Sunday, June 15, 2003		Books

Hidden histories
Rumina Sethi

The Partitions of Memory: The Afterlife of the Division of India.
Edited by Suvir Kaul. Permanent Black,
New Delhi. Pages 301.

WITH the winning of Independence in 1947 came the devastating experience of Partition. The many difficulties bound up with the problematic history and politics of the Hindu and the Muslim communities were finally ‘resolved’ in the vivisection of Punjab and Bengal, where the Muslims were in a majority, to fashion West and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh).

Thousands died in the terrible riots, which erupted as refugees moved across the new borders to relocate themselves. Thousands were left homeless and destitute. The holocaust of Partition was in a way more horrifying than the extermination of Jews by the Nazis, as Gyanendra Pandey has put it in his recent book, Remembering Partition. For many people involved in the national movement, Partition was simply a failure, even a letting down, of the national ideal and the resulting nation. Suvir Kaul’s collection of essays is a welcome companion to other books on Partition that appeared recently, namely the two volumes of Pangs of Partition by S. Settar and Indira Baptista Gupta, Translating Partition by Ravikant and Tarun K. Saint, and Inventing Boundaries by Mushirul Hasan.

The Partitions of Memory begins poetically indeed: Kaul takes support from Arundhati Roy’s misgivings about the nuclear tests in 1998 which, ironically, link these two ill-fated nations and remind them that they share the same destiny. The wind and the rain will decide where the fallout of the nuclear disaster will be, Lahore and Amritsar being only 30 km apart. Kaul links up the Partition’s ‘unfinished business’ to the PM’s yearly speech, to cricket matches between India and Pakistan, to the countless tales emerging from oral testimony, to school syllabi which should include tales about Partition, and to a re-examination of a ‘no-faults’ nationalism.

One of the constituencies to which the history of Partition, in its splintered form, has been most indifferent to, is the history of gender. Urvashi Butalia’s The Other Side of Silence and Kamla Bhasin and Ritu Menon’s Borders and Boundaries stress that there has been no feminist historiography of the Partition of India. In the words of Joan Kelly, women’s history has a dual goal: to restore women to history and to restore our history to women. The contributors to Kaul’s volume have the intention of doing that although the only essay nudging feminist concerns is Priyamvada Gopal’s analysis of Manto’s ‘Thanda Gosht.’ Since the historical archive has so little to offer in terms of women’s experience, a greater emphasis on gender would undeniably have been a great asset. Gopal argues about the sexual inadequacy in Manto’s male characters, which is as important as the gendered communal violence these stories depict. It is her contention that Manto shows the male psyche itself being reconstituted in incidents of male sexual violence against women. We need to understand that this is history too albeit in a fictionalised form. One can call it oral history or personal history and can place this history alongside documented history, which we so thoroughly trust.

The purpose of the book is to examine memories of Partition, the trauma and the dislocation, particularly the way it affects our functioning and our institutions today. Alongside, it explores "healing and recovery, repression and forgetting, (and the) ... re-enactment and reiterations of the original divide." The book also proposes to introduce new methodologies of analysing group identities and national representations. Such methods would involve psychoanalytic tools or the contemporary concepts of deconstruction. These proposed objectives are not often followed in the contributions. Many a time, contributors ‘fit’ the research previously done on related topics into a new framework of ideas even as they may not be completely compatible.

Urvashi Butalia’s essay deserves special mention. Butalia takes as her archive the many letters written by trauma victims to the administrative authorities for help, assistance and rehabilitation. This, she says, constitutes the ‘underside’ of the history of Partition, a history of silence and neglect, owing not so much to the indifference of the historian but to the pain of Partition which has needed more than half a century for academics to come to terms with it. Butalia focuses on the human dimension of Partition, ignoring (understandably) the main plays—Nehru, Gandhi, Jinnah and Mountbatten—and tells exceptionally poignant stories, particularly that of Harkishan Singh Bedi who established contact with Chaudhry Latif, the new Muslim occupant of Bedi’s abandoned house in Lahore. A moving relationship was established between the two across the border and Bedi was able to recover all his beloved books and papers he had had to leave behind in Pakistan. Butalia evokes the anguish of these people, as she did in her earlier book, even among the current readership whose families may have been uprooted during the Partition. This is a valuable record, "not of violence and loot, but instead of the bonds of humanity and friendship stretching across borders."

While there exist an abundance of official papers, documents, private diaries, accords and treaties, political histories and newspaper records, it makes us aware of the paucity of social histories and the absence of cultural, psychological and social studies about Partition. Kaul’s collection is a timely addition to the task of recollection.