and artistic expressions about social truth and community morality.

Narratives within memorialization

This article explores how narrative space within Partition memorialization and public history projects become agential and emotional spaces that reframe and reorder analysis about home, religion, community and nation. This article also suggests that narrative silence within public history is agential, irrespective of whether the recounted experiences were once disempowering for the narrator. While narrators already develop enough distance from their experiences to articulate these as memories, memorialization becomes a process of story-making. Oft-recounted memories become defining ‘scripts’ that concur with the narrator’s evolving sense of self within socially accepted frameworks, co-produced through social networks. The ‘madness’ or silent inexplicability of Partition can only be ‘broken’ through its memorialization more than seventy years later, when memories have been already subject to collective interpretation and meaning-making. The product of memorialization, formally archived Partition narratives, are thus performative engagements that entangle the narrator with the emotional ‘tidying-up’ of muddled emotions and memories that fit within the narrator’s evolving sense of self in the present. The narrator often discards memories that do not fit, combining self-structured narratives within the changing values of her social networks.¹¹ And Partition scholarship is aware of these complexities within memorialization projects. Mahn and Murphy (2018, 1–14), whilst exploring Partition memorialization, consider archives and museums as neither innocuous nor entirely constitutive of contemporary sources preceding the era of history-writing based on it. Partition memorialization is, hence, a personal endeavor mixed with political practices rooted in the present.¹² Kabir (2013) too analyses the problematic inherent within partition memory-narratives as a temporalization process that organizes memories to fit self-inscribed and prior-expected beginnings/closures, in contrast to art and poetry. Linking the Partition of Bengal with the Bangladesh War in 1971, Kabir translates Hirsch’s formulation of ‘postmemory’ for Holocaust memorialization as a process characterized by ‘post-amnesia’.¹³ What we glean about Partition memorialization, thus, lies within the exploration of narrative and emotional gaps mediated by the interview process; silences produced between the internal and consolidated narrative ‘script’, and smaller memory-emotion details that ‘slip’. These gaps, that are palpable, appear unexpectedly within interviews, and are laden with painful nostalgia, constituting evidence for Butalia’s research on Partition silences. Narrators, for example, mourn lost toys and childhoods, irrespective of the Partition, within contexts wherein losing/gaining nation is considered of hegemonic value. Silences within narratives can thus also constitute agential spaces for control, where narrators ‘think’, ‘remember’ or ‘contemplate’ questions in silence, reconsidering their older memory-emotions anew as factors hitherto outside their ‘script’. All the while, while they think in silence, they tidy up internally muddled feelings and memories, to arrive at a new narrative consensus, providing interviewers with stories that are coherent with their evolving selfhood.

Something common to emotions expressed within Partition narratives, for instance, is the narrator’s declaration of the pre-existing ‘love’ between Hindus and Muslims before Partition. What is often silenced within such declarations is how this betrayed love describes violence within the same class, while lamenting how ‘neighbor turned against neighbor’ and ‘friend against friend’, especially since it was likely for neighbors and friends to inhabit common social networks in mixed religious cities like Lahore or Amritsar (Talbot 2006). Butalia (1998) demonstrates how Dalits, who were considered lower and poorer than rioting Hindus and Muslims, were left relatively untouched by Partition violence. Religious hatred as a rupture, in this case, is therefore measured against the ethics of cosmopolitan class-solidarity, while declarations of ‘love’ between Hindus and Muslims within Partition narratives also reframes the lament about class rupture as the decrying of religious violence that is more in conformity with public discourse about Partition.

There are important methodological issues, well-worth considering while analyzing the oral narratives of Partition memory-emotions. The first issue pertains to the nature of public archives, compared to oral narratives personally recorded by researchers. Stalwart oral historians of women’s Partition narratives (Virdee 2013, 2018, xv–19) have pointed to the importance of oral history as constituting a vital retrieval mechanism for writing a social and gender history of Partition, a ‘history from below’. This, she says is especially poignant for women researchers interested in decolonizing Partition; something that is underplayed in comparison to Indian Independence (Tan and Kudaisya 2000). Virdee also outlines subaltern feminist research methods entailed in the recording of women’s oral narratives (Partition survivors) by women researchers that highlight the relationship between interviewer and respondent and allow for the eliciting of a layered and empathetic narrative, produced outside the domain of power relations. This method is seemingly reversed in the 1947 Partition Archive, the latter being the first public oral history archive of its kind that defocusses from the interviewer and the relationship between interviewer and respondent. In this case, interviewers, unknown to respondents (often amateurs and lay-society enthusiasts), accompanied with stock questionnaires, are outsiders and incidental to the respondent and her interview. This interview process with a virtual stranger therefore objectifies Partition narratives as exhibits of national memorialization within the public domain, musealizing nation-making events and moments. There is no evidence of any rapport-building between the interviewer and respondent in the 1947 Partition Archive. The interviewer and questionnaires used in the interview remain as open-ended as possible, with interviews lasting several hours to include discussions on various other topics. It is important to note that these objectified and musealized individual oral narratives are in danger of being coopted and deployed within Indian and Pakistani nationalist agendas. While oral narratives, as Virdee (2013) and Pandey (2001) demonstrate, have the power to deconstruct official narratives and subvert the nationalist agenda, something that is especially relevant for current-day politics in India and Pakistan, the public history of Partition is also vulnerable to nationalist deployment, as part of renewed history-writing endeavors (Iob 2017). It is therefore methodologically impossible to divorce the problematic politics of public history-making from power relationships inherent within the interview process.

This article responds to such methodological concerns in various ways. Interviewers can only ameliorate power to a certain extent, despite remaining aware of power-relationships embedded within the interview process. Even if ameliorated, power remains an inevitable impediment, unless narrators write their own history, as Zeba Rizvi does in her own narrative with the help of a short story that she reads aloud. Moreover, it is only partially possible to methodologically read public history against the nationalist grain, since Partition narratives recorded almost seventy years after the event, evidence various degrees of internalized nationalism among respondents. Respondents can only interrogate and reflect on this internalized nationalism, as Zeba Rizvi does in her short story. And though nationalist sentiments run the danger of being overtly expressed in public history ventures, 1947 Partition Archive interviews, archived outside India and Pakistan as a global venture, can certainly be deployed to fit nationalist goals. Paradoxically, however, given the dearth of social history resources on Partition, compared to the public domain that overflows with documentaries, cinema, art, and informal internet interviews; the somewhat methodologically imperfect oral history archives of the 1947 Partition Archive also constitutes an important resource for researchers interested in migration, oral history, social history, and memory-emotions. While public history can obviously be critiqued for its limitations in terms of methodological rigor and imperfect interview processes, part of this article is indeed interested in how public history about Partition is made; not as inhabiting the binaries of subversion or compliance to nationalist agendas, but as narratives that negotiate personal, public, political and academic interests surrounding public history-writing and nation-building.

Studying emotions entailed in ‘remembering’ and narrativizing a personal life story in public, seemingly without the mediation of interviewers, is itself a relevant academic goal that explores how such emotional memories become concomitant with the aims of public history making and archive building that documents witnessing narratives. Thus, while the 1947 Partition Archive can be critiqued as a resource that is methodologically imperfect and perhaps even bolstering of populist history, the same resource and repository may be considered sensitive to the understanding of ideological and biographical differences that challenge present-day toxic nationalisms in South Asia. Hence, perhaps respondents would answer differently in oral history interviews if interviewers were insiders, but these differences are subject to the interviewer’s standpoint-position. Interviewers of diverse backgrounds using different research methods could potentially also elicit different interviews from the same respondent, depending on the degree of rapport. This article thus, restricts itself to analyzing public history and exploring how Partition emotions and memories are discursively produced along with gaps and silences that can be read and interpreted as an interrogation of nationalist sentiments, as respondents negotiate their personal history with an awareness about the changing politics of their time, in agential ways.

The oral narrative as an objective exhibit within the public history of Partition, with a research aim to explore its emotions, does however run the risk of producing an orientalizing gaze, whereby Partition ‘savagery’ is perceived as a cultural preponderance to violence in South Asia. However, interviews recorded in 1947 Partition Archive are hardly voyeuristic, or insistent upon documenting the history of violence among respondents. In fact, ‘Partition’ as a framing device is only introduced by interviewers, while respondents talk at length about many other subjects pertaining to their childhood, education, schooling, married life, relationships, and other social events. There is therefore no one ‘clean’ Partition emotion in the archive. Recounting and memorializing Partition is associated with the personal memories and emotions of respondents to events pertaining to their personal lives, wherein Partition becomes a catalyzing fragment for remembering and recounting a shared and collective past. Finally, an archive like the 1947 Partition Archive is entangled within a growing and gathering process. As Kleinberg (2017, 1–12) elaborates, an archive is never complete and secular, or completely representative of a whole social spectrum in time and space, in contrast to a general notion that posits the community archive as a secular and representative body. Similarly, the 1947 Partition Archive is a growing public corpus containing other interviews that represent different Partition emotions and moods.

Zeba Rizvi’s narrative

In this article, I analyze Zeba Rizvi’s audio-visual interview, recorded in December 2015 at Cupertino California, within the scope of the oral history project, 1947 Partition Archive, now part of Stanford University library repositories.¹⁴ Zeba (or Zebi, her pet-name) was born in 1940 and was seven years old at the time of Partition. She was interviewed by Sobia Saleem and Nabila Islam in December 2015 at Cupertino, California, and was seventy-five years old at the time of her interview. Linking biographical memory-emotion with narrative making, history-writing and community-building,¹⁵ I demonstrate how Zeba Rizvi’s Partition narrative, along with the silent gaps in her internal ‘script’, transforms her memorialization of Partition into a public record that is aware of its present-day political ramifications, especially while according special emotional meaning to her art. Zeba Rizvi’s interview strongly demonstrates the agency of emotional recounting (or silence) as a deliberate narrative measure that matches with the present-day Indian political scenario of her interview. And her emotions of ‘secularism’ -especially love or pyar, using both words (the English and Urdu) interchangeably or combined in her narrative, produces a concept that defines secularism as ‘love’ for ‘other’ religious communities (Hindus and Sikhs). Any deviation from this for Zeba¹⁶ is tantamount to the anti-secular Muslim demand for Pakistan that resulted in Partition.

The importance of Zeba’s interview lies in a paradox between her ‘not-remembering’ of emotionally conflicted moments and its counterbalance against her extremely emotional short-story that she reads from her diary as part of her interview. While Zeba denies many negative emotions about Partition by saying she did not remember it, her short story is replete with poignant emotions that she publicly shares. It is Zeba’s short story that made me choose her narrative for analyzing Partition memory-emotions; emotions that are publicly shared as creativity and art in her interview, even as she denies the poignancy of the same emotions in her narrative by saying that she ‘did not remember’. Virdee’s reading (2018) of the important role played by fictionalized accounts in the social and gender history of Partition fits perfectly with Zeba’s narrative, as the latter weaves a story of Islamist terrorism, based on the fictionalized experience of Partition and its poignant critique, expressed through the emotions of secularism-pyar.

Though oral history is considered a research method associated with subaltern history, Zeba does not consider herself subaltern. Neither does Zeba consider herself a victim. Though women are considered to predominate as ‘victims’ within the public imagery of Partition, their memorialization is often reduced to ‘emotions’. While this over-inscribes men as rational information providers within oral history, it underplays their role as emotional agents, whose memories are also produced by emotions. Comparing male Partition narratives with female narratives only reiterates gender stereotypes that overemphasize the gender of emotionality as the ‘other’ of the gender of rationality. I have therefore not chosen Zeba’s interview because of her gender. Any ascription of correct gendered behavior is part of her own narrative.

According to the official description of her interview, Zeba, or Zeba Roshan Raza, is an Ashraf Muslim woman from Badaun (Uttar Pradesh, India), whose family traced its ancestry to Iran. While Zeba’s parents remained in India after Partition, her grandparents migrated to Pakistan. Marrying Yusuf Zaki Rizvi (also a Muslim) in an arranged alliance, Zeba moved to Mumbai, and stayed there for forty-five years as Zeba Rizvi, before moving to her daughter’s home in the United States after widowhood. An articulate and educated woman, Zeba grew up in post-Partition India, and her emotions are strongly anchored within the repercussions of deteriorating Hindu-Muslim relations in modern India. However, her social power is non-uniform, since she is located within patriarchal family relationships, and as a Muslim in Hindu-dominated society that identifies all North Indian Muslims as ‘others’ associated with Pakistan. Zeba’s narrative reflects this ambivalence. Though physically unharmed by Partition, she was unable to escape its repercussions that resulted in homelessness, the loss of ancestral home, and a history of anti-Muslim pogroms in India. Moreover, as a woman from the upper-class, her emotions are expressed in art; an expression behoving middle-class femininity. Zeba imbibed upper-class patriarchy by perceiving politics as a male domain and considering women’s strident political expressions disrespectful to the protection afforded them by home, family and nation. She instead chose to express the very same tabooed political emotions for women as artistic expression, that fitted gendered norms of correct womanly behavior for her religion and class, even though this subverted masculine space reserved for political opinion. Living with her daughter, a widow and migrant in the United States at the time of the interview, Zeba projected the same ambivalence between homelessness and having a home that was reminiscent of Partition. A dependent in her daughter’s family without home and homeland, she simultaneously enjoyed an elite audience of those among her generation and background, who shared and listened to her politically emotional Urdu stories and poems about Muslim homelessness in India based on Partition memories. This shared political art, that used fictionalized and poetic formats, consolidated a collective cultural space around her, that reformulated and expressed the memory-emotions of Partition, while she remained outside politics at the same time, a migrant widow with great artistic and poetic talent.

Zeba’s Partition memories and emotions

Zeba said that her first Partition memory was defined by shock, associated with the murder of Gandhi and its implication: the resurgence of anti-Muslim riots. Though Zeba was eight years old in 1948 and did not do more than listen to songs on the radio at the time, it was Nehru’s repeated announcements of how a Hindu had killed Gandhi that first confronted Zeba with the reality of Partition. Zeba hero-worshipped Nehru, and her first memory-emotions of shock and fear of Partition-riots became combined with this hero-worship, wherein the emphasis on ‘Hindu’ became imbued with a special significance of her being Muslim in Hindu-dominated India. She felt this emphasis on ‘Hindu’ had been deliberate; an attempt at delinking Muslims from Gandhi’s murder to avert the upsurge of anti-Muslim riots. Zeba, however, repeated that she was very young at the time and had very vague memories of Partition, reiterating that she did not understand the word ‘Partition’ till much later. Zeba’s ‘not understanding’ Partition is itself a metaphor that runs through her interview: a narrative mechanism that produces Partition as too diabolical to be comprehended by an innocent child, combined with her adult emotion of secularism-love that silenced any criticism of the Hindu ‘other’.

Zeba’s father was a high-ranking government officer in the agriculture department and owned a house in Badaun before Partition. Zeba’s grandparents also lived in Badaun, in what was their ancestral home. After Hindu-Muslim riots engulfed Badaun, Zeba’s grandparents were looted and all their property was destroyed. Zeba’s father’s house was destroyed too, though Zeba remained unhurt. Zeba’s grandparents and larger family migrated to Pakistan thereafter, and Zeba said her father turned his back on Badaun, breaking all relationship with the past and ancestral connections after that. Zeba again said she had no recollections of her old home in Badaun, nor of her family and grandparents, and repeatedly said that her memories of Partition were ‘vague’. Zeba’s vagueness is deliberately emotional, conveying incongruence between her childhood memories of 1947 and 1948 and the knowledge about Partition that she later acquired. Her vagueness re-endorses her ideological and emotional difficulties with Partition, while narratively producing it as incomprehensible even seventy years later. On being pressed by the interviewer, Zeba recounted her own version of Partition memories: intense discussions at home between her parents, between her father and his colleagues, between neighbors and friends, who streamed into their house to ask Zeba’s father whether he would migrate to Pakistan. Zeba said she overheard these discussions without really comprehending their import at the time, but she had a clear memory of her father’s firm declaration that he would never migrate to Pakistan.

The memory of this refusal had emotional ramifications for Zeba, especially in the context of post-Partition India, where Muslims were regularly asked to prove their loyalty to India. Zeba reiterated that she was secular and grew irritated with the interviewer when the latter asked her whether she ever visited temples or churches. Zeba said she had studied at a mission school in her childhood and was happy there, apart from also having attended Hindu celebrations with friends and festivals at temples. While Zeba’s Partition memory of her father declining to go to Pakistan may be strategic within the public domain of India (perhaps friends and relatives listening to her narrative), her endorsement of political belonging in India is also defined by the production of a binary: religion on the Pakistani side against the liberal secularism characteristic of Nehruvian politics on the Indian side. Zeba recounts various incidents from her childhood and her later life in Bombay as examples of how Hindus, Sikhs, Christians and Muslims lived as neighbors and friends, treating each other lovingly and celebrating festivals together, as well-imbibed secular practices. Zeba said that she had never gone alone to a mosque in her life before moving to California. Her emphasis on this as secular-practice in India, characterized by her childhood environment of growing up as a Muslim in a Hindu-dominated environment, went a long way in producing Zeba’s internal emotional terrain of secularism-pyar.

Some of the mild altercations between Zeba and her interviewer hint at the obvious pitfalls in the making of public history, wherein the interviewer is ‘outside’ the respondent’s emotional terrain. While more rapport between the interviewer and the respondent could have ameliorated these pitfalls, irritations within the interview also demonstrate the important differences between the emotional subjectivity of Indian and Pakistani Muslims separated by Partition. Fractures within Zeba’s universal category of all South Asian Muslims divided painfully by Partition would, moreover, not have become so evident, had she not been confronted by an unknown interviewer, who was perhaps more influenced by Pakistani emotions of Partition migration that described the joyous arrival of Muslims to their ideological homeland.

Secularism-pyar at home

Zeba’s Partition memory-emotions were embroiled in an ambivalence towards home, pitted as she was between living in many plush houses and losing her ancestral home in Badaun. While Zeba, her siblings and mother had earlier stayed in Badaun whenever her father was transferred outside, this changed after Partition. As her father turned away from Badaun after Partition, and after Zeba’s larger family migrated to Pakistan, Zeba gradually ‘forgot’ the past, moving with her father and family wherever he was transferred, which was often. It was only after Zeba reached high school that her father grew concerned about the children’s education and bought a house in Lucknow. For the first time, Zeba experienced belonging in Lucknow, the longest stable childhood home she knew, that she referred to as her watan. It was not as if the various government quarters they had earlier lived in were uncomfortable. Zeba remembered spacious and comfortable houses, gardens, compounds, pet animals, orderlies, cars and servants; a leisurely life led in the ‘Civil Lines’ area of various cities. She did not, however, experience any attachment to these houses that frequently changed as the family shifted. Neither did Zeba have any attachments with the cities where they lived, since the family hardly ventured outside government areas. Zeba had no long-standing identification with her schools, relationships with teachers, or childhood school-friends and neighbors, before Lucknow. While her father’s government quarters and ‘secular’ neighborhoods provided the family security from anti-Muslim encounters, it forced her and the family to adopt a non-religious lifestyle, as they migrated frequently and remained socially anonymous as Muslims, mingling with ‘others’ as part of secular practice.

Combined with this was a strict and secluded middle-class childhood that taught Zeba manners (tehzeeb) and the ability to maintain respectful dignity (izzat). Physical freedom outside the home was strictly restricted, and activities outside the house, including the borrowing of books from public libraries and shopping, were delegated to servants and orderlies, who also chaperoned the children to school. This moral seclusion delegitimized Zeba from enjoying any public entertainment like fairs, roadside-shows, restaurants or movies, limiting her public life to school debates or elocution competitions. Describing her childhood as strange (ajeeb), Zeba recounted how her family was disconnected from larger clan and religious networks, concentrating their energies inwards to promote the home as an institution. This tightly knit family-and-home institution was a space and predisposition where any strong friendship with outsiders was discouraged, and where cousins visited only occasionally during summer vacations. This was an ambivalent mix of secularism-pyar, strict middle-class values, and Ashraf morality and seclusion, amidst plentiful comforts and a transience that precluded all attachments. This seclusion and secularism-pyar, moreover, contained deep pride, as all domestic work in Zeba’s family, despite the presence of servants, was primarily carried out by the women as a mark of honor. Zeba recounted how her mother had once prevented her from changing the clothes she was wearing, whilst cooking at home, when there were guests waiting to meet her in their drawing room, saying that there was no shame in looking disheveled because of working in one’s own kitchen.

Zeba and her siblings were not intimate, although she reiterated how loving and dutiful, they always were. She shared the same loving but distanced relationship with her parents. Though love in their small nuclear unit was an unquestioned value, their mutual interaction remained simultaneously distanced, as everyone was encouraged to ‘think independently’. Emotional distance was perhaps a natural by-product of this close-knit nuclear family of Ashraf Muslims in postcolonial India, where individuals living in close quarters desisted from emotionally pressuring one another, especially since they did not enjoy the usual buffer of large clans, community or neighborhood. Zeba said that her parents shared an extremely close and intimate relationship, frequently talking together and going out. It was a special relationship that Zeba described as being ahead of its times and the pivot of their nuclear family-life. This was perhaps another by-product of Partition that disengaged their nuclear unit from the larger family, community and ancestral home. This transformation produced emotional conflicts for Zeba. While disengaging from Badaun produced the whole of India as Zeba’s home, her Muslim-ness and the destruction of their ancestral home in Partition riots associated Zeba with Pakistan at the same time. This paradox between having various personal homes and Muslim homelessness in India after the Partition, where ancestral homes were lost and threatened, produced Zeba and her nuclear family as deeply isolated. When the interviewer asked Zeba whether she had a happy childhood, Zeba answered by saying that her childhood was a time that simply ‘passed’ for her (waqt gujar gaya). She said she existed in the everyday in ways that were emotionally unmarked and disconnected from her later and adult life as a writer and poet. No, she said with a shrug, there were no special toys or special games. Everything had to be accepted the way it was, and one simply went on with life.

In response to a question about whether there were any family heirlooms of sentimental value or some article from the past that she had inherited and passed to her children, Zeba framed her answer in harsh terms. Saying that she did not believe in dowry, she reiterated that she did not remember the past and chose to live in the present to avoid the pain (dard) of remembering. She said she followed her father’s precedent and turned her back to painful childhood memories, like he had turned his back to Badaun. The ‘pain’ Zeba was referring to here was unclear and the interviewer did not ask or rather took it for granted that it was Partition that was painful for Zeba. Her translation of a sentimental heirloom from the past (koi aisi purnai, pehle ki cheez) to dowry however, that was especially followed by a verdict of always remaining in the present in order to avoid pain, pointed to Zeba’s relationship with attachment; a relationship marked by absence, negation and taboo.

Zeba’s emotions of secularism-pyar expressed in her short-story is hence contextualized in the political values and emotions of secularism, cultural seclusion and avoidance of limelight in accordance with middle-class Ashraf values, combined with an urge to express these same emotions through the fictionalized format. While Zeba was agential in practicing silence as a form of honor and decorum, she was also agential in expressing emotions as fiction. While her silences and ‘forgetting’ could be read in tandem with Butalia’s concept of women’s silences, mired within structural inequalities (1998), Zeba’s intellectual-artistic expressions also broke with this silence that was concomitant with class, by transforming privately-held emotions into recognizable and elite cultural expressions, considered fitting for women from her background.

Forging a community

Zeba said she disagreed with the Partition decision. She felt that problems between Hindus and Muslims could have been resolved differently, though she was unable to explain why Partition hadn’t been a good-enough resolution for Hindu-Muslim difficulties. Growing uncomfortable and restless in her interview, Zeba finally said that Pakistan was in a bad political condition, Partition having not served anyone’s purpose (kisika faida nahi hua). While Zeba’s criticism of Partition pointed to the difficulties faced by Pakistani Muslims, who purportedly lived in the absence of secularism, her use of ‘anyone’ also referred to her own predicament as an Indian Muslim. On the other hand, her discomfort with a pro-Pakistan political verdict was perhaps also generated by her interview context, wherein her interviewer was more influenced by a Pakistani narrative of freedom from Hindu oppression. Blaming Pakistan became a convenient panacea for Zeba; a strategy that proclaimed her secularism-pyar by generating silence about Hindu excesses in India. This silence about Hindus lay rooted in an anger; a secular Muslim (Indian) anger of being betrayed and abandoned by religious Muslims (Pakistanis). By accusing Pakistan of being anti-secular, compared to India, Zeba linked Pakistani and Indian Muslims in a theory that posited all South Asian Muslims as a united community that was ruptured by the religious Muslim demand for Pakistan, resulting in Partition. Also, Pakistanis for Zeba had not just betrayed Indian Muslims by breaking their united community, but they had also abandoned the cause of secularism.

As noted earlier, Zeba’s writing on politics and Partition memory-emotion as fiction constituted a public expression of shared emotions, while simultaneously remaining within the framework of a strict and gendered, class-based upbringing that framed literature and poetry as genteel and educated expressions of middle-class and secluded femininity. It is therefore within this ambivalent and negotiated domain of Nehruvian secularism politics expressed through fictionalized Partition emotions, and its location within the feminine domain of middle class ‘love’, art and culture, that Zeba expressed Partition emotions within public memorialization. There were other layers of subterfuge too. For example, Zeba said her story had been inspired by the Paris terrorist attacks of 2015, even though her text was replete with evocative and powerful Partition imagery. Zeba insisted that she had written the story to criticize current-day Muslim barbarism. How could a true Muslim be a terrorist? Zeba asked her interviewer rhetorically. Lamenting the barbarism of Muslims, she reiterated that though a terrorist could be Muslim, a true Muslim could never be a terrorist. Not only was Zeba hinting here to the absence of secularism-pyar among the Muslim community of 1947 India; Zeba also hinted at a globally united Muslim community that was ruptured by religious fundamentalism, while lamenting the destruction of secularism-pyar espoused by ‘true’ Islam. Below is a translated and paraphrased version of the short story that Zeba read-out as part of her interview.

The chilly fog of the winter morning was so thick, that I could hardly see ahead. As I started walking, a sudden sharp gust of freezing wind buffeted me and shook me to my very core, forcing me to wrap my shawl tighter. I had left home courageously, but now felt my strength ebb away. And then there was a loud bang. Yah Allah! Was this a firecracker? Or was it a gun? The birds, sitting cold and huddled in the branches of trees, flew into the air as my fear increased. What was happening to my country? Were these the same people of yesteryears? How had times changed us so rapidly? My dear city could be called small in many ways, but it was still more beautiful than big cities. The decorum, affection and love between people here could not be found elsewhere. Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs and Christians all spent their childhoods together and we all loved our religions dearly and adhered to them. But our religion was inside our homes, never spilling out of its gates and walls. When we came out of our homes, we became citizens of our city, children of our country. There were temples, mosques and churches here, but no one was afraid. These were places of peace and prayer; buildings without locks and watchmen, because those who lived there were our watchmen, our caretakers. How could we take care of someone, who took care of us? When we children played and fought, we forgot our religion. Sometimes a Hindu came to a Muslim brother’s aid, when he fought with another Muslim. This was my beautiful country, my beautiful childhood. Childhood passed, and youth came, giving way to old age. Now there was a new generation that had brought with it its own thoughts. Who cast an evil eye on my country? Who hurled a burning coal of hatred into its belly? It had slowly turned into a torch of hatred, indicating the oncoming storm.

We all thought we would face this storm bravely and that is why we were going to congregate at the city hall today for discussion. The city hall was surrounded by a temple, a mosque and a church. But all of them were empty; each of them locked with no-one in sight. There was a mosque, but no one to offer namaaz there; the temple and idols were there, but the Gods were waiting for aarti; there was a church, but no-one to ring its bells. I reached the town hall but none of my supporters had reached. Waiting for them, I sat on the steps of an abandoned and silent temple. I began thinking: was the old blood lighter than the young (kya purana khoon naye ke muqable halka pad gaya)? Did the new generation defeat the old generation? Did our traditions die?

Suddenly, I heard a cry. Was it a child or an animal? No, this was no animal’s cry; it was a child. How could someone expose a child to such extreme cold on an early winter morning? The child’s crying grew louder. Why, I wondered, was no-one consoling the child? Standing up, I advanced towards the sound and on looking carefully, I saw a small baby wrapped in a cloth, lying on the cold, bare ground. I quickly lifted the child and looked around. Where were its parents? Even though I called, I couldn’t see or hear anyone. Yah Allah! Whose child was this? On examining the child closely, I saw it was wearing a crucifix on a thread around its neck; there was a tilak (Hindu ritual mark) on its forehead; and its clothes had Allah written over it. Was the child a Hindu, Muslim or Christian? One thing was certain: it was a human that I had picked up in my arms. Though my companions hadn’t come, I no longer felt the need to wait.

Though the sound of bullets was growing louder, I wasn’t afraid anymore. Neither did I feel cold; I had rescued humanity in the form of a human child. But I was pondering, what would I name the child? Mohammad Ahmed? Ram Prasad? Or Peter D’Souza? I thought of its mother. What God had she called out to, before leaving the child here? Did she say, ‘Yah Allah’, ‘He Bhagwan’, or ‘Oh God’? Then my heart answered: whomever the mother called out to, the hearer was the same; the same hearer, who had sent me here this freezing morning. Following that God, I had saved a child and rescued humanity, for when a man kills another, he kills humanity. What did we get by becoming Hindus and Muslims that we did not get by becoming human?

Partition emotions, silences and art

I take a phenomenological approach to emotions in this article, exploring how Zeba’s memory-emotions combine with her evolving biography, and the developing notion of her selfhood as a middle-class, Ashraf Muslim woman and secular writer-poet. Though I could methodologically compare Partition memory-emotions across narratives, the phenomenological approach to emotions prefers exploring biographical life-contexts that reveal interconnected systems of thought, memory, emotion and belief, internal to the narrator and her sense of self.

Secularism-pyar for Zeba is a strongly experienced, interstitial emotion that assumes Indian Muslims and Muslims across the globe to constitute a united but ruptured community, violated by Muslim religious bigotry that she considers un-Islamic and barbaric. Further, overlapping this ruptured community are ‘other’ religious communities, who are to be loved and never criticized by secular and true Muslims. While her short-story considers religious identity ‘private’ and confined ‘within the home’, as her own childhood was, secularism-pyar for her was global, primordial and vintage, exemplified by her nuclear family that intermingled with ‘others’ as part of their secular Muslim identity. Zeba condemns religious identity-politics, since she accuses it of ‘spilling-over’ its boundaries, to use a euphemism for her theory that teaches her listeners about the emotional experience of drawing religious, national and domestic boundaries in internally contiguous ways. Zeba’s childhood of learnt secularism-pyar helped her to feel like a middle-class Muslim woman at home and a secular citizen outside, enabling the drawing of a boundary-line between the private and public, and the religious and secular. An even subtler boundary existed between the meaning of home and homeland in transience, moving constantly between houses, and the loss of ancestral home and family in Badaun after Partition; homelessness emotions that Zeba referred to as the pain of the childhood past. She poignantly expressed this homelessness emotion in the metaphor of the abandoned child in her short story.

Although a lot has been written about silence, making it a separate topic for academic analysis, I have limited myself here to contextualizing silence within Zeba’s interview as an agential emotional domain. While silences in Zeba’s interview are overwhelming expressions of ‘doing’ selfhood, an agential space she claims for herself as she tidies up memory-emotions that are generated by the interviewer’s unexpected questions, this tidying-up almost runs parallel with the interview. Zeba remains introspective, contemplative, sometimes hostile, and even physically restless when unable to answer questions that stray too far from her internal ‘script’ of Partition and Muslim religiosity. Zeba’s contemplative silences are narrative mechanisms of producing space within her own interview. For example, on occasion, she introspectively mirrors and reflects the interviewer’s questions to gain distance from experiences that she feels too ambivalent to recount. For instance, when the interviewer asked Zeba what she felt at the time of Partition (us waqt kaisa laga?), Zeba answers by repeating the interviewer’s question rhetorically (us waqt kaisa laga!) and wonderingly (us waqt kaisa laga … ) reformulating the interviewer’s question contemplatively, before deciding to say that she felt ‘nothing’ (kucch nahi laga). While her narrative silence is also produced by the absence of rapport with her interviewer, this narrative reflecting and mirroring process remains significant, demonstrating Zeba’s agency to negotiate and moderate her story for public consumption.

Zeba narratively produced ‘herself’ within Partition memorialization as a secular writer, and a middle-class Indian Ashraf Muslim woman. Her memories were therefore not entirely factual, but emotional and discursive (in accordance with other existent literature on Partition), transforming these memories into social truths, expressed in art. Her narrative silences that contemplated ambivalence were also embedded at the interstices of memory and emotion, as she narratively conjoined them with her internal ‘script’, referring to this process as the pain of ‘remembering’, and the benefits of ‘forgetting’. Zeba’s ambivalences are at the same time socially located at the juncture of her ideas about a simultaneously united and a ruptured Muslim community, and between ideologies of religion and secularism-pyar for ‘others’ who are outsiders to that Muslim community. This ambivalence is also biographical, formulating a boundary between the transience of multiple and luxurious homes, and the homelessness caused by the destruction of ancestral home and family in Badaun that resulted in her grandparents migrating to Pakistan, and her parent’s secular-outside and secluded-inside nuclear family in India. Zeba contemplated all these interstices, junctures and ambivalences within her narrative silences; sometimes transforming her emotions into social truths, and sometimes turning hostile or restless, combining ‘she felt nothing’ or ‘remembered little’ with comments on how ‘remembering caused pain’. She counterbalanced this contemplative silence with poignant emotional representations of Partition in her art; social truths that were valid for her generation and audience of Indians, now living in Cupertino. While such transformations collapsed boundaries between the personal and the political in Zeba’s writing, she nevertheless refused to reframe her art as political, in keeping with her gendered and class-based norms.

Jean-Paul Sartre, writing in the 1930s in Sketch for the Theory of Emotions (1962) and R. G. Collingwood’s The Principles of Art (2014), written at the same time, defined phenomenological approaches to the study of emotion. Sartre described how persons lapse into a magical, virtual and symbolic world when confronted with pain and confusion in the real world, as emotions become transformed into the physical world of the body. Sartre wrote of the body as a magical ‘incantation’ that ‘does’ emotions (like dancing with joy), transforming magic-emotions arising out of pain in the real world to physicality. But he also considered this magic-emotion ineffectual and powerless to address the experienced pain of the real world. Collingwood, though agreeing with Sartre on multiple points, pointed out that it is not the emotions in the body, but artistic and creative activities that become magical, as artistic engagement evoked emotions that address suffering in the practical world, allowing for its reordering and resolution (in contrast to Sartre). So, while Sartre viewed emotions and physicality as magic, and the result of bodily incantation arising from suffering, Collingwood considered the emotions arising from magical artistic activity to be instruments of resolving suffering.

Both approaches can be extended to Zeba’s case. While Sartre’s phenomenological approach can be extended to Zeba’s contemplative and agential silences in her interview, as she ‘does’ her ambivalent emotions, reordering them within her narrative, her silence constitutes a bodily incantation that expresses inner purpose. Similarly, Collingwood’s idea of art as a magical activity can be likened to Zeba’s artistic expressions of Partition emotions. Her short-story evokes emotions about Partition even as it resolves its suffering, by transforming memory-emotions into social truths that her community in Cupertino shares. Her short story, as Rosenwein would say (2002), creates history and memorialization for a community through emotions. Scheer (2012), on the other hand, would say that Zeba’s silence as an emotional ‘doing’ was not as completely ineffectual as Sartre claimed. Her practice of silence was also emotional, resulting in her seemingly emotion-less narrative, where she repeatedly ‘forgot’. Zeba’s ‘forgetting’ could hence be deconstructed as constituting a ‘trace’ of what was omnipresent and yet unmarked; her experience of Partition that interwove through all her stories about ‘Muslim barbarism’.¹⁷

Conclusion: resistance

I conclude by suggesting that the public history of Partition does not necessarily constitute the ‘other’ of official records or alternate as evidence for the subversion of South Asian nationalist history. Instead, these interviews negotiate nationalism and nation-making by selectively combining memory and emotions. While the official discourse on Partition has percolated deep within South Asian society, these publicly accessed oral narratives also run the risk of being coopted by nationalism or being characterized by its subversion. They provide a commentary on nation-making through biographical events, memories and abstract emotions contextualized within discourse and expressed creatively. Zeba’s secularism-pyar is politically entrenched within an articulate class of educated and elite Hindus and Muslims who subscribe to Nehruvian ideas of secularism. Inadvertently, therefore, her interview re-inscribes structural power in ways that corresponded with her social and emotional context at the time of her interview, while at the same time subverting religious and gendered spaces of political entitlement through the political nature of her artistic expression.

What information do we gain about Partition by analyzing Zeba’s oral narrative? The answer lies in the primacy accorded by Zeba to her emotions, while recounting memories. For example, though we know of Partition as being one of the largest global mass-migrations and genocides of the twentieth century, this cannot be borne out by Zeba’s interview, since she neither migrated to Pakistan, nor was subjected to physical harm. Despite this, her narrative provides us with information about the emotions of homelessness for Partition migrants, since she suffered from the repercussions of Partition, losing her ancestral home and family in Badaun. Neither could she ever gain closure from its destruction, as her father turned away from Badaun after Partition. Safe and ensconced in a privileged life, she nevertheless felt homeless, inhabiting the many homes she lived in as a child. Though Zeba remained in India, her emotions of homelessness resonated with the many others who lost their homes but did not find the opportunity of participating within public history projects.¹⁸ Though the degree of homelessness differs over the specificities of every Partition narrative and biography, the emotions of Partition are so poignant that the feeling of homelessness is shared in Cupertino; Zeba did not need to undergo all the degrees of devastation that homelessness at Partition entailed in order to feel and write its emotions. Her writing and artistic expressions about it instead transformed the emotions of this experience into a collectively shared social truth about the Indian Muslim struggle for home and homeland in India. And her audience in turn understood and shared these homelessness emotions, without sharing the same degree of homelessness in their own lives. Memorialization in this case, therefore, produced an emotional archive of the narrator’s self, wherein the narrator could place her emotional memories at the center-stage of historical events, providing agential political interpretations that did not necessitate the sharing of personal, biographical details.

But then, are Partition narratives complicit with the same nationalism that produces them as part of public history? The best example of Zeba’s resistance was her expression of irritation with her interviewer when the latter called the Indian Muslim migration to Pakistan Hijrat, referring to the Prophet’s journey from Mecca to Medina. Zeba did not contest the term as much as she contested the interviewer’s efforts to reduce all Muslims to a specific variety in South Asia: that is, Muslims who demanded Pakistan and considered Partition migration to Pakistan a ‘religious’ journey. Since Zeba supported her father’s decision of remaining in India after Partition, she grew irritated with Muslim migration to Pakistan being termed Hijrat in the interview, which in turn imagined her as a ‘lesser’ Muslim whose religion had mixed with Hinduism and was corrupted by secularism. While religious migration from India to Pakistan may have been part of the interviewer’s own family context as an American of Pakistani descent (though not explicitly mentioned), this introduced the rupture of the integrated Muslim community that Zeba bemoaned in her interview, to a rupture within the interview process; a rupture that was inexplicable in the world that considered all Muslims to form a unified community. This Indian-Pakistani Muslim rupture became increasingly evident in the interview, as Zeba said she did not understand many of the words used by her interviewer. Zeba’s hostility revealed emotional ‘gaps’ within her secularism-pyar that became intolerant to an ‘other’ South Asian Muslim. And this unintentional ‘difference’ between Zeba and her interviewer made Zeba even more zealous about secularism-pyar as a truly ‘Islamic’ and anti-Pakistan tenet that upheld the nationalist values espoused by a globalizing India. Secularism-pyar therefore almost became a proxy-religious emotion for Zeba in her interview, countering the imagined implications of being a lesser-Muslim in comparison to Pakistani Muslims. Zeba thus repeatedly criticized Partition and the role played by Muslims in demanding Pakistan in her interview, wherein Secularism-pyar became a counter-instrument against Muslim and religious identity-politics.

Pandey (1999) interrogates how Hindu nationalist majorities and mainstreams were historically formed by Partition in relation to Muslim minorities in India, who were utilized for the nationalistic task of recreating the same Hindu mainstream that minoritized them. Once the Indian Hindu mainstream and majority was produced by Partition, it became the burden of ‘good’ and secular Muslims and other religious minorities in India to produce, facilitate and enable this mainstream, while redirecting their anger at the Muslim nation across the fuzzy social border that threatened their structural position, at the mercy of the Hindu mainstream. Zeba’s resistance to Pakistan, her silence about the first and instinctive fear of Hindu violence on hearing Nehru’s announcements about Gandhi’s murder in 1948, was entrenched within Indian nationalism and the boundary positions Muslim minorities were accorded in post-Partition India. Her espousal of Nehruvian ideals that represented this minority burden of appeasing and allying with the Hindu Indian mainstream accompanied by the criticism of Pakistan became zealous, especially when confronted with a Pakistani interviewer. Donning the selfhood-mantle that was larger than her middle-class Ashraf identity of a person minoritized by Partition, she now became larger than her artistic and feminine self, imbued with the emotions of homelessness at Partition. She was now a proud Indian Muslim in the interview, upholding the emotional morality of secularism-pyar and decrying Islamic terrorism, while considering India her ‘true home’, despite the destruction of Badaun and her ancestral home in the ensuing riots of Partition.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Deepra Dandekar (Ph.D.) currently works on the history of migration in India, as a researcher at the Center for History of Emotions, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin. Her research publications and interests span subjects that link the history of religious identity and conversion in Nineteenth and Twentieth century India with gender relations and minority community interactions in a global context.

Notes

1 I am grateful to the external reviewers of this article, for theoretical feedback on research methodology, and for refining my engagement with data.

2 A Partition Museum was inaugurated in Amritsar (Punjab) on October 2016, www.partitionmuseum.org (accessed 15 May 2018).

3 One of the recent-most Partition memory collections, the 1947 Partition Archive (www.1947partitionarchive.org) is founded by Guneeta Singh Bhalla. Guneeta, according to NBC News (by Anjali on 04 May 2016) took encouragement from a visit to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum in Tokyo and began collecting Partition memories with a small team of trained researchers (accessed 15 May 2018).

4 This research received funding from the multi-collaborative project ‘The Challenges of Migration, Integration and Exclusion’ (WiMi Project) funded by Max Planck Society, with the special interest in Partition memorialization being initiated by Margrit Pernau.

5 Pandey (2001, 4) interconnects the history of society and community with narratives of violence that transforms ‘community’ formation into a subject of history-writing.

6 Menon and Bhasin (1998) and Butalia (1998, 70–71) describe the governmental retrieval of abducted women after Partition as another form of violation. Butalia (in 1993) also describes the silence surrounding Partition stories and the bureaucratic mechanism of governmental retrieval memorialized by Patel (2006), Mridulaben Sarabhai (Cf. Basu 1996), and Kidwai (2011).

7 Cf. Scheer (2012) on the practice of naming emotions as a way of inhabiting them.

8 C.f. Kaul (2001, 4) on how the modern Indian state reenacts the Partition exemplified by Mrs. Sushma Swaraj, External Affairs Minister in the BJP-led government, who named ‘retrieved’ Indian women from Pakistan ‘Bharat ki Beti’, characterizing their experiences within Partition-tropes of abduction (Hindustan Times, by Ahmed (2017) and Uttam (2017), accessed 15 May 2018).

9 Short stories on Partition by Krishna Sobti, Intizar Hussain, Ismat Chugtai, Yashpal, Manto and others have been translated and compiled by Alok Bhalla (1994, 2012). Dalmia (2017) discusses Yashpal’s Jhutha-Sach as part of the Partition-Independence theme.

10 Buniyaad, a popular TV serial based on Manohar Shyam Joshi’s Hindi novel (2010). Also, cf. Jha (2018) for the cinematic representation of Partition.

11 Gregory Bateson in Steps to the Ecology of the Mind (1972). Also c.f. Marie Kondo in the life-changing magic of tidying up (2014).

12 Viewing Partition from a multi-angular lens, scholars have explored its impact as historical metaphor on the nation’s memory of inexplicable violence in the global context. (cf. Amin’s research [1995] on Chauri Chaura). Jojo Joy and Raj (2011) describe Partition as a metaphor for Emergency declared in 1975, and Menon and Bhasin (1998) and Butalia (1998) write of the Partition riots mirroring the anti-Sikh riots of 1984 and the Babri Masjid riots in 1992. Nandy (2007) compares the Partition to the Jewish and Armenian holocaust, while Pandey unpacks the Bhagalpur riots in 1989 (1992) through the Partition lens. Also, cf. Tan and Kudaisya (2000) and Hasan’s edited books on the Partition (1993, 2000); Anjali Gera Roy and Nandi Bhatia’s edited volume on refugees (2008) and Khan (2007).

13 Kabir quotes Hirsch (2013, 26) on the subject of post memory.

14 1947 Partition Archive – Zeba Rizvi (http://1947partitionarchive.org/story/2021), 5 videos. Stanford University Libraries, Department of Special Collections and University Archives (https://purl.stanford.edu/bj312jq7198), California Humanities, last accessed 25th May 2018.

15 Barbara Rosenwein (2006) on emotional communities that can be detected as an analytical category within historical narrative.

16 I shall henceforth refer to Zeba Rizvi as Zeba in the article.

17 I am drawing here on Kleinberg’s (2017) engagement with Derrida’s ideas about deconstruction and trace.

18 Zamindar (2007) on the struggle for home and homeland among Muslim refugees in India. Also, cf. Talbot (2006) and Talbot and Tatla (2006) for Partition violence in Lahore and Amritsar.