The silence of partition: borders, trauma, and partition history

Abstract

In contrast to the story of the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan as an epiphenomenal event of independence, this article suggests that the division of British India signaled a unique rupture in which the creation of borders became the defining traumatic event of that history. Moving away from familiar discourses of independence, I argue that the history of the 1947 Partition is a history of borders in which the geographical borders drawn to separate and establish the independent nations of India and Pakistan are at once a concretely historical division and an incomprehensible site of trauma. The border becomes the site of the simultaneity between empirically known realities that constitute specific historical contexts and the overwhelming experience of history that exceeds immediate understanding. From the borders of the 1947 Partition, the subcontinent inherited what I call “a geography of trauma” – a conceptual schema that is at once a geographical and national reality in which people live and an ungraspable experience that refuses boundaries. This article argues that the border created through the Partition becomes the geographical inscription of the meaning and impact of history upon identity – both collective and individual – and demands an impossible yet necessary witness.

Keywords:

• partition
• trauma
• silence
• ethics
• border
• geography

Notes

1. See Dominick LaCapra's (2004) History in transit.

2. In 1930 Sir Muhammad Iqbal, a Muslim poet, philosopher, and politician, was elected President of the Muslim League. In his inaugural speech, he outlined his vision for an independent Muslim nation by naming the Muslim-majority provinces in the northwestern region of the subcontinent. Then, in 1933, a Cambridge University student named Rahmat Ali assembled a pamphlet entitled “Now or never: Are we to live or perish forever” in response to Iqbal's call for a Muslim majority state in the northwestern region of British India. In that pamphlet he explicitly suggested “Pakistan” as an acronym representing the different Muslim-majority provinces (Ali 1933). Ali also states that Pakistan is both an Urdu and Persian word. The Urdu influence comes from the names of the provinces, and the Persian influence can be seen in the word “pak”, which means pure and clean. Additionally, the suffix “stan” is Persian for “place of”, “land”, “nation”, “country” and bears relation to a cognate Sanskrit suffix with a similar meaning.

Here it is important to note that even though Kashmir was claimed by Pakistan, it was also claimed by India and continues to be a disputed region. Many Indians thus claim, and have always claimed, Kashmir as part of India. Although I have included Kashmir in my mention of the etymological birth of Pakistan, it is not my intention to make any kind of greater territorial claim about Kashmir.

3. In 1947 East and West Pakistan were formally known as the Dominion of Pakistan, and in 1957 the name changed to the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.

4. The different subject positions also suggest the separation of East and West Pakistan into an independent Bangladesh and Pakistan in 1971. See Gyanendra Pandey's (2001) Remembering Partition, Amrik Singh's (2000) edited volume The Partition in retrospect, and Ian Talbot's (1997) Freedom's cry.

5. See, in particular, Chapters Two and Three.

6. On this point, Cathy Caruth has written extensively in Unclaimed experience (Caruth 1996) as well as in her edited volume Trauma: Explorations in memory (Caruth 1995).

7. For more on the relationship between the language of testimony and the language of alterity, and specifically of ethical responsibility and response, Jill Robbins's (1999) Altered reading as well as from Cathy Caruth's reading of Lacan's engagement with Freud's interpretation of the burning child dream in The interpretation of dreams in unclaimed experience (Caruth 1996). Caruth, in fact, attributes her thinking of the particular language of awakening as a language of alterity and ethics to her conversations with Robbins.

8. “To be for a time that would be without me”, Levinas argues, “to be for a time after my time, for a future beyond the celebrated ‘being-for-death’, to-be-for-after-my-death … is not a banal thought that extrapolates one's own duration; it is passage to the time of the other” (1963, 349). The gift, in this respect, is to be for a time “without me”, to be absolutely and unselfishly responsible for the other. The “radical generosity” of the gift therefore gives unto the other in a manner that completely empties the self of its own selfish interests. For this to happen, however, the self, the giver of the gift, and the other must occupy temporalities completely independent of each other. The giver of the gift and the receiver of the gift, in other words, cannot be simultaneously present to each other, and thus the giver can never know about, in any regard, the reception of the gift. Under these circumstances, it seems that the gift is both impossible to give and receive. How does one give a gift that promises not even the acknowledgement of the gift? The impossibility of the gift, however, is a positive impossibility precisely because it arises out of the obligation to the other and is completely divested of the self and its ego.