New perspectives on Partition

Published : Aug 18, 2001 00:00 IST

NAUNIDHI KAUR

The Partitions of Memory: The Afterlife of the Division of India edited by Suvir Kaul; Permanent Black, New Delhi, 2001; pages 301, Rs.595.

Translating Partition by Ravikant and Tarun K. Saint; Katha, 2001; pages 238, Rs.250.

THE early works on Partition concentrate on "high politics", with most of the writers emphasising the roles and political tactics of the state actors, that is the British and the Congress and Muslim League leaderships. This approach changed in the 1990s, with emphasis being shifted to oral histories - letters, interviews, diaries - of the survivors in understanding Partition. The books under review belong to the 1990s category.

They go into some of the finer points of history and depend on memory to study Partition beyond the context of the instrumental and ideological politics of state actors. Collectively, they attempt to sensitise history to the pain of Partition.

The volume edited by Suvir Kaul is a collection of essays dealing with a range of topics. The most interesting are those which emphasise the impact of Partition on contemporary India and Pakistan. Suvir Kaul teaches English in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His volume departs from the much-debated question of how Partition has constructed the identity of India and Pakistan and explores the intellectual, human and material problems it poses in the two countries even today.

The book has two essays that explore the legacies of Partition in the case of Pakistan. Richard McGill Murphy's ''Performing Partition in Lahore'' is the more interesting of these. Murphy has analysed the ceremonial exchange at the Wagah border, which takes place every day between India and Pakistan, and the Basant parties in Lahore. He stresses the 'enforced difference' between India and Pakistan that is apparent in both the ceremonies. According to Murphy, the aggressive foot-stamping in the ceremonial marches at the border dramatises the hostility between India and Pakistan in a way that is not very different from the Basant festival celebrated by Lahoris. He explains the pains that Lahoris take to emphasise that their Basant celebrations have no connection with the Hindu celebrations in pre-Partition Lahore. Both mirror for India and Pakistan the cultural and political paranoia with respect of each other.

Some of the other essays in the volume, including Urvashi Butalia's ''An Archive with a difference: Partition letters'', emphasise the role of oral history in Partition. Butalia has continued her use of non-conventional sources, which she used in The Other Side of Silence. In the present essay she has used the letters written by ordinary people who were directly affected by the miseries of Partition to those in the civil and administrative authority. They were displaced by events and decisions 'larger' than themselves. They are requests of help to the new state and its representatives.

Mukulika Banerjee's essay ''Partition and North West Frontier: Memories of some Khudai Khidmatgars'', as the title suggests, uses the memories of the Khudai Khidmatgars (KKs) or the Red Shirts to explore the culture and history of the Frontier before and at the time of Partition. Banerjee's essay is based on her interviews with the KKs. It explores how memories of the KKs function as the bulwark against the precise narratives of histories authorised by the state, narratives which would deny them a place within the received tradition of Pakistani political history. It is a study of the frontier, which Banerjee points out, is a difficult area to partition because of its very nature as a region of exchange.

IT is time that archives of letters, diaries, memories and testimonies, which rely on memory, are used to understand Partition holistically. Both the volumes emphasise this point. However, it is to be hoped that such works are done keeping the constraints of 'memory' in mind. There has been considerable research to show that memory is not ever pure or unmediated. Much depends on who remembers, when, about whom, indeed to whom, and how. In his book Narrative Truth and Historical Truth: Meaning and Interpretation in Psychoanalysis (New York, 1982) Donald P. Spence argues that while listening and speaking the past gets fixed in a particular manner - once a construction gets decided on, it goes on to determine the past in a particular manner. Pushed to its logical extreme, the verbal construction that is created shapes our view of the past; indeed it, a creation of the present, also becomes the past.

Indeed, the problems with working on oral history are many, the least of which is the interpretative possibilities these sources open up with memory being considered a kind of retrieval system. In this context, it was hoped that both the volumes could have gone beyond analysing memories in fact and fiction, in not only what is in them but essentially what is lacking in them.

This is not to negate the importance of the way people choose to remember Partition. This is as important as the facts of history. The second volume, a collection of stories and essays on Partition, is based on this perspective. It makes an interesting pair with the first volume. Both show how the same event can be seen in two different ways to reach the same conclusion - the need to rethink Partition histories.

Translating Partition has stories by Attia Hosain, Bhisham Sahni, Joginder Paul, Kamleshwar, Sa'adat Hasan Manto and Surendra Prakash, besides commentaries. The essays address the contemporary debates on Partition in the social sciences and in literary criticism. The contributions are on fiction in Urdu and Hindi, the social history of the print media, feminist concern about representation, the historiography of Partition, modes of remembrance and forgetting. The stories and the secondary readings suggested at the end of the volume are concise and not exhaustive. They would be of interest especially to a beginner, especially Manto's ''Toba Tek Singh'', which underlines the sanity of the madman in times of madness, which is how Partition has been defined.

The introduction to the volume rightly points out that ''Toba Tek Singh'' is a triumph of ambivalence and a great story because it proclaims that in-betweenness of its protagonist and his triumph over those who want to fix his identity. The madman's death takes place in no-man's land, where the writ of neither nation runs.

The essays in the volume also discuss the madness in the time of Partition. They reflect on madness, which has a privileged place in the discourse on Partition. They make an important point that the metaphor of madness has been used in Partition literature to communicate a sense of incomprehension and that it denotes a refusal to understand. Partition was therefore dismissed as an aberration and the responsibility of owning up to its ugly reality was denied.

Cumulatively, the two volumes complement each other. Translating Partition concentrates on the pain and sorrow of the human condition that resulted from Partition. It presents the thematic focus of Partition literature, which shifted from the horror over large-scale killings and abduction to the retrieval of memory and experiences of exile. Its weakness is that it fails to look at the fault lines of religion, gender, caste and class that still run through our lives as legacies of Partition. Suvir Kaul's volume explores some of these important issues.

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