India Archives - Page 4 of 4

Voices of India’s Partition, Part II

by Amber Abbas

In 2009, I spent five months living at the Aligarh Muslim University in the town of Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh, India.I was there to research the role and experience of Aligarh students in the movement for Pakistan during the 1940s. As part of this research, I actively sought out university employees and former students of the university from that period. I was referred to S.M. Mehdi through a chance encounter with a university official and arrived at his home without an appointment. Though he was never an Aligarh student — in fact, said he had an “allergy” to Aligarh as a young man — he moved to the town after his daughter completed her medical degree and settled there. S.M. Mehdi was surprised to see me, but agreed to answer my questions, though he cautioned that he could not be considered an expert on Aligarh. After finishing high school in Bhopal, Mehdi went on to Kanpur for his B.A. and then to Lucknow for his M.A. Degree. During his time living in both places, he was involved with the Students’ Union and began to turn towards Socialism, under the influence of his teacher Christopher Ackroyd, and then to Communism. During 1946 and 1947, he was in Bombay putting out an Urdu paper for the Communist party — a post to which he had been recruited by Sajjad Zaheer. He worked for thirty years in the Soviet Embassy in New Delhi and has been a Communist ever since.

The Communist activist and writer S.M. Mehdi

During the early years after partition, Mehdi was living in Bombay, where he made friends with many well-known Leftists and writers, including Sardar Jafri — an Aligarian — who he mentions here. Throughout 1947 and 1948 these young activists and thinkers printed and distributed the Communist Urdu paper especially in the Muslim areas. Mehdi tells me that Bombay was not affected by partition’s violence in the same way as places in Punjab; violence was sporadic and casualties were few. He himself felt little fear, but had a friend who was so terrified that he could hardly travel safely in the city without “betraying” that they were Muslims.

He tells a long story about his experiences on the day Gandhi was killed. He is one of the few people whom I interviewed who does not suggest that he or she heard “immediately” that the assassin had been a Hindu rather than a Muslim. He describes the anxiety that dogged his colleagues and him all day as they wondered whether the assassin was a Muslim, and recalls how he felt fear, to which he had previously believed himself to be immune. His story is both terrifying and funny, and thoroughly dramatic. The disjunctures that that day created are still fresh in his mind — the stillness of life outside the Victoria Terminus station, the silence on the roads. “There was no person!” he exclaims. That is, until a car pulled up besides his Hindu companion, Munish, and him. The driver of the vehicle was a Sikh off to “Pakistan,” the colloquial name for Muslim areas that, despite partition’s migrations, is still used in Indian cities today. The Sikh jovially invites these two young men along “to kill.” Betraying that Mehdi could become his first victim.

The young men free themselves from their “generous” driver and head back to the home of newlywed Sardar Jafri, who didn’t know a thing about the day’s events. Not until Mehdi hears the 9 o’clock new bulletin can he finally breathe easily that the assassin was not a Muslim, and therefore, there would be no violence, only mourning. Though he was sympathetic to Gandhi, and describes his own opposition to “communal” thinking, Mehdi depicts how the events of that day temporarily changed his outlook. He was “relieved” to learn that the assassin was not a Muslim, relieved that he belonged to a different community, he, who did not believe in that “nonsense.” The uncertainty and fear that followed him all day completely subsumed his ability to grieve for the fallen leader. Because of the tensions that the assassination threatened to unleash, almost none of the Muslims I spoke to described an immediate sense of grief at the loss. Though they realized the significance of his absence, and even now credit him with bringing peace to the subcontinent after the violent upheavals of partition, on January 30, 1948, all were too concerned for their own safety to indulge in mourning.

LISTEN TO THE ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW HERE

READ THE ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT HERE

Photo credits:

Genesis Media Pvt., Ltd., Untitled Portrait of S.M. Mehdi

“Mammojan Ki Diary,” a series that chronicles S.M. Mehdi’s life and experience with many famous Indian Progressive Writers of the 1950s and 1960s.

Unititled Portrait of Mahatma Gandhi, Bombay, 1944

www.mkgandhi.org via Wikimedia Commons

Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and his Struggle with India by Loseph Lelyveld (2010)

by Sundar Vadlamudi

Gandhi challenges biographers. The author must confront Gandhi’s prodigious writings, six decades of work as a political activist and social reformer, and importantly, his consecration as “Father of India” and international stature as Mahatma (Great Soul). Perhaps aware of this difficulty, Joseph Lelyveld sets himself a modest goal to “amplify rather than replace the standard narrative” of Gandhi’s life. The author, a former correspondent and Executive Editor of the New York Times, reported for nearly four decades on both India and South Africa. Thus, he brings a unique perspective to the project. In the book’s first part, Lelyveld revisits the oft-repeated tale of Gandhi’s transformation in South Africa between 1893 and 1914 from an unknown lawyer to a social reformer and a political organizer. The second part presents the well-known story of Gandhi’s trials and tribulations in his attempts to impose his ideas, developed during his South African experience, on a “recalcitrant India.” Throughout, Lelyveld focuses on Gandhi’s social reform efforts rather than his involvement in India’s nationalist movement for independence from British rule. His choice could have been influenced by the recent decline in public enthusiasm in India for Gandhi’s ideas of non-violence. Today, the term “Gandhian,” as Lelyveld notes, implies little more than “social conscience.”

Despite its conventional conclusions, Lelyveld’s biography acquired notoriety following a review in the Wall Street Journal, which claimed that the author depicts Gandhi as a bisexual and a racist during his stay in South Africa, a bald misrepresentation of the book. Lelyveld compares Gandhi’s pronouncements on black South Africans on different occasions and concludes that they remained “contradictory and unsettled.” The second instance of controversy relates to Gandhi’s relationship with an East Prussian Jewish architect, Hermann Kallenbach. The two lived together for about three years in Transvaal and, in one letter, Gandhi pledges “more love, and yet more love… such love as they hope the world has not yet seen.” But Lelyveld never implies that Gandhi and Kallenbach had a homosexual relationship. Rather, he indicates that Gandhi only expected love, devotion, and unquestioning support from Kallenbach. The unfortunate controversy overshadows some crucial points raised in the book.

Significantly, at several points, Lelyveld questions the historical construction of the myth about Gandhi. He points to the current South African government’s appropriation of Gandhi into its national history and he presents evidence that Gandhi actually supported South African whites’ suppression of the Zulus in the 1906 Bhambatha Rebellion. Similarly, he questions Gandhi’s saintly status as a champion of India’s lower-caste untouchables. Lelyveld illustrates Gandhi’s limited enthusiasm for a struggle by untouchables in Kerala (South India) to gain entry into temples since he believed that such conflicts could weaken the unity among Hindus in the larger struggle for Indian independence.

In his discussion of Gandhi’s successes and failures in India, Lelyveld treads on well- traveled ground and breaks no new turf. But, his discussion of Gandhi’s attitudes towards blacks and the absence of any sustained relationship between Gandhi and black South African leaders raises interesting questions about the role of race in the three-way contest between white settlers, black South Africans, and Indians. The book, therefore, promises to initiate further debate on Gandhi’s views on race as well as on racial relations among non-white populations in the British empire.

Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (1980)

by Gail Minault

We are in the delivery room in Bombay, at midnight on August 14/15, 1947, the moment India and Pakistan are created as independent nations. Two children enter the world simultaneously, one Muslim, one Hindu, and their destinies will be determined by the timing of their birth. Through their eyes, and especially through the eyes of Saleem Sinai, the reader travels around the subcontinent, meeting the other children of partition and viewing every major national event until Saleem Sinai quite literally disintegrates. Saleem is the reader’s guide through the world of independent India and Pakistan; its problems become his problems in fantastic and unpredictable ways. Through this journey, Saleem must face his past and his future, and it is not always clear how they will come together.

Midnight’s Children, winner of the 1981 Man Booker Prize, stands out as the most compelling account of the surreal aspects of partition experienced by families throughout the affected areas. While it may seem unusual to turn to a work of magic realism for guidance on a topic as complex as partition, Rushdie captures the tensions of these historical events better than most standard histories. There are no Viceroys or national fathers in Rushdie’s novel. But there are fathers and mothers, lovers, sons and daughters, friends and bitter enemies. As a young Muslim entering newly created Pakistan, Saleem loses his memory, loses his connection to his past, his connection to the history of Muslims in India; now relegated to a separate chapter, a separate country, a separate history.

The realities of partition, it seems, are best interpreted through Rushdie’s magical landscapes. Writing in English, he nonetheless expands a body of Urdu and Hindi literature that, in the months and years after the traumatic migrations of 1947, tried to capture the sense of unease that the divide introduced. These stories and poems looked into the dark heart of partition, long before the high politics had concluded or become fodder for official histories. As in Saadat Hasan Manto’s famous Urdu short story of partition, Toba Tek Singh, where the actions of the sane appear insane, and the insane sane, Rushdie builds upon a tradition of interpretation that goes beyond the histories of real actors and dives into partition’s fictions, its profound surreality.

Prejudice and Pride: School Histories of the Freedom Struggle in India and Pakistan by Krishna Kumar (2001)

by Amber Abbas

Krishna Kumar’s study of school textbooks in Pakistan and India shows that the discipline of history in South Asia has “come under the strain of nation-building rather more than other subjects.” History teaching in these textbooks seeks to settle political and ideological points and guide children’s responses to present day situations.

The two states that were formed in 1947, India and Pakistan, share a history that national textbooks try to claim exclusively for each individual state. The freedom movement remains a controversial and tricky subject, a mere 60 years after independence. As a result of this nationalized education, informed knowledge of the other, neighboring nation, is rare in both places; powerful stereotypes have tended to stifle academic curiosity and serious enquiry. A particularly alarming discovery of Kumar’s study is the extent to which Indian and Pakistani school textbooks teach history by reading back outcomes onto causes. This tactic obscures any complexity in history, hiding the places where ideology and action fail to align, or where leaders changed their minds, altered their tactics, or went back on their word. It precludes any appreciation of the motivation of the historical actors at the time. This is history in reverse.

In both countries, textbooks deploy the freedom movement as a story about national values. The Pakistani narrative is dominated by a triumphal sense of self-protection and escape determined to serve as a unifying national ethos by emphasizing issues of the contemporary significance in the history of state-building. In India, by contrast, this narrative emphasizes the tolerance of different groups for one another in the course of an idealized and varied history. Great personalities of the freedom movement and of earlier periods are treated, not as complex and flawed historical figures, but as vessels for ideals for young readers to follow.

Kumar’s study, pensive and often self-reflective, reveals the importance of history as a practical discipline in schools. He laments the condition of education in both countries, and uses the freedom movement to investigate the political stifling of intellectual curiosity. In neither place is history considered a valuable subject for inquiry, or for students to acquire more practical skills. On the contrary, government and nationalist historians use the school textbook to train patriotic citizens willing and able to perpetuate the prejudices that led to the separation of the two states in the first place.

As textbook revision debates continue here in Texas with politically-motivated concerns about the teaching of Islam and other subjects, it is worth remembering that history is not a neutral field, rather it is often an ideological battle ground for conflicting narratives.

The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan by Yasmin Khan (2008)

by Gail Minault

Reading this compelling account of the partition of India in 1947, one is moved to ask: What were they thinking? Early accounts of the end of British rule in India concentrate on the high politics of the negotiations between the leaders of the Indian National Congress, the Muslim League, and a succession of Viceroys—ending with the striking and decisive Lord Mountbatten. The British were concerned to leave a legacy, of which they could be proud and hence avoid an unseemly civil war in the wake of their departure. Both the Congress, led by the future Indian Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and the Muslim League headed by Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the father of Pakistan, were concerned to inherit a state or states that would be governable and would guarantee civil rights and economic improvement to their people. The negotiations had reached a stalemate by late 1946. Mountbatten arrived in Delhi in early 1947, rapidly decided that partition was the only solution, convinced the leaders to agree to the plan by early June, and then announced, to everyone’s amazement, that the transfer of power would take place in mid-August.

This grand narrative, with Mountbatten as the master of ceremonies, has remained dominant for far too long. Questions about Mountbatten’s judgment have emerged in recent years, but the politics of the partition settlement have generally remained at the center of historical focus. In this book, Yasmin Khan endeavors to change that focus by bringing together a range of voices that reveal the human toll of those hasty political decisions. The Great Partition, in other words, listens to “the Indian street,” the stories of ordinary men and women, hapless and displaced by decisions over which they had no control. Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs fled for their lives to opposite sides of a frontier that was not defined until after Independence Day and its attendant celebrations. Hundreds of thousands lost their lives in the violence. The solidarity of neighborhoods and villages disintegrated.

Khan assembles an impressive array of sources from all levels of the social and political spectrum to paint a convincing picture of official incompetence and unseemly haste. The British were more concerned about withdrawal than with maintaining order as they did so. The political leadership, who should have been better prepared for the possibility of violent mass migration, remained remarkably insouciant, convinced that once power was transferred, all would be well. No such luck.

This dramatic account brings in much needed ground-level detail and opens up partition’s stories to more varied interpretations. It is accessibly written and I recommend it as a much-needed revision of the official partition histories of decades past.

Related recommendations:

Judith M. Brown, Gandhi: Prisoner of Hope (1989)

Penderel Moon, Divide and Quit: An Eye-Witness Account of the Partition of India (1998)

Gyanendra Pandey Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism, and History in India (2001)

Beseiged: Voices from Delhi 1857 by Mahmood Farooqui (2010)

by Isabel Huacuja

During the summer of 1857, Indian rebel soldiers from the British Army attempted to overthrow the British hold on India and reinstall Mughal rule. For five months, rebels seized Delhi and declared the aged Mughal noble, Bahadur Shah Zafar, Emperor of India. Referred to as the 1857 Mutiny by British rulers and as the First War of Independence by enthusiastic nationalists, few events in Indian history incite more passion than the 1857 seige of Delhi. In Besieged: Voices from Delhi 1857, Mahmood Farooqui draws on more than ten thousand Urdu and Persian documents processed by the rebel administration and later used by the British as evidence in Bahadur Shah Zafar’s trial. As Farooqui notes in the introduction, despite the widespread availability of histories, memoires, and essays on the 1857 uprising, we know much about the British experience and remarkably little about what went on within the walls of the seized city. The documents in this collection show how the rebel government administered the city and how the uprising affected ordinary people.

One man asks the rebel government to release his dhobie (washerman) from prison because the dhobie has all the man’s clothing and he has nothing left to wear. A widow asks for financial compensation because rebel soldiers killed her husband and stole all her belongings. Farooqui presents grievances from soldiers who had not been paid, letters from ordinary citizens complaining about harassment by rebel soldiers, documents describing elopements, evictions, burglaries, bail proceedings, gambling, and counterfeit currency. Food was scarce and looting widespread. The city’s sanitation system broke-down and corpses and animal carcasses lay on the streets untouched for months. The documents recount “the unsung, the ordinary, and the unheroic” of 1857.

A few themes run through the selected documents and cannot fail to capture the imagination. First, anti-British sentiments were widespread. Regardless of how the English may have thought of themselves, to the natives, they were “trespassers.” Second, the uprising enjoyed a wide base of support; doctors and lawyers joined the cause along with soldiers and civilians. Third, religion played a role in the uprising as anti-Christian rhetoric was widespread, but, as the translator reminds us, not everybody was affected by “religious fervor.” Fourth, while chaos certainly prevailed in Delhi in 1857, the historiography overemphasizes disorder and confusion and almost completely overlooks attempts at order and organization. In the author’s opinion, the mere existence of an archive produced by and for the rebel government shows “there was some order, organization and method to the outward chaos.”

The papers collected in that archive and presented in this book serve to record a time of turmoil and provide a bird’s eye view of everyday life during a very complicated and multifaceted event.

Voices of India’s Partition, Part I

by Amber Abbas

During the summer of 2005 I embarked on my first research trip. I had recently taken a class on oral history methodology and was eager to put my newly acquired skills to use. My research focuses on a tumultuous time in the history of the Indian subcontinent: the 1947 events that gave India its independence and created the new state of Pakistan. My own family hails from Aligarh, a city about 90 miles southeast of New Delhi and, as Muslims, opted to move to Pakistan. I was aware of this as a child, but because I grew up outside Pakistan, it was not until I began my research and had enough comfort speaking Urdu that I persuaded some of my elderly relatives to tell me their stories of the time of independence and partition.

Lahore's old city from the minaret of the Wazir Khan Mosque — Lahore’s old city from the minaret of the Wazir Khan Mosque. Photo by Aaron Jakes.

Mrs. Zahra Haider was married to my grandmother’s cousin, Khurshid Haider. I have known her my whole life, but it is only in the last few years that I have become close with her and her family. She was born in Dehra Dun. Her father’s name was Yaqoob Shah and her mother’s Zohra Shah. She was raised in Lahore by her Aunt because her mother was unwell. Her father was the Auditor General of Pakistan. He was posted for two years in Washington as Pakistan’s representative to the World Bank, and took his family along with him. She married Khurshid Haider, who died a few years before this interview. Currently she lives in Rawalpindi Pakistan with her son Mohsin and his family.

I interviewed Mrs. Haider at her sister’s home in Lahore, Pakistan. As it was June, and very hot, we sat in a room with the air-conditioning running. The hum is audible on the recording. Throughout the interview, Mrs. Haider’s sister, kept coming in to offer us food or fruit.

She speaks here about her experiences during the 1947 partition, an event that played out violently on the streets of Lahore. Mrs. Haider remembershaving her daily routine disrupted by partition’s displacements. Although she briefly mentions the bureaucratic imperatives of partition, she is mostly focused on personal experiences. It was unbearably hot as they prepared for their exams that summer; in August, many of her friends moved away; the school tuition bills had to be paid; she was scolded by a doctor in a refugee hospital for seeking a few moments of normalcy with her friends; she took clothing from her mother’s laundry to give to the refugees. This focus on the everyday helps us, as historians, to understand the experience of women and youth during partition.

Mrs. Haider’s memories come in snippets that take on comprehensive significance and are influenced by the national history of Pakistan. She speaks of conflicts with Hindus yet, it is the loss of her Hindu friends that she feels most sharply. And the innocence of her surprise at their departure is still evident in her voice. As her story concludes, she refers to a woman who died from her wounds after doctors’ heroic attempts to save her. When she died, her baby daughter became an orphan. Though the story is not included here, one of Mrs. Haider’s friends took that baby home and today, she is practically an older sister of Mrs. Haider’s daughter-in-law, Neely, the daughter of that friend who long ago carried a baby home from the refugee hospital.

Zahra Haider’s story gives a glimpse of Lahore, a primary site of partition’s violent upheavals. She shows us that partition’s disruptions were both massive and mundane. Stories like Mrs. Haider’s bring partition down to ground-level where we can see, hear and feel what partition was like for one young girl trying to make sense of the world around her.

LISTEN TO THE ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW HERE

READ THE ORAL HISTORY INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT HERE

Voices of India’s Partition, Part I: Mrs. Zahra Haider

Interviewed by Amber Abbas

Lahore, Pakistan (June 28, 2005)

Transcript:

Zahra Haider: Actually, I was born in Dehra Dun, the year was 1928. And Dehra Dun is in India. And I was born there. We came back to Lahore and I lived with my grandparents! My own mother got very ill, she had some problem with her legs, she couldn’t walk. She recovered from that, but at that time she was like that. So my Aunt, my father’s sister, she took me over and then I lived with her all my life and she became my adopted mother.

AA: You have lived most of your life in Lahore?

ZH: Most of my life. I remember when we were in our old house, it was a big house, which is a big house with a big courtyard inside and a big garden outside. It was a big area. And we used to all sleep inside in the courtyard with all the beds laid out and mosquito nets and everything and one table fan for all of us because we used to be in a row, all the beds laid out. Then, you know the first sound one woke up to in the morning, was we could hear the noise of the lion roaring in the zoo! Really! That! And then we could hear the cocks, our own cocks and things crow and everything. And then there used to be the Salvation Army band which used to march around outside on the road of our house. These are the few things. There was a beggar woman who used to come early in the morning and she used to sing for her pennies. Those are the few noises I remember very clearly… We can’t hear any lion any more.

[Audio and Transcript Edited from Original]

AA: What happened in Lahore in your memory during the partition days?

ZH: See, we had gone up to Murree. It happened the summer. First, it started with this that we used to sleep upstairs in our house. On the roof! And we used to see—our neighbors were Hindus—surrounded. We had a lot of neighbors who were Hindus and we were quite friendly with them! But we saw them bringing up guns and things. Then we also got our guns. Inside the city, arson started, in the summer. And people were burning—inside the city, there were houses being burned—Hindus would burn Muslims, Muslims would burn Hindus. I don’t say that it was only “the bad Hindus” who were doing it. Muslims did in retaliation also! I don’t know if they started it but that’s how it [indistinguishable]. And it was such a hot summer, you can’t imagine!

We had to have our exams and all. We used to sit inside there, in the rooms—there were no air conditioners then—with the fans going. We had given our exams and all, then after that the real trouble started. Then, of course, our Hindu friends—we had friends, we used to go to the same college and everything—they took all their things away. We said, “Why are you taking them? You’ll come back when the holidays are over!” They said, “No, we are not going to come back if this is Pakistan.” And they took everything they could, you know, and moved.

AA: From the hostel?

ZH: From the hostel, and even from their homes. This is the sad thing, when one people get uprooted from their homes.

[Audio and Text Edited from Original]

When we came back from the hills, we had to go to college for our studies. And when we went to the college, it was closed. The only thing that was up were the bills, on the boards. And then, of course, we paid our bills! And then when our teachers came in they said that there aren’t enough people here, because most of the students were Hindus and Sikhs. Now we were few Muslim girls left. So they said, “No, we will now start.” Because there were a lot of refugees coming into the hostel. Because ours was Kinnaid College and the brother college was FC [Forman Christian] College. And they made FC College into a hospital. We all went. All the wounded people were taken there, the refugees. We went to work over there. They said they’ll give us marks for that. We went there and you can’t imagine what we saw!

[Audio and Transcript Edited from Original]

There were a whole group of us who had to go to work there. We used to be there form the morning to the evening. Then one afternoon we just said, “Let’s take some cold coffee and have sandwiches and have something to drink.” So we were standing upstairs on the roof and having this when the doctor with whom we were working went past and said “Here you are having so much fun and go and see what’s happening downstairs! We went down and a new lot of refugees had come in. Uff! They were in all those wounded states and everything. Then we started off by cleaning their wounds, giving them bath. We needed clothes for them. Half of them were naked. We came home whichever way we could and took out our mother’s old clothes lying to be washed and took them there and gave it to those people. We washed them, scrubbed them. We couldn’t wash them properly. Their hair was absolutely matted and full of lice! We had to cut it open and it was worn down over here, lice coming down that—they were even going all over our hands. But we had to do that! And we gave them baths and bandaged them then brought food for them, and fed them.

Little children without arms, with their hands cut off, they were just saying, “I have no mother, give me something! Give me something!” So one would give them food and things, and feed them. Then there was one occasion, there was this lady who had maggots in her wounds. And she was a beautiful red-headed girl and she had a little baby with her. The doctor spent the whole morning getting out the—first they said, “She’s about to die, we won’t do anything.” There are so many others who we can help. Then they came around the next morning and she was still living. So he picked out all the maggots. And when he had picked them all out, she died. That was so sad.

Review of The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India by Urvashi Butalia (2000) by Urvashi Butalia

Urvashi Butalia’s remarkable book on India’s partition emerged out of the terrible violence that gripped Delhi, not in 1947, when the partition took place, but in 1984. In the wake of Indira Gandhi’s assassination by her Sikh bodyguard, the citizens of Delhi unleashed a murderous campaign of violence on the Sikh community as a whole. Delhi-ites were horrified to discover both the inaction of the local authorities to provide safety and security for citizens, and the failure of the media to report the atrocities taking place.

In response, South Asian scholars began to see for the first time, the holes in the official narratives of India’s 1947 partition into independent Pakistan and India. In this book, Urvashi Butalia turns to oral histories to tell the real story of the violence in Delhi and across North India in 1947. In Butalia’s oral histories both perpetrators and victims of the violence in Punjab reveal amazing stories of complicity and action. She contextualizes the stories by also narrating an official history of partition that covers the major events, including the story of her own divided family. Linking varied narratives illuminates facets of the partition story that are often obscured by concentration on political histories.

Butalia’s revelation that violence against women during the partition was not always connected to the narrative of religious identity gone awry is an important step in creating a gendered history of partition that shows how women became pawns in a national game about honor and community. The bodies of women came to represent the strength of different communities and their vulnerability exposed the weakness of male protectors.

Throughout these explorations, Butalia’s own concerns about the relationship between nation-building and violence come to the fore. Her oral histories consistently point to violence as an “outsider” act, perpetrated on communities by people from outside those communities. Butalia explains, “as long as violence can be located somewhere outside, a distance away from the boundaries of family and the community, it can be contained. It is for this reason, I feel, that during Partition, and in so much of the recall of Partition, violence is seen as relating only to the ‘other.’”

Many of Butalia’s partition narratives are surprising and touching. They reveal the difficulties of remembering violence and speaking about it aloud. Some of Butalia’s brave narrators remember their own complicity in actions that sharply defined religious difference and marginalized religious minorities, which became one of many reasons the subcontinent was divided.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

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