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Generations of Memory: Remembering Partition in India/Pakistan and Israel/Palestine

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Generations of Memory: Remembering Partition in India/Pakistan and Israel/Palestine Generations of Memory: Remembering Partition in India/Pakistan and Israel/Palestine Jonathan D. Greenberg Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Volume 25, Number 1, 2005, pp. 89-110 (Article) Published by Duke University Press For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/185343 Access provided by University of South Dakota (6 Sep 2018 15:21 GMT) Generations of Memory: Remembering Partition in India/Pakistan and Israel/Palestine Jonathan D. Greenberg I had lost everything, forty people of our family were martyred, but the happiness I found when I saw the Pakistan flag flying at the Pakistan border is still living in every cell of my body. —Hurmat Bibi, after more than four decades, remembering her 1947 flight from Nikodar in East Punjab MOURNING AND MEMORY How much blood has to be spilled until we understand that land is not holier than people’s lives? —Ilan Leibowitz, Israeli Knesset member, July 2004 n 14–15 August 1947 in India—and again, nine months later, on 14 May 1948 in O Palestine—the bitterly contested problem of postcolonial governance and social or- der in each British territory was “resolved” by the partition of the land on the basis of ethnicity.1 Since then, indigenous and foreign historians (and, to a lesser extent, anthro- pologists) have produced two enormous sets of literature on the origins and consequences of partition in South Asia and the Middle East. Each historiography or ethnography is produced, and received, in the context of a highly charged political debate within each respective society concerning partition’s national and regional legacy. However, very little scholarship has compared these historically simultaneous partition and nation-building processes or the ways in which they are remembered. In an effort to suggest a research agenda for comparative partition historiography and ethnography, I ex- Comparative Studies of amine how partition’s meaning and memory have been constituted, and reconstituted, in 2 each national community. By considering partition’s memory across national borders and South Asia, Africa and regional distances, I hope to suggest an expanded framework in which the unresolved legacy of these cataclysmic events can be assessed: a larger space for reflection than might otherwise the Middle East be permitted within the familiar, separate boundaries of each community’s bitterly contested, intensely polarized, internally oriented discourse. A Duke University Press Vol. 25, No. 1, 2005 The author wishes to thank Roger Friedland, Natsuko Green- Punjab, and the Partition of the Subcontinent, ed. Ian Talbot berg, Rebecca Saunders, and Matt Sommer for their generosity and Gurharpal Singh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), and counsel during the writing of this article. 246, 252; and (2) Ha’aretz staff, “Hanegbi Warns: ‘The Assassin Is Already among Us,’” Ha’aretz, 7 July 2004. 1. The two epigraphs come from the following sources: (1) M. M. Mirza and S. Bakht, eds., Azadi ke Mujahyd (Lahore: 2. See Jonathan D. Greenberg, “Divided Lands, Phantom Limbs: Jang, 1989), 16, cited in Ian Talbot, “Literature and the Human Partition in the Indian Subcontinent, Palestine, China, and Ko- Drama of the 1947 Partition,” in Region and Partition: Bengal, rea,” Journal of International Affairs 57 (2004): 7–27. 89 90 The first part of this article reflects on Jerusalem. To one family (or part of a family) the meaning of “partition” in each population’s the association confirms a homeland secured, collective memory.3 The second part examines to another a home lost forever. Still, it is useful how the state-building project in India, Pak- to create a rough map of partition’s domain in istan, and Israel, and the emerging Palestinian each regional context, in order to suggest an ap- national-liberation project, shaped dominant proximate baseline for comparisons within and versions of respective “first generation” parti- across the cases, and to understand how this Be- tion narratives. The third part analyzes how setzung operates in similar and different ways in these dominant historical narratives have been each context. Comparative reenvisioned by scholars within the second, “hinge generation” of Indians and Pakistanis,4 Evoking “1947” and “1948” Studies of and Israelis and Palestinians.5 To Indians and Pakistanis, the term “partition” (often rendered with a capital “P” and effec- South Asia, What Does “Remembering Partition” Mean? tively synonymous with the term “1947”) trig- Africa and the Partition, the political division of formerly in- gers associations to a highly charged, intensely tegrated territory, in these cases refers to a contradictory set of images, memories, and Middle East set of interrelated historical events that remain meanings intimately related to core issues of fraught with intense emotional significance for personal and national identity. millions who lived through them, and their chil- Above all, one is struck by the almost un- dren and grandchildren. In this context, it is bearable tension of opposites these associations useful to understand “partition” as a code word contain. On the one hand, “partition” corre- evoking layers of psychologically heightened, sponds to collective memories of overwhelming politically resonant meaning. In psychoanalytic trauma: 12 million refugees fleeing their homes terms, “partition” can be seen as a set of associa- under circumstances of terror, panic, and eth- tions to which an individual has invested a high nic cleansing; between several hundred thou- degree of psychic energy and identification; to sand and 2 million people slaughtered; tens use Freud’s analogy, it is as if such “cathected” of thousands of women raped and abducted; associations are infused with an electric current. countless individual acts of atrocity; hundreds (“Cathexis” is James Strachey’s pseudoscientific of thousands more killed by malnutrition and translation of Freud’s original, more resonant disease.6 On the other hand, associations to term: Besetzung, or “occupying,” i.e., libidinal “partition” or “1947” correspond to core nar- energy occupying, or attaching itself to, an ob- ratives of national liberation and triumph: the ject.) final victory of historic anticolonial struggles in At the outset, then, it is essential to rec- which millions had participated and sacrificed ognize that “partition” has no consistent mean- over decades; the birth of new independent ing for populations across these cases and states; the transformation of national identity can only be understood in the context of de- and agency for the subcontinent’s vast popula- tailed, specific memories, images, and stories tions, who suddenly released themselves from remembered and transmitted by individuals. dependency as subjects of the British Raj to be- “Partition” means Lahore, Delhi, or Bombay; come citizens in new sovereign republics. Kashmir, Punjab, or Bengal; Jaffa, Haifa, or 3. Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. 5. Eva Hoffman, After Such Knowledge: Memory, His- 6. See Urvashi Butalia, The Other Side of Silence: Lewis A. Coser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, tory, and the Legacy of the Holocaust (New York: Voices from the Partition of India (Durham, NC: Duke 1992); see also Nancy Wood, Vectors of Memory: Public Affairs, 2004), 103. My reference to “Israelis and University Press, 2000), 3; see also Gyanendra Pandey, Legacies of Trauma in Postwar Europe (Oxford: Berg, Palestinians” is a shorthand, as it does not acknowl- Remembering Partition: Violence, Nationalism, and 1999), 1. edge the fact that a significant percentage of Pales- History in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University tinian Arabs are Israeli citizens, and a significant per- Press, 2001), 88–91. 4. Because I focus on the 1947 partition of the sub- centage of Israeli citizens are Palestinian Arabs. continent, this article does not specifically address the 1971 Pakistani civil war, the transformation of East Pakistan into an independent Bangladesh, or the memory of either partition among Bangladeshis. What does “partition” mean to Palestini- and children, and the ongoing national suffer- 91 ans and Israelis? The first partition of the Pales- ing and humiliation that remains its legacy. tine Mandate territory, granted to Britain by What caused this exodus? Dominant Is- the League of Nations in 1920, effectively took raeli accounts, especially in the initial decades place in the following year, when the man- of the state—to the extent that they remember dated land east of the Jordan River became the Palestinian refugees, or explain the causes allocated to Transjordan (and closed to Jew- of their flight, at all—emphasize panic and fear ish settlement). “Partition” also refers to the caused by the surrounding war between Jew- 29 November 1947 United Nations Partition ish and invading Arab forces, and specifically Plan, a plan endorsed by the UN General As- the pleas of local Arab leaders, the evacuation sembly, accepted by David Ben-Gurion and the orders by Arab commanders, and the expecta- Jewish Agency, rejected by the Palestinian Arabs tion of a prompt return after Jewish defeat. But and neighboring Arab states, and never imple- Palestinians remember panic and fear caused mented. But to the extent “partition” has a by successful Haganah offensives against ma- Jonathan D. Greenberg shared meaning between Israelis and Palestini- jor population centers, specific campaigns of Generations of Memory ans, it is “1948,” a term that encompasses the forced expulsion (the largest examples
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