Neeti NAIR, Changing Homelands: Hindu Politics and the Partition of India

204 Book Reviews / JESHO 55 (2012) 183-213

Neeti NAIR, Changing Homelands: Hindu Politics and the Partition of India. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2011. x + 346 pp. ISBN: 978-0-674-05779-1 (hbk.). $55.00 / £40.95 / €49.50.

In the last decade or so, a new field of ‘Partition Studies’ has emerged in scholarship on South Asia. This field is interdisciplinary: spanning disci- plines like history, anthropology, gender studies, and literary studies, schol- ars in ‘Partition Studies’ have devoted themselves to re-examining the transition and transformation that was the 1947 partition of British India. When the British decolonized India, they also divided it, creating two new nations India and Pakistan. This partition was bloody as by unofficial counts almost two million people died in ethnic violence and at least six- teen million were displaced, generating what was the modern world’s larg- est mass migration in under nine months. Neeti Nair’s Changing Homelands is part of this tremendously generative new field; it offers a compelling historical account that revisits four decades leading up to the Partition, in order to offer a fuller account of the complex role played by Punjabi Hin- dus in the political negotiations that generated Partition. By attending to institutional and discursive negotiations around ‘Punjabi Hindu’ identity in the early twentieth century, Nair skillfully complicates dominant histo- riographical usage of the terms ‘communalism’ and ‘secular nationalism’ when narrating Partition and its violence. Arguing instead for a historically attentive, nuanced understanding of how religiously enumerated communities negotiated political power in colonial India, Nair’s book offers a new look at the communalism vs. nationalism binary that dominates conven- tional Indian historiography. The first chapter, ‘Loyalty and Anti-colonial Nationalism’, explores the emergence of a Punjabi Hindu constituency as a community of interest in the first decade of the twentieth century. Nair shows how this community was constituted around an anti-colonial agrarian movement as well as against the backdrop of the British policy of separate electorates for Muslims and the Punjab Land Alienation Act of 1907 that newly restricted the acquisition of agricultural land. The chapter underscores the complex set of political forces at this time—‘a tactical loyalism, an emotive anti- colonialism, communal patriotism, and communal antagonism’ (7)—that shaped the conflicting loyalties of Punjabi Hindus in early twentieth century India. Chapter two, ‘Negotiating a Minority Status’, provides an important analysis of the Hindu-Muslim Kohat Riot in the North West Frontier

Province (NWFP) in 1924, which led to the forced evacuation of the minority Hindus from Kohat. Offering a close-range look at the riot and its aftermath, Nair skillfully unveils how Kohat’s Muslims were represented as the aggressors responsible for the riots, erasing in the process the role of the British and the sangathanists in the Hindus’ violent displacement. The chapter analyses how the Kohat Riot got mobilized in public and political discourse across India in order to articulate various ‘communal’ and ‘nationalist’ agendas. This chapter thus introduces what the book as a whole enacts: it complicates the easy labeling of some organizations and politi- cians like Lala Lajpat Rai (1865-1928) as ‘communalist’—underscoring the shifting politics and alliances of many leading Punjabi Hindu figures of this period as they negotiated being a religious minority in Punjab, advo- cating for just power-sharing, and being a religious majority in India. Chapter three, ‘Religion and Non-Violence in Punjabi Politics’, addresses two moments in the twenties that challenge the categorization of key Pun- jabi political figures and their protests as either ‘communal’ or ‘nationalist’: Swami Shraddhanand (1856-1926) led the anti-Rowlatt Act agitation in Delhi in 1919, and Bhagat Singh (1907-1931) led the hunger strikes to demand rights for political prisoners between 1929 and 1931. While both popular actions had elements of Hindu-Muslim unity and non-violent protest as espoused by Gandhi and the Congress, Nair persuasively shows that the political success and opportunity for inter-ethnic alliance they represented were compromised in their neglect by Gandhi as well as main- stream Congress-led politics. The fourth chapter, ‘Towards an All-India Settlement’, illuminates the complex collusions and conflicts that raged through the 1930s and 1940s, as various pan-India settlements to share power among the religiously defined communities were pursued, negotiated, and contested. With clar- ity and sharp insight, Nair analyzes the political debates around minority rights, unveils the different meanings that settled onto the termPakistan during this period, and cites the numerous alternative possibilities for power-sharing signaled by many Punjabi participants that suggest that the Partition of India was not necessarily, as it has been claimed by some, inevitable. Chapter five, ‘Partition Violence and the Question of Responsibility’, rewrites Partition’s ethnic violence, arguing that it was not caused by religious fanaticism, but was the result of the breakdown of political negotiations for power. Here, Nair indicts the British ruling elite as pri- marily responsible for this violence, showing that this breakdown ‘had