The Indian subcontinent marked the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Partition and the emergence of India and Pakistan as independent nation-states in 2022. A year before that was the fiftieth anniversary of the creation of Bangladesh which had involved another revision of the subcontinent’s political cartography. When in 1997, India and Pakistan celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of Independence, the circumstances were significantly different from what prevails today. Most obviously, in 1997 there was a generation in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh that had lived experience and memories of Independence and Partition. Many from the generation that experienced Partition are aging or have passed away. Now the memory of Independence and Partition is a living memory for only a few. The political and cultural developments of the new millennium have also compelled reconsiderations of Partition. In 1997, the “idea of India,” the creation of Bangladesh, and the political situation in Pakistan were the major topics of discussion in South Asian studies. Today, South Asian politics generally seems inextricably bound up with authoritarianism, so much so that democratic “populism” is widely held responsible for the prevailing illiberal majoritarianism.
So, the seventy-fifth anniversary confronts scholars with significantly new subjects for reflection. The question of historical memory has now largely transformed to one of its reproduction through mass politics and mass media and, perhaps, professional academic inquiry, while the very meaning or value of Independence is in crisis. Across South Asia a vast new generation comes of age and grapples with religious clashes, repression of minorities through the National Register of Citizens and the Citizenship Amendment Act, pandemic disruption, gendered violence, border issues, and war. The postcolonial projects of development and democratization, to the extent that they are still paid lip service, have moved from bureaucratic to increasingly technocratic in their conception. At any event, few apart from his loyal following can without misgiving concur with Prime Minister Modi’s recent claim that India presents “an unparalleled story in democratic nation-building over the last 75 years” (Summit for Democracy, December 2021). At the same time, the alternatives to Indian democracy, whether as realized in Pakistan and Bangladesh or elsewhere, are not particularly more successful. Finally, where once the subcontinental Left promised to articulate an alternative to the unsatisfying status quo, today its very existence seems quite precarious indeed. So, faced with uncertainty, even melancholy, in 2024, we return in this special issue of the South Asian Review to examining Partition and its aftermath through the lens of the present moment.
Beginning in the late-twentieth century and continuing into the twenty-first there has been a focused effort to gather oral histories and material memories of the political division of the subcontinent through the Partition Museum in Amritsar, the 1947 Partition Archive, the Museum of Material Memory, and others. Pritika Chowdhry’s art installations, collectively entitled “Unbearable Memories, Unspeakable Histories: The Partition Anti-Memorial Project,” reconsiders the Partition and Bangladesh’s emergence as a sovereign nation. Recent literature and cinema both from the subcontinent and the diaspora have also re-explored the texture of the experience. After the first wave of Partition writings in the years immediately following the event and a resurgence of interest in the 1980s (predominantly Anglophone writings), the Partition and its aftereffects provide a rich field for literary excavations in the twenty-first century including Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004), Hasan Azizul Huq’s Agunpakhi/The Phoenix (2006), Amit Majmudar’s Partitions (2011), Gitanjali Shree’s Ret Samadhi/Tomb of Sand (2018), Veera Hiranandani’s The Night Diary (2018) and its sequel Amil and the After (2024), Bhaswati Ghosh’s Victory City 1950 (2020), Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Independence (2022), Aanchal Malhotra’s The Book of Everlasting Things (2022), Rahad Abir’s Bengal Hound (2023), and Rashmi Narzary An Unfinished Search (2023) among others. Similarly, Partition cinema traces its genealogy beginning with the Tamil-language crime drama Andhaman Kaidhi/The Andhaman Convict (1952) directed by V. Krishnan through Ritwick Ghatak’s Partition trilogy—Meghe Dhaka Tara/The Cloud-Capped Star (1960), Komal Gandhar/E-Flat (1961), Subarnarekha (1962), and M.S. Sathyu’s Garam Hawa/Scorching Winds (1973) to Kamal Haasan’s Hey Ram (2000), Anil Sharma’s Gadar: Ek Prem Katha/Rebellion: A Love Story (2001) and Gadar 2 (2023), Sabiha Sumar’s Khamosh Pani/Silent Waters (2003), Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra’s Bhaag Milkha Bhaag/Run, Milkha, Run (2013), Srijit Mukherji’s Rajkahini (2015) and Begum Jaan (2017), Gurinder Chadha’s Viceroy’s House (2017), Karim Traïdia and Pankaj Sehgal’s The Gandhi Murder (2019), Ali Abbas Zafar’s Bharat (2019), and N.S. Ponkumar’s August 16 1947 (2023).
This issue brings together conversations about the Partition and its haunting residues in the present as represented in literary, visual, oral, and material cultures of the subcontinent and beyond. Although we include a few essays focused on the partition experiences in Bengal, it remains a source of permanent regret that this special issue does not include studies on the founding of Bangladesh as a reshaping of the Partition, as another re-drawing of the subcontinent’s political map. (The eastern part of Bengal is the only region in the world to have undergone five name changes within the course of a single century—at the beginning of the twentieth century it was part of the Bengal Presidency; then with Lord Curzon’s splitting the Bengal Presidency in 1905—the first partition of Bengal or Bongo Bhongo—it was designated the province of East Bengal—whose borders coincided, to some extent, with the international borders for India and Pakistan drawn in 1947—1905-11; when the first partition of Bengal was annulled, it was eastern Bengal once again, 1911–1947; with Independence and Partition, it became part of Pakistan and was renamed East Bengal, 1947–1955; subsequently, the name was changed to East Pakistan, 1955–71; and finally Bangladesh since 1971). However, this journal will be publishing a special issue (guest edited by Dr. Umme Al-wazedi) on Bangladeshi literature in 2025 to focus discussions on Partition(s) and beyond in Bangladeshi writing of the last fifty years. While the impact of the partition of the Punjab has been the focus of much scholarly studies in the past, and Bengal to a smaller extent, this special issue extends the examination of the impact of this political event elsewhere in other communities in the subcontinent, and across other differentials.
Our contributors explore important questions including the role of archives, oral histories and memorials in Partition studies; the place of writers, filmmakers, cultural creators in narrating and preserving Partition history; the experience of Partition in literatures beyond the Anglophone; the geographic and linguistic diversities in Partition studies; the intersections of caste, gender, and sexuality in reframing Partition archives; and the relationship between Partition and the global “war on terror.” Ananya Jahanara Kabir’s essay examines the film Pathaan (2023) and Salman Rushdie’s Victory City (2023) to explore the audacious and joyful return of the Muslim in India after 75 years of battered precarity. Through an examination of Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games Sami Ahmad Khan’s Jihad, Souvik Kar and Shuhita Bhattacharjee argue that the traumas of Partition shape narratives of nuclear brinkshmanship between Indian and Pakistan and the narratives mark the necessity of healing of Partition’s wounds. Rini Bhattacharya Mehta argues in her essay that recent films such as Rajkahini, Begum Jahan, and Bhaag Milkha Bhaag evoke Partition trauma only to sideline it. She interrogates these films and their style and content against the over-narration strategy of turn of the millenium films like Gadar, He Ram, and Pinjar. Anjali Tripathy’s essay explores the recurring motif of the shawl in partition narratives to examine the contours of memory and the shifting meaning of different kinds of shawls. Geetanjali Shree’s award-winning novel, Ret Samadhi/Tomb of Sand is the focus of Weiling Ding’s essay. Ding coins the term “bordersand” to offer a queer reading of the novel. Through a careful reading of Mahmud Rehman’s short story “Kerosene”, Shailendra Singh foregrounds the plight of the “Bihari” Muslim (Urdu-speaking Muslims of Bangladesh twice displaced by Partitions) in his essay. Two essays focus on Dalit experiences of Partition. Samrat Sengupta examines ecological disaster and Partition in the works of migrant Bengali Dalit writers Jatin Bala and Manohar Mouli Biswas. Praggnaparamita Biswas and Anup Shekhar Chakraborty write about caste and marginality in Partition writing through an examination of Manoranjan Byapari’s My Chandal Life. Ayan Choudhury and Akshaya K. Rath focus on Bengali Little Magazines to argue that they often published partition narratives side-lined by the mainstream and that the texts and paratexts in these publications became a storehouse of counternarratives. Turning our focus to Assam, Ragini Chakraborty analyzes the anthology Barbed Wire Fence and the novel Jangam to dismantle monolithic narratives of Partition to examine multiple borders and multiple forms of violence in these narratives. Aiswarya Sanath and Anjali Gera Roy use oral histories of Sindhi refugees in Bangalore to study diverse strategies of refugee resettlement and practices in the community.
Seventy-five years after the cataclysmic events of 1947, the essays in this special issue testify to the importance of continuing to examine the Partition and how it haunts and shapes the histories of three nations in the subcontinent. These traumatic memories have carried through to the children and grandchildren of Partition survivors. The narratives and memories of Partition have continued into the spaces where the South Asian diaspora migrated after World War II. Even as we publish this special issue, the ongoing genocide in Gaza reminds us that the legacies of the British Empire and particularly their decolonizing strategy of partitioning territories continue to have deadly impacts on several generations.
Correction Statement
This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.