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Editorial Board Ishan Chakrabarti – Co-Editor-in-Chief, The University of Texas at Austin Justin Fifield – Co-Editor-in-Chief, The University of Texas at Austin Cary Curtiss – Editor, The University of Texas at Austin Dana Kornberg – Editor, The University of Texas at Austin Elliott McCarter – Editor, The University of Texas at Austin Kathryn Page-Lippsmeyer – Editor, The University of Texas at Austin Jacqueline Pallardy – Editor, The University of Texas at Austin Urmila Patil– Editor, The University of Texas at Austin Sanvita Sample – Editor, The University of Texas at Austin Keely Sutton – Editor, The University of Texas at Austin Faculty Advisor Syed Akbar Hyder, Department of Asian Studies Editorial Advisory Board Richard Barnett, The University of Virginia Manu Bhagavan, Hunter College-CUNY Nandi Bhatia, The University of Western Ontario Purnima Bose, Indiana University Raza Mir, Monmouth University Gyan Prakash, Princeton University Paula Richman, Oberlin College Eleanor Zelliot, Carleton College The University of Texas Editorial Advisory Board Kamran Ali, Department of Anthropology James Brow, Department of Anthropology Barbara Harlow, Department of English Janice Leoshko, Department of Art and Art History W. Roger Louis, Department of History Gail Minault, Department of History Veena Naregal, Department of Radio-Television-Film Sharmila Rudrappa, Department of Sociology Martha Selby, Department of Asian Studies Kamala Visweswaran, Department of Anthropology SAGAR A SOUTH ASIA GRADUATE RESEARCH JOURNAL Sponsored by South Asia Institute Itty Abraham, Director The University of Texas at Austin Volume 17, Fall 2007 Sagar is published biannually in the fall and spring of each year. The editors are responsible for the final selection of the content of the journal and reserve the right to reject any material deemed inappropriate for publication. Articles presented in the journal do not represent the views of either the South Asia Institute at The University of Texas at Austin or the Sagar editors. Responsibility for the opinions expressed and the accuracy of the facts published in articles and reviews rests solely with the individual authors. Requests for permission to reprint articles should be directed to the individual authors. All correspondence regarding subscriptions, advertising, or business should be addressed to: Sagar South Asia Institute The University of Texas at Austin 1 University Station G9300 Austin, TX 78712-0587 USA Sagar is not printed with state funds. Sagar does not discriminate on any basis prohibited by applicable law including but not limited to caste, creed, disability, ethnicity, gender, national origin, race, religion, or sexual orientation. Volume 17, Fall 2007 TABLE OF CONTENTS Articles Thinking Through Partition AMBER ABBAS ……………….. 1-10 Comparison of Tamil Political Movements in India and Sri Lanka MADURIKA RASARATNAM ……………….. 11-34 Women, Rice, and Ritual ELEANOR SHOREMAN ……………….. 35-44 Freedom in the Suicidal Act: A Political and Gendered Reading of Two Kabuki Plays TORSTEN SANNAR ……………….. 45-54 From Family Planning to Family Reunification: Reproducing Indian Diasporas AMY BHATT ……………….. 55-68 Voters’ Ethnicity and National Identity: in the Case of Taiwan TAOFANG HUANG ……………….. 69-82 Thinking Through Partition AMBER ABBAS THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN Partition for India’s Muslims was a profound national trauma, an extraordinary disruption of “the institutional underpinnings of the social order” (Neal 1998, xi). In Pakistan today, even in families directly affected by their partition move, many people choose not to speak of Partition at all. Those who do often describe the extent of Pakistan’s disadvantage relative to India in 1947. There is a common narrative about how poorly Pakistan fared in the division of assets that established Pakistan’s history in direct opposition to India’s. The oppositional aspect of this narrative is part of the triumphal story of the establishment of the nation-state as the culmination of the Pakistan movement. In the popular imagination, this national story must reconcile the intellectual antecedents of the Pakistan Movement with the demand for statehood and the competing calls of non-territorial and territorial nationalism. It is, as such, a fragmented tale stitched together by a series of myths and teleologies. For a particular group of Pakistani narrators, recounting their personal relationship to Muslim nationalism means developing a narrative in which they can emphasize their connection to institutions in India, without acknowledging India’s role as a space which contains Muslim history, houses important Muslim monuments and in which the Muslim dynasties flourished for hundreds of years.1 These narrators, all men old enough to remember the events of 1947, are Aligarh educated professionals. They migrated to Pakistan during the period of the Partition and have built their lives there. They have used the national narrative to redefine India in officially acceptable ways, but by localizing their memories they have not fully allowed that national narrative to redefine their own stories. 1 These narratives do not illuminate the experiences of other marginalized communities, women or the poor. In fact, the narrators are myopic in their treatment of their own community, and this narrow view is a distinguishing feature of many of these interviews. This exploration, therefore, is similarly narrow, an exploration of narratives collected in interviews with a dozen people in the Pakistani cities of Lahore, Karachi, and Islamabad in the summers of 2005 and 2006. 2 AMBER ABBAS The exchange below, which took place during an interview in Lahore, Pakistan in July 2006, reveals the disruption in one narrator’s family as a result of their decision to migrate to Pakistan. This narrator, Major General Wajahat Husain (Ret’d) of the Pakistan Army, chose to move because, as a recently commissioned army officer, he expected the move to benefit his career. His family, however, made their decision in haste, in the middle of the night, and under threat. In trying to locate his relationship to Aligarh, the city in which his family had lived for generations, and a center of Muslim cultural and intellectual life, I asked: AA: Do you ever miss India? WH: No. AA: I just wonder [because] Muslims gave up a lot to come to Pakistan. WH: Especially my family… They gave up a lot and all said and done, it was our childhood. We were very happy. We were very well brought up, very well brought up, we were well educated, we had excellent friends… The fact is that I had made up my mind when Pakistan was established. My mind was oriented towards going to Pakistan and joining the Pakistan Army. I have never regretted it. AA: Do you think your parents ever missed it? WH: No… All they were concerned with was the well-being of the children—there were nine of us. The main reason why my father left was when he realized there was no future for us in India. Whatever they had was worthless because [there was no opportunity] for all these children. (personal interview, July 11, 2006, Lahore) In his critique of Partition historiography, Gyanendra Pandey establishes Partition as a “limit case” of historiography, a moment so colored by horror that it is unique (Pandey 2001, 45). But he challenges historiography that treats Partition violence as a “problem of origins.” The problem of origins is insufficient to explain the trauma, disruptive as it is, of the pre-existing situation, that is, of the origins themselves (ibid., 49-50). What interests me about narratives of origins is not how I might use them to explain or understand the violence of partition. Rather, I can use them to understand how a community remembers its origins to create continuities in the midst of THINKING THROUGH PARTITION 3 trauma that allow it to survive that trauma. As David Gilmartin has suggested, the problems with narrating Partition should encourage historians to “place the tension between multiple realities and the production of shared moral meaning at the very heart of the partition story” (Gilmartin 1998, 1070). To explore these tensions and to look for historical continuities in what has been characterized as a moment of rupture is to complicate a view of history that has become codified in official and collective memory. I suggest that Partition is more than a moment, and that if, as historians, we can treat it as ongoing then we can in fact address the multiple realities of the Partition story. By expanding the chronology of partition, the event itself can incorporate the narratives of community and change that are excluded by a more limited historical approach. This move creates space for a long- term understanding of Partition as it exists in narrative today. To me, Partition is a process of unhitching communities from their pasts, the physical, spiritual and emotional ties that bind them to space and to chronology. The stories told by the several narrators I have interviewed have shown me how their community reconnected those ties to build (they actually said, “reestablish” or “recreate”) their future in a new space: Pakistan. A natural entry point for me into the rich traditions of North Indian Muslims is the powerful educational institution of the Aligarh Muslim University and the vision of its founder, Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan, whose vocabulary and priorities occupied a prominent place in the drive for Muslim statehood in the twentieth-century. Sir Sayyid certainly recognized the importance of institutional continuity as he sought to restore status to the Muslim community in North India. Emerging out of another national crisis of enormous importance, the rebellion of 1857— what Pakistanis today call the First War of Independence— Sir Sayyid embarked on a mission “to restore continuity to the social realm” of Muslims by defining them as a “moral community” (Neal 1998, 21 & 33). Disruptions to everyday life, such as the events of 1857, and of course Partition, become points of coherence in the collective memory of that community.

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