Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India

Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism and History in India Gyanendra Pandey CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Remembering Partition Violence, Nationalism and History in India Through an investigation of the violence that marked the partition of British India in 1947, this book analyses questions of history and memory, the nationalisation of populations and their pasts, and the ways in which violent events are remembered (or forgotten) in order to en- sure the unity of the collective subject – community or nation. Stressing the continuous entanglement of ‘event’ and ‘interpretation’, the author emphasises both the enormity of the violence of 1947 and its shifting meanings and contours. The book provides a sustained critique of the procedures of history-writing and nationalist myth-making on the question of violence, and examines how local forms of sociality are consti- tuted and reconstituted by the experience and representation of violent events. It concludes with a comment on the different kinds of political community that may still be imagined even in the wake of Partition and events like it. GYANENDRA PANDEY is Professor of Anthropology and History at Johns Hopkins University. He was a founder member of the Subaltern Studies group and is the author of many publications including The Con- struction of Communalism in Colonial North India (1990) and, as editor, Hindus and Others: the Question of Identity in India Today (1993). This page intentionally left blank Contemporary South Asia 7 Editorial board Jan Breman, G.P. Hawthorn, Ayesha Jalal, Patricia Jeffery, Atul Kohli Contemporary South Asia has been established to publish books on the politics, society and culture of South Asia since 1947. In acces- sible and comprehensive studies, authors who are already engaged in researching specific aspects of South Asian society explore a wide vari- ety of broad-ranging and topical themes. The series will be of interest to anyone who is concerned with the study of South Asia and with the legacy of its colonial past. 1 Ayesha Jalal, Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia: AComparativeandHistoricalPerspective 2 Jan Breman, Footloose Labour: Working in India’s Informal Economy 3 Roger Jeffery and Patricia Jeffery, Population, Gender and Politics: Demographic Change in Rural North India 4 Oliver Mendelsohn and Marika Vicziany, The Untouchables: Subordination, Poverty and the State in Modern India 5 Robert Jenkins, Democratic Politics and Economic Reform in India 6 Atul Kohli (ed.), The Success of India’s Democracy This page intentionally left blank Remembering Partition Violence, Nationalism and History in India Gyanendra Pandey Johns Hopkins University PUBLISHED BY CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS (VIRTUAL PUBLISHING) FOR AND ON BEHALF OF THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 IRP 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia http://www.cambridge.org © Gyanendra Pandey 2001 This edition © Gyanendra Pandey 2003 First published in printed format 2001 A catalogue record for the original printed book is available from the British Library and from the Library of Congress Original ISBN 0 521 80759 X hardback Original ISBN 0 521 00250 8 paperback ISBN 0 511 01897 5 virtual (netLibrary Edition) To Nishad (once more) and to Ruby – for being there. This page intentionally left blank Contents Acknowledgements page x List of abbreviations xiii 1 By way of introduction 1 2 The three partitions of 1947 21 3 Historians’ history 45 4 The evidence of the historian 67 5 Folding the local into the national: Garhmukhteshwar, November 1946 92 6 Folding the national into the local: Delhi 1947–1948 121 7 Disciplining difference 152 8 Constructing community 175 Select bibliography 206 Index 212 ix Acknowledgements I owe a deep debt of gratitude to colleagues, friends and the many other people who have helped in innumerable ways in the making of this book. First, to those who raised many of the questions considered in this book as they watched Colombo 1983, Delhi 1984 and Ayodhya 1992, with tears in their eyes. Secondly, to those who lived through 1947 and have given so generously of their time and energy in talking to me, and to many other researchers, about it. For invaluable assistance and kindness in aiding my search for oral accounts of Partition, I especially thank Sant Harnam Singh Gandhi, our eighty-year-old ‘newspaper man’ who introduced me to the vibrant community of Kahuta Sikhs settled in Bhogal; and Mr S. S. Dhanoa in Chandigarh for his personal recollections and for taking me to Gharuan and facilitating my numerous conversations there and in Mohali. Also, for their camaraderie and exceptional support: Anuradha Kapur, Mrs M. N. Kapur and Syeda Saiyidain Hameed in Delhi; Anil Joshi in Chandigarh; Mohammad Aslam in Allahabad; and David Page, Viqar Ahmed and Sayeed Hasan Khan saheb in London. Thirdly, to the academic and research institutions that made this work possible. To the librarians and staff of the National Archives of India and the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi; the UP State Archives, Lucknow; the Haryana Secretariat Library, Chandigarh; the India Office Library, London; the Indian Institute Library, Oxford; the Southampton University Library; and the Regenstein Library, University of Chicago. To colleagues, students and staff in the history department, University of Delhi, where I taught from 1986 to 1998; and in the anthropology and history departments at the Johns Hopkins University where I am currently teaching. Also to the history departments, University of Chicago and University of Michigan at Ann Arbor; the politics department, La Trobe University, Melbourne; and the South Asia Research Unit, School of Social Sciences, Curtin University of Technology, Perth, which have invited me periodically over the last decade and given me the benefit of responses and questions in numerous x Acknowledgements xi seminars and classes: and especially to Bernard Cohn, Nicholas Dirks, Peter Reeves, John McGuire and Robin Jeffrey for making these visits possible. To Peter Reeves at Curtin, and Ravinder Kumar, then Direc- tor of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library and Chairman of the Indian Council of Historical Research, I am also grateful for grants that enabled me to carry out a good part of the oral history research that un- derlies many of the questions raised in this study. Also to Dr Mohinder Singh in Delhi, and to Dr Paramjit Singh Judge and Professor Harish Puri in Amritsar, for help in research on Punjab and in translation from the Punjabi. Then, there are intellectual debts that are less easily pinpointed. My colleagues in the Subaltern Studies editorial group have seen this book grow from very small beginnings. Shahid Amin, Gautam Bhadra, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Partha Chatterjee and David Hardiman are intellectual comrades of three decades’ standing. As on earlier occasions, they have been subjected to multiple versions of the various parts of this book and have given freely of their advice and criticism. My heartfelt thanks to them. Also to a more recent set of comrades, critics and friends – Talal Asad, Veena Das, Nicholas Dirks, M. Ali Khan, Ruby Lal, Deepak Mehta, Gabrielle Spiegel – who read the manuscript, insisted on further reflection and clarification and saved me from many errors. Javeed Alam, Alok Bhalla, Sudhir Chandra, Mamadou Diouf, Peter Geschiere, Anjan Ghosh, Nayanjot Lahiri, Chowdhury Mohammad Naim, David Page and Peter Reeves have been important interlocutors. Sudhir, David and Peter (Reeves), Barbara and Tom Metcalf and two anonymous readers of Cambridge University Press took on the additional burden of reading through and commenting on the entire manuscript. Christopher Bayly did the same and made several helpful suggestions regarding publishers. My deep gratitude to all of them. Qadri Ismail, Pradeep Jeganathan, Vijay Prashad, Ram Narayan Singh Rawat, Nilanjan Sarkar and Ravikant Sharma have helped with many questions over the years. The last three, along with Shahina Arslan, Pragati Mahapatra and Sanjay Sharma also provided valuable research assistance. Again, I could not have done without the technical assistance given by Reena Tandon, Deepak Verma and Liz Torres in the final stages of preparation of the manuscript. To them all, and to Marigold Acland and Sara Adhikari, my vigilant editors at Cambridge University Press, I am greatly indebted for their part in the making of this book. Parts of chapters 6 and 8 have appeared in a different form, in papers I published in Economic and Political Weekly (9 August and 6 September 1997); part of chapter 7 in Comparative Studies in Society and History, 41, 4 (1999); and parts of chapters 3 and 8 in my Deuskar lectures, xii Acknowledgements published by the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, under the title Memory, History and the Question of Violence, in 1999. I am indebted to the editors and publishers of all these for permission to use this material once again in this book. Finally, and briefly, a few essential personal acknowledgements: to Bhupen Khakhar who so readily and generously allowed the use of his untitled painting for the cover; to my parents, my sisters and their signif- icant others, for their interest and support; and to Nishad, and to Ruby, for all they have meant to me. Abbreviations IOR India Office Library and Records, now part of the British Library, London. NAI National Archives of India, New Delhi. NMML Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi. xiii This page intentionally left blank 1 By way of introduction Questions of violence, nationhood and history This book focuses on a moment of rupture and genocidal violence, mark- ing the termination of one regime and the inauguration of two new ones. It seeks to investigate what that moment of rupture, and the violent founding of new states claiming the legitimacy of nation-statehood, tells us about the procedures of nationhood, history and particular forms of sociality.

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