The well-known Hindi writer Krishna Sobti once said that Partition was difficult to forget but dangerous to remember. Her counterpart and contemporary, Amrita Pritam, addressed the issue somewhat indirectly — she spoke through the medium of poetry, addressing her question to Punjab’s legendary poet, Waris Shah, who created the story of Heer and Ranjha, star-crossed lovers of the Punjab: I ask you Waris Shah/Let your voice rise from within your grave/When one Heer died in Punjab/You penned an epic lament/Now that hundreds of Heers are being violated/Why are you silent Waris Shah?
In many ways, both writers put their finger unerringly on that most difficult problem of all: the importance of remembering a violent history, for the sake of those who lived through it and died; those who lived through it and survived; and those who may have had little to do with it directly, but are deeply involved with taking its legacies — negative as well as positive — into the future.
In this sense, Partition history is indeed difficult to forget. Despite the fact that in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, bureaucrats, politicians, the State, its historians and intelligentsia, and indeed its people, have done their best to sweep the uncomfortable aspects of this history under the carpet, it continues to make its presence felt again and again. The existence of Partition survivors and their stories continually reminds us that this was once a shared history and, in many ways even today, it continues to cross and extend borders as only personal stories can do.
Why is it then a history that is dangerous to remember? Dangerous for whom? Perhaps it is because Partition history can reveal so much that is uncomfortable, unsettling and difficult to accept that people are understandably reluctant to make that journey.
How dangerous and how disturbing can knowledge really be? Is it better to know or not to know? Hard on the heels of these questions is a more pragmatic one, for those who believe remembering is important and necessary: where are the records, the details that can lead them back to their family histories? Newspaper records have little to offer; police documents are often not recorded properly, or recorded at all.
In recent years, literature — understood in its wider sense — has offered us a rich seam that can be mined to begin to understand the many aspects of Partition. Two things stand out about this body of work — much of it is by women and, perhaps, for that reason much of it goes beyond the dominant narrative of Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims, choosing instead to look at minorities, at women, at Dalits and at the impact of Partition in areas beyond just the north and the east.
Academic work, for example, is not usually counted as literature. And yet, much academic writing on Partition in recent years has focused on literature, on visuality, on culture, on performance and on memory. Even a random list of writers throws up mainly women’s names: Ritu Menon, Kamla Bhasin, Veena Das, Wazira Zamindar, Yasmin Khan, Ananya Jahanara Kabir, Rita Kothari, Kavita Panjabi, Sukeshi Kamra, Jhuma Sen, Prajna Parasher, Niti Nair, Kavita Daiya, Deepti Misri, to name only a few. Together, these scholars have explored areas that have so far remained little touched upon.
Indeed female scholars have added new areas of exploration to the research on Partition. They have drawn attention to women’s stories, to the stories of ordinary people, to the role of caste in this history, to the stories of minorities, of nomads and wanderers, to the first-person narrative, the oral account, the memories held in pictures and objects. In other words, to aspects that so called ‘mainstream’ historians have traditionally shied away from. Instead, these scholars have confidently asserted their claim to the mainstream, while inflecting it with their concerns.
To the academic has been added the literary and the biographical. So writers like Sobti and Pritam and Chughtai and Mastoor and Begum Shah Nawaz and Bapsi Sidhwa join Anis Kidwai and Kamlaben Patel and Mridula Sarabhai and Usha Mehta and a younger crop of writers like Uzma Aslam Khan, Kamila Shamsie, Shauna Singh Baldwin to name only a few.
Not surprisingly, their work and concern are echoed in the work of women artists such as Nalini Malani, Arpana Kaur, Nilima Sheikh whose explorations take them deeper into the stories of Partition, stories of ordinary people, stories that form the stuff of the new histories that are today being written. Indeed, this collapsing of the borders between literature and history, and the expansion and deepening of the archive of history is something that women’s writings on Partition have contributed to significantly.
